The Amateur Cracksman
E. W. Hornung




TO
A. C. D.
THIS FORM OF FLATTERY




THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN



THE IDES OF MARCH


I

It was half-past twelve when I returned to the Albany as a last
desperate resort.  The scene of my disaster was much as I had
left it.  The baccarat-counters still strewed the table, with the
empty glasses and the loaded ash-trays.  A window had been opened
to let the smoke out, and was letting in the fog instead.
Raffles himself had merely discarded his dining jacket for one of
his innumerable blazers.  Yet he arched his eyebrows as though I
had dragged him from his bed.

"Forgotten something?" said he, when he saw me on his mat.

"No," said I, pushing past him without ceremony.  And I led the
way into his room with an impudence amazing to myself.

"Not come back for your revenge, have you?  Because I'm afraid I
can't give it to you single-handed.  I was sorry myself that the
others--"

We were face to face by his fireside, and I cut him short.

"Raffles," said I, "you may well be surprised at my coming back
in this way and at this hour.  I hardly know you.  I was never in
your rooms before to-night.  But I fagged for you at school, and
you said you remembered me.  Of course that's no excuse; but will
you listen to me--for two minutes?"

In my emotion I had at first to struggle for every word; but his
face reassured me as I went on, and I was not mistaken in its
expression.

"Certainly, my dear man," said he; "as many minutes as you like.
Have a Sullivan and sit down."  And he handed me his silver
cigarette-case.

"No," said I, finding a full voice as I shook my head; "no, I
won't smoke, and I won't sit down, thank you.  Nor will you ask
me to do either when you've heard what I have to say."

"Really?" said he, lighting his own cigarette with one clear blue
eye upon me.  "How do you know?"

"Because you'll probably show me the door," I cried bitterly;
"and you will be justified in doing it!  But it's no use beating
about the bush.  You know I dropped over two hundred just now?"

He nodded.

"I hadn't the money in my pocket."

"I remember."

"But I had my check-book, and I wrote each of you a check at that
desk."

"Well?"

"Not one of them was worth the paper it was written on, Raffles.
I am overdrawn already at my bank!"

"Surely only for the moment?"

"No.  I have spent everything."

"But somebody told me you were so well off. I heard you had come
in for money?"

"So I did.  Three years ago.  It has been my curse; now it's all
gone--every penny!  Yes, I've been a fool; there never was nor
will be such a fool as I've been. . . .  Isn't this enough for
you?  Why don't you turn me out?"  He was walking up and down
with a very long face instead.

"Couldn't your people do anything?" he asked at length.

"Thank God," I cried, "I have no people!  I was an only child.  I
came in for everything there was.  My one comfort is that they're
gone, and will never know."

I cast myself into a chair and hid my face. Raffles continued to
pace the rich carpet that was of a piece with everything else in
his rooms.  There was no variation in his soft and even
footfalls.

"You used to be a literary little cuss," he said at length;
"didn't you edit the mag. before you left?  Anyway I recollect
fagging you to do my verses; and literature of all sorts is the
very thing nowadays; any fool can make a living at it."

I shook my head.  "Any fool couldn't write off my debts," said I.

"Then you have a flat somewhere?" he went on.

"Yes, in Mount Street."

"Well, what about the furniture?"

I laughed aloud in my misery.  "There's been a bill of sale on
every stick for months!"

And at that Raffles stood still, with raised eyebrows and stern
eyes that I could meet the better now that he knew the worst;
then, with a shrug, he resumed his walk, and for some minutes
neither of us spoke.  But in his handsome, unmoved face I read my
fate and death-warrant; and with every breath I cursed my folly
and my cowardice in coming to him at all.  Because he had been
kind to me at school, when he was captain of the eleven, and I
his fag, I had dared to look for kindness from him now; because I
was ruined, and he rich enough to play cricket all the summer,
and do nothing for the rest of the year, I had fatuously counted
on his mercy, his sympathy, his help!  Yes, I had relied on him
in my heart, for all my outward diffidence and humility; and I
was rightly served.  There was as little of mercy as of sympathy
in that curling nostril, that rigid jaw, that cold blue eye which
never glanced my way.  I caught up my hat.  I blundered to my
feet.  I would have gone without a word; but Raffles stood
between me and the door.

"Where are you going?" said he.

"That's my business," I replied.  "I won't trouble YOU any more."

"Then how am I to help you?"

"I didn't ask your help."

"Then why come to me?"

"Why, indeed!" I echoed.  "Will you let me pass?"

"Not until you tell me where you are going and what you mean to
do."

"Can't you guess?" I cried.  And for many seconds we stood
staring in each other's eyes.

"Have you got the pluck?" said he, breaking the spell in a tone
so cynical that it brought my last drop of blood to the boil.

"You shall see," said I, as I stepped back and whipped the pistol
from my overcoat pocket. "Now, will you let me pass or shall I do
it here?"

The barrel touched my temple, and my thumb the trigger.  Mad with
excitement as I was, ruined, dishonored, and now finally
determined to make an end of my misspent life, my only surprise
to this day is that I did not do so then and there. The
despicable satisfaction of involving another in one's destruction
added its miserable appeal to my baser egoism; and had fear or
horror flown to my companion's face, I shudder to think I might
have died diabolically happy with that look for my last impious
consolation.  It was the look that came instead which held my
hand.  Neither fear nor horror were in it; only wonder,
admiration, and such a measure of pleased expectancy as caused me
after all to pocket my revolver with an oath.

"You devil!" I said.  "I believe you wanted me to do it!"

"Not quite," was the reply, made with a little start, and a
change of color that came too late. "To tell you the truth,
though, I half thought you meant it, and I was never more
fascinated in my life.  I never dreamt you had such stuff in you,
Bunny!  No, I'm hanged if I let you go now.  And you'd better not
try that game again, for you won't catch me stand and look on a
second time.  We must think of some way out of the mess.  I had
no idea you were a chap of that sort!  There, let me have the
gun."

One of his hands fell kindly on my shoulder, while the other
slipped into my overcoat pocket, and I suffered him to deprive me
of my weapon without a murmur.  Nor was this simply because
Raffles had the subtle power of making himself irresistible at
will.  He was beyond comparison the most masterful man whom I
have ever known; yet my acquiescence was due to more than the
mere subjection of the weaker nature to the stronger. The forlorn
hope which had brought me to the Albany was turned as by magic
into an almost staggering sense of safety.  Raffles would help me
after all!  A. J. Raffles would be my friend!  It was as though
all the world had come round suddenly to my side; so far
therefore from resisting his action, I caught and clasped his
hand with a fervor as uncontrollable as the frenzy which had
preceded it.

"God bless you!" I cried.  "Forgive me for everything.  I will
tell you the truth.  I DID think you might help me in my
extremity, though I well knew that I had no claim upon you.
Still--for the old school's sake--the sake of old times--I
thought you might give me another chance.  If you wouldn't I
meant to blow out my brains--and will still if you change your
mind!"

In truth I feared that it was changing, with his expression, even
as I spoke, and in spite of his kindly tone and kindlier use of
my old school nickname.  His next words showed me my mistake.

"What a boy it is for jumping to conclusions! I have my vices,
Bunny, but backing and filling is not one of them.  Sit down, my
good fellow, and have a cigarette to soothe your nerves.  I
insist.  Whiskey?  The worst thing for you; here's some coffee
that I was brewing when you came in.  Now listen to me.  You
speak of 'another chance.'  What do you mean?  Another chance at
baccarat?  Not if I know it!  You think the luck must turn;
suppose it didn't?  We should only have made bad worse.  No, my
dear chap, you've plunged enough. Do you put yourself in my hands
or do you not? Very well, then you plunge no more, and I
undertake not to present my check.  Unfortunately there are the
other men; and still more unfortunately, Bunny, I'm as hard up at
this moment as you are yourself!"

It was my turn to stare at Raffles.  "You?" I vociferated.  "You
hard up?  How am I to sit here and believe that?"

"Did I refuse to believe it of you?" he returned, smiling.  "And,
with your own experience, do you think that because a fellow has
rooms in this place, and belongs to a club or two, and plays a
little cricket, he must necessarily have a balance at the bank?
I tell you, my dear man, that at this moment I'm as hard up as
you ever were.  I have nothing but my wits to live on--absolutely
nothing else. It was as necessary for me to win some money this
evening as it was for you.  We're in the same boat, Bunny; we'd
better pull together."

"Together!"  I jumped at it.  "I'll do anything in this world for
you, Raffles," I said, "if you really mean that you won't give me
away.  Think of anything you like, and I'll do it!  I was a
desperate man when I came here, and I'm just as desperate now.  I
don't mind what I do if only I can get out of this without a
scandal."

Again I see him, leaning back in one of the luxurious chairs with
which his room was furnished. I see his indolent, athletic
figure; his pale, sharp, clean-shaven features; his curly black
hair; his strong, unscrupulous mouth.  And again I feel the clear
beam of his wonderful eye, cold and luminous as a star, shining
into my brain--sifting the very secrets of my heart.

"I wonder if you mean all that!" he said at length.  "You do in
your present mood; but who can back his mood to last?  Still,
there's hope when a chap takes that tone.  Now I think of it,
too, you were a plucky little devil at school; you once did me
rather a good turn, I recollect.  Remember it, Bunny?  Well, wait
a bit, and perhaps I'll be able to do you a better one.  Give me
time to think."

He got up, lit a fresh cigarette, and fell to pacing the room
once more, but with a slower and more thoughtful step, and for a
much longer period than before.  Twice he stopped at my chair as
though on the point of speaking, but each time he checked himself
and resumed his stride in silence.  Once he threw up the window,
which he had shut some time since, and stood for some moments
leaning out into the fog which filled the Albany courtyard.
Meanwhile a clock on the chimney-piece struck one, and one again
for the half-hour, without a word between us.

Yet I not only kept my chair with patience, but I acquired an
incongruous equanimity in that half-hour.  Insensibly I had
shifted my burden to the broad shoulders of this splendid friend,
and my thoughts wandered with my eyes as the minutes passed.  The
room was the good-sized, square one, with the folding doors, the
marble mantel-piece, and the gloomy, old-fashioned distinction
peculiar to the Albany.  It was charmingly furnished and
arranged, with the right amount of negligence and the right
amount of taste.  What struck me most, however, was the absence
of the usual insignia of a cricketer's den.  Instead of the
conventional rack of war-worn bats, a carved oak bookcase, with
every shelf in a litter, filled the better part of one wall; and
where I looked for cricketing groups, I found reproductions of
such works as "Love and Death" and "The Blessed Damozel," in
dusty frames and different parallels.  The man might have been a
minor poet instead of an athlete of the first water.  But there
had always been a fine streak of aestheticism in his
complex composition; some of these very pictures I had myself
dusted in his study at school; and they set me thinking of yet
another of his many sides--and of the little incident to which he
had just referred.

Everybody knows how largely the tone of a public school depends
on that of the eleven, and on the character of the captain of
cricket in particular; and I have never heard it denied that in
A. J. Raffles's time our tone was good, or that such influence as
he troubled to exert was on the side of the angels.  Yet it was
whispered in the school that he was in the habit of parading the
town at night in loud checks and a false beard.  It was
whispered, and disbelieved.  I alone knew it for a fact; for
night after night had I pulled the rope up after him when the
rest of the dormitory were asleep, and kept awake by the hour to
let it down again on a given signal.  Well, one night he was
over-bold, and within an ace of ignominious expulsion in the
hey-day of his fame.  Consummate daring and extraordinary nerve
on his part, aided, doubtless, by some little presence of mind on
mine, averted the untoward result; and no more need be said of a
discreditable incident.  But I cannot pretend to have forgotten
it in throwing myself on this man's mercy in my desperation.  And
I was wondering how much of his leniency was owing to the fact
that Raffles had not forgotten it either, when he stopped and
stood over my chair once more.

"I've been thinking of that night we had the narrow squeak," he
began.  "Why do you start?"

"I was thinking of it too."

He smiled, as though he had read my thoughts.

"Well, you were the right sort of little beggar then, Bunny; you
didn't talk and you didn't flinch. You asked no questions and you
told no tales.  I wonder if you're like that now?"

"I don't know," said I, slightly puzzled by his tone.  "I've made
such a mess of my own affairs that I trust myself about as little
as I'm likely to be trusted by anybody else.  Yet I never in my
life went back on a friend.  I will say that, otherwise perhaps I
mightn't be in such a hole to-night."

"Exactly," said Raffles, nodding to himself, as though in assent
to some hidden train of thought; "exactly what I remember of you,
and I'll bet it's as true now as it was ten years ago.  We don't
alter, Bunny.  We only develop.  I suppose neither you nor I are
really altered since you used to let down that rope and I used to
come up it hand over hand.  You would stick at nothing for a
pal--what?"

"At nothing in this world," I was pleased to cry.

"Not even at a crime?" said Raffles, smiling.

I stopped to think, for his tone had changed, and I felt sure he
was chaffing me.  Yet his eye seemed as much in earnest as ever,
and for my part I was in no mood for reservations.

"No, not even at that," I declared; "name your crime, and I'm
your man."

He looked at me one moment in wonder, and another moment in
doubt; then turned the matter off with a shake of his head, and
the little cynical laugh that was all his own.

"You're a nice chap, Bunny!  A real desperate character--what?
Suicide one moment, and any crime I like the next!  What you want
is a drag, my boy, and you did well to come to a decent
law-abiding citizen with a reputation to lose.  None the less we
must have that money to-night--by hook or crook."

"To-night, Raffles?"

"The sooner the better.  Every hour after ten o'clock to-morrow
morning is an hour of risk.  Let one of those checks get round to
your own bank, and you and it are dishonored together.  No, we
must raise the wind to-night and re-open your account first thing
to-morrow.  And I rather think I know where the wind can be
raised."

"At two o'clock in the morning?"

"Yes."

"But how--but where--at such an hour?"

"From a friend of mine here in Bond Street."

"He must be a very intimate friend!"

"Intimate's not the word.  I have the run of his place and a
latch-key all to myself."

"You would knock him up at this hour of the night?"

"If he's in bed."

"And it's essential that I should go in with you?"

"Absolutely."

"Then I must; but I'm bound to say I don't like the idea,
Raffles."

"Do you prefer the alternative?" asked my companion, with a
sneer.  "No, hang it, that's unfair!" he cried apologetically in
the same breath.  "I quite understand.  It's a beastly ordeal.
But it would never do for you to stay outside.  I tell you what,
you shall have a peg before we start--just one.  There's the
whiskey, here's a syphon, and I'll be putting on an overcoat
while you help yourself."

Well, I daresay I did so with some freedom, for this plan of his
was not the less distasteful to me from its apparent
inevitability.  I must own, however, that it possessed fewer
terrors before my glass was empty.  Meanwhile Raffles rejoined
me, with a covert coat over his blazer, and a soft felt hat set
carelessly on the curly head he shook with a smile as I passed
him the decanter.

"When we come back," said he.  "Work first, play afterward.  Do
you see what day it is?" he added, tearing a leaflet from a
Shakespearian calendar, as I drained my glass.  "March 15th.
'The Ides of March, the Ides of March, remember.' Eh, Bunny, my
boy?  You won't forget them, will you?"

And, with a laugh, he threw some coals on the fire before turning
down the gas like a careful householder.  So we went out together
as the clock on the chimney-piece was striking two.


II

Piccadilly was a trench of raw white fog, rimmed with blurred
street-lamps, and lined with a thin coating of adhesive mud.  We
met no other wayfarers on the deserted flagstones, and were
ourselves favored with a very hard stare from the constable of
the beat, who, however, touched his helmet on recognizing my
companion.

"You see, I'm known to the police," laughed Raffles as we passed
on.  "Poor devils, they've got to keep their weather eye open on
a night like this!  A fog may be a bore to you and me, Bunny, but
it's a perfect godsend to the criminal classes, especially so
late in their season.  Here we are, though--and I'm hanged if
the beggar isn't in bed and asleep after all!"

We had turned into Bond Street, and had halted on the curb a few
yards down on the right.  Raffles was gazing up at some windows
across the road, windows barely discernible through the mist, and
without the glimmer of a light to throw them out. They were over
a jeweller's shop, as I could see by the peep-hole in the shop
door, and the bright light burning within.  But the entire "upper
part," with the private street-door next the shop, was black and
blank as the sky itself.

"Better give it up for to-night," I urged. "Surely the morning
will be time enough!"

"Not a bit of it," said Raffles.  "I have his key. We'll surprise
him.  Come along."

And seizing my right arm, he hurried me across the road, opened
the door with his latch-key, and in another moment had shut it
swiftly but softly behind us.  We stood together in the dark.
Outside, a measured step was approaching; we had heard it through
the fog as we crossed the street; now, as it drew nearer, my
companion's fingers tightened on my arm.

"It may be the chap himself," he whispered. "He's the devil of a
night-bird.  Not a sound, Bunny!  We'll startle the life out of
him.  Ah!"

The measured step had passed without a pause. Raffles drew a deep
breath, and his singular grip of me slowly relaxed.

"But still, not a sound," he continued in the same whisper;
"we'll take a rise out of him, wherever he is!  Slip off your
shoes and follow me."

Well, you may wonder at my doing so; but you can never have met
A. J. Raffles.  Half his power lay in a conciliating trick of
sinking the commander in the leader.  And it was impossible not
to follow one who led with such a zest.  You might question, but
you followed first.  So now, when I heard him kick off his own
shoes, I did the same, and was on the stairs at his heels before
I realized what an extraordinary way was this of approaching a
stranger for money in the dead of night.  But obviously Raffles
and he were on exceptional terms of intimacy, and I could not but
infer that they were in the habit of playing practical jokes upon
each other.

We groped our way so slowly upstairs that I had time to make more
than one note before we reached the top.  The stair was
uncarpeted.  The spread fingers of my right hand encountered
nothing on the damp wall; those of my left trailed through a dust
that could be felt on the banisters. An eerie sensation had been
upon me since we entered the house.  It increased with every step
we climbed.  What hermit were we going to startle in his cell?

We came to a landing.  The banisters led us to the left, and to
the left again.  Four steps more, and we were on another and a
longer landing, and suddenly a match blazed from the black.  I
never heard it struck.  Its flash was blinding.  When my eyes
became accustomed to the light, there was Raffles holding up the
match with one hand, and shading it with the other, between bare
boards, stripped walls, and the open doors of empty rooms.

"Where have you brought me?" I cried.  "The house is unoccupied!"

"Hush!  Wait!" he whispered, and he led the way into one of the
empty rooms.  His match went out as we crossed the threshold, and
he struck another without the slightest noise.  Then he stood
with his back to me, fumbling with something that I could not
see.  But, when he threw the second match away, there was some
other light in its stead, and a slight smell of oil.  I stepped
forward to look over his shoulder, but before I could do so he
had turned and flashed a tiny lantern in my face.

"What's this?" I gasped.  "What rotten trick are you going to
play?"

"It's played," he answered, with his quiet laugh.

"On me?"

"I am afraid so, Bunny."

"Is there no one in the house, then?"

"No one but ourselves."

"So it was mere chaff about your friend in Bond Street, who could
let us have that money?"

"Not altogether.  It's quite true that Danby is a friend of
mine."

"Danby?"

"The jeweller underneath."

"What do you mean?" I whispered, trembling like a leaf as his
meaning dawned upon me.  "Are we to get the money from the
jeweller?"

"Well, not exactly."

"What, then?"

"The equivalent--from his shop."

There was no need for another question.  I understood everything
but my own density.  He had given me a dozen hints, and I had
taken none. And there I stood staring at him, in that empty room;
and there he stood with his dark lantern, laughing at me.

"A burglar!" I gasped.  "You--you!"

"I told you I lived by my wits."

"Why couldn't you tell me what you were going to do?  Why
couldn't you trust me?  Why must you lie?" I demanded, piqued to
the quick for all my horror.

"I wanted to tell you," said he.  "I was on the point of telling
you more than once.  You may remember how I sounded you about
crime, though you have probably forgotten what you said yourself.
I didn't think you meant it at the time, but I thought I'd put
you to the test.  Now I see you didn't, and I don't blame you.  I
only am to blame. Get out of it, my dear boy, as quick as you
can; leave it to me.  You won't give me away, whatever else you
do!"

Oh, his cleverness!  His fiendish cleverness! Had he fallen back
on threats, coercion, sneers, all might have been different even
yet.  But he set me free to leave him in the lurch.  He would not
blame me.  He did not even bind me to secrecy; he trusted me.  He
knew my weakness and my strength, and was playing on both with
his master's touch.

"Not so fast," said I.  "Did I put this into your head, or were
you going to do it in any case?"

"Not in any case," said Raffles.  "It's true I've had the key for
days, but when I won to-night I thought of chucking it; for, as a
matter of fact, it's not a one-man job."

"That settles it.  I'm your man."

"You mean it?"

"Yes--for to-night."

"Good old Bunny," he murmured, holding the lantern for one moment
to my face; the next he was explaining his plans, and I was
nodding, as though we had been fellow-cracksmen all our days.

"I know the shop," he whispered, "because I've got a few things
there.  I know this upper part too; it's been to let for a month,
and I got an order to view, and took a cast of the key before
using it. The one thing I don't know is how to make a connection
between the two; at present there's none. We may make it up here,
though I rather fancy the basement myself.  If you wait a minute
I'll tell you."

He set his lantern on the floor, crept to a back window, and
opened it with scarcely a sound: only to return, shaking his
head, after shutting the window with the same care.

"That was our one chance," said he; "a back window above a back
window; but it's too dark to see anything, and we daren't show an
outside light. Come down after me to the basement; and remember,
though there's not a soul on the premises, you can't make too
little noise.  There--there--listen to that!"

It was the measured tread that we had heard before on the
flagstones outside.  Raffles darkened his lantern, and again we
stood motionless till it had passed.

"Either a policeman," he muttered, "or a watchman that all these
jewellers run between them. The watchman's the man for us to
watch; he's simply paid to spot this kind of thing."

We crept very gingerly down the stairs, which creaked a bit in
spite of us, and we picked up our shoes in the passage; then down
some narrow stone steps, at the foot of which Raffles showed his
light, and put on his shoes once more, bidding me do the same in
a rather louder tone than he had permitted himself to employ
overhead.  We were now considerably below the level of the
street, in a small space with as many doors as it had sides.
Three were ajar, and we saw through them into empty cellars; but
in the fourth a key was turned and a bolt drawn; and this one
presently let us out into the bottom of a deep, square well of
fog.  A similar door faced it across this area, and Raffles had
the lantern close against it, and was hiding the light with his
body, when a short and sudden crash made my heart stand still.
Next moment I saw the door wide open, and Raffles standing within
and beckoning me with a jimmy.

"Door number one," he whispered.  "Deuce knows how many more
there'll be, but I know of two at least.  We won't have to make
much noise over them, either; down here there's less risk."

We were now at the bottom of the exact fellow to the narrow stone
stair which we had just descended: the yard, or well, being the
one part common to both the private and the business premises.
But this flight led to no open passage; instead, a singularly
solid mahogany door confronted us at the top.

"I thought so," muttered Raffles, handing me the lantern, and
pocketing a bunch of skeleton keys, after tampering for a few
minutes with the lock. "It'll be an hour's work to get through
that!"

"Can't you pick it?"

"No: I know these locks.  It's no use trying. We must cut it out,
and it'll take us an hour."

It took us forty-seven minutes by my watch; or, rather, it took
Raffles; and never in my life have I seen anything more
deliberately done.  My part was simply to stand by with the dark
lantern in one hand, and a small bottle of rock-oil in the other.

Raffles had produced a pretty embroidered case, intended
obviously for his razors, but filled instead with the tools of
his secret trade, including the rock-oil.  From this case he
selected a "bit," capable of drilling a hole an inch in diameter,
and fitted it to a small but very strong steel "brace." Then he
took off his covert-coat and his blazer, spread them neatly on
the top step--knelt on them--turned up his shirt cuffs--and went
to work with brace-and-bit near the key-hole.  But first he oiled
the bit to minimize the noise, and this he did invariably before
beginning a fresh hole, and often in the middle of one.  It took
thirty-two separate borings to cut around that lock.

I noticed that through the first circular orifice Raffles thrust
a forefinger; then, as the circle became an ever-lengthening
oval, he got his hand through up to the thumb; and I heard him
swear softly to himself.

"I was afraid so!"

"What is it?"

"An iron gate on the other side!"

"How on earth are we to get through that?" I asked in dismay.

"Pick the lock.  But there may be two.  In that case they'll be
top and bottom, and we shall have two fresh holes to make, as the
door opens inwards. It won't open two inches as it is."

I confess I did not feel sanguine about the lock-picking, seeing
that one lock had baffled us already; and my disappointment and
impatience must have been a revelation to me had I stopped to
think. The truth is that I was entering into our nefarious
undertaking with an involuntary zeal of which I was myself quite
unconscious at the time.  The romance and the peril of the whole
proceeding held me spellbound and entranced.  My moral sense and
my sense of fear were stricken by a common paralysis.  And there
I stood, shining my light and holding my phial with a keener
interest than I had ever brought to any honest avocation. And
there knelt A. J. Raffles, with his black hair tumbled, and the
same watchful, quiet, determined half-smile with which I have
seen him send down over after over in a county match!

At last the chain of holes was complete, the lock wrenched out
bodily, and a splendid bare arm plunged up to the shoulder
through the aperture, and through the bars of the iron gate
beyond.

"Now," whispered Raffles, "if there's only one lock it'll be in
the middle.  Joy!  Here it is!  Only let me pick it, and we're
through at last."

He withdrew his arm, a skeleton key was selected from the bunch,
and then back went his arm to the shoulder.  It was a breathless
moment.  I heard the heart throbbing in my body, the very watch
ticking in my pocket, and ever and anon the tinkle-tinkle of the
skeleton key.  Then--at last--there came a single unmistakable
click.  In another minute the mahogany door and the iron gate
yawned behind us; and Raffles was sitting on an office table,
wiping his face, with the lantern throwing a steady beam by his
side.

We were now in a bare and roomy lobby behind the shop, but
separated therefrom by an iron curtain, the very sight of which
filled me with despair. Raffles, however, did not appear in the
least depressed, but hung up his coat and hat on some pegs in the
lobby before examining this curtain with his lantern.

"That's nothing," said he, after a minute's inspection; "we'll be
through that in no time, but there's a door on the other side
which may give us trouble."

"Another door!" I groaned.  "And how do you mean to tackle this
thing?"

"Prise it up with the jointed jimmy.  The weak point of these
iron curtains is the leverage you can get from below.  But it
makes a noise, and this is where you're coming in, Bunny; this is
where I couldn't do without you.  I must have you overhead to
knock through when the street's clear. I'll come with you and
show a light."

Well, you may imagine how little I liked the prospect of this
lonely vigil; and yet there was something very stimulating in the
vital responsibility which it involved.  Hitherto I had been a
mere spectator.  Now I was to take part in the game. And the
fresh excitement made me more than ever insensible to those
considerations of conscience and of safety which were already as
dead nerves in my breast.

So I took my post without a murmur in the front room above the
shop.  The fixtures had been left for the refusal of the incoming
tenant, and fortunately for us they included Venetian blinds
which were already down.  It was the simplest matter in the world
to stand peeping through the laths into the street, to beat twice
with my foot when anybody was approaching, and once when all was
clear again.  The noises that even I could hear below, with the
exception of one metallic crash at the beginning, were indeed
incredibly slight; but they ceased altogether at each double rap
from my toe; and a policeman passed quite half a dozen times
beneath my eyes, and the man whom I took to be the jeweller's
watchman oftener still, during the better part of an hour that I
spent at the window.  Once, indeed, my heart was in my mouth, but
only once.  It was when the watchman stopped and peered through
the peep-hole into the lighted shop.  I waited for his whistle--I
waited for the gallows or the gaol!  But my signals had been
studiously obeyed, and the man passed on in undisturbed serenity.

In the end I had a signal in my turn, and retraced my steps with
lighted matches, down the broad stairs, down the narrow ones,
across the area, and up into the lobby where Raffles awaited me
with an outstretched hand.

"Well done, my boy!" said he.  "You're the same good man in a
pinch, and you shall have your reward.  I've got a thousand
pounds' worth if I've got a penn'oth.  It's all in my pockets.
And here's something else I found in this locker; very decent
port and some cigars, meant for poor dear Danby's business
friends.  Take a pull, and you shall light up presently.  I've
found a lavatory, too, and we must have a wash-and-brush-up
before we go, for I'm as black as your boot."

The iron curtain was down, but he insisted on raising it until I
could peep through the glass door on the other side and see his
handiwork in the shop beyond.  Here two electric lights were left
burning all night long, and in their cold white rays I could at
first see nothing amiss.  I looked along an orderly lane, an
empty glass counter on my left, glass cupboards of untouched
silver on my right, and facing me the filmy black eye of the
peep-hole that shone like a stage moon on the street.  The
counter had not been emptied by Raffles; its contents were in the
Chubb's safe, which he had given up at a glance; nor had he
looked at the silver, except to choose a cigarette case for me.
He had confined himself entirely to the shop window.  This was in
three compartments, each secured for the night by removable
panels with separate locks. Raffles had removed them a few hours
before their time, and the electric light shone on a corrugated
shutter bare as the ribs of an empty carcase.  Every article of
value was gone from the one place which was invisible from the
little window in the door; elsewhere all was as it had been left
overnight. And but for a train of mangled doors behind the iron
curtain, a bottle of wine and a cigar-box with which liberties
had been taken, a rather black towel in the lavatory, a burnt
match here and there, and our finger-marks on the dusty
banisters, not a trace of our visit did we leave.

"Had it in my head for long?" said Raffles, as we strolled
through the streets towards dawn, for all the world as though we
were returning from a dance.  "No, Bunny, I never thought of it
till I saw that upper part empty about a month ago, and bought a
few things in the shop to get the lie of the land.  That reminds
me that I never paid for them; but, by Jove, I will to-morrow,
and if that isn't poetic justice, what is?  One visit showed me
the possibilities of the place, but a second convinced me of its
impossibilities without a pal.  So I had practically given up the
idea, when you came along on the very night and in the very
plight for it!  But here we are at the Albany, and I hope there's
some fire left; for I don't know how you feel, Bunny, but for my
part I'm as cold as Keats's owl."

He could think of Keats on his way from a felony!  He could
hanker for his fireside like another!  Floodgates were loosed
within me, and the plain English of our adventure rushed over me
as cold as ice.  Raffles was a burglar.  I had helped him to
commit one burglary, therefore I was a burglar, too.  Yet I could
stand and warm myself by his fire, and watch him empty his
pockets, as though we had done nothing wonderful or wicked!

My blood froze.  My heart sickened.  My brain whirled.  How I had
liked this villain!  How I had admired him!  Now my liking and
admiration must turn to loathing and disgust.  I waited for the
change.  I longed to feel it in my heart.  But--I longed and I
waited in vain!

I saw that he was emptying his pockets; the table sparkled with
their hoard.  Rings by the dozen, diamonds by the score;
bracelets, pendants, aigrettes, necklaces, pearls, rubies,
amethysts, sapphires; and diamonds always, diamonds in
everything, flashing bayonets of light, dazzling me--blinding
me--making me disbelieve because I could no longer forget.  Last
of all came no gem, indeed, but my own revolver from an inner
pocket. And that struck a chord.  I suppose I said something--my
hand flew out.  I can see Raffles now, as he looked at me once
more with a high arch over each clear eye.  I can see him pick
out the cartridges with his quiet, cynical smile, before he would
give me my pistol back again.

"You mayn't believe it, Bunny," said he, "but I never carried a
loaded one before.  On the whole I think it gives one confidence.
Yet it would be very awkward if anything went wrong; one might
use it, and that's not the game at all, though I have often
thought that the murderer who has just done the trick must have
great sensations before things get too hot for him.  Don't look
so distressed, my dear chap.  I've never had those sensations,
and I don't suppose I ever shall."

"But this much you have done before?" said I hoarsely.

"Before?  My dear Bunny, you offend me!  Did it look like a first
attempt?  Of course I have done it before."

"Often?"

"Well--no!  Not often enough to destroy the charm, at all events;
never, as a matter of fact, unless I'm cursedly hard up.  Did you
hear about the Thimbleby diamonds?  Well, that was the last
time--and a poor lot of paste they were.  Then there was the
little business of the Dormer house-boat at Henley last year.
That was mine also--such as it was.  I've never brought off a
really big coup yet; when I do I shall chuck it up."

Yes, I remembered both cases very well.  To think that he was
their author!  It was incredible, outrageous, inconceivable.
Then my eyes would fall upon the table, twinkling and glittering
in a hundred places, and incredulity was at an end.

"How came you to begin?" I asked, as curiosity overcame mere
wonder, and a fascination for his career gradually wove itself
into my fascination for the man.

"Ah! that's a long story," said Raffles.  "It was in the
Colonies, when I was out there playing cricket.  It's too long a
story to tell you now, but I was in much the same fix that you
were in to-night, and it was my only way out.  I never meant it
for anything more; but I'd tasted blood, and it was all over with
me.  Why should I work when I could steal?  Why settle down to
some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger
and a decent living were all going begging together?  Of course
it's very wrong, but we can't all be moralists, and the
distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with.  Besides,
you're not at it all the time.  I'm sick of quoting Gilbert's
lines to myself, but they're profoundly true.  I only wonder if
you'll like the life as much as I do!"

"Like it?" I cried out.  "Not I!  It's no life for me.  Once is
enough!"

"You wouldn't give me a hand another time?"

"Don't ask me, Raffles.  Don't ask me, for God's sake!"

"Yet you said you would do anything for me! You asked me to name
my crime!  But I knew at the time you didn't mean it; you didn't
go back on me to-night, and that ought to satisfy me, goodness
knows!  I suppose I'm ungrateful, and unreasonable, and all that.
I ought to let it end at this.  But you're the very man for me,
Bunny, the--very--man!  Just think how we got through to-night.
Not a scratch--not a hitch!  There's nothing very terrible in it,
you see; there never would be, while we worked together."

He was standing in front of me with a hand on either shoulder; he
was smiling as he knew so well how to smile.  I turned on my
heel, planted my elbows on the chimney-piece, and my burning head
between my hands.  Next instant a still heartier hand had fallen
on my back.

"All right, my boy!  You are quite right and I'm worse than
wrong.  I'll never ask it again. Go, if you want to, and come
again about mid-day for the cash.  There was no bargain; but, of
course, I'll get you out of your scrape--especially after the way
you've stood by me to-night."

I was round again with my blood on fire.

"I'll do it again," I said, through my teeth.

He shook his head.  "Not you," he said, smiling quite
good-humoredly on my insane enthusiasm.

"I will," I cried with an oath.  "I'll lend you a hand as often
as you like!  What does it matter now?  I've been in it once.
I'll be in it again.  I've gone to the devil anyhow.  I can't go
back, and wouldn't if I could.  Nothing matters another rap!
When you want me, I'm your man!"

And that is how Raffles and I joined felonious forces on the Ides
of March.


A COSTUME PIECE

London was just then talking of one whose name is already a name
and nothing more. Reuben Rosenthall had made his millions on the
diamond fields of South Africa, and had come home to enjoy them
according to his lights; how he went to work will scarcely be
forgotten by any reader of the halfpenny evening papers, which
revelled in endless anecdotes of his original indigence and
present prodigality, varied with interesting particulars of the
extraordinary establishment which the millionaire set up in St.
John's Wood.  Here he kept a retinue of Kaffirs, who were
literally his slaves; and hence he would sally, with enormous
diamonds in his shirt and on his finger, in the convoy of a
prize-fighter of heinous repute, who was not, however, by any
means the worst element in the Rosenthall melange.  So said
common gossip; but the fact was sufficiently established by the
interference of the police on at least one occasion, followed by
certain magisterial proceedings which were reported with
justifiable gusto and huge headlines in the newspapers aforesaid.

And this was all one knew of Reuben Rosenthall up to the time
when the Old Bohemian Club, having fallen on evil days, found it
worth its while to organize a great dinner in honor of so wealthy
an exponent of the club's principles.  I was not at the banquet
myself, but a member took Raffles, who told me all about it that
very night.

"Most extraordinary show I ever went to in my life," said he.
"As for the man himself--well, I was prepared for something
grotesque, but the fellow fairly took my breath away.  To begin
with, he's the most astounding brute to look at, well over six
feet, with a chest like a barrel, and a great hook-nose, and the
reddest hair and whiskers you ever saw.  Drank like a
fire-engine, but only got drunk enough to make us a speech that I
wouldn't have missed for ten pounds.  I'm only sorry you weren't
there, too, Bunny, old chap."

I began to be sorry myself, for Raffles was anything but an
excitable person, and never had I seen him so excited before.
Had he been following Rosenthall's example?  His coming to my
rooms at midnight, merely to tell me about his dinner, was in
itself enough to excuse a suspicion which was certainly at
variance with my knowledge of A. J. Raffles.

"What did he say?" I inquired mechanically, divining some subtler
explanation of this visit, and wondering what on earth it could
be.

"Say?" cried Raffles.  "What did he not say!  He boasted of his
rise, he bragged of his riches, and he blackguarded society for
taking him up for his money and dropping him out of sheer pique
and jealousy because he had so much.  He mentioned names, too,
with the most charming freedom, and swore he was as good a man as
the Old Country had to show--PACE the Old Bohemians. To prove it
he pointed to a great diamond in the middle of his shirt-front
with a little finger loaded with another just like it: which of
our bloated princes could show a pair like that?  As a matter of
fact, they seemed quite wonderful stones, with a curious purple
gleam to them that must mean a pot of money.  But old Rosenthall
swore he wouldn't take fifty thousand pounds for the two, and
wanted to know where the other man was who went about with
twenty-five thousand in his shirt-front and another twenty-five
on his little finger. He didn't exist.  If he did, he wouldn't
have the pluck to wear them.  But he had--he'd tell us why. And
before you could say Jack Robinson he had whipped out a whacking
great revolver!"

"Not at the table?"

"At the table!  In the middle of his speech!  But it was nothing
to what he wanted to do.  He actually wanted us to let him write
his name in bullets on the opposite wall, to show us why he
wasn't afraid to go about in all his diamonds!  That brute
Purvis, the prize-fighter, who is his paid bully, had to bully
his master before he could be persuaded out of it.  There was
quite a panic for the moment; one fellow was saying his prayers
under the table, and the waiters bolted to a man."

"What a grotesque scene!"

"Grotesque enough, but I rather wish they had let him go the
whole hog and blaze away.  He was as keen as knives to show us
how he could take care of his purple diamonds; and, do you know,
Bunny, _I_ was as keen as knives to see."

And Raffles leaned towards me with a sly, slow smile that made
the hidden meaning of his visit only too plain to me at last.

"So you think of having a try for his diamonds yourself?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"It is horribly obvious, I admit.  But--yes, I have set my heart
upon them!  To be quite frank, I have had them on my conscience
for some time; one couldn't hear so much of the man, and his
prize-fighter, and his diamonds, without feeling it a kind of
duty to have a go for them; but when it comes to brandishing a
revolver and practically challenging the world, the thing becomes
inevitable.  It is simply thrust upon one.  I was fated to hear
that challenge, Bunny, and I, for one, must take it up.  I was
only sorry I couldn't get on my hind legs and say so then and
there."

"Well," I said, "I don't see the necessity as things are with us;
but, of course, I'm your man."

My tone may have been half-hearted.  I did my best to make it
otherwise.  But it was barely a month since our Bond Street
exploit, and we certainly could have afforded to behave ourselves
for some time to come.  We had been getting along so nicely: by
his advice I had scribbled a thing or two; inspired by Raffles, I
had even done an article on our own jewel robbery; and for the
moment I was quite satisfied with this sort of adventure.  I
thought we ought to know when we were well off, and could see no
point in our running fresh risks before we were obliged.  On the
other hand, I was anxious not to show the least disposition to
break the pledge that I had given a month ago.  But it was not on
my manifest disinclination that Raffles fastened.

"Necessity, my dear Bunny?  Does the writer only write when the
wolf is at the door?  Does the painter paint for bread alone?
Must you and I be DRIVEN to crime like Tom of Bow and Dick of
Whitechapel?  You pain me, my dear chap; you needn't laugh,
because you do.  Art for art's sake is a vile catchword, but I
confess it appeals to me. In this case my motives are absolutely
pure, for I doubt if we shall ever be able to dispose of such
peculiar stones.  But if I don't have a try for them--after
to-night--I shall never be able to hold up my head again."

His eye twinkled, but it glittered, too.

"We shall have our work cut out," was all I said.

"And do you suppose I should be keen on it if we hadn't?" cried
Raffles.  "My dear fellow, I would rob St. Paul's Cathedral if I
could, but I could no more scoop a till when the shopwalker
wasn't looking than I could bag the apples out of an old woman's
basket.  Even that little business last month was a sordid
affair, but it was necessary, and I think its strategy redeemed
it to some extent. Now there's some credit, and more sport, in
going where they boast they're on their guard against you.  The
Bank of England, for example, is the ideal crib; but that would
need half a dozen of us with years to give to the job; and
meanwhile Reuben Rosenthall is high enough game for you and me.
We know he's armed.  We know how Billy Purvis can fight.  It'll
be no soft thing, I grant you. But what of that, my good
Bunny--what of that?  A man's reach must exceed his grasp, dear
boy, or what the dickens is a heaven for?"

"I would rather we didn't exceed ours just yet," I answered
laughing, for his spirit was irresistible, and the plan was
growing upon me, despite my qualms.

"Trust me for that," was his reply; "I'll see you through.  After
all I expect to find that the difficulties are nearly all on the
surface.  These fellows both drink like the devil, and that
should simplify matters considerably.  But we shall see, and we
must take our time.  There will probably turn out to be a dozen
different ways in which the thing might be done, and we shall
have to choose between them.  It will mean watching the house for
at least a week in any case; it may mean lots of other things
that will take much longer; but give me a week and I will tell
you more.  That's to say, if you're really on?"

"Of course I am," I replied indignantly.  "But why should I give
you a week?  Why shouldn't we watch the house together?"

"Because two eyes are as good as four and take up less room.
Never hunt in couples unless you're obliged.  But don't you look
offended, Bunny; there'll be plenty for you to do when the time
comes, that I promise you.  You shall have your share of the fun,
never fear, and a purple diamond all to yourself--if we're
lucky."

On the whole, however, this conversation left me less than
lukewarm, and I still remember the depression which came upon me
when Raffles was gone.  I saw the folly of the enterprise to
which I had committed myself--the sheer, gratuitous, unnecessary
folly of it.  And the paradoxes in which Raffles revelled, and
the frivolous casuistry which was nevertheless half sincere, and
which his mere personality rendered wholly plausible at the
moment of utterance, appealed very little to me when recalled in
cold blood.  I admired the spirit of pure mischief in which he
seemed prepared to risk his liberty and his life, but I did not
find it an infectious spirit on calm reflection.  Yet the thought
of withdrawal was not to be entertained for a moment.  On the
contrary, I was impatient of the delay ordained by Raffles; and,
perhaps, no small part of my secret disaffection came of his
galling determination to do without me until the last moment.

It made it no better that this was characteristic of the man and
of his attitude towards me.  For a month we had been, I suppose,
the thickest thieves in all London, and yet our intimacy was
curiously incomplete.  With all his charming frankness, there was
in Raffles a vein of capricious reserve which was perceptible
enough to be very irritating. He had the instinctive
secretiveness of the inveterate criminal.  He would make
mysteries of matters of common concern; for example, I never knew
how or where he disposed of the Bond Street jewels, on the
proceeds of which we were both still leading the outward lives of
hundreds of other young fellows about town.  He was consistently
mysterious about that and other details, of which it seemed to me
that I had already earned the right to know everything.  I could
not but remember how he had led me into my first felony, by means
of a trick, while yet uncertain whether he could trust me or not.

That I could no longer afford to resent, but I did resent his
want of confidence in me now.  I said nothing about it, but it
rankled every day, and never more than in the week that succeeded
the Rosenthall dinner.  When I met Raffles at the club he would
tell me nothing; when I went to his rooms he was out, or
pretended to be.

One day he told me he was getting on well, but slowly; it was a
more ticklish game than he had thought; but when I began to ask
questions he would say no more.  Then and there, in my annoyance,
I took my own decision.  Since he would tell me nothing of the
result of his vigils, I determined to keep one on my own account,
and that very evening found my way to the millionaire's front
gates.

The house he was occupying is, I believe, quite the largest in
the St. John's Wood district.  It stands in the angle formed by
two broad thoroughfares, neither of which, as it happens, is a
'bus route, and I doubt if many quieter spots exist within the
four-mile radius.  Quiet also was the great square house, in its
garden of grass-plots and shrubs; the lights were low, the
millionaire and his friends obviously spending their evening
elsewhere.  The garden walls were only a few feet high.  In one
there was a side door opening into a glass passage; in the other
two five-barred, grained-and-varnished gates, one at either end
of the little semi-circular drive, and both wide open. So still
was the place that I had a great mind to walk boldly in and learn
something of the premises; in fact, I was on the point of doing
so, when I heard a quick, shuffling step on the pavement behind
me.  I turned round and faced the dark scowl and the dirty
clenched fists of a dilapidated tramp.

"You fool!" said he.  "You utter idiot!"

"Raffles!"

"That's it," he whispered savagely; "tell all the
neighborhood--give me away at the top of your voice!"

With that he turned his back upon me, and shambled down the road,
shrugging his shoulders and muttering to himself as though I had
refused him alms.  A few moments I stood astounded, indignant, at
a loss; then I followed him.  His feet trailed, his knees gave,
his back was bowed, his head kept nodding; it was the gait of a
man eighty years of age.  Presently he waited for me midway
between two lamp-posts.  As I came up he was lighting rank
tobacco, in a cutty pipe, with an evil-smelling match, and the
flame showed me the suspicion of a smile.

"You must forgive my heat, Bunny, but it really was very foolish
of you.  Here am I trying every dodge--begging at the door one
night--hiding in the shrubs the next--doing every mortal thing
but stand and stare at the house as you went and did. It's a
costume piece, and in you rush in your ordinary clothes.  I tell
you they're on the lookout for us night and day.  It's the
toughest nut I ever tackled!"

"Well," said I, "if you had told me so before I shouldn't have
come.  You told me nothing."

He looked hard at me from under the broken brim of a battered
billycock.

"You're right," he said at length.  "I've been too close.  It's
become second nature with me when I've anything on.  But here's
an end of it, Bunny, so far as you're concerned.  I'm going home
now, and I want you to follow me; but for heaven's sake keep your
distance, and don't speak to me again till I speak to you.
There--give me a start."  And he was off again, a decrepit
vagabond, with his hands in his pockets, his elbows squared, and
frayed coat-tails swinging raggedly from side to side.

I followed him to the Finchley Road.  There he took an Atlas
omnibus, and I sat some rows behind him on the top, but not far
enough to escape the pest of his vile tobacco.  That he could
carry his character-sketch to such a pitch--he who would only
smoke one brand of cigarette!  It was the last, least touch of
the insatiable artist, and it charmed away what mortification
there still remained in me. Once more I felt the fascination of a
comrade who was forever dazzling one with a fresh and unsuspected
facet of his character.

As we neared Piccadilly I wondered what he would do.  Surely he
was not going into the Albany like that?  No, he took another
omnibus to Sloane Street, I sitting behind him as before.  At
Sloane Street we changed again, and were presently in the long
lean artery of the King's Road.  I was now all agog to know our
destination, nor was I kept many more minutes in doubt.  Raffles
got down.  I followed.  He crossed the road and disappeared up a
dark turning.  I pressed after him, and was in time to see his
coat-tails as he plunged into a still darker flagged alley to the
right.  He was holding himself up and stepping out like a young
man once more; also, in some subtle way, he already looked less
disreputable.  But I alone was there to see him, the alley was
absolutely deserted, and desperately dark.  At the further end he
opened a door with a latch-key, and it was darker yet within.

Instinctively I drew back and heard him chuckle. We could no
longer see each other.

"All right, Bunny!  There's no hanky-panky this time.  These are
studios, my friend, and I'm one of the lawful tenants."

Indeed, in another minute we were in a lofty room with skylight,
easels, dressing-cupboard, platform, and every other adjunct save
the signs of actual labor.  The first thing I saw, as Raffles lit
the gas, was its reflection in his silk hat on the pegs beside
the rest of his normal garments.

"Looking for the works of art?" continued Raffles, lighting a
cigarette and beginning to divest himself of his rags.  "I'm
afraid you won't find any, but there's the canvas I'm always
going to make a start upon.  I tell them I'm looking high and low
for my ideal model.  I have the stove lit on principle twice a
week, and look in and leave a newspaper and a smell of
Sullivans--how good they are after shag!  Meanwhile I pay my rent
and am a good tenant in every way; and it's a very useful little
pied-a-terre--there's no saying how useful it might be at a
pinch.  As it is, the billy-cock comes in and the topper goes
out, and nobody takes the slightest notice of either; at this
time of night the chances are that there's not a soul in the
building except ourselves."

"You never told me you went in for disguises," said I, watching
him as he cleansed the grime from his face and hands.

"No, Bunny, I've treated you very shabbily all round.  There was
really no reason why I shouldn't have shown you this place a
month ago, and yet there was no point in my doing so, and
circumstances are just conceivable in which it would have suited
us both for you to be in genuine ignorance of my whereabouts.  I
have something to sleep on, as you perceive, in case of need,
and, of course, my name is not Raffles in the King's Road.  So
you will see that one might bolt further and fare worse."

"Meanwhile you use the place as a dressing-room?"

"It is my private pavilion," said Raffles.  "Disguises?  In some
cases they're half the battle, and it's always pleasant to feel
that, if the worst comes to the worst, you needn't necessarily be
convicted under your own name.  Then they're indispensable in
dealing with the fences.  I drive all my bargains in the tongue
and raiment of Shoreditch.  If I didn't there'd be the very devil
to pay in blackmail. Now, this cupboard's full of all sorts of
toggery. I tell the woman who cleans the room that it's for my
models when I find 'em.  By the way, I only hope I've got
something that'll fit you, for you'll want a rig for to-morrow
night."

"To-morrow night!" I exclaimed.  "Why, what do you mean to do?"

"The trick," said Raffles.  "I intended writing to you as soon as
I got back to my rooms, to ask you to look me up to-morrow
afternoon; then I was going to unfold my plan of campaign, and
take you straight into action then and there.  There's nothing
like putting the nervous players in first; it's the sitting with
their pads on that upsets their applecart; that was another of my
reasons for being so confoundedly close.  You must try to forgive
me.  I couldn't help remembering how well you played up last
trip, without any time to weaken on it beforehand.  All I want is
for you to be as cool and smart to-morrow night as you were then;
though, by Jove, there's no comparison between the two cases!"

"I thought you would find it so."

"You were right.  I have.  Mind you, I don't say this will be the
tougher job all round; we shall probably get in without any
difficulty at all; it's the getting out again that may flummox
us.  That's the worst of an irregular household!" cried Raffles,
with quite a burst of virtuous indignation.  "I assure you,
Bunny, I spent the whole of Monday night in the shrubbery of the
garden next door, looking over the wall, and, if you'll believe
me, somebody was about all night long!  I don't mean the Kaffirs.
I don't believe they ever get to bed at all--poor devils!  No, I
mean Rosenthall himself, and that pasty-faced beast Purvis.  They
were up and drinking from midnight, when they came in, to broad
daylight, when I cleared out.  Even then I left them sober enough
to slang each other.  By the way, they very nearly came to blows
in the garden, within a few yards of me, and I heard something
that might come in useful and make Rosenthall shoot crooked at a
critical moment.  You know what an I. D. B. is?"

"Illicit Diamond Buyer?"

"Exactly.  Well, it seems that Rosenthall was one.  He must have
let it out to Purvis in his cups. Anyhow, I heard Purvis taunting
him with it, and threatening him with the breakwater at Capetown;
and I begin to think our friends are friend and foe. But about
to-morrow night: there's nothing subtle in my plan.  It's simply
to get in while these fellows are out on the loose, and to lie
low till they come back, and longer.  If possible, we must doctor
the whiskey.  That would simplify the whole thing, though it's
not a very sporting game to play; still, we must remember
Rosenthall's revolver; we don't want him to sign his name on US.
With all those Kaffirs about, however, it's ten to one on the
whiskey, and a hundred to one against us if we go looking for it.

A brush with the heathen would spoil everything, if it did no
more.  Besides, there are the ladies--"

"The deuce there are!"

"Ladies with an _I_, and the very voices for raising Cain.  I
fear, I fear the clamor!  It would be fatal to us.  Au contraire,
if we can manage to stow ourselves away unbeknownst, half the
battle will be won.  If Rosenthall turns in drunk, it's a purple
diamond apiece.  If he sits up sober, it may be a bullet instead.
We will hope not, Bunny; and all the firing wouldn't be on one
side; but it's on the knees of the gods."

And so we left it when we shook hands in Picadilly--not by any
means as much later as I could have wished.  Raffles would not
ask me to his rooms that night.  He said he made it a rule to
have a long night before playing cricket and--other games.  His
final word to me was framed on the same principle.

"Mind, only one drink to-night, Bunny.  Two at the outside--as
you value your life--and mine!"

I remember my abject obedience; and the endless, sleepless night
it gave me; and the roofs of the houses opposite standing out at
last against the blue-gray London dawn.  I wondered whether I
should ever see another, and was very hard on myself for that
little expedition which I had made on my own wilful account.

It was between eight and nine o'clock in the evening when we took
up our position in the garden adjoining that of Reuben
Rosenthall; the house itself was shut up, thanks to the
outrageous libertine next door, who, by driving away the
neighbors, had gone far towards delivering himself into our
hands.  Practically secure from surprise on that side, we could
watch our house under cover of a wall just high enough to see
over, while a fair margin of shrubs in either garden afforded us
additional protection.  Thus entrenched, we had stood an hour,
watching a pair of lighted bow-windows with vague shadows
flitting continually across the blinds, and listening to the
drawing of corks, the clink of glasses, and a gradual crescendo
of coarse voices within.  Our luck seemed to have deserted us:
the owner of the purple diamonds was dining at home and dining at
undue length.  I thought it was a dinner-party.  Raffles
differed; in the end he proved right.  Wheels grated in the
drive, a carriage and pair stood at the steps; there was a
stampede from the dining-room, and the loud voices died away, to
burst forth presently from the porch.

Let me make our position perfectly clear.  We were over the wall,
at the side of the house, but a few feet from the dining-room
windows.  On our right, one angle of the building cut the back
lawn in two diagonally; on our left, another angle just permitted
us to see the jutting steps and the waiting carriage.  We saw
Rosenthall come out--saw the glimmer of his diamonds before
anything. Then came the pugilist; then a lady with a head of hair
like a bath sponge; then another, and the party was complete.

Raffles ducked and pulled me down in great excitement.

"The ladies are going with them," he whispered.  "This is great!"

"That's better still."

"The Gardenia!" the millionaire had bawled.

"And that's best of all," said Raffles, standing upright as hoofs
and wheels crunched through the gates and rattled off at a fine
speed.

"Now what?" I whispered, trembling with excitement.

"They'll be clearing away.  Yes, here come their shadows.  The
drawing-room windows open on the lawn.  Bunny, it's the
psychological moment. Where's that mask?"

I produced it with a hand whose trembling I tried in vain to
still, and could have died for Raffles when he made no comment on
what he could not fail to notice.  His own hands were firm and
cool as he adjusted my mask for me, and then his own.

"By Jove, old boy," he whispered cheerily, "you look about the
greatest ruffian I ever saw! These masks alone will down a
nigger, if we meet one.  But I'm glad I remembered to tell you
not to shave.  You'll pass for Whitechapel if the worst comes to
the worst and you don't forget to talk the lingo.  Better sulk
like a mule if you're not sure of it, and leave the dialogue to
me; but, please our stars, there will be no need.  Now, are you
ready?"

"Quite."

"Got your gag?"

"Yes."

"Shooter?"

"Yes."

"Then follow me."

In an instant we were over the wall, in another on the lawn
behind the house.  There was no moon. The very stars in their
courses had veiled themselves for our benefit.  I crept at my
leader's heels to some French windows opening upon a shallow
veranda.  He pushed.  They yielded.

"Luck again," he whispered; "nothing BUT luck! Now for a light."

And the light came!

A good score of electric burners glowed red for the fraction of a
second, then rained merciless white beams into our blinded eyes.
When we found our sight four revolvers covered us, and between
two of them the colossal frame of Reuben Rosenthall shook with a
wheezy laughter from head to foot.

"Good-evening, boys," he hiccoughed.  "Glad to see ye at last.
Shift foot or finger, you on the left, though, and you're a dead
boy.  I mean you, you greaser!" he roared out at Raffles.  "I
know you.  I've been waitin' for you.  I've been WATCHIN' you all
this week!  Plucky smart you thought yerself, didn't you?  One
day beggin', next time shammin' tight, and next one o' them old
pals from Kimberley what never come when I'm in.  But you left
the same tracks every day, you buggins, an' the same tracks every
night, all round the blessed premises."

"All right, guv'nor," drawled Raffles; "don't excite.  It's a
fair cop.  We don't sweat to know 'ow you brung it orf.  On'y
don't you go for to shoot, 'cos we 'int awmed, s'help me Gord!"

"Ah, you're a knowin' one," said Rosenthall, fingering his
triggers.  "But you've struck a knowin'er."

"Ho, yuss, we know all abaht thet!  Set a thief to ketch a
thief--ho, yuss."

My eyes had torn themselves from the round black muzzles, from
the accursed diamonds that had been our snare, the pasty pig-face
of the over-fed pugilist, and the flaming cheeks and hook nose of
Rosenthall himself.  I was looking beyond them at the doorway
filled with quivering silk and plush, black faces, white
eyeballs, woolly pates.  But a sudden silence recalled my
attention to the millionaire.  And only his nose retained its
color.

"What d'ye mean?" he whispered with a hoarse oath.  "Spit it out,
or, by Christmas, I'll drill you!"

"Whort price thet brikewater?" drawled Raffles coolly.

"Eh?"

Rosenthall's revolvers were describing widening orbits.

"Whort price thet brikewater--old _I.D.B._?"

"Where in hell did you get hold o' that ?" asked Rosenthall, with
a rattle in his thick neck, meant for mirth.

"You may well arst," says Raffles.  "It's all over the plice
w'ere _I_ come from."

"Who can have spread such rot?"

"I dunno," says Raffles; "arst the gen'leman on yer left; p'r'aps
'E knows."

The gentleman on his left had turned livid with emotion.  Guilty
conscience never declared itself in plainer terms.  For a moment
his small eyes bulged like currants in the suet of his face; the
next, he had pocketed his pistols on a professional instinct, and
was upon us with his fists.

"Out o' the light--out o' the light!" yelled Rosenthall in a
frenzy.

He was too late.  No sooner had the burly pugilist obstructed his
fire than Raffles was through the window at a bound; while I, for
standing still and saying nothing, was scientifically felled to
the floor.


I cannot have been many moments without my senses.  When I
recovered them there was a great to-do in the garden, but I had
the drawing-room to myself.  I sat up.  Rosenthall and Purvis
were rushing about outside, cursing the Kaffirs and nagging at
each other.

"Over THAT wall, I tell yer!"

"I tell you it was this one.  Can't you whistle for the police?"

"Police be damned!  I've had enough of the blessed police."

"Then we'd better get back and make sure of the other rotter."

"Oh, make sure o' yer skin.  That's what you'd better do.  Jala,
you black hog, if I catch YOU skulkin'. . . ."

I never heard the threat.  I was creeping from the drawing-room
on my hands and knees, my own revolver swinging by its steel ring
from my teeth.

For an instant I thought that the hall also was deserted.  I was
wrong, and I crept upon a Kaffir on all fours.  Poor devil, I
could not bring myself to deal him a base blow, but I threatened
him most hideously with my revolver, and left the white teeth
chattering in his black head as I took the stairs three at a
time.  Why I went upstairs in that decisive fashion, as though it
were my only course, I cannot explain.  But garden and ground
floor seemed alive with men, and I might have done worse.

I turned into the first room I came to.  It was a bedroom--empty,
though lit up; and never shall I forget how I started as I
entered, on encountering the awful villain that was myself at
full length in a pier-glass!  Masked, armed, and ragged, I was
indeed fit carrion for a bullet or the hangman, and to one or the
other I made up my mind.  Nevertheless, I hid myself in the
wardrobe behind the mirror; and there I stood shivering and
cursing my fate, my folly, and Raffles most of all--Raffles first
and last--for I daresay half an hour.  Then the wardrobe door was
flung suddenly open; they had stolen into the room without a
sound; and I was hauled downstairs, an ignominious captive.

Gross scenes followed in the hall; the ladies were now upon the
stage, and at sight of the desperate criminal they screamed with
one accord. In truth I must have given them fair cause, though my
mask was now torn away and hid nothing but my left ear.
Rosenthall answered their shrieks with a roar for silence; the
woman with the bath-sponge hair swore at him shrilly in return;
the place became a Babel impossible to describe.  I remember
wondering how long it would be before the police appeared.
Purvis and the ladies were for calling them in and giving me in
charge without delay.  Rosenthall would not hear of it.  He swore
that he would shoot man or woman who left his sight.  He had had
enough of the police.  He was not going to have them coming there
to spoil sport; he was going to deal with me in his own way.
With that he dragged me from all other hands, flung me against a
door, and sent a bullet crashing through the wood within an inch
of my ear.

"You drunken fool!  It'll be murder!" shouted Purvis, getting in
the way a second time.

"Wha' do I care?  He's armed, isn't he?  I shot him in
self-defence.  It'll be a warning to others.  Will you stand
aside, or d'ye want it yourself?"

"You're drunk," said Purvis, still between us. "I saw you take a
neat tumblerful since you come in, and it's made you drunk as a
fool.  Pull yourself together, old man.  You ain't a-going to do
what you'll be sorry for."

"Then I won't shoot at him, I'll only shoot roun' an' roun' the
beggar.  You're quite right, ole feller.  Wouldn't hurt him.
Great mishtake. Roun' an' roun'.  There--like that!"

His freckled paw shot up over Purvis's shoulder, mauve lightning
came from his ring, a red flash from his revolver, and shrieks
from the women as the reverberations died away.  Some splinters
lodged in my hair.

Next instant the prize-fighter disarmed him; and I was safe from
the devil, but finally doomed to the deep sea.  A policeman was
in our midst. He had entered through the drawing-room window; he
was an officer of few words and creditable promptitude.  In a
twinkling he had the handcuffs on my wrists, while the pugilist
explained the situation, and his patron reviled the force and its
representative with impotent malignity.  A fine watch they kept;
a lot of good they did; coming in when all was over and the whole
household might have been murdered in their sleep.  The officer
only deigned to notice him as he marched me off.

"We know all about YOU, sir," said he contemptuously, and he
refused the sovereign Purvis proffered.  "You will be seeing me
again, sir, at Marylebone."

"Shall I come now?"

"As you please, sir.  I rather think the other gentleman requires
you more, and I don't fancy this young man means to give much
trouble."

"Oh, I'm coming quietly," I said.

And I went.

In silence we traversed perhaps a hundred yards. It must have
been midnight.  We did not meet a soul.  At last I whispered:

"How on earth did you manage it?"

"Purely by luck," said Raffles.  "I had the luck to get clear
away through knowing every brick of those back-garden walls, and
the double luck to have these togs with the rest over at Chelsea.
The helmet is one of a collection I made up at Oxford; here it
goes over this wall, and we'd better carry the coat and belt
before we meet a real officer.  I got them once for a fancy
ball--ostensibly--and thereby hangs a yarn.  I always thought
they might come in useful a second time.  My chief crux to-night
was getting rid of the hansom that brought me back.  I sent him
off to Scotland Yard with ten bob and a special message to good
old Mackenzie.  The whole detective department will be at
Rosenthall's in about half an hour.  Of course, I speculated on
our gentleman's hatred of the police--another huge slice of luck.
If you'd got away, well and good; if not, I felt he was the man
to play with his mouse as long as possible. Yes, Bunny, it's been
more of a costume piece than I intended, and we've come out of it
with a good deal less credit.  But, by Jove, we're jolly lucky to
have come out of it at all!"


GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS

Old Raffles may or may not have been an exceptional criminal, but
as a cricketer I dare swear he was unique.  Himself a dangerous
bat, a brilliant field, and perhaps the very finest slow bowler
of his decade, he took incredibly little interest in the game at
large.  He never went up to Lord's without his cricket-bag, or
showed the slightest interest in the result of a match in which
he was not himself engaged.  Nor was this mere hateful egotism on
his part.  He professed to have lost all enthusiasm for the game,
and to keep it up only from the very lowest motives.

"Cricket," said Raffles, "like everything else, is good enough
sport until you discover a better.  As a source of excitement it
isn't in it with other things you wot of, Bunny, and the
involuntary comparison becomes a bore.  What's the satisfaction
of taking a man's wicket when you want his spoons?  Still, if you
can bowl a bit your low cunning won't get rusty, and always
looking for the weak spot's just the kind of mental exercise one
wants.  Yes, perhaps there's some affinity between the two things
after all.  But I'd chuck up cricket to-morrow, Bunny, if it
wasn't for the glorious protection it affords a person of my
proclivities."

"How so?" said I.  "It brings you before the public, I should
have thought, far more than is either safe or wise."

"My dear Bunny, that's exactly where you make a mistake.  To
follow Crime with reasonable impunity you simply MUST have a
parallel, ostensible career--the more public the better.  The
principle is obvious.  Mr. Peace, of pious memory, disarmed
suspicion by acquiring a local reputation for playing the fiddle
and taming animals, and it's my profound conviction that Jack the
Ripper was a really eminent public man, whose speeches were very
likely reported alongside his atrocities.  Fill the bill in some
prominent part, and you'll never be suspected of doubling it with
another of equal prominence.  That's why I want you to cultivate
journalism, my boy, and sign all you can.  And it's the one and
only reason why I don't burn my bats for firewood."

Nevertheless, when he did play there was no keener performer on
the field, nor one more anxious to do well for his side.  I
remember how he went to the nets, before the first match of the
season, with his pocket full of sovereigns, which he put on the
stumps instead of bails.  It was a sight to see the professionals
bowling like demons for the hard cash, for whenever a stump was
hit a pound was tossed to the bowler and another balanced in its
stead, while one man took #3 with a ball that spreadeagled the
wicket.  Raffles's practice cost him either eight or nine
sovereigns; but he had absolutely first-class bowling all the
time; and he made fifty-seven runs next day.

It became my pleasure to accompany him to all his matches, to
watch every ball he bowled, or played, or fielded, and to sit
chatting with him in the pavilion when he was doing none of these
three things.  You might have seen us there, side by side, during
the greater part of the Gentlemen's first innings against the
Players (who had lost the toss) on the second Monday in July.  We
were to be seen, but not heard, for Raffles had failed to score,
and was uncommonly cross for a player who cared so little for the
game.  Merely taciturn with me, he was positively rude to more
than one member who wanted to know how it had happened, or who
ventured to commiserate him on his luck; there he sat, with a
straw hat tilted over his nose and a cigarette stuck between lips
that curled disagreeably at every advance.  I was therefore much
surprised when a young fellow of the exquisite type came and
squeezed himself in between us, and met with a perfectly civil
reception despite the liberty.  I did not know the boy by sight,
nor did Raffles introduce us; but their conversation proclaimed
at once a slightness of acquaintanceship and a license on the
lad's part which combined to puzzle me.  Mystification reached
its height when Raffles was informed that the other's father was
anxious to meet him, and he instantly consented to gratify that
whim.

"He's in the Ladies' Enclosure.  Will you come round now?"

"With pleasure," says Raffles.  "Keep a place for me, Bunny."

And they were gone.

"Young Crowley," said some voice further back.  "Last year's
Harrow Eleven."

"I remember him.  Worst man in the team."

"Keen cricketer, however.  Stopped till he was twenty to get his
colors.  Governor made him.  Keen breed.  Oh, pretty, sir!  Very
pretty!"

The game was boring me.  I only came to see old Raffles perform.
Soon I was looking wistfully for his return, and at length I saw
him beckoning me from the palings to the right.

"Want to introduce you to old Amersteth," he whispered, when I
joined him.  "They've a cricket week next month, when this boy
Crowley comes of age, and we've both got to go down and play."

"Both!" I echoed.  "But I'm no cricketer!"

"Shut up," says Raffles.  "Leave that to me. I've been lying for
all I'm worth," he added sepulchrally as we reached the bottom of
the steps. "I trust to you not to give the show away."

There was a gleam in his eye that I knew well enough elsewhere,
but was unprepared for in those healthy, sane surroundings; and
it was with very definite misgivings and surmises that I followed
the Zingari blazer through the vast flower-bed of hats and
bonnets that bloomed beneath the ladies' awning.

Lord Amersteth was a fine-looking man with a short mustache and a
double chin.  He received me with much dry courtesy, through
which, however, it was not difficult to read a less flattering
tale.  I was accepted as the inevitable appendage of the
invaluable Raffles, with whom I felt deeply incensed as I made my
bow.

"I have been bold enough," said Lord Amersteth, "to ask one of
the Gentlemen of England to come down and play some rustic
cricket for us next month.  He is kind enough to say that he
would have liked nothing better, but for this little fishing
expedition of yours, Mr.-----, Mr.-----," and Lord Amersteth
succeeded in remembering my name.

It was, of course, the first I had ever heard of that fishing
expedition, but I made haste to say that it could easily, and
should certainly, be put off.  Raffles gleamed approval through
his eyelashes.  Lord Amersteth bowed and shrugged.

"You're very good, I'm sure," said he.  "But I understand you're
a cricketer yourself?"

"He was one at school," said Raffles, with infamous readiness.

"Not a real cricketer," I was stammering meanwhile.

"In the eleven?" said Lord Amersteth.

"I'm afraid not," said I.

"But only just out of it," declared Raffles, to my horror.

"Well, well, we can't all play for the Gentlemen," said Lord
Amersteth slyly.  "My son Crowley only just scraped into the
eleven at Harrow, and HE'S going to play.  I may even come in
myself at a pinch; so you won't be the only duffer, if you are
one, and I shall be very glad if you will come down and help us
too.  You shall flog a stream before breakfast and after dinner,
if you like."

"I should be very proud," I was beginning, as the mere prelude to
resolute excuses; but the eye of Raffles opened wide upon me; and
I hesitated weakly, to be duly lost.

"Then that's settled," said Lord Amersteth, with the slightest
suspicion of grimness.  "It's to be a little week, you know, when
my son comes of age.  We play the Free Foresters, the Dorsetshire
Gentlemen, and probably some local lot as well. But Mr. Raffles
will tell you all about it, and Crowley shall write.  Another
wicket!  By Jove, they're all out!  Then I rely on you both."
And, with a little nod, Lord Amersteth rose and sidled to the
gangway.

Raffles rose also, but I caught the sleeve of his blazer.

"What are you thinking of?" I whispered savagely.  "I was nowhere
near the eleven.  I'm no sort of cricketer.  I shall have to get
out of this!"

"Not you," he whispered back.  "You needn't play, but come you
must.  If you wait for me after half-past six I'll tell you why."

But I could guess the reason; and I am ashamed to say that it
revolted me much less than did the notion of making a public fool
of myself on a cricket-field.  My gorge rose at this as it no
longer rose at crime, and it was in no tranquil humor that I
strolled about the ground while Raffles disappeared in the
pavilion.  Nor was my annoyance lessened by a little meeting I
witnessed between young Crowley and his father, who shrugged as
he stopped and stooped to convey some information which made the
young man look a little blank. It may have been pure self-
consciousness on my part, but I could have sworn that the trouble
was their inability to secure the great Raffles without his
insignificant friend.

Then the bell rang, and I climbed to the top of the pavilion to
watch Raffles bowl.  No subtleties are lost up there; and if ever
a bowler was full of them, it was A. J. Raffles on this day, as,
indeed, all the cricket world remembers.  One had not to be a
cricketer oneself to appreciate his perfect command of pitch and
break, his beautifully easy action, which never varied with the
varying pace, his great ball on the leg-stump--his dropping
head-ball--in a word, the infinite ingenuity of that versatile
attack.  It was no mere exhibition of athletic prowess, it was an
intellectual treat, and one with a special significance in my
eyes.  I saw the "affinity between the two things," saw it in
that afternoon's tireless warfare against the flower of
professional cricket.  It was not that Raffles took many wickets
for few runs; he was too fine a bowler to mind being hit; and
time was short, and the wicket good.  What I admired, and what I
remember, was the combination of resource and cunning, of
patience and precision, of head-work and handiwork, which made
every over an artistic whole.  It was all so characteristic of
that other Raffles whom I alone knew!

"I felt like bowling this afternoon," he told me later in the
hansom.  "With a pitch to help me, I'd have done something big;
as it is, three for forty-one, out of the four that fell, isn't
so bad for a slow bowler on a plumb wicket against those fellows.
But I felt venomous!  Nothing riles me more than being asked
about for my cricket as though I were a pro. myself."

"Then why on earth go?"

"To punish them, and--because we shall be jolly hard up, Bunny,
before the season's over!"

"Ah!" said I.  "I thought it was that."

"Of course, it was!  It seems they're going to have the very
devil of a week of it--balls--dinner parties--swagger house
party--general junketings--and obviously a houseful of diamonds
as well.  Diamonds galore!  As a general rule nothing would
induce me to abuse my position as a guest.  I've never done it,
Bunny.  But in this case we're engaged like the waiters and the
band, and by heaven we'll take our toll!  Let's have a quiet
dinner somewhere and talk it over."

"It seems rather a vulgar sort of theft," I could not help
saying; and to this, my single protest, Raffles instantly
assented.

"It is a vulgar sort," said he; "but I can't help that.  We're
getting vulgarly hard up again, and there's an end on 't.
Besides, these people deserve it, and can afford it.  And don't
you run away with the idea that all will be plain sailing;
nothing will be easier than getting some stuff, and nothing
harder than avoiding all suspicion, as, of course, we must.  We
may come away with no more than a good working plan of the
premises.  Who knows?  In any case there's weeks of thinking in
it for you and me."

But with those weeks I will not weary you further than by
remarking that the "thinking," was done entirely by Raffles, who
did not always trouble to communicate his thoughts to me.  His
reticence, however, was no longer an irritant.  I began to accept
it as a necessary convention of these little enterprises.  And,
after our last adventure of the kind, more especially after its
denouement, my trust in Raffles was much too solid to be shaken
by a want of trust in me, which I still believe to have been more
the instinct of the criminal than the judgment of the man.

It was on Monday, the tenth of August, that we were due at
Milchester Abbey, Dorset; and the beginning of the month found us
cruising about that very county, with fly-rods actually in our
hands.  The idea was that we should acquire at once a local
reputation as decent fishermen, and some knowledge of the
countryside, with a view to further and more deliberate
operations in the event of an unprofitable week.  There was
another idea which Raffles kept to himself until he had got me
down there.  Then one day he produced a cricket-ball in a meadow
we were crossing, and threw me catches for an hour together.
More hours he spent in bowling to me on the nearest green; and,
if I was never a cricketer, at least I came nearer to being one,
by the end of that week, than ever before or since.

Incident began early on the Monday.  We had sallied forth from a
desolate little junction within quite a few miles of Milchester,
had been caught in a shower, had run for shelter to a wayside
inn. A florid, overdressed man was drinking in the parlor, and I
could have sworn it was at the sight of him that Raffles recoiled
on the threshold, and afterwards insisted on returning to the
station through the rain.  He assured me, however, that the odor
of stale ale had almost knocked him down.  And I had to make what
I could of his speculative, downcast eyes and knitted brows.

Milchester Abbey is a gray, quadrangular pile, deep-set in rich
woody country, and twinkling with triple rows of quaint windows,
every one of which seemed alight as we drove up just in time to
dress for dinner.  The carriage had whirled us under I know not
how many triumphal arches in process of construction, and past
the tents and flag-poles of a juicy-looking cricket-field, on
which Raffles undertook to bowl up to his reputation.  But the
chief signs of festival were within, where we found an enormous
house-party assembled, including more persons of pomp, majesty,
and dominion than I had ever encountered in one room before.  I
confess I felt overpowered.  Our errand and my own presences
combined to rob me of an address upon which I have sometimes
plumed myself; and I have a grim recollection of my nervous
relief when dinner was at last announced.  I little knew what an
ordeal it was to prove.

I had taken in a much less formidable young lady than might have
fallen to my lot.  Indeed I began by blessing my good fortune in
this respect. Miss Melhuish was merely the rector's daughter, and
she had only been asked to make an even number.  She informed me
of both facts before the soup reached us, and her subsequent
conversation was characterized by the same engaging candor. It
exposed what was little short of a mania for imparting
information.  I had simply to listen, to nod, and to be thankful.

When I confessed to knowing very few of those present, even by
sight, my entertaining companion proceeded to tell me who
everybody was, beginning on my left and working conscientiously
round to her right.  This lasted quite a long time, and really
interested me; but a great deal that followed did not, and,
obviously to recapture my unworthy attention, Miss Melhuish
suddenly asked me, in a sensational whisper, whether I could keep
a secret.

I said I thought I might, whereupon another question followed, in
still lower and more thrilling accents:

"Are you afraid of burglars?"

Burglars!  I was roused at last.  The word stabbed me.  I
repeated it in horrified query.

"So I've found something to interest you at last!" said Miss
Melhuish, in naive triumph. "Yes--burglars!  But don't speak so
loud.  It's supposed to be kept a great secret.  I really
oughtn't to tell you at all!"

"But what is there to tell?" I whispered with satisfactory
impatience.

"You promise not to speak of it?"

"Of course!"

"Well, then, there are burglars in the neighborhood."

"Have they committed any robberies?"

"Not yet."

"Then how do you know?"

"They've been seen.  In the district.  Two well-known London
thieves!"

Two!  I looked at Raffles.  I had done so often during the
evening, envying him his high spirits, his iron nerve, his
buoyant wit, his perfect ease and self-possession.  But now I
pitied him; through all my own terror and consternation, I pitied
him as he sat eating and drinking, and laughing and talking,
without a cloud of fear or of embarrassment on his handsome,
taking, daredevil face.  I caught up my champagne and emptied the
glass.

"Who has seen them?" I then asked calmly.

"A detective.  They were traced down from town a few days ago.
They are believed to have designs on the Abbey!"

"But why aren't they run in?"

"Exactly what I asked papa on the way here this evening; he says
there is no warrant out against the men at present, and all that
can be done is to watch their movements."

"Oh! so they are being watched?"

"Yes, by a detective who is down here on purpose.  And I heard
Lord Amersteth tell papa that they had been seen this afternoon
at Warbeck Junction!"

The very place where Raffles and I had been caught in the rain!
Our stampede from the inn was now explained; on the other hand, I
was no longer to be taken by surprise by anything that my
companion might have to tell me; and I succeeded in looking her
in the face with a smile.

"This is really quite exciting, Miss Melhuish," said I.  "May I
ask how you come to know so much about it?"

"It's papa," was the confidential reply.  "Lord Amersteth
consulted him, and he consulted me. But for goodness' sake don't
let it get about!  I can't think WHAT tempted me to tell you!"

"You may trust me, Miss Melhuish.  But--aren't you frightened?"

Miss Melhuish giggled.

"Not a bit!  They won't come to the rectory. There's nothing for
them there.  But look round the table: look at the diamonds: look
at old Lady Melrose's necklace alone!"

The Dowager Marchioness of Melrose was one of the few persons
whom it had been unnecessary to point out to me.  She sat on Lord
Amersteth's right, flourishing her ear-trumpet, and drinking
champagne with her usual notorious freedom, as dissipated and
kindly a dame as the world has ever seen.  It was a necklace of
diamonds and sapphires that rose and fell about her ample neck.

"They say it's worth five thousand pounds at least," continued my
companion.  "Lady Margaret told me so this morning (that's Lady
Margaret next your Mr. Raffles, you know); and the old dear WILL
wear them every night.  Think what a haul they would be!  No; we
don't feel in immediate danger at the rectory."

When the ladies rose, Miss Melhuish bound me to fresh vows of
secrecy; and left me, I should think, with some remorse for her
indiscretion, but more satisfaction at the importance which it
had undoubtedly given her in my eyes.  The opinion may smack of
vanity, though, in reality, the very springs of conversation
reside in that same human, universal itch to thrill the auditor.
The peculiarity of Miss Melhuish was that she must be thrilling
at all costs.  And thrilling she had surely been.

I spare you my feelings of the next two hours. I tried hard to
get a word with Raffles, but again and again I failed.  In the
dining-room he and Crowley lit their cigarettes with the same
match, and had their heads together all the time.  In the
drawing-room I had the mortification of hearing him talk
interminable nonsense into the ear-trumpet of Lady Melrose, whom
he knew in town.  Lastly, in the billiard-room, they had a great
and lengthy pool, while I sat aloof and chafed more than ever in
the company of a very serious Scotchman, who had arrived since
dinner, and who would talk of nothing but the recent improvements
in instantaneous photography.  He had not come to play in the
matches (he told me), but to obtain for Lord Amersteth such a
series of cricket photographs as had never been taken before;
whether as an amateur or a professional photographer I was unable
to determine.  I remember, however, seeking distraction in little
bursts of resolute attention to the conversation of this bore.
And so at last the long ordeal ended; glasses were emptied, men
said good-night, and I followed Raffles to his room.

"It's all up!" I gasped, as he turned up the gas and I shut the
door.  "We're being watched. We've been followed down from town.
There's a detective here on the spot!"

"How do YOU know?" asked Raffles, turning upon me quite sharply,
but without the least dismay.  And I told him how I knew.

"Of course," I added, "it was the fellow we saw in the inn this
afternoon."

"The detective?" said Raffles.  "Do you mean to say you don't
know a detective when you see one, Bunny?"

"If that wasn't the fellow, which is?"

Raffles shook his head.

"To think that you've been talking to him for the last hour in
the billiard-room and couldn't spot what he was!"

"The Scotch photographer--"

I paused aghast.

"Scotch he is," said Raffles, "and photographer he may be.  He is
also Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard--the very man I sent
the message to that night last April.  And you couldn't spot who
he was in a whole hour! O Bunny, Bunny, you were never built for
crime!"

"But," said I, "if that was Mackenzie, who was the fellow you
bolted from at Warbeck?"

"The man he's watching."

"But he's watching us!"

Raffles looked at me with a pitying eye, and shook his head again
before handing me his open cigarette-case.

"I don't know whether smoking's forbidden in one's bedroom, but
you'd better take one of these and stand tight, Bunny, because
I'm going to say something offensive."

I helped myself with a laugh.

"Say what you like, my dear fellow, if it really isn't you and I
that Mackenzie's after."

"Well, then, it isn't, and it couldn't be, and nobody but a born
Bunny would suppose for a moment that it was!  Do you seriously
think he would sit there and knowingly watch his man playing pool
under his nose?  Well, he might; he's a cool hand, Mackenzie; but
I'm not cool enough to win a pool under such conditions.  At
least I don't think I am; it would be interesting to see.  The
situation wasn't free from strain as it was, though I knew he
wasn't thinking of us.  Crowley told me all about it after
dinner, you see, and then I'd seen one of the men for myself this
afternoon. You thought it was a detective who made me turn tail
at that inn.  I really don't know why I didn't tell you at the
time, but it was just the opposite. That loud, red-faced brute is
one of the cleverest thieves in London, and I once had a drink
with him and our mutual fence.  I was an Eastender from tongue to
toe at the moment, but you will understand that I don't run
unnecessary risks of recognition by a brute like that."

"He's not alone, I hear."

"By no means; there's at least one other man with him; and it's
suggested that there may be an accomplice here in the house."

"Did Lord Crowley tell you so?"

"Crowley and the champagne between them.  In confidence, of
course, just as your girl told you; but even in confidence he
never let on about Mackenzie.  He told me there was a detective
in the background, but that was all.  Putting him up as a guest
is evidently their big secret, to be kept from the other guests
because it might offend them, but more particularly from the
servants whom he's here to watch.  That's my reading of the
situation, Bunny, and you will agree with me that it's infinitely
more interesting than we could have imagined it would prove."

"But infinitely more difficult for us," said I, with a sigh of
pusillanimous relief.  "Our hands are tied for this week, at all
events."

"Not necessarily, my dear Bunny, though I admit that the chances
are against us.  Yet I'm not so sure of that either.  There are
all sorts of possibilities in these three-cornered combinations.
Set A to watch B, and he won't have an eye left for C.  That's
the obvious theory, but then Mackenzie's a very big A.  I should
be sorry to have any boodle about me with that man in the house.
Yet it would be great to nip in between A and B and score off
them both at once!  It would be worth a risk, Bunny, to do that;
it would be worth risking something merely to take on old hands
like B and his men at their own old game!  Eh, Bunny?  That would
be something like a match. Gentlemen and Players at single
wicket, by Jove!"

His eyes were brighter than I had known them for many a day.
They shone with the perverted enthusiasm which was roused in him
only by the contemplation of some new audacity.  He kicked off
his shoes and began pacing his room with noiseless rapidity; not
since the night of the Old Bohemian dinner to Reuben Rosenthall
had Raffles exhibited such excitement in my presence; and I was
not sorry at the moment to be reminded of the fiasco to which
that banquet had been the prelude.

"My dear A. J.," said I in his very own tone, "you're far too
fond of the uphill game; you will eventually fall a victim to the
sporting spirit and nothing else.  Take a lesson from our last
escape, and fly lower as you value our skins.  Study the house as
much as you like, but do--not--go and shove your head into
Mackenzie's mouth!"

My wealth of metaphor brought him to a stand-still, with his
cigarette between his fingers and a grin beneath his shining
eyes.

"You're quite right, Bunny.  I won't.  I really won't.  Yet--you
saw old Lady Melrose's necklace?  I've been wanting it for years!
But I'm not going to play the fool; honor bright, I'm not; yet
--by Jove!--to get to windward of the professors and Mackenzie
too!  It would be a great game, Bunny, it would be a great game!"

"Well, you mustn't play it this week."

"No, no, I won't.  But I wonder how the professors think of going
to work?  That's what one wants to know.  I wonder if they've
really got an accomplice in the house?  How I wish I knew their
game!  But it's all right, Bunny; don't you be jealous; it shall
be as you wish."

And with that assurance I went off to my own room, and so to bed
with an incredibly light heart. I had still enough of the honest
man in me to welcome the postponement of our actual felonies, to
dread their performance, to deplore their necessity: which is
merely another way of stating the too patent fact that I was an
incomparably weaker man than Raffles, while every whit as wicked.

I had, however, one rather strong point.  I possessed the gift of
dismissing unpleasant considerations, not intimately connected
with the passing moment, entirely from my mind.  Through the
exercise of this faculty I had lately been living my frivolous
life in town with as much ignoble enjoyment as I had derived from
it the year before; and similarly, here at Milchester, in the
long-dreaded cricket-week, I had after all a quite excellent
time.

It is true that there were other factors in this pleasing
disappointment.  In the first place, mirabile dictu, there were
one or two even greater duffers than I on the Abbey
cricket-field.  Indeed, quite early in the week, when it was of
most value to me, I gained considerable kudos for a lucky catch;
a ball, of which I had merely heard the hum, stuck fast in my
hand, which Lord Amersteth himself grasped in public
congratulation.  This happy accident was not to be undone even by
me, and, as nothing succeeds like success, and the constant
encouragement of the one great cricketer on the field was in
itself an immense stimulus, I actually made a run or two in my
very next innings.  Miss Melhuish said pretty things to me that
night at the great ball in honor of Viscount Crowley's majority;
she also told me that was the night on which the robbers would
assuredly make their raid, and was full of arch tremors when we
sat out in the garden, though the entire premises were
illuminated all night long.  Meanwhile the quiet Scotchman took
countless photographs by day, which he developed by night in a
dark room admirably situated in the servants' part of the house;
and it is my firm belief that only two of his fellow-guests knew
Mr. Clephane of Dundee for Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard.

The week was to end with a trumpery match on the Saturday, which
two or three of us intended abandoning early in order to return
to town that night.  The match, however, was never played.  In
the small hours of the Saturday morning a tragedy took place at
Milchester Abbey.

Let me tell of the thing as I saw and heard it.  My room opened
upon the central gallery, and was not even on the same floor as
that on which Raffles--and I think all the other men--were
quartered.  I had been put, in fact, into the dressing-room of
one of the grand suites, and my too near neighbors were old Lady
Melrose and my host and hostess.  Now, by the Friday evening the
actual festivities were at an end, and, for the first time that
week, I must have been sound asleep since midnight, when all at
once I found myself sitting up breathless.  A heavy thud had come
against my door, and now I heard hard breathing and the dull
stamp of muffled feet.

"I've got ye," muttered a voice.  "It's no use struggling."

It was the Scotch detective, and a new fear turned me cold.
There was no reply, but the hard breathing grew harder still, and
the muffled feet beat the floor to a quicker measure.  In sudden
panic I sprang out of bed and flung open my door. A light burnt
low on the landing, and by it I could see Mackenzie swaying and
staggering in a silent tussle with some powerful adversary.

"Hold this man!" he cried, as I appeared. "Hold the rascal!"

But I stood like a fool until the pair of them backed into me,
when, with a deep breath I flung myself on the fellow, whose face
I had seen at last. He was one of the footmen who waited at
table; and no sooner had I pinned him than the detective loosed
his hold.

"Hang on to him," he cried.  "There's more of 'em below."

And he went leaping down the stairs, as other doors opened and
Lord Amersteth and his son appeared simultaneously in their
pyjamas.  At that my man ceased struggling; but I was still
holding him when Crowley turned up the gas.

"What the devil's all this?" asked Lord Amersteth, blinking.
"Who was that ran downstairs?"

"Mac--Clephane!" said I hastily.

"Aha!" said he, turning to the footman.  "So you're the
scoundrel, are you?  Well done!  Well done!  Where was he
caught?"

I had no idea.

"Here's Lady Melrose's door open," said Crowley.  "Lady Melrose!
Lady Melrose!"

"You forget she's deaf," said Lord Amersteth. "Ah! that'll be her
maid."

An inner door had opened; next instant there was a little shriek,
and a white figure gesticulated on the threshold.

"Ou donc est l'ecrin de Madame la Marquise?  La fenetre est
ouverte.  Il a disparu!"

"Window open and jewel-case gone, by Jove!" exclaimed Lord
Amersteth.  "Mais comment est Madame la Marquise?  Est elle
bien?"

"Oui, milor.  Elle dort."

"Sleeps through it all," said my lord.  "She's the only one,
then!"

"What made Mackenzie--Clephane--bolt?" young Crowley asked me.

"Said there were more of them below."

"Why the devil couldn't you tell us so before?" he cried, and
went leaping downstairs in his turn.

He was followed by nearly all the cricketers, who now burst upon
the scene in a body, only to desert it for the chase.  Raffles
was one of them, and I would gladly have been another, had not
the footman chosen this moment to hurl me from him, and to make a
dash in the direction from which they had come.  Lord Amersteth
had him in an instant; but the fellow fought desperately, and it
took the two of us to drag him downstairs, amid a terrified
chorus from half-open doors.  Eventually we handed him over to
two other footmen who appeared with their nightshirts tucked into
their trousers, and my host was good enough to compliment me as
he led the way outside.

"I thought I heard a shot," he added.  "Didn't you?"

"I thought I heard three."

And out we dashed into the darkness.

I remember how the gravel pricked my feet, how the wet grass
numbed them as we made for the sound of voices on an outlying
lawn.  So dark was the night that we were in the cricketers'
midst before we saw the shimmer of their pyjamas; and then Lord
Amersteth almost trod on Mackenzie as he lay prostrate in the
dew.

"Who's this ?" he cried.  "What on earth's happened?"

"It's Clephane," said a man who knelt over him.  "He's got a
bullet in him somewhere."

"Is he alive?"

"Barely."

"Good God!  Where's Crowley?"

"Here I am," called a breathless voice.  "It's no good, you
fellows.  There's nothing to show which way they've gone.  Here's
Raffles; he's chucked it, too."  And they ran up panting.

"Well, we've got one of them, at all events," muttered Lord
Amersteth.  "The next thing is to get this poor fellow indoors.
Take his shoulders, somebody.  Now his middle.  Join hands under
him.  All together, now; that's the way.  Poor fellow!  Poor
fellow!  His name isn't Clephane at all.  He's a Scotland Yard
detective, down here for these very villains!"

Raffles was the first to express surprise; but he had also been
the first to raise the wounded man.  Nor had any of them a
stronger or more tender hand in the slow procession to the house.

In a little we had the senseless man stretched on a sofa in the
library.  And there, with ice on his wound and brandy in his
throat, his eyes opened and his lips moved.

Lord Amersteth bent down to catch the words.

"Yes, yes," said he; "we've got one of them safe and sound.  The
brute you collared upstairs." Lord Amersteth bent lower.  "By
Jove!  Lowered the jewel-case out of the window, did he?  And
they've got clean away with it!  Well, well!  I only hope we'll
be able to pull this good fellow through.  He's off again."

An hour passed: the sun was rising.

It found a dozen young fellows on the settees in the
billiard-room, drinking whiskey and soda-water in their overcoats
and pyjamas, and still talking excitedly in one breath.  A
time-table was being passed from hand to hand: the doctor was
still in the library.  At last the door opened, and Lord
Amersteth put in his head.

"It isn't hopeless," said he, "but it's bad enough. There'll be
no cricket to-day."

Another hour, and most of us were on our way to catch the early
train; between us we filled a compartment almost to suffocation.
And still we talked all together of the night's event; and still
I was a little hero in my way, for having kept my hold of the one
ruffian who had been taken; and my gratification was subtle and
intense.  Raffles watched me under lowered lids.  Not a word had
we had together; not a word did we have until we had left the
others at Paddington, and were skimming through the streets in a
hansom with noiseless tires and a tinkling bell.

"Well, Bunny," said Raffles, "so the professors have it, eh?"

"Yes," said I.  "And I'm jolly glad!"

"That poor Mackenzie has a ball in his chest?"

"That you and I have been on the decent side for once."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"You're hopeless, Bunny, quite hopeless!  I take it you wouldn't
have refused your share if the boodle had fallen to us?  Yet you
positively enjoy coming off second best--for the second time
running!  I confess, however, that the professors' methods were
full of interest to me.  I, for one, have probably gained as much
in experience as I have lost in other things.  That lowering the
jewel-case out of the window was a very simple and effective
expedient; two of them had been waiting below for it for hours."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I saw them from my own window, which was just above the dear old
lady's.  I was fretting for that necklace in particular, when I
went up to turn in for our last night--and I happened to look out
of my window.  In point of fact, I wanted to see whether the one
below was open, and whether there was the slightest chance of
working the oracle with my sheet for a rope.  Of course I took
the precaution of turning my light off first, and it was a lucky
thing I did.  I saw the pros. right down below, and they never
saw me.  I saw a little tiny luminous disk just for an instant,
and then again for an instant a few minutes later.  Of course I
knew what it was, for I have my own watch-dial daubed with
luminous paint; it makes a lantern of sorts when you can get no
better.  But these fellows were not using theirs as a lantern.
They were under the old lady's window.  They were watching the
time.  The whole thing was arranged with their accomplice inside.
Set a thief to catch a thief: in a minute I had guessed what the
whole thing proved to be."

"And you did nothing!" I exclaimed.

"On the contrary, I went downstairs and straight into Lady
Melrose's room--"

"You did?"

"Without a moment's hesitation.  To save her jewels.  And I was
prepared to yell as much into her ear-trumpet for all the house
to hear.  But the dear lady is too deaf and too fond of her
dinner to wake easily."

"Well?"

"She didn't stir."

"And yet you allowed the professors, as you call them, to take
her jewels, case and all!"

"All but this," said Raffles, thrusting his fist into my lap.  "I
would have shown it you before, but really, old fellow, your face
all day has been worth a fortune to the firm!"

And he opened his fist, to shut it next instant on the bunch of
diamonds and of sapphires that I had last seen encircling the
neck of Lady Melrose.


LE PREMIER PAS

That night he told me the story of his earliest crime.  Not since
the fateful morning of the Ides of March, when he had just
mentioned it as an unreported incident of a certain cricket tour,
had I succeeded in getting a word out of Raffles on the subject.
It was not for want of trying; he would shake his head, and watch
his cigarette smoke thoughtfully; a subtle look in his eyes, half
cynical, half wistful, as though the decent honest days that were
no more had had their merits after all.  Raffles would plan a
fresh enormity, or glory in the last, with the unmitigated
enthusiasm of the artist.  It was impossible to imagine one throb
or twitter of compunction beneath those frankly egotistic and
infectious transports.  And yet the ghost of a dead remorse
seemed still to visit him with the memory of his first felony, so
that I had given the story up long before the night of our return
from Milchester.  Cricket, however, was in the air, and Raffles's
cricket-bag back where he sometimes kept it, in the fender, with
the remains of an Orient label still adhering to the leather.  My
eyes had been on this label for some time, and I suppose his eyes
had been on mine, for all at once he asked me if I still burned
to hear that yarn.

"It's no use," I replied.  "You won't spin it. I must imagine it
for myself."

"How can you?"

"Oh, I begin to know your methods."

"You take it I went in with my eyes open, as I do now, eh?"

"I can't imagine your doing otherwise."

"My dear Bunny, it was the most unpremeditated thing I ever did
in my life!"

His chair wheeled back into the books as he sprang up with sudden
energy.  There was quite an indignant glitter in his eyes.

"I can't believe that," said I craftily.  "I can't pay you such a
poor compliment!"

"Then you must be a fool--"

He broke off, stared hard at me, and in a trice stood smiling in
his own despite.

"Or a better knave than I thought you, Bunny, and by Jove it's
the knave!  Well--I suppose I'm fairly drawn; I give you best, as
they say out there.  As a matter of fact I've been thinking of
the thing myself; last night's racket reminds me of it in one or
two respects.  I tell you what, though, this is an occasion in
any case, and I'm going to celebrate it by breaking the one good
rule of my life.  I'm going to have a second drink!"

The whiskey tinkled, the syphon fizzed, the ice plopped home; and
seated there in his pyjamas, with the inevitable cigarette,
Raffles told me the story that I had given up hoping to hear.
The windows were wide open; the sounds of Piccadilly floated in
at first.  Long before he finished, the last wheels had rattled,
the last brawler was removed, we alone broke the quiet of the
summer night.


". . . No, they do you very well, indeed. You pay for nothing but
drinks, so to speak, but I'm afraid mine were of a comprehensive
character.  I had started in a hole, I ought really to have
refused the invitation; then we all went to the Melbourne Cup,
and I had the certain winner that didn't win, and that's not the
only way you can play the fool in Melbourne.  I wasn't the steady
old stager I am now, Bunny; my analysis was a confession in
itself.  But the others didn't know how hard up I was, and I
swore they shouldn't.  I tried the Jews, but they're extra fly
out there. Then I thought of a kinsman of sorts, a second cousin
of my father's whom none of us knew anything about, except that
he was supposed to be in one or other of the Colonies.  If he was
a rich man, well and good, I would work him; if not there would
be no harm done.  I tried to get on his tracks, and, as luck
would have it, I succeeded (or thought I had) at the very moment
when I happened to have a few days to myself.  I was cut over on
the hand, just before the big Christmas match, and couldn't have
bowled a ball if they had played me.

"The surgeon who fixed me up happened to ask me if I was any
relation of Raffles of the National Bank, and the pure luck of it
almost took my breath away.  A relation who was a high official
in one of the banks, who would finance me on my mere name--could
anything be better?  I made up my mind that this Raffles was the
man I wanted, and was awfully sold to find next moment that he
wasn't a high official at all.  Nor had the doctor so much as met
him, but had merely read of him in connection with a small
sensation at the suburban branch which my namesake managed; an
armed robber had been rather pluckily beaten off, with a bullet
in him, by this Raffles; and the sort of thing was so common out
there that this was the first I had heard of it!  A suburban
branch--my financier had faded into some excellent fellow with a
billet to lose if he called his soul his own. Still a manager was
a manager, and I said I would soon see whether this was the
relative I was looking for, if he would be good enough to give me
the name of that branch.

"'I'll do more,' says the doctor.  'I'll get you the name of the
branch he's been promoted to, for I think I heard they'd moved
him up one already.' And the next day he brought me the name of
the township of Yea, some fifty miles north of Melbourne; but,
with the vagueness which characterized all his information, he
was unable to say whether I should find my relative there or not.

"'He's a single man, and his initials are W. F.,' said the
doctor, who was certain enough of the immaterial points.  'He
left his old post several days ago, but it appears he's not due
at the new one till the New Year.  No doubt he'll go before then
to take things over and settle in.  You might find him up there
and you might not.  If I were you I should write.'

"'That'll lose two days,' said I, 'and more if he isn't there,'
for I'd grown quite keen on this up-country manager, and I felt
that if I could get at him while the holidays were still on, a
little conviviality might help matters considerably.

"'Then,' said the doctor, 'I should get a quiet horse and ride.
You needn't use that hand.'

"'Can't I go by train?'

"'You can and you can't.  You would still have to ride.  I
suppose you're a horseman?'

"'Yes.'

"'Then I should certainly ride all the way.  It's a delightful
road, through Whittlesea and over the Plenty Ranges.  It'll give
you some idea of the bush, Mr. Raffles, and you'll see the
sources of the water supply of this city, sir.  You'll see where
every drop of it comes from, the pure Yan Yean! I wish I had time
to ride with you.'

"'But where can I get a horse?'

"The doctor thought a moment.

"'I've a mare of my own that's as fat as butter for want of
work,' said he.  'It would be a charity to me to sit on her back
for a hundred miles or so, and then I should know you'd have no
temptation to use that hand.'

"'You're far too good!' I protested.

"'You're A. J. Raffles,' he said.

"And if ever there was a prettier compliment, or a finer instance
of even Colonial hospitality, I can only say, Bunny, that I never
heard of either."

He sipped his whiskey, threw away the stump of  his cigarette,
and lit another before continuing.

"Well, I managed to write a line to W. F. with my own hand,
which, as you will gather, was not very badly wounded; it was
simply this third finger that was split and in splints; and next
morning the doctor packed me off on a bovine beast that would
have done for an ambulance.  Half the team came up to see me
start; the rest were rather sick with me for not stopping to see
the match out, as if I could help them to win by watching them.
They little knew the game I'd got on myself, but still less did I
know the game I was going to play.

"It was an interesting ride enough, especially after passing the
place called Whittlesea, a real wild township on the lower slope
of the ranges, where I recollect having a deadly meal of hot
mutton and tea, with the thermometer at three figures in the
shade.  The first thirty miles or so was a good metal road, too
good to go half round the world to ride on, but after Whittlesea
it was a mere track over the ranges, a track I often couldn't see
and left entirely to the mare.  Now it dipped into a gully and
ran through a creek, and all the time the local color was inches
thick; gum-trees galore and parrots all colors of the rainbow.
In one place a whole forest of gums had been ring-barked, and
were just as though they had been painted white, without a leaf
or a living thing for miles. And the first living thing I did
meet was the sort to give you the creeps; it was a riderless
horse coming full tilt through the bush, with the saddle twisted
round and the stirrup-irons ringing.  Without thinking, I had a
shot at heading him with the doctor's mare, and blocked him just
enough to allow a man who came galloping after to do the rest.

"'Thank ye, mister,' growled the man, a huge chap in a red
checked shirt, with a beard like W. G. Grace, but the very devil
of an expression.

"'Been an accident?' said I, reining up.

"'Yes,' said he, scowling as though he defied me to ask any more.

"'And a nasty one,' I said, 'if that's blood on the saddle!'

"Well, Bunny, I may be a blackguard myself, but I don't think I
ever looked at a fellow as that chap looked at me.  But I stared
him out, and forced him to admit that it was blood on the twisted
saddle, and after that he became quite tame.  He told me exactly
what had happened.  A mate of his had been dragged under a
branch, and had his nose smashed, but that was all; had sat tight
after it till he dropped from loss of blood; another mate was
with him back in the bush.

"As I've said already, Bunny, I wasn't the old stager that I am
now--in any respect--and we parted good enough friends.  He asked
me which way I was going, and, when I told him, he said I should
save seven miles, and get a good hour earlier to Yea, by striking
off the track and making for a peak that we could see through the
trees, and following a creek that I should see from the peak.
Don't smile, Bunny!  I began by saying I was a child in those
days.  Of course, the short cut was the long way round; and it
was nearly dark when that unlucky mare and I saw the single
street of Yea.

"I was looking for the bank when a fellow in a white suit ran
down from the veranda.

"'Mr. Raffles?' said he.

"'Mr. Raffles,' said I, laughing as I shook his hand.

"'You're late.'

"'I was misdirected.'

"'That all?  I'm relieved,' he said.  'Do you know what they are
saying?  There are some brand-new bushrangers on the road between
Whittlesea and this--a second Kelly gang!  They'd have caught a
Tartar in you, eh?'

"'They would in you,' I retorted, and my tu quoque shut him up
and seemed to puzzle him. Yet there was much more sense in it
than in his compliment to me, which was absolutely pointless.

"'I'm afraid you'll find things pretty rough,' he resumed, when
he had unstrapped my valise, and handed my reins to his man.
'It's lucky you're a bachelor like myself.'

"I could not quite see the point of this remark either, since,
had I been married, I should hardly have sprung my wife upon him
in this free-and-easy fashion.  I muttered the conventional sort
of thing, and then he said I should find it all right when I
settled, as though I had come to graze upon him for weeks!
'Well,' thought I, 'these Colonials do take the cake for
hospitality!'  And, still marvelling, I let him lead me into the
private part of the bank.

"'Dinner will be ready in a quarter of an hour,' said he as we
entered.  'I thought you might like a tub first, and you'll find
all ready in the room at the end of the passage.  Sing out if
there's anything you want.  Your luggage hasn't turned up yet, by
the way, but here's a letter that came this morning.'

"'Not for me?'

"'Yes; didn't you expect one?'

"'I certainly did not!'

"'Well, here it is.'

"And, as he lit me to my room, I read my own superscription of
the previous day--to W. F. Raffles!


"Bunny, you've had your wind bagged at footer, I daresay; you
know what that's like?  All I can say is that my moral wind was
bagged by that letter as I hope, old chap, I have never yet
bagged yours. I couldn't speak.  I could only stand with my own
letter in my hands until he had the good taste to leave me by
myself.

"W. F. Raffles!  We had mistaken EACH OTHER for W. F.
Raffles--for the new manager who had not yet arrived!  Small
wonder we had conversed at cross-purposes; the only wonder was
that we had not discovered our mutual mistake.  How the other man
would have laughed!  But I--I could not laugh.  By Jove, no, it
was no laughing matter for me!  I saw the whole thing in a flash,
without a tremor, but with the direst depression from my own
single point of view.  Call it callous if you like, Bunny, but
remember that I was in much the same hole as you've since been in
yourself, and that I had counted on this W. F. Raffles even as
you counted on A. J.  I thought of the man with the W. G.
beard--the riderless horse and the bloody saddle--the deliberate
misdirection that had put me off the track and out of the
way--and now the missing manager and the report of bushrangers at
this end.  But I simply don't pretend to have felt any personal
pity for a man whom I had never seen; that kind of pity's usually
cant; and besides, all mine was needed for myself.

"I was in as big a hole as ever.  What the devil was I to do?  I
doubt if I have sufficiently impressed upon you the absolute
necessity of my returning to Melbourne in funds.  As a matter of
fact it was less the necessity than my own determination which I
can truthfully ascribe as absolute.

"Money I would have--but how--but how?  Would this stranger be
open to persuasion--if I told him the truth?  No; that would set
us all scouring the country for the rest of the night.  Why
should I tell him?  Suppose I left him to find out his mistake .
. . would anything be gained?  Bunny, I give you my word that I
went in to dinner without a definite intention in my head, or one
premeditated lie upon my lips.  I might do the decent, natural
thing, and explain matters without loss of time; on the other
hand, there was no hurry.  I had not opened the letter, and could
always pretend I had not noticed the initials; meanwhile
somet