“Why! It’s a conspiracy, sir. It’s a conspiracy, that’s what it is!” decided the Indian judge.
“Gang is a shorter word,” Cecil observed, and a young girl in a macintosh giggled.
Sleepy employés now began to appear, and the rumour ran that six waiters and a chambermaid were missing. Mrs. Macalister rallied from the billiard table and came into the drawing-room, where most of the company had gathered. Cecil yawned (the influence of the drug was still upon him) as she approached him and weakly spoke. He answered absently; he was engaged in watching the demeanour of these idlers on the face of the earth—how incapable they seemed of any initiative, and yet with what magnificent Britannic phlegm they endured the strange situation! The talking was neither loud nor impassioned.
Then the low, distant sound of a cannon was heard. Once, twice, thrice.
“Heavens!” sighed Mrs. Macalister, swaying towards Cecil. “What can that be?”
He avoided her, hurried out of the room, and snatched somebody else’s hat from the hat-racks in the hall. But just as he was turning the handle of the main door of the hotel, the Englishman who had lost two hundred or so returned out of the Algerian night with an inspector of police. The latter courteously requested Cecil not to leave the building, as he must open the inquiry (ouvrir l’enquête) at once. Cecil was obliged, regretfully, to comply.
The inspector of police then commenced his labours. He telephoned (no one had thought of the telephone) for assistance and asked the Central Bureau to watch the railway station, the port, and the stage coaches. He acquired the names and addresses of tout le monde. He made catalogues of articles. He locked all the servants in the ping-pong-room. He took down narratives, beginning with Cecil’s. And while the functionary was engaged with Mrs. Macalister, Cecil quietly but firmly disappeared.
After his departure, the affair loomed larger and larger in mere magnitude, but nothing that came to light altered its leading characteristics. A wholesale robbery had been planned with the most minute care and knowledge, and executed with the most daring skill. Some ten persons—the manager and his wife, a chambermaid, six waiters, and the concierge—seemed to have been concerned in the enterprise, excluding Mrs. Macalister’s Arab and no doubt other assistants. (The guests suddenly remembered how superior the concierge and the waiters had been to the ordinary concierge and waiter!) At a quarter-past five o’clock the police had ascertained that a hundred rooms had been entered, and horrified guests were still descending! The occupants of many rooms, however, made no response to a summons to awake. These, it was discovered afterwards, had either, like Cecil, received a sedative unawares, or they had been neatly gagged and bound. In the result, the list of missing valuables comprised nearly two hundred watches, eight hundred rings, a hundred and fifty other articles of jewellery, several thousand pounds’ worth of furs, three thousand pounds in coin, and twenty-one thousand pounds in bank-notes and other forms of currency. One lady, a doctor’s wife, said she had been robbed of eight hundred pounds in Bank of England notes, but her story obtained little credit; other tales of enormous loss, chiefly by women, were also taken with salt. When the dawn began, at about six o’clock, an official examination of the façade of the hotel indicated that nearly every room had been invaded by the balconied window, either from the roof or from the ground. But the stone flags of the terrace, and the beautifully asphalted pathways of the garden disclosed no trace of the plunderers.
“I guess your British habit of sleeping with the window open don’t cut much ice to-day, anyhow!” said an American from Indianapolis to the company.