“You mistake yourself—I am not drunk. It is that red-eye man I talk of. Last night, when he walk about behind the bar with that stone, he has cut all the glass with it.”
“Burchell says he never remembers anything next day,” I said, not seeing the full force of what had happened.
“That may be, but when Burchell come into the bar by a little, he shall see it, and all the men who shall drink out of those glass, they shall see, and, my word, the jig is up!”
“You’re right, Marky, it will be,” I said seriously. “Seems to me the best thing we can do is to clear off right away.”
“No, that’s a cabbage-head thing to do, my Flint. We are too near, if some of them begins to think. No, it is for you, or for me, to get very much drunk very quick, and smash all that glass in one blow!”
“Let’s go and have a look,” I said.
It was only too true. The whisky, like Clara Vere de Vere, must have “put strange memories in the head” of the red-eyed man, whom I now suspected to have had more experience with stones than the rest. He had scratched and cut two or three bottles, and a number of glasses in a way that could not possibly have passed unnoticed, and that could not, either, have been mistaken for anything but the work of a diamond. There are some things that will scratch glass fairly well, but nothing on earth that will cut into it clear and deep and clean save the king of precious stones.
We stood there in the half light of the ugly slab-built room, that was all stale with dregs of drink and littered with rubbish, straw and paper—looking at each other.
“There isn’t much time to waste,” I said. “Which of us is going to do it?”
“My friend, it is I who make this sacrifice,” said the Marquis solemnly. “I haven’t no doubt that you could get intoxicated if I asked you in the name of friendship——”