"Ho!" said the Terror. "Not them! Wosn't no light, yer see. 'Ad ter strike a match ter tear the watches orf 'em. Ho-ho-ho!"
"Bermondsey," said Warren, enthusiastically, as the other stared dully at his costume, "I want to shake your hand. I also want to offer you a drink of champagne… What's on your mind, Hank?"
Morgan had begun to stalk about excitedly. He picked up the watches and examined them. Then he put them down on the couch with the emerald elephant.
"If this idea works out," he said, swinging round, "then there'll be no need to he under a heap of marionettes and play dead for two days. Nor will there be any need to go to the brig, either, for any of us except Curt… "
"That's fine," said Warren. "That's great. Well, all I've not to say is, and I take my oath on it, I am not going back lo that damned padded cell, whatever happens! Get me? furthermore—"
"Shut up, will you? — and listen! You'll need to go back for not more than an hour. The whole point is, Captain Whistler doesn't know you're out of the brig, does he? Right. Now don't interrupt. So what have we got? We've got in Bermondsey a witness who can definitely prove we were not stealing that emerald out of Kyle's cabin, but were returning it, together with Kyle's papers. Our witness needn't say anything about Curt's having taken it from there. Then—"
"Ahoy dere!" protested Valvick. "Coroosh! you are not going to try to see Barnacle now, are you?"
"Listen! Then this is the way it's to be done:
"Peggy takes the note-cases, watches, and the rest of it, including the emerald. She goes to Whistler and says, 'Captain, do you know what the two people you thought were thieves have done? They've saved your bacon and saved the emerald when it was nearly stolen a second time.'
«She then tells a story of how, as we were passing by, the skipper and I saw a mysterious masked stranger—" i "Horse feathers!" said Warren, with some definiteness.