"Ay dunno yust what it mean," admitted the captain, blinking on them rather sheepishly. "Ay read it in a book once, and ay t'ink it iss fine. If ay ever get stirred up in de heart — hoooo-o! — Ay say it." He shook his head. "But ay got to be careful wit' de books. When ay finish reading one, ay got to be careful to write its name down so I don't forget and go back and read it all over again."
He looked on them with great amiability, rubbing his nose, and inquired, "But what iss dere you want me to do?"
"First," said Morgan, "it's agreed that you don't want official steps taken, Curt? I mean, you could tell Captain Whistler—?"
"Lord, no!" the other said violently. "I can't do that, don't you see? If we get this back at all, it's got to be under the strictest cover. And that's where it's going to be difficult. Out of the whole passenger-list of this boat, how are we going to pick out the person who might want to steal the thing? Besides, how did the fellow know I had that film, if I didn't know it myself?"
Morgan reflected. "That wireless message—" he said, and stopped. "Look here, you said you read it aloud, And it was only a very short time afterwards that the chap tried to burgle this cabin. It seems too much to be a coincidence… Was there anybody who might have overheard you?"
The other made scoffing noises. In the pure absorption of the debate he had absent-mindedly fished out a bottle of whisky from one of his suit-cases. "Bunk!" said Warren. "Suppose there were a crook of some description aboard. What would that cock-eyed message mean to him? It took some time for me to figure it out."
"All right. All right, then! It's got to mean this. The thief was somebody who already knew about the film; that is, that there had been one made… That's possible, isn't it?"
Warren hesitated, knocking his knuckles against his turbaned forehead.
"Ye-es, I suppose it is," he admitted. "There were all sorts of rumours afloat next day; you know how it is. But we were in the library with the door locked, and naturally it can't be any of the people who were in the game… I told you there was a reception downstairs, but how anybody down there could have known—"
"Well, evidently somebody did know," Morgan argued. "And it's at a crush of a reception like that, at the home of some big pot, where you'd expect to find a specimen of the gentry we're looking for… Put it this way, just for a starter." He meditated, pulling at his ear-lobe. "The thief — we'll call him, say, Film-Flam — gets wind of your important document. But he thinks it's been destroyed and abandons any idea of pinching it. Still, he is travelling abroad on the Queen Victoria—"