"When!" repeated Crouch. "Why, now."
[CHAPTER XVII--Number 758]
The more they thought about the whole strange, mysterious business, the more was it apparent that they were face to face with plain matter-of-fact. It was now obvious that the written message was nothing more than the memorandum of an address. Every Londoner knows the Edgware Road. Stork, however, or perhaps Rosencrantz or von Essling, the German military attaché, had thought it advisable to write it down, and that in such a manner that it would be extremely improbable that any one else could read it.
Captain Crouch was once again upon his feet, limping backwards and forwards from one end of the room to the other, talking in a quick, excited voice, and flinging his arms about him like a windmill.
"We must go to London at once," he cried. And at that, he hastened from the room, to find the whole hotel in complete darkness. The "Goat and Compasses" kept late hours as a rule; but it was now two o'clock in the morning, and everyone had long since gone to bed. Crouch found his bedroom candle and lit it, and with the aid of this searched the smoking-room for a South-Western Railway time-table, a copy of which he at length succeeded in finding. Licking the end of his second finger, he turned over the pages so rapidly that he tore several in half.
"Here we are!" he cried. "There's a workmen's train at three-fifteen. We'll catch that, and be in London before daybreak."
Crouch woke up the proprietor in order to pay his bill, concerning which neither was much inclined to argue, the one being too sleepy and the other in too great haste even to count his change. They had little in the way of luggage, and Crouch had been well supplied with money by Mr. Jason, who was determined that Jimmy Burke should want for nothing. Accordingly, in little more than an hour after they had discovered that Stork's message was nothing more or less than a simple acrostic cypher, they were speeding to London at the rate of forty miles an hour, both sound asleep on the comfortable cushions in a first-class railway carriage.
Crouch had his own rooms in Pimlico, where he had constituted his headquarters--so to speak--and where he rented two rooms, divided one from the other by folding doors. In one was a camp-bed and a veritable armoury of big-game rifles and shotguns; whereas the other, which he called the dining-room, contained a table, a few basket chairs, and many kinds of curios from all parts of the world. The walls of both rooms were adorned with the heads and antlers of many rare animals: waterbuck and koodoo, white and black leopards, jaguars, tigers and lions.
Thither, on a cold, dark, wintry morning, Crouch and his young companion hastened immediately on their arrival at Waterloo, chartering the only taxi that was to be found at that early hour.
First, it was necessary to have breakfast, during which Crouch explained that it would be certainly advisable for them to disguise themselves. In all probability, Stork would repair to the house in the Edgware Road, and it would never do for them to be recognized. They had the whole morning at their disposal, and it must be admitted that the precautions that the little sea-captain deemed it expedient to take bordered on the ludicrous.