Jacob laid his hand upon his friend’s shoulder. There was a strange light in his eyes.
“Dick,” he said, “you’d think I was a commonplace sort of fellow enough, wouldn’t you? So I am, in a way, and yet I’ve got something stirring in my blood of the fever which sent Sam out to the far west of America, more for the sheer love of going than for any hope of making a fortune. I’ve lived an everyday sort of life, but I’ve had my dreams.”
“We’re not going around the world treasure hunting, or anything of that sort, are we?” Dauncey asked anxiously.
“All the treasure hunting we shall do,” Jacob replied, with a little thrill in his tone, “will be on the London pavements. All the adventures which the wildest buccaneers the world has ever known might crave are to be found under the fogs of this wonderful city. We shan’t need to travel far in the body, Dick. A little office somewhere in the West End, a little ground bait which I know about, and the sharks of the world will come stealing around us. There are seven or eight million people in London, Dick. A detective I once knew—kind of thoughtful chap he was—once told me that on a moderate computation there were twenty-five thousand of them who would commit murder without hesitation if they could get their hand deep enough into their neighbour’s pocket.”
“Talking through his hat,” Dauncey muttered.
“That is what we shall find out. Only remember this, Richard. I am convinced that I possess in some degree that sixth sense the French criminologist talked about,—the sense for Adventure. I’ve had to keep my nose to the grindstone, worse luck, but there have been times when I’ve lifted my head and sniffed it in the air. In queer places, too! In the dark, shadowy streets of old towns which I have visited as a commercial traveller, selling goods by day and wandering out alone by night into the backwaters. I’ve felt the thrill there, Dick, trying to look through the curtained windows of some of those lonely houses. I’ve been brushed by a stranger in Fleet Street and felt it; looked into a woman’s mysterious eyes as she turned around, with a latchkey in her hand, before a house in Bloomsbury. We shan’t need to wander far away, Richard.”
“Seems to me,” the latter observed, “that I am to play Man Friday to—”
He suddenly stood rigid. He gripped his friend’s arm, his lips a little parted. He was listening in a paroxysm of subdued joy. From out of the sitting-room window came faint sounds of melody.
“It’s Nora,” he murmured ecstatically. “It’s the first time for years! She’s singing!”