“You won’t fall in then?” asked Daniel, with a sinking heart.
“I don’t say that; but if you’m in earnest, you can tell us all about it as we go along.”
“An’ you’ll swear, all three of you, to give Minnie Sweetland two hundred pounds of the reward?”
“I will,” said Bartley. “’Tis flying in the face of Providence to do otherwise.”
“If it can be proved we’m not straining the law, I’ll do the same,” declared Inspector Gregory. “What do you say, Corder?”
“The law’s clear, for that matter,” answered the big man. “The law ban’t strained. The law have nothing to do with a private bargain. This here man comes to us an’ says, ‘I’ll put you chaps in the way to make twelve hundred an’ fifty pounds between you.’ An’ we says, ‘Do it.’ Then he says, ‘But I must have two hundred for my wife; because I, who be her natural support, be taken from her.’ Well—there it is. My conscience is clear. Since he’s brought to book an’ may go down on it, the burglary never will be any use to him; so he peaches. For my part I’ll promise what he wants this minute.”
“And so will I,” said Bartley. “’Tis a very honest, open offer for a condemned man.”
“Not condemned at all—merely an arrested man,” corrected Gregory. “An’ I’ll take his offer too,” he added; “so it only remains for him to tell us where the stuff be hidden.”
Daniel looked straight into Corder’s face.
“That was why I axed you not to be in a hurry,” he said. “The Giffard plate from Westcombe was brought up to the Moor, an’ such a fuss have been made that the burglars haven’t been able to get it clear for all these weeks. Nobody dared to go near it. But I’ve kept secret watch on it for ’em. As for the stuff, ’tis within a mile of this very house, though I daresay Johnny Beer would have a fit if he knowed about it.”