The Fellowship of the Frog

by Edgar Wallace

“When I decided upon my career, I served for five years in the factory of the greatest English safe-maker in Wolverhampton. I studied locks, safes, the tensile qualities of steel, until I was proficient, and my spare time I gave up to as important a study—the transportation of negotiable currency. That in itself is a study which might well occupy a man’s full time.

“I returned to America at the age of twenty-five, and accumulated a kit of tools, which cost me several thousand dollars, and with these, and alone, I smashed the Ninth National Bank, getting away, on my first attempt, with three hundred thousand dollars. I will not give you a long list of my many crimes; some of them I have conveniently forgotten. Others are too unimportant, and contain too many disappointments to tell you in detail. It is sufficient to say that there is no proof, other than my word, that I was responsible for any of these depredations. My name has only been associated with one—the robbery of the strong-room on the Mantania.

“In 1898 I learnt that the Mantania was carrying to France fifty-five million francs in paper currency. The money was packed in two stout wooden cases, and before being packed, was submitted to hydraulic pressure in order to reduce the bulk. In one case were thirty-five packets, each containing a thousand mille notes, and in the second case twenty packets. I particularly want you to remember that there were two cases, because you will understand a little better what happened subsequently.

“It was intended that the ship should call at a French port; I think it was Havre, because the trans-Atlantic boats in those days did not call at Cherbourg. I had made all my plans for getting away with the stuff, and the robbery had actually been committed and the boxes were in my cabin trunk, substitute boxes of an exact shape having been left in the strong-room of the Mantania, when to my dismay we lost a propeller blade whilst off the coast of Ireland, and the captain of the Mantania decided to put in to Southampton without making the French port.

“A change of plans, to a man of my profession, is almost as embarrassing as a change of plan in the middle of a battle. I had on this occasion an assistant—a man who afterwards died in delirium tremens. It was absolutely impossible to work alone; the job was too big, and my assistant was a man I had every reason to trust.”

“Harry Lyme?” suggested Elk.

“Joshua Broad” shook his head.

“No, you’re wrong. I will not tell you his name—the man is dead, and he was a very faithful and loyal fellow, though inclined to booze, a weakness which I never shared. However, the reason we were so embarrassed was that, had we gone ashore at the French port, the robbery in the strong-room would not have been discovered, because it was unlikely that the purser would go to the strong-room until the ship was in Southampton Water. I had fixed everything, the passing of my bags through the Customs being the most important. This change meant that we must improvise a method to get ashore at Southampton before the hue and cry was raised, and, if possible, before the robbery was discovered, though it did not seem possible that we should succeed.

“Fortunately, there was a fog in the Solent, and we had to go dead slow; and, if you remember the circumstances, as the Mantania came up the Solent, she collided with a steam dredger that was going into Portsmouth. The dredger’s foremast became entangled in the bowsprit of the Mantania and it was some time before they were extricated. It was then that I seized my opportunity. From an open port-way on my deck, where we were waiting with our baggage, ready to land, we were level with the side of the dredger as she swung round under the impact. I flung the two grips that held the boxes on to the dredger’s deck, and I and my friend jumped together.

“As I say, a fog lay on the water, and we were not seen, and not discovered by the crew of the dredger until we had parted company with the Mantania, and although the story we told to the dredger’s captain was the thinnest imaginable—namely, that we thought it was a tender that had come off to collect us—he very readily accepted it, and the twenty-dollar bill which I gave him.