“He won’t come,” Simmonds answered confidently.
“He’s slim, is Van Bleit, and a coward—of the bullying sort. He’ll scent danger.”
“We can but try it,” Colonel Grey said. And added grimly: “If we once get him inside this room he doesn’t leave it until we get those letters.”
Simmonds smiled drily.
“If I know anything of the man,” he said, “he’ll not bring them with him. He may carry them around as a rule, but he isn’t at all likely to march into the enemy’s camp with them. You forget Denzil’s in this. He will leave the letters with him.”
“He may do.”
The Colonel spoke with a slight irritation, the result of discouragement. He had been many months striving to get hold of these papers, and he was no nearer success than when he first landed in Cape Town. The rogue he had to deal with was insatiable, unprincipled, and unrelenting. He had attempted in the first instance straightforward methods; but Van Bleit, being possessed of a crooked mind, was suspicious of straightforward dealings, and he had been forced to resort to more subtle and underhand means. It was, he felt sure, by no open and honest device that he would prevail against him—if, indeed, he ever prevailed. To-night, baffled and disheartened, he believed that he would be forced to throw down the cards and acknowledge himself beaten.
“I’d give five years of my life,” he said—“and my years are not so many now that I can spare them—to best that scoundrel. To think that a contemptible hound like that should have the power to intimidate anyone with a Damocles’ sword in the form of a packet of damning letters! The law of the land ought to permit one to shoot blackmailers on sight.”
“I rather fancy the law—out here, anyway—would bring it in manslaughter,” Simmonds replied coolly. He knocked the ash out of his pipe. “Then, I understand you wish me to try to induce him to come here?”
“Yes, that’s it.”