Laurie brightened wonderfully at this assurance. During the past month he had come to have an almost childlike trust in Elliott’s powers of saving him from troubles, and at lunch he had almost recovered his customary serene benignity. But Elliott was far from that placid state of mind. The whole campaign would have to be altered. There was now no hope of learning the location of the wreck from any of her survivors. So far as he could see, there was only the chance of searching all that portion of the channel till her bones were discovered, and it was ten to one that the Arab coasters would have been before them. But at any rate he could now meet Sevier without fear; he had no longer any plan to conceal.
He spent that afternoon in anxious thought, and finally wrote a long letter to Henninger, detailing his adventures on the man-hunt that had ended in a mare’s nest. As the letter might take over a month to reach Zanzibar, he stopped at the cable office on his way to the Club, and sent the following message:
“Mate dead, taking secret with him. Shall I join you? Letter follows.”
Sevier was waiting for him when he arrived at the Club’s massive façade, and a table was already reserved in the farthest corner of the dining-room. The air was heavy under the swinging punkahs, for it had come on to rain again, and the drip and splash of the streets came through the open windows.
They discussed the soup in silence, and with the introduction of a violently flavoured entrée they talked of the rain.
“The weather’s no fit subject for conversation in this country,” Sevier broke off all at once. “Look here, Elliott, you’re up against it, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know that I am, particularly,” answered the treasure-hunter, coolly. “You’re in something of a blind alley yourself, I fancy.”
“I don’t mind admitting that I am, for the moment. What do you know about the Clara McClay?”
“Nothing—except that she was wrecked.”
“But you know what her cargo was?”