“You told it with a certain amount of hesitation,” he said. “You suggested you might be mistaken in thinking there was anything in it. Now I’m going to make a suggestion with even more hesitation, for it’s ten times wilder than yours, and there is simply nothing to back it up. But here goes all the same.”
His indecision had passed now, and he went on fluently and with a certain excitement.
“Here you have a trade with something fishy about it. Perhaps you think that’s putting it too strongly; if so, let us say there is something peculiar about it; something, at all events, to call one’s attention to it, as being in some way out of the common. And when we do think about it, what’s the first thing we discover?”
Hilliard looked inquiringly at his friend. The latter sat listening carefully, but did not speak, and Hilliard answered his own question.
“Why, that it’s an export trade from France to England—an export trade only, mind you. As far as you learned, these people’s boat runs the pit-props to England, but carries nothing back. Isn’t that so?”
“They didn’t mention return cargoes,” Merriman answered, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I did not go into the thing exhaustively.”
“But what could there be? What possible thing could be shipped in bulk from this country to the middle of a wood near Bordeaux? Something, mind you, that you, there at the very place, didn’t see. Can you think of anything?”
“Not at the moment. But I don’t see what that has to do with it.”
“Quite possibly nothing, and yet it’s an interesting point.”
“Don’t see it.”