“It’s frightfully clever of you,” said Phillips, “to have thought of all that.”
“It does not lead to anything very definite yet,” said the Queen. “But you’ll find it will all fit together—like a jigsaw puzzle you know—when we get to work on the other two clues. We can’t expect to solve a mystery of this sort straight off. We’ve only been at it two hours.”
Kalliope stood all the time at the far end of the balcony watching the Queen. She knew nothing about the investigation of the island mystery which was going on under her eyes. But she was a young woman who had lived a simple and natural life. In some things she was far wiser than her mistress. She seems to have realized that the Queen and Phillips were making, without knowing it, considerable progress into the heart of another, much more enthralling, mystery. As a chaperone Kalliope was negligible.
“The next clue,” said the Queen, “is Smith. We must shadow him.”
“Day and night,” said Phillips.
“And Stephanos. Stephanos was with him when he went to the cavern that morning.”
“Stephanos is in it up to the neck,” said Phillips. They shadowed Smith for the rest of that day. They stole on tip-toe about the house and burst suddenly into rooms where Smith was at work, coming upon him unexpectedly. They hid in cupboards and behind curtains in rooms which Smith was likely to enter. They left letters, written in cipher, and marked coins in prominent places where Smith could hardly fail to see them. Kalliope conceived that an elaborate game of hide-and-seek was being played. She joined in, enthusiastically but unintelligently, concealing herself in various parts of the house without regard to Smith’s habits. Once she remained obstinately hidden for more than an hour under the Queen’s bed.
The results were most unsatisfactory. Smith spent his day sweeping floors, making beds, cooking food and compounding cocktails for Mr. Donovan. His few leisure moments were spent in polishing silver. He was totally uninterested in cipher documents and never looked at marked coins.
Smith still slept on the steamer, so it fell to Phillips to keep guard over him at night. He adopted the ingenious, though not very novel plan of pasting a strip of paper across the door of Smith’s cabin. In the morning, very early, he went to look at the door. The paper was intact.