As they left the house he paused, and closed the door again, remaining inside.
“You see,” he said, “there is not even a bolt on the door. They knew better than to depend on bolts and bars. They knew a trick worth two of that.”
At the gate they met a small, inoffensive man, with a brown beard and a walking-stick. There was nothing else to say about him; without the beard and the walking-stick there would have been nothing left to know him by.
“That is my assistant,” announced the London detective quietly. “He has been down to the cliff.”
The two men stepped aside together, and consulted in an undertone for some time. Then the last speaker returned to Captain Pharland and Sidney, who were standing together.
“That newspaper,” he said, “the Beacon, is word for word right. My assistant has been to the spot. The arms and ammunition have undoubtedly been shipped from this place. The cases of cartridges mentioned by the man who wrote the article as having been seen, in a dream, half-way down the cliff, are actually there; my assistant has seen them.”
Captain Pharland scratched his honest cavalry head. He was beginning to regret that he had accepted the post of district inspector of the police. Sidney Carew puffed at his pipe in silence.
“Of course,” said the detective, “the newspaper man got all this information through the treachery of one of the party. I should like to get hold of that traitor. He would be a useful man to know.”
In this the astute gentleman from London betrayed his extremely limited knowledge of the Society of Jesus. There are no traitors in that vast corporation.
Sidney and Captain Pharland rode home together, leaving the two detectives to find their way to Brayport Station.