“I ought to tell you, boy,” he said, in a husky tone, towards the end of the meal, “that it looks as if there’ll be the dickens to pay over this job. A French detective from Paris has been here, and he’s coming again this afternoon to have a word with you.”
“With me, sir?”
The old man, whose eyes were furtively devouring the face of William, was quick to observe its startled look. “Yes, boy, you’re the one he wants to see. The Loov authorities have managed to get wind of this Van Roon of ours, and they say it’s the feller they’ve been looking for since 1898.”
Easy to gull William in some respects was, yet, he could not help thinking that the French Government took a little too much for granted.
“I think so, too—but there it is,” said the old man. “They have to prove the Van Roon is theirs, and that won’t be easy, as I told the detective this morning. But I understand that the question of identity turns upon certain marks, as well as upon similarity of subject.”
William allowed that the subject had an undoubted similarity with that of the picture stolen from the Louvre, but then, as he explained, every known Van Roon had a strong family likeness. In size they varied little, and they always depicted trees, water, clouds, and in some cases a windmill.
“Ours, I believe, had no windmill.”
“No, sir, only water and trees, and a wonderful bit of cloud.”
“I understand,” said the old man mournfully, “that the one that was stolen from the Loov had no windmill.”
“The other one in the Louvre has no windmill; there are two at Amsterdam that have no windmill; and there’s one at The Hague, I believe, that hasn’t a windmill.”