"You have a most expressive way of putting things, Carstairs," he said with a smile. There was more than humor in that smile; there was something in it that looked remarkably like relief.
"I can't stand figures of any sort," I volunteered with a fervent hope in my heart that I wasn't over-doing my part. "A sheet of them'd just about give me the D.Ts."
He laughed out loud at that and then, expressing a hope that I would make myself at home, he padded out of the room. It was astonishing how quietly he could walk when he was moving about the house. For all his gross bulk there was something furtive and cat-like about him that told me just how insistent must be the menace of a sudden death. He moved so silently that I never knew he was there until I looked up and saw him. He glided from room to room like some obese ghost. At first it got on my nerves, but pretty soon I settled down to it, and in a day or so got quite used to seeing a silent bulk sliding noiselessly about the house, appearing at all sorts of odd times in all sorts of queer places.
The cook returned about 5 o'clock and seemed rather inclined to take up a high-handed attitude with me, until a few well-chosen words from her master quietened her down a little. She was not slow to show me in other ways that she regarded me as an intruder in the house, and if any one thing about me was more preferable than another it was my room rather than my company. Still as I kept out of her way as much as possible, and as my sole duties consisted in keeping an eye on all strangers that approached the place and in listening for any unaccountable sounds, I came into conflict with her very seldom.
Matters progressed so quietly for the next couple of days that I began to wonder whether I had not fallen into a sinecure after all. Bryce had procured me a decent outfit so that I was now my own man again, ready to argue the right-of-way with all comers. Added to that my feet were well on the mend and my general health was keeping pretty near to the top-notch mark, so I wasn't finding life such a bad thing after all. Bryce worried me but little. At times I went odd messages for him, but all my trips were so arranged that I was never away from the house more than half an hour at a time. The more I thought over the mystery surrounding him the deeper and more inexplicable it became. I knew of whom he was afraid, but I had no more idea of the reason of his fear than I had of the name of the man in the moon. My occupation was more reminiscent of revolutionary South America than of a civilised country, and the thought of it set me wondering whether Bryce had ever lived amongst the volatile Latins on the other side of the Pacific. Come to think of it the one man I had seen closely had been a dark type. It was just barely possible that Bryce had somehow tangled himself in something of the kind. But then that cipher business—I was fully convinced by now that it was some original kind of cryptogram—rather pointed the other way. One of the things I had noticed had been a £ sign, and anything dealing with any of the Latin Republics would almost assuredly have been written with a $ sign. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I had been barking up the wrong tree.
I jotted down the figures that I remembered, but I must have had some of the signs down wrong, for, try as I would, I could make nothing out of them. As a matter of fact the solution was so simple that in the end I only stumbled on it by accident.
Bryce had a bad habit of locking himself in his room for hours at a time, and it occurred to me that such a course wasn't in his own interest any more than mine, so I tackled him about it at the first opportunity.
"Here you are," I said, "paying me for being a mixture of Swiss Guard and watch-dog, but for all the looking-after you get I might as well be miles away. I don't want to be hanging on to your skirts every ten minutes or so, but doesn't it strike you as a reasonable man that you're inviting trouble by locking yourself in so securely?"
"I do that so I won't be disturbed," he urged.
"That's a reason that cuts both ways," I said. "Suppose somebody happened to be in the room when you arrived. Don't you see that he could do all he wanted to do without being disturbed either."