It didn't look very inviting, being only a hundred feet away from the grimy railroad station by which we had first come here, with cinders blown all over it, and if the building had been back in the U. S. A. and I was a deputy state fire marshal, I would have ordered it torn down at once. Of course none of the constables were in sight anywhere, probably being asleep in some back room!
Holmes led the way into the feed store, and we met the proprietor, who strongly reminded me of Inspector Letstrayed and Egbert Bunbury by his general air of sleepy incompetence. It was now five minutes to five, and after Holmes had warned old man Wuxley of his identity beneath the valet's livery, we decided to hide behind one of the barrels of bran that stood on one side of the store, and there await the coming of Demetrius with his booty.
We didn't have long to wait, for he soon showed up in the doorway,—with his swarthy face and shifty eyes,—and asked Wuxley if Luigi had arrived yet to meet him. Suppressing a smile, Wuxley motioned him in, saying that Luigi was in a back room.
As he passed the bran barrels Holmes and I jumped out and nailed him, and Holmes exclaimed:
"Well, here I am, Mr. Xanthopoulos. We'll catch the next train in to London and sell the diamonds,—maybe!"
But the wily Greek was quicker than I thought he would be; he jerked loose as soon as he heard the tones of Holmes's well-remembered voice that had bawled him out at the inquisition the day before, and in a second had escaped by the back door, leaving Holmes with a shred of cloth out of his coat-tail held between his fingers.
We two gave chase at once; out of the rickety old back door of the feed store we sped, nearly breaking our necks in our stumble down the uneven steps that led to a weedy yard. There was a gate in the picket fence surrounding the yard, and through this we dashed madly after the swiftly retreating Demetrius, who led us down a narrow lane back of the stores fronting on the main street for several hundred feet, until we arrived at a small creek that paralleled the railroad tracks,—a stream that I had not noticed on the way out from London the previous Monday.
As our ill luck would have it, Demetrius found a couple of dingy rowboats at the edge of the creek, and into one of them he jumped, grabbed the oars, and paddled himself down-stream at a pretty good clip. Holmes swore, both in English and French, but quickly grabbed the other boat, shoved me into it, and started to row after the gardener down the turbid and muddy waters of the creek, which was about sixty feet wide. As we rounded a sharp left bend in the creek, Holmes ran our boat in near the opposite shore and succeeded in hitting the side of Demetrius's boat with the prow of our own.
Demetrius yelled something unintelligible,—in his native Greek, I guess,—and the collision threw him overboard, on the outer side of his boat, whereupon he began to swim across the creek to the farther side.