“What, precisely?”
“It will be just what I told you a moment ago,” replied Lord Muir. “He is laying plans now; she’s quite keen to get into any queer corner of the earth. It is easy enough to get a girl worked up, especially when she has a big legend of her father before her. He will do precisely what I have said, take her into South Africa.”
He got up with sudden energy.
“The law can’t stop him, but there must be something, and that’s why I come to you, sir,” he added.
“To me,” said Walker, “—because you believe in providence?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy continued, “that is precisely the reason I came to you. It is true that the American Ambassador has a point of attack with Dercum because of these American properties, but that is not the thing I depended upon. My uncle, when he was chief of the criminal investigation department of Scotland Yard, used to say when we had a perplexed thing to take up with America: ‘We can unravel it, if Captain Walker comes up with one of his inspirations from heaven.’ Well, sir, I have come to you for one of these inspirations.”
Walker laughed softly. The reputation was perhaps his greatest asset—a sort of intuition arising at certain complicated stages of an affair, the sudden swift realization of some essential hitherto unobserved.
Walker continued to smile.
The young man was looking at him with a tense, serious expression.
“You will have one of these inspirations, Captain Walker?”