“The sooner the better,” I agreed. “It is understood that you do all the talking?”
“It shouldn’t need much talking, but anyway I’ll start it.”
“Then the sooner the better,” I repeated.
“Let us be off.”
Ronald Thoyne met us on the deck of the yacht and stood with his hands clasped loosely behind him, surveying us with a queer, twisted smile on his face. He waited for us to speak and evidently had no intention of helping us out. If he wondered how we had caught his trail he said nothing.
“We have come,” Pepster began, “for a word or two with Tulmin.”
“Tulmin!” Thoyne exclaimed. “What a disappointment when I thought it was a friendly call on myself. Though I can’t say you look very friendly or I might invite you to stay to lunch. I have quite a good cook, a negro, certainly, but in his way a genius. Now if—”
“I suppose,” Pepster said with a smile, “you are talking to gain time.”
“No, not at all,” Thoyne replied calmly. “Why should I? Let us come down to bedrock facts. Tulmin isn’t here.”
“We traced him here,” Pepster interposed in his small, squeaky voice. “He was here, you know.”