Æsthetically considered, wearing as he did a pink shirt and a slouch hat which should long ago have been given to the deserving poor, Mr. Carmody was not much of a spectacle, but Soapy, eyeing him, felt that he had never beheld anything lovelier. He was not a fisherman himself, but he knew all about fishermen. They became, he was aware, when engaged on their favourite pursuit, virtually monomaniacs. Earthquakes might occur in their immediate neighbourhood, dynasties fall and pestilences ravage the land, but they would just go on fishing. As long as the bait held out, Lester Carmody, sitting in that punt, was for all essential purposes as good as if he had been crammed to the brim of the finest knock-out drops. It was as though he were in another world.
Exhilaration filled Soapy like a tonic.
"Any luck?" he shouted.
"Wah, wah, wah," replied Mr. Carmody inaudibly.
"Stick to it," cried Soapy. "Atta-boy!"
With an encouraging wave of the hand he hurried back to the house. The problem which a moment before had seemed to defy solution had now become so simple and easy that a child could have negotiated it—any child, that is to say, capable of holding a hatchet and endowed with sufficient strength to break a cupboard door with it.
"I'm telling the birds, telling the bees," sang Soapy gaily, charging into the hall, "Telling the flowers, telling the trees how I love you...."
"Sir?" said Sturgis respectfully, suddenly becoming manifest out of the infinite.
Soapy gazed at the butler blankly, his wild wood-notes dying away in a guttural gurgle. Apart from the embarrassment which always comes upon a man when caught singing, he was feeling, as Sturgis himself would have put it, stottled. A moment before, the place had been completely free from butlers, and where this one could have come from was more than he could understand. Rudge Hall's old retainer did not look the sort of man who would pop up through traps, but there seemed no other explanation of his presence.
And then, close to the cupboard door, Soapy espied another door, covered with green baize. This, evidently, was the Sturgis bolt-hole.