"Eh?"
"Shall I bring you something to drink, sir?"
Few men ever become so distrait that this particular question fails to penetrate. Soapy nodded feverishly. Something to drink was precisely what at this moment he felt he needed most. Moreover, the process of fetching it would relieve him for a time, at least, of the society of a butler who seemed to combine in equal proportions the outstanding characteristics of a porous plaster and a gadfly.
"Yes," he replied.
"Very good, sir."
III
Soapy's mind was in a whirl. He could almost feel the brains inside his head heaving and tossing like an angry ocean. So that was what that smooth old crook had done with the stuff—stored it away in a Left Luggage office at a railway station! If circumstances had been such as to permit of a more impartial and detached attitude of mind, Soapy would have felt for Mr. Carmody's resource and ingenuity nothing but admiration. A Left Luggage office was an ideal place in which to store stolen property, as good as the innermost recesses of some safe deposit company's deepest vault.
But, numerous as were the emotions surging in his bosom, admiration was not one of them. For a while he gave himself up almost entirely to that saddest of mental exercises, the brooding on what might have been. If only he had known that John had the ticket...!
But he was a practical man. It was not his way to waste time torturing himself with thoughts of past failures. The future claimed his attention.