Mr. John Timmons's tea was a very long and unsociable meal. It took hours, and not even the half-dozen red-herrings brought to him by Mrs. Stamer in the fish-basket were allowed to assist at it. They lay in dense obscurity on the floor of the marine-store. Tunbridge Street was now as silent as the grave.
It was after eleven o'clock and John Timmons had not yet emerged from his cellar. All the while he had been below a strong pungent smell of burning, the dry sulphurous smell of burning coke, had ascended from below, with now and then noise of a hand-bellows blowing a fire, but no steam or sound or savour of cooking. Now and again there was the noise of stirring a fire, and now and again the noise of a tongs gripping and loosing and slipping on what a listener might, in conjunction with other evidence, take to be pieces of coke. From time to time the man below might be heard to breathe heavily and sigh. Otherwise he uttered no sound. If the subterranean stoker desired secrecy he had his wish, for there was no one in or near the place listening.
But if no one was listening to the stoker some one was watching the exterior of the marine-store in Tunbridge Street. A short time before eleven o'clock a man dressed in seedy black cloth, with short iron-grey, whiskers and beard, and long iron-grey hair and wearing blue spectacles, turned into the street, and sat down in a crouching position on the axle-tree of a cart, whose shafts, like a pair of slender telescopes, pointed to the dim summer stars, or taken together the cart and man looked like a huge flying beetle, the body of the cart being the wings, the wheels the high elbowed legs, the man the body of the insect and the two long shafts the antennae thrust upwards in alarm.
When it was about a quarter past eleven John Timmons emerged from the cellar, carrying in one hand a dark lantern, with the slide closed. When he found himself in his upper, or ground-floor chamber, or shop, or store, he drew himself to his full height, and, with head advanced sideways, listened awhile.
There was no sound. He nodded his head with satisfaction. Then he went cautiously to the wicket, and with a trowel began digging up the earth of the floor, which was here dark and friable and dry. It was, old sand from a foundry, and could be moved and replaced without showing the least trace of disturbance. Timmons did not use the lamp. He had placed it beside him on the ground with the slide closed.
After digging down about a foot he came upon a small, old, courier-bag, which he lifted out, and which contained something heavy. The bag had been all rubbed over with grease and to the grease the dark sand stuck thickly. Out of this bag he took a small, heavy, cylindrical bundle of chamois leather. Then he restored the bag to the hole, shovelled back the sand and smoothed the floor, rose and stood a minute hearkening, with the cylinder of chamois rolled-up leather in his hand.
This hiding-place had been selected and contrived with great acuteness. It was so close to the foot of the shutters that no one looking in through the ventilators at any angle could catch sight of it. The presence of the moulder's sand at the threshold was explained by the fact that no other substance was so good for canting heavy metal objects upon. Superficial disturbances were to be expected in such a floor, and it was impossible to tell superficial disturbances from deep ones. Once the sand was re-levelled with a broom-handle, used as a striker is used in measuring corn, it was impossible to guess whether any disturbance had recently taken place. In concealing and recovering anything here the operator's ear was within two inches of the street, and he could hear the faintest sound outside. The threshold was not a likely place to challenge examination in case of search.
Timmons now walked softly over his noiseless floor, carrying his lantern in one hand and the roll of leather in the other, until he got behind the old boiler of the donkey engine. Here he slid back the slide of the lantern and unrolled the leather. The latter proved to be a belt about a palm deep, and consisting of little bags or pockets of chamois leather, clumsily but securely sewn to a band of double chamois.
There were a dozen of those little pockets in all; six of them contained some heavy substance. Each one closed with a piece of string tied at the mouth. Timmons undid one and rolled out on his hand a thick lump of yellow metal about the size of the large buttons worn as ornaments on the coats of coachmen. It was not, however, flat, but slightly convex at one side and almost semi-spherical on the other.
He smiled a well-satisfied smile at the gold ingot, and weighed it affectionately in his black, grimy palm, where the gold shone like a yellow unchanging flame. Timmons gave the ingot a loving polish with his sleeve, dropped it back into its bag, and re-tied the string. Then out of each of his trousers' pockets he took a similar ingot or button, weighed each, and looked at each with affectionate approval, and secured each in one of the half-dozen vacant leather bags.