Lord James flicked the ash from his cigar with his little finger, and smiled at Griffith.
"Tom and I had been knocking around quite a bit, you know," he began.
"Fetched up in South Africa. American engineers in demand on the Rand.
Tom was asked to manage a mine."
"He could do it," commented Griffith. "Was two years on a low-grade proposition in Colorado—made it pay dividends. Didn't he suit the Rand people?"
"Better than they suited him, I take it. I left for a run home. Week before I arrived a servant looted the family jewels—heirlooms, all that, you know—chap named Hawkins. Thought I'd play Sherlock Holmes. Learned that my man had booked passage for India. Traced him to Calcutta. Lost two months; found he'd doubled back and gone to the Cape. Cape Town, found he'd booked passage for England under his last alias—Winthrope. Steamer list also showed names of my friend Lady Bayrose, Miss Leslie, and Tom."
"Hey?" ejaculated Griffith, opening his narrowed eyes a line.
"Same time, learned the steamer had been posted as lost, somewhere between Port Natal and Zanzibar."
"Crickey!" gasped Griffith. "Then it was Tom who pulled H. V.'s daughter—Miss Leslie—through that deal! Heard all about it from H. V. himself, when he took me out to Arizona to look over this Zariba Dam proposition. But he didn't name the man. Well, I'll be—switched! Tommy sure did land in High Society that time!"
"They landed in the primitive, so to speak,—he and Miss Leslie and
Hawkins,—when the cyclone flung them ashore in the swamps."
"Hawkins? Didn't you just say—"
"Rather a grim joke, was it not? Every soul aboard drowned except those three—Tom and Miss Leslie and Hawkins, of all men!"