“Why,” continued Harvey, “they caught the men that stole the Curtis diamonds over there; that is, they got two of them. A third one escaped. He was the worst of the three, they say.”
The man in the bow had paused in his rowing.
“The worst one got away, did he?” said he.
“He did,” said Harvey. “It seemed one of them had the diamonds hidden in a house that every one thought was haunted. He was stopping at the hotel as a regular guest. And no one suspected him but Henry Burns. Then, when his confederates came, the detectives were lying in wait for them in the cellar. They nearly beat the detectives, though, at that. For they smashed the lanterns out—that is, one of them did, and made a run for it. The other one was hurt.”
“Did he die?” asked the man, quickly.
“No,” replied Harvey. “He’s all right, waiting trial along with the other one. We got him, too, just as he was nearly down to shore, where the other man was waiting to take him off in a boat. The third man escaped in his yacht. We only captured two.”
The man in the bow had drawn his oars in, now, so that they rested along the side of the boat. His hands worked nervously together, and he half-rose in his seat.
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, huskily. “Who did it—did you have a hand in it?”
If, by chance, this moment was a crisis in the life of Jack Harvey, and if, by chance, he was in greater danger at this moment than he had ever been before in all his life, there was no shadow of it across his mind. He answered with a laugh:
“No, not I. No such luck. If there’s anything like that going on, I’m sure to miss it. No, ’twas the other camp and a crowd I have no liking for that did it all, that got all the glory and all the fun and the money, too. The reward, I mean. I’d rather have been there at the capture, though, than get the money for it. And I don’t know why, but I felt rather sorry for the two chaps that got caught, bad as they were.”