“How do you know there is any?”
“Must be something peculiar about the book or Enderby wouldn’t put in four months of work on the chance of stealing it. And it must be obscure, otherwise the auctioneer would have spotted it.”
“Sound enough!” approved the other. “What could it be? Some interpolated page?”
“Hardly. I’ve a treatise in my pocket on seventeenth century book-making, which I’m going to study to-night. Be ready for an early start to meet Bertram.”
That languid and elegant gentleman arrived by the first morning train. He protested mightily when he was led to the humble shoe-shop. He protested more mightily when invited to don a leather apron and smudge his face appropriately to his trade. His protests, waxing vehement and eventually profane, as he barked his daintily-kept fingers, in rehearsal for giving a correct representation of an honest artisan cobbling a boot, died away when Average Jones explained to him that on pretense of having found a rare book, he was to worm out of a cautious and probably suspicious criminal the nature of some unique and hidden feature of the volume.
“Trust me for diplomacy,” said Bertram airily.
“I will because I’ve got to,” retorted Average Jones. “Well, get to work. To you the outer shop: to Warren and me this rear room. And, remember, if you hear me whetting a knife, that means come at once.”
Uncomfortably twisted into a supposedly professional posture, Bertram wrought with hammer and last, while putting off, with lame, blind and halting, excuses, such as came to call for their promised footgear. By a triumph of tact he had just disposed of a rancid-tongued female who demanded her husband’s boots, a satisfactory explanation, or the arbitrament of the lists, when the bell tinkled and the two watchers in the back room heard a nervous, cultivated voice say:
“Is Mr. Fichtel here?”
“That’s me,” said Bertram, landing an agonizing blow on his thumb-nail.