Now I had unpacked that chop-box and repacked it the previous night. I knew everything it contained—exactly how many cans of plum pudding. It was the box I had rested my feet on. I felt perfectly sure he knew as well as I what the box contained, and to suppose he would sit there planning to recover canned food, however dainty, was ridiculous.
Wherefore it was a safe conclusion he was trying to deceive me as to his real intention. I put my foot on the box again, and he frowned, as much as to say I had forestalled his only hope. Pretending to watch the box and him, I examined every detail of the tent, particularly that side of it opposite the box, away from where it seemed he wanted me to look.
The human eye is a highly imperfect piece of mechanism and the human brain is mostly grayish slush. It was minutes before I detected the edge of his diary, sticking out from the pocket of Fred's shooting coat that itself protruded from under the folded blanket on which Fred had slept. It was nearer to Schillingschen than to me. After watching him for about fifteen minutes, during which he made a great fuss about his headache, I was quite sure it was the diary that interested him.
I stooped and extracted it from the coat pocket. The grimace he made was certainly not due to headache.
"Fred!" I called out, and he and Will came striding in together.
"That diary's the key," I said. "It's important. It holds his secrets!"
Will was swift to put that to the test.
"What will you offer?" he asked Schillingschen. "We want you to go back direct to German East. Will you go, if we give you back your diary?"
Schillingschen blundered into the trap like a buffalo in strange surroundings.
"Ja wohl!" he answered. "Give me that, and yon shall never see me again!"