Chapter Twelve.
Gossip from the Sunshine.
“Oh, yes, that’s right enough,” Lord Logan said, when we questioned him. “I saw her the night before I left. She was playing trente-et-quarante—and winning a bit, too, by Gad!”
He was an ordinary type of the modern young peer—well-set-up, unemotional, faultlessly groomed. He produced a gold cigarette case as he spoke, and held it out to me. I noticed that the cigarettes it contained bore his coat of arms.
“These cigarettes are not likely to be stolen from you,” I said lightly, indicating the coat of arms.
He smiled.
“You are right. I was the first to start the fashion—get ’em from Cairo every week—and now everybody’s doin’ it, haw, haw! I’ve got my cartridges done the same way. At some places where one shoots the beater fellers rob one right and left—the devils. I said to one of my hosts the other day, I said: ‘Your cartridge carriers are a lot of bally rogues.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, bristlin’ up like a well-bred bull-dog. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you make ’em all turn out their pockets, and you’ll see,’ I said. And he did!”
“And what was in them?”
“In them? Damme, what wasn’t in them? My dear feller, every beater who had carried cartridges had a dozen or two cartridges in his pockets then—it’s a fact. And we’d done shootin’, and the beaters were goin’ home, so they couldn’t pretend they were just carryin’ the bally cartridges in their pockets to have ’em handy. But there wasn’t a cartridge of mine missing among the lot. They knew only too well they wouldn’t be able to sell to the local ironmonger cartridges with a coat of arms on ’em—eh what? And that’s why I now have my cigarettes tattooed in the same way. I believe my servants used to rob them by the hundred. They don’t now, except perhaps a handful to smoke themselves, and of course that’s only natural. What was it you were askin’ me just now? Ah, yes, about Vera Thorold. She seems to be a flyer.”
“Did you speak to her?”