Then Roddy explained, and repeated what the mysterious voice from the void had said.
“Both speaker and listener were disguised under false call-signs,” he went on. “Hence it is highly suspicious, and I felt it my duty to tell you.”
Andrew Barclay was puzzled. The porter was placing his bags in a first-class compartment of the boat train, which was crowded with people going holiday-making abroad. Loud-voiced society women commanded porters, and elderly men stalked along to the carriages following their piles of baggage. The eight-forty Paris service is usually crowded in summer and winter, for one gets to Paris by five, in time for a leisurely dinner and the series of trains which leave the Gare de Lyon in the region of nine o’clock.
“Just repeat all you said, Roddy, will you?” asked the man in the heavy travelling coat.
The young fellow did so.
“Freda? That’s a rather unusual name. Has it anything to do with that woman Freda Crisp you told me about? What do you think?”
“I believe it has.”
Barclay was aware of all the strange experiences of the shrewd young mining engineer. Only three days after his return to Little Farncombe he had gone down to the quiet old country rectory and listened to his friend’s story.
In this concession to work the ancient mines in the Wad Sus he was equally interested with his young friend in whom he believed so implicitly, knowing how enthusiastic and therefore successful he had been in his prospecting expeditions up the Amazon.
The big portable luggage-vans—those secured by wire hawsers which are slung on to the mail-boat and re-slung on to the Paris express—had been locked and sealed with lead, as they always are. The head guard’s whistle blew, and Barclay was about to enter the train, when Roddy said: