“It would probably make you want to fight,” he said.
“I don’t care to think of it,” said Mr. Lund.
“And the curious part of it is,” mused Trent, “that in the sort of crowd these high class crooks mix with it is most unusual not to drink, and the man who doesn’t is almost always under suspicion. The great thing is to be able to take your share and stop before the danger mark is reached. Did you ever hear of Captain Despard?”
“I think not,” Lund answered.
“A boyhood idol of mine,” Anthony Trent admitted. “One of the few gentleman crooks. Most of the so-called gentlemen criminals have been anything but gentlemen born. Despard was. I was in Devonshire on my last trip to the other side and I made a pilgrimage to the place where he was born. Funny to think that a man brought up in one of the ‘stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand,’ should come to what he was.”
“Woman, I suppose,” said Lund, as one man of the world to another.
“Not in the beginning,” Anthony Trent answered. “He was a cavalry officer in India—Kipling type you know—and had a craze for precious stones. Began to collect them honestly enough and found his pay and private fortune insufficient. He got kicked out of his regiment anyway and went to Cape Town. One night a very large diamond was stolen from a bedroom of the Mount Nelson hotel and he was suspected. They couldn’t prove anything, but he came over here to New York and sold it, under another name, and with a different history, to one of the Pierpoints. The trouble with Captain Despard was that he used to drink heavily when he had pulled a big thing off. While he was planning a coup he was temperate and he never touched a drop while he was working.”
“Started to boast, I suppose?” Lund suggested.
“No,” said Anthony Trent. “Not that sort at all. He lived at a pretty fair sort of club here in the forties and was well enough liked until the drink was in him. It was then that he began to think of his former mode of life and the kind he was now living. He used to think the other members were trying to slight him or avoid him. He laboriously picked quarrels with some of them. He beat up one of them in a fist fight in the club billiard room. This fellow brooded over his licking for a long time and then with another man, also inflamed with cocktails, went up to Despard’s room to beat him up. Despard was out, so they broke his furniture. They found that the legs of chairs and tables had been hollowed so as to conceal what Despard stole. It was in one of the chairs that they found the Crediton pearls which had been missing for a year. They waited for him and he was sent to Sing Sing but escaped. He shot a man later in Denver and was executed. He might have been living comfortably but for getting suspicious when he had been drinking.”
“You must have studied this thing deeply,” Lund commented.