The Case of the Climbing Rat by Christopher Bush

Author:Christopher Bush [Bush, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2018-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

A DISCOVERY

CHARLES had been so famished after his morning on the beach that he had almost finished his lunch. The hotel was crowded, but Velot had reserved a special table for the three in a corner of the loggia.

“A good appetite is a good sign,” said Travers in French. “You’re almost yourself again, Charles.”

“You will pardon me,” said Gallois, “but he will talk in English when with ourselves. By my instruction he continues his studies since you saw him last,and here is an occasion that is admirable for practice. Also there may be times when we do not wish that others understand what it is that we say.”

Charles caught the eye of Travers. Travers, older than Gallois, was still, as Charles had come to know, very much of a boy.

“Well then, how are you coming along, Charles?” Travers asked flippantly.

“I come along very well,” Charles told him, with a grin. “There is the—the buzz in the head, but very little now.”

Gallois nodded benignantly.

“A day or two and he will be able perhaps to assist in this business of Letoque.”

“But what has this Letoque to do with Bariche? For my part I do not see a connection.”

Gallois gave him a look of sad reproach.

“It appears that this morning you do not rest. On the contrary you occupy yourself with reading the papers.”

Charles grimaced. “It is necessary that one passes the time.”

Gallois ignored him and turned to Travers. “This afternoon, we will spend on the beach, where I shall perhaps explain this new affair to those who have only read of it in newspapers.”

But what he did discuss during lunch was Charles’s accident, which, since the Letoque–Bariche discoveries, had acquired in his eyes an even greater significance. Charles was frankly of the opinion of Travers, that the accident was precisely what it had seemed, and that a deliberate collision with his car would have required a timing and an ingenuity which the circumstances could not conceivably have allowed.

Gallois shelved the subject, though far from abandoning his own opinion. After lunch deck–chairs were taken to the beach. It was not too crowded,and there was plenty to observe.

“Lizou would have been an ideal spot for your convalescence, Charles,” Travers said. “I wouldn’t mind being ill there myself.”

“Ah! The country, the mountains, the goodair,” said Gallois with a grand poetic flourish. “Above all, the quiet, the solitude, in which one can reflect and even create.”

Charles once more caught the eye of Travers.

“That is what I thought when I woke,” he said in his tentative English. “I ask myself where I am, because everywhere it is quiet. For a moment I tell myself I am dead, because there is no noise even of a moustique, but after I have the milk and take a little sleep for an hour I wake again and it is not so quiet―no! There is the noise of sheep and cows, and Gabrielle, she laughs and tells me it is the animals that traverse the road from the fair.”

“I met some of them the same night,” Travers told him.

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