William Hope Hodgson by Collected Fiction Vol. 01

Author:Collected Fiction Vol. 01 [01, Collected Fiction Vol.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-12T20:28:14+00:00

It was, maybe, a week later, that Mr. Brown and I had dinner together.

“Pigeons—” said Mr. Brown, meditatively—” I like ’em best with a neat little packet of diamonds fixed under their feathers.”

“Same here!” I said, smiling reminiscently. I filled my glass.

“Pigeons!” I said.

“Pigeons!” said Mr. Brown, raising his glass.

And we drank.

The Red Herring

S.S. Calypso,

August 10.

We docked this morning, and the Customs gave us

the very devil of a turn-out; but they found nothing.

“We shall get you one of these days, Captain Gault,” the head of the searchers told me. “We’ve gone through you pretty carefully; but I’m not satisfied. We’ve had information that I could swear was sound, but where you’ve hidden the stuff, I’ll confess, stumps me out.”

“Don’t be so infernally ready to give the dog the bad name, and then add insult to injury by trying to hang him,” I said. “You know you’ve never yet caught me trying to shove stuff through.”

The head searcher laughed.

“Don’t rub it in, Captain,” he said. “That’s just it! Take that last little flutter of yours, with the pigeons, and the way you made money both ways, both on the hens and on the diamonds; and all the rest of your devil’s tricks. You’ve got the nerve! You ought to be able to retire by now!”

“I’m afraid I’m neither so fortunate nor so clever as you seem to think, Mr. Anderson,” I told him. “You had no right to kill my hens, and I made your man apologise for his abominable suggestion about the pigeons!”

“You did so, Cap’n,” he said. “But we’ll get you yet. And I’ll eat my hat if you get a thing through the gates this time, even if we’ve missed finding it now. We’re bound to get you at last. Good morning, Captain!”

“Good morning, Mr. Anderson!” I said. And he went ashore.

There you have the position. I’ve got £6000 worth of pearls in a remarkable little hiding-place of my own aboard; and somehow word has been passed to the Customs, and it’s going to make the getting of them ashore a deuced difficult thing, that will take some planning. All my old methods, they’re up to. Besides, I never try the same plan twice, if I can help it; for it is altogether too risky.

And a lot of them are not so practicable as they appear at first. That carrier pigeon idea, for instance, was both good and bad; but Mr. Brown and I lost nearly a thousand pounds’ worth of stones through it; for there’s a class of oaf with a gun who would shoot his own mother-in-law if she passed him on wings. Perhaps he’d not be really to blame in such circumstances; but he is certainly to blame when he looses off at a “carrier.” Any shooting man should be able to recognise them from the common or garden variety. But I fancy the aforementioned oaf does the recognising cheerfully, and shoots promptly. Some of these gentlemen must have made a haul! That was why we never loosed the pigeons before reaching port.

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