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Page 52
Down below, among the second-class passengers, Mr. Noah Hawker paced to
and fro, gazing meditatively toward the Shakespeare Cliff. Mr. Hawker,
to give him the name by which he was known in Scotland Yard circles, was
a man of fifty, five feet nine in height, and rather stockily built. He
was lantern-jawed and dark-haired, with a coarse, black mustache curled
up at the ends like a pair of buffalo horns, and so strong a beard that
his cheeks were the color of blue ink, though he had shaved only three
hours before. His long frieze overcoat, swinging open, disclosed beneath
a German-made suit of a bad cut and very loud pattern. His soft hat,
crushed in, was perched to one side; a big horseshoe pin and a scarlet
cravat reposed on a limited space of pink shirt-front.
There was about one chance in ten of guessing his calling. He looked
equally like a successful sporting man, an ex-prize fighter, a barman,
a racing tout, a book-maker, or a public house thrower-out. But the most
unprejudiced observer would never have taken him for a gentleman.
It was a thrilling moment when the _Calais-Douvres_, slipping between
the waves, ran close in to the granite pier. She accomplished the feat
safely, and was quickly made fast. The gangway was thrown across, and
there was a mad rush of passengers hurrying to get ashore. A babel of
shouting voices broke loose: "London train ready!" "Here you are, sir!"
"Luggage, sir?" "Extry! extry!"
Sir Lucius Chesney, who was rarely disturbed by anything, showed on
this occasion a fussy solicitude about his trunks and boxes; nor was
he appeased until he had seen them all on a truck, waiting for the
inspection of the customs officers. Mr. Hawker, slouching along the pier
with his ulster collar turned up and his hat well down over his eyes,
observed the military-looking gentleman and then the prominent
white-lettered name on the luggage. He passed on after an instant's
hesitation.
"Sir Lucius Chesney!" he muttered. "It's queer, but I'll swear I've
heard that name before. Now, where could it have been? The bloke's face
ain't familiar--I never ran across him. But the name? Ah, hang me if I
don't think I've got it!"
Mr. Hawker did not get into the London train, though his goal was
the metropolis. He left the pier, and as he walked with apparent
carelessness through the town--he had no luggage--he took an occasional
crafty survey over his shoulder, as a man might do who feared that he
was being shadowed. When the train rattled out of Dover he was in the
public bar of a tavern not far from the Lord Warden Hotel, fortifying
himself with a brandy-and-soda after the rough passage across the
Channel. Meanwhile, Sir Lucius Chesney, seated in a first-class
carriage, was regarding with an ecstatic expression the one piece of
luggage that he had refused to trust to the van. This was a flat leather
case, and it contained something of much greater importance than the
dress-suit for which it was intended.
Dover was honored by Mr. Hawker's presence until three o'clock in the
afternoon, and he took advantage of the intervening couple of hours to
eat a hearty meal and to count his scanty store of money, after which he
dozed on a bench in the restaurant until roused by a waiter. There are
two railway stations in the town, and he chose the inner one. He found
an empty third-class compartment, and his relief was manifest when the
train pulled out. He produced a short briar-root pipe, and stuffed it
with the last shreds of French Caporal tobacco that remained in his
pouch.
"Give me the shag of old England," he said to himself, as he puffed away
with a poor relish and watched the flying sides of the deep railway
cutting. "This is no class--it's cabbage leaf soaked in juice. I wonder
if I ain't a fool to come back! But it can't be helped--there was
nothing to be picked up abroad, after that double stroke of hard luck.
And there's no place like London! I'll be all right if I dodge the
ferrets at Victoria. For the last ten years they've only known me
clean-shaven or with a heavy beard, and this mustache and the rig will
puzzle them a bit. Yes, I ought to pass for a foreign gent come across
to back horses."
The truth about Mr. Noah Hawkins, though it may shock the reader, must
be told in plain words. He was a professional burglar; none of your
petty, clumsy craftsmen that get lagged for smashing a shopkeeper's
till, but a follower to some extent in the footsteps of the masterful
Charles Peace. During the previous February he had come out of
Dartmoor--it was his third term of penal servitude--with a period of
police supervision to undergo. For the space of four months he regularly
reported himself, and then, in company with a pal of even higher
professional standing than himself, he suddenly disappeared from London.
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