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Page 29
Curiously enough, only a quarter of an hour before, R. Jones had
set out with exactly the same object in view.
* * *
At almost exactly the hour when Aline Peters set off to visit her
friend, Miss Valentine, three men sat in the cozy smoking-room of
Blandings Castle.
They were variously occupied. In the big chair nearest the door
the Honorable Frederick Threepwood--Freddie to pals--was reading.
Next to him sat a young man whose eyes, glittering through
rimless spectacles, were concentrated on the upturned faces of
several neat rows of playing cards--Rupert Baxter, Lord
Emsworth's invaluable secretary, had no vices, but he sometimes
relaxed his busy brain with a game of solitaire. Beyond Baxter, a
cigar in his mouth and a weak highball at his side, the Earl of
Emsworth took his ease.
The book the Honorable Freddie was reading was a small
paper-covered book. Its cover was decorated with a color scheme
in red, black and yellow, depicting a tense moment in the lives
of a man with a black beard, a man with a yellow beard, a man
without any beard at all, and a young woman who, at first sight,
appeared to be all eyes and hair. The man with the black beard,
to gain some private end, had tied this young woman with ropes to
a complicated system of machinery, mostly wheels and pulleys. The
man with the yellow beard was in the act of pushing or pulling a
lever. The beardless man, protruding through a trapdoor in the
floor, was pointing a large revolver at the parties of the second
part.
Beneath this picture were the words: "Hands up, you scoundrels!"
Above it, in a meandering scroll across the page, was: "Gridley
Quayle, Investigator. The Adventure of the Secret Six. By Felix
Clovelly."
The Honorable Freddie did not so much read as gulp the adventure
of the Secret Six. His face was crimson with excitement; his hair
was rumpled; his eyes bulged. He was absorbed.
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if we do but
search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental
powers. Grave and earnest men, at Eton and elsewhere, had tried
Freddie Threepwood with Greek, with Latin and with English; and
the sheeplike stolidity with which he declined to be interested
in the masterpieces of all three tongues had left them with the
conviction that he would never read anything.
And then, years afterward, he had suddenly blossomed out as a
student--only, it is true, a student of the Adventures of Gridley
Quayle; but still a student. His was a dull life and Gridley
Quayle was the only person who brought romance into it. Existence
for the Honorable Freddie was simply a sort of desert, punctuated
with monthly oases in the shape of new Quayle adventures. It was
his ambition to meet the man who wrote them.
Lord Emsworth sat and smoked, and sipped and smoked again, at
peace with all the world. His mind was as nearly a blank as it is
possible for the human mind to be. The hand that had not the task
of holding the cigar was at rest in his trousers pocket. The
fingers of it fumbled idly with a small, hard object.
Gradually it filtered into his lordship's mind that this small,
hard object was not familiar. It was something new--something
that was neither his keys nor his pencil; nor was it his small
change. He yielded to a growing curiosity and drew it out. He
examined it. It was a little something, rather like a fossilized
beetle. It touched no chord in him. He looked at it with amiable
distaste.
"Now how in the world did that get there?" he said.
The Honorable Freddie paid no attention to the remark. He was now
at the very crest of his story, when every line intensified the
thrill. Incident was succeeding incident. The Secret Six were
here, there and everywhere, like so many malignant June bugs.
Annabel, the heroine, was having a perfectly rotten
time--kidnapped, and imprisoned every few minutes. Gridley
Quayle, hot on the scent, was covering somebody or other with his
revolver almost continuously. Freddie Threepwood had no time for
chatting with his father. Not so Rupert Baxter. Chatting with
Lord Emsworth was one of the things for which he received his
salary. He looked up from his cards.
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