Part 49

Amazement held the woman longer than she thought, over this extraordinary thing. Then she thrust it into the bosom of her jacket, fastening the button securely over it.

The act kept her head down. When she lifted it Bramwell Winton was standing in the door.

In terror her hand caught up the automatic pistol out of the tin box. She acted with no clear, no determined intent. It was a gesture of fear and of indecision; escape through menace was perhaps the subconscious motive; the most primitive, the most common motive of all creatures in the corner. It extends downward from the human mind through all life.

To spring up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of escape through menace.

Then a thing happened.

There was a sharp report and the figure standing in the doorway swayed a moment and fell forward into the room. The unconscious gripping of the woman's fingers had fired the pistol.

For a moment Lady Muriel stood unmoving, arrested in every muscle by this accident. But her steady wits--skilled in her profession--did not wholly desert her. She saw that the man was dead. There was peril in that--immense, uncalculated peril, but the prior and immediate peril, the peril of discovery in the very accomplishment of theft, was by this act averted.

She stooped over, her eyes fixed on the sprawling body and with her free hand closed the door of the safe. Then she crossed the room, put the pistol down on the floor near the dead man's hand and went out.

She went swiftly down the stairway and paused a moment at the door to look out. The street was empty. She hurried away.

She met no one. A cab in the distance was appearing. She hailed it as from a cross street and returned to Regent. It was characteristic of the woman that her mind dwelt upon the spoil she carried rather than upon the act she had done.

She puzzled at the water color. How could these things be flowers?

Bramwell Winton was a biologist; he would not be concerned with flowers. And Sir Godfrey Halleck and his son Tony, the big game hunter, were not men to bother themselves with blossoms. Sir Godfrey, as she now remembered vaguely, had, like his dead son, been a keen sportsman in his youth; his country house was full of trophies.

She carried buttoned in the bosom of her jacket something that these men valued. But, what was it? Well, at any rate it was something that would mean fame and fortune to the one who should bring it out of Africa. That one would now be Hecklemeir, and she should have her share of the spoil.

Lady Muriel found the drawing-room of her former employer in some confusion; rugs were rolled up, bronzes were being packed. But in the disorder of it the proprietor was imperturbable. He merely elevated his eyebrows at her reappearance. She went instantly to the point.

“Hecklemeir,” she said, “how would you like to have a definite objective in your explorations?”

The man looked at her keenly.

“What do you mean precisely?” he replied.

“I mean,” she continued, “something that would bring one fame and fortune if one found it.” And she added, as a bit of lure, “You remember the gold plates Hector Bartlett dug up in Syria?”

He came over closer to her; his little eyes narrowed.

“What have you got?” he said.

His facetious manner--that vulgar persons imagine to be distinguished--was gone out of him. He was direct and simple.

She replied with no attempt at subterfuge.

“I've got a map of a route to some sort of treasure--I don't know what--It's in the Karamajo Mountains in the French Congo; a map to it and a water color of the thing.”

Hecklemeir did not ask how Lady Muriel came by the thing she claimed; his profession always avoided such detail. But he knew that she had gone to Bramwell Winton; and what she had must have come from some scientific source. The mention of Hector Bartlett was not without its virtue.

Lady Muriel marked the man's changed manner, and pushed her trade.

“I want a check for a hundred pounds and a third of the thing when you bring it out.”

Hecklemeir stood for a moment with the tips of his fingers pressed against his lips; then replied.

“If you have anything like the thing you describe, I'll give you a hundred pounds... let me see it.”