Tom tiddlers island, p.13
Tom Tiddler's Island, page 13
An earlier speculation of his own flashed back into Colin’s mind.
“Placer mining!” he ejaculated.
Northfleet shook his head decidedly.
“That notion won’t wash,” he said bluntly. “In the first place, there isn’t a stream longer than half a mile in Ruffa. You’d never find placer deposits in them. Secondly, I’ve been over every inch of the island, bar the Heather Lodge grounds, and there’s no sign of any workings—no digging, no cradles, nothing. Thirdly, these fellows keep to Heather Lodge, except when they take the dog for a walk. I’d have seen them if they’d been working a deposit. No, you can dismiss that notion.”
Colin was downcast for a moment, but a fresh idea came to his aid.
“Hold on, though! Suppose an alluvial deposit got buried by a cave-in of the banks of an old river. The gold would be underground, then. What about that subterranean tunnel? Might be some stuff down there. I mean, we don’t know anything about it beyond the bricked-up part. The Heather Lodge lot may have found a deposit near their end and dug an adit into it from the tunnel. Then they could dig away as they pleased, underground, and you’d be no wiser.”
“The streams here are too short.”
Northfleet reiterated his objection in a slightly impatient tone. But Colin had an answer ready.
“Yes, if Ruffa had been an island from the Creation onwards. But it was part of the mainland once, I guess. The gold may have been laid down then, when there was plenty of room for a river. After that, the land round about may have submerged and left Ruffa sticking up.”
“I see you’re set on that explanation. Don’t let me disturb your mind,” Northfleet begged ironically. “Divert your attention for a moment and I’ll show you something. See that big white motor-launch in the offing yonder? She’s the Heather Lodge supply-boat. See! She’s coming up in our direction hand over fist.”
Colin followed Northfleet’s gesture and saw the white hull of the visitor cutting through the waves in the distance. For a moment the sun gleamed dazzlingly on the windows of the cabin as the vessel changed her course by a point or two.
“I’ve never seen her before,” Colin said, as he watched the swift approach of the vessel. “Fairish size, she is. Could stand up to weather not badly. Not a bad turn of speed, either. Does she call here often, in the usual run?”
“Irregularly. She was here last week.”
“Last week? I never saw her,” Colin objected.
“No. You were out all day with Mrs. Trent, down the coast in your motor-boat. The launch was away again before you turned up in the evening. Do you remember what day that was?”
Something in Northfleet’s tone as he uttered the last sentence made Colin look up sharply.
“What day it was? One forgets the days of the week in this place. Lemme see . . . Last Thursday, was it? I mean Thursday in last week.”
“That’s correct. Does it suggest anything?”
Thursday? Colin knew he had seen the word somewhere. Of course! It was in the cipher message. He pulled the paper towards him and re-read the sentence: “The final lot of the last three thousand was sent off on Thursday and got through safe.”
“You mean that motor-launch took away the stuff, whatever it is?”
“Very curious coincidence, if it didn’t,” Northfleet commented. “At least, it took ‘part’ of it away.”
“And the rest went in the yacht, eh?”
“If it did, it went disguised as petrol.”
“Petrol tins might hold anything, and you didn’t see inside them,” said Colin weightily. “What did the launch bring in, did you see?”
“A lot of boxes and parcels,” Northfleet answered, making no concealment of the fact that he had watched the whole affair. “They might have been simply groceries and so forth. In fact, one box at least was that. It had no lid and I could see tins and jam-jars in it as they carried it up from the jetty. I was up on the hill with a good pair of glasses—the ones I use for bird-watching,” he explained with a faint grin.
“Ha! Thrilling, no doubt,” said Colin, acknowledging the thrust. “But what’s more to the point: what did the launch take away with her when she went?”
“Two wooden boxes, like ammunition boxes, rather. They were iron-clamped, I could see. And they seemed pretty heavy, to judge by the way they carried them—two men to the box.”
“Ah!” said Colin, in what he hoped was an indifferent tone.
How many of these gold bricks could one pack into an ammunition box, he wondered. If the box was full, it would make a heavyish load to carry over rough ground, certainly. Then a fresh thought prompted him to ask a question.
“What crew has she, did you see?”
“Two men. That was all I saw.”
“Like these foreign scoundrels on the yacht?” Colin inquired.
Northfleet shook his head.
“I didn’t go near them, so I didn’t hear them speak. But I had a good look at them through my glasses. English, I’d say. Gentlemen, possibly—or, at any rate, they’d been gentlemen at one time. Miss Arrow mentioned them to me once, and that’s the impression I got from the way she spoke. It fits in with some other information I have from another source.”
Colin was busy with his new line of thought.
“Four men at Heather Lodge; two fellows at least on the yacht; and these two on the motor-launch. That’s eight men to divide the profits, whatever they are. If all that gang are making a good thing out of it, the receipts must run into big figures.”
“They do,” Northfleet confirmed succinctly.
As well they might, Colin thought, if those boxes were packed with gold bricks. Ruffa must be Tom Tiddler’s Ground and no mistake.
“Another thing the launch brought was a load of petrol tins,” Northfleet went on, supplementing his earlier list. “Some of them may be for re-fuelling the yacht and the rest must be benzene for the Heather Lodge gas plant.”
He paused for a moment, then and added:
“Do these points suggest anything to you, Trent?”
Colin pondered for a while without hitting upon anything.
“No, I don’t see much in it,” he confessed.
Northfleet put forward his interpretation with obvious diffidence.
“Perhaps this is straining the thing a bit, but here’s an explanation, for what it’s worth,” he said. “If the yacht needs re-fuelling, she must have come a longish distance without touching a port. On her looks, she had a for bigger effective radius than the motor-launch, and yet it’s the launch that brings the petrol tins, and the yacht that takes them away.”
“If it was petrol that they held,” Colin objected. “It might have been poteen. Perhaps Arrow’s running an illicit still. He may be, for all we know.”
“Pigs might fly,” said Northfleet contemptuously. “Stick to the facts. That short-radius motor-launch brings the tins. Therefore its trips are well within its ordinary radius of action. The yacht’s engine’s only an auxiliary, and yet she has been eating up her supply, apparently. Obviously she’s had a far longer trip than the motor-launch. Besides, the launch drops in here fairly regularly, whilst I’ve only seen the yacht once or twice since I came to Ruffa. That points the same way, on the probabilities of the case. I don’t say the thing’s proved, naturally. Still it suggests things.”
But Colin was in no mood for idle discussions about the effective radius of yachts or motor-launch. A new and brilliant idea had crossed his mind, and he blurted it out on the spur of the moment.
“I say, you know. Remember the Traprain Law business over on the East Coast. Archaeology stunt. They dug up a place there and found a sea-rover’s hoard. Gold vessels all bashed up and squashed for easy carriage. Heaps of them. Some old Norse pirate had looted an abbey on the Normandy coast, or somewhere thereabouts. Going up the North Sea he’d got into trouble, somehow. Came ashore at Traprain Law, cached his plunder, and probably got scuppered on the way home. Never came back for the stuff anyhow.”
“Well?” Northfleet prompted, with more interest than he had hitherto shown in Colin’s speculations.
“Well, don’t you see?” Colin pursued in high excitement. “That tunnel’s the very place for a cache—under the floor or behind some of the stones in the walls. Suppose somebody had played the old Norseman’s game. And suppose Arrow happened to come upon the stuff by chance. That would cover every inch of the ground.”
“Why all this secrecy business, then?” Northfleet inquired sceptically.
“Law of Treasure Trove, of course! If any gold plate or such-like stuff’s found and there’s no traceable owner to it the Crown steps in and grabs it. You may get something for finding it, but it’s Crown property. I don’t know whether you get a percentage for your pains or not. You certainly don’t scoop the lot. So if you bleat about it publicly—snap! in come the law officers and take it off your hands. But if you keep your mouth shut—who’s going to know anything about it, except yourself and your pals? There’s your solution, down to a dot.”
Northfleet made no reply for a full minute.
“You may have come near it,” he admitted frankly, at last. “I don’t know whether you’re right or wrong, Trent; but it would be a devil of a relief, I can tell you, if that proved to be the true solution. In more ways than one,” he added, as though musing aloud.
CHAPTER XI
THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE
COLIN would have liked to demand some elucidation of Northfleet’s meaning, but his tact suggested that he should refrain. The chemist’s fined phrase pointed straight to Hazel Arrow, though her name had not been mentioned; and Colin felt that a direct question might freeze up the stream of information which had just begun to trickle. For some moment’s he sat silent, his eyes on the stretch of sea across which the white motor-launch was chipping through the waves on its way toward the western cape of Ruffa. His restraint was at length rewarded; but when Northfleet spoke again he seemed to choose a fresh topic.
“You seem to gather up out-of-the-way information, Trent. Did you ever read anything about the Philosopher’s Stone?”
Colin shook his head rather doubtfully. His store of knowledge in that field was no greater than the average man’s.
“Not much,” he admitted. “Stunt of the alchemists, wasn’t it? Something that changed lead into gold? Fake, mostly, if not entirely, so to speak. Pot of molten lead; a few powders to give a flash; a metal rod to stir up the ingredients: that was the outfit, wasn’t it? Only, the rod was really hollow, plugged with wax at both ends, and with some pellets of gold in the cavity. When they stirred the lead with that, the wax melted and the gold slipped down into the crucible. Then they could show their patrons that the lead contained gold and get a subsidy to carry on the good work. That sort of thing.”
“That sort of thing, as you say,” Northfleet confirmed. “It was a stock joke with generations of lecturers on chemistry Nobody believed in the possibility of changing one element into another. Anyone who said a word in its favour got laughed at. Then came radioactivity, and it turned out that every specimen of uranium was a bit of the Philosopher’s Stone. Know anything about recent work on the transmutation of the elements, by any chance?”
“Just what I read in the newspapers,” Colin confessed modestly. “All this stuff about splitting the atom, and so forth.”
“And what do you think of it? You’re a plain, unscientific person.”
“It doesn’t mean much in my young life, and that’s a fact,” Colin admitted. “Thrilling to you chemists, no doubt. But beyond that, it’s just a toy affair. Nothing on a big scale can come out of it’s far’s I can see.”
Northfleet smiled rather wryly.
“I expect some honest citizens of Alexandria said the same when they heard about Hero’s aeolipile. And yet it was one of the first steam engines.”
“Something in that, perhaps.” Colin’s tone showed no enthusiasm. “But, so far, this atom-splitting’s uneconomic. Uses some frightfully expensive stuffs or machinery and doesn’t yield enough gold to make a flea wink if you put the lot into its eye.”
“Like the fellow in Lamb’s essay who burned down his house every time he wanted roast pig? Yes. But according to Lamb they weren’t so very long before they found a cheaper way of doing the job, once they got the right notion into their heads. And it might be the same with gold-making. Some bright lad might strike the right method.”
Colin shook his head decidedly.
“That’s rot,” he affirmed bluntly.
“Think so?” said Northfleet. “I’m not so sure.”
“But it would have made a stir, if it had been done,” Colin objected. “It’d upset things a bit. Newspapers would be on to it like terriers after a rat.”
Northfleet made no attempt to conceal his amusement.
“Yes. And the wiseacre in the street, like you, would turn up his nose and say: ‘Fake!’ immediately. And then he’d forget it, eh? But here’s an actual case. I’m not inventing it. I read about it in an old volume of Pearson’s Magazine that was kicking about the house when I was a kid at school.”
Colin snorted contemptuously.
“Is that where you get your chemical information?” he inquired ironically. “Wish I’d taken up chemistry myself. It must be light reading.”
“All I’m trying to do is to convince you I’m not inventing,” Northfleet assured him. “You’ll find the business mentioned in Fournier d’Albe’s life of Sir William Crookes. There’s a fairly full account of it in Commander Gould’s Enigmas, too. That’s surely enough to satisfy you that I’m not trying to pull your leg.”
“All right,” said Colin; “give us the yam, whatever it is.”
“Towards the end of last century,” Northfleet began, unperturbed, “there was an American chemist by the name of Emmens. He invented an explosive called ‘Emmensite,’ which I believe was taken up by the U.S.A. Government. In 1897 Emmens gave out that he had discovered how to convert silver into gold. He started with Mexican silver dollars, and by using some machinery or other—he called it a Force Engine—he claimed that he had turned the silver into a stuff called ‘Argentaurum,’ which was half-way between silver and gold. From this argentaurum he could go on a further stage if he liked and change it into gold by continuing his treatment.”
“Fake!” was Colin’s comment, accompanied by a shrug of his shoulders. “You don’t swallow that, do you?”
“Not as it stands, I admit. Modem ideas don’t allow for any such half-way materials as argentaurum was supposed to be. But let that go, for the moment. The point is that Emmens took his argentaurum gold to the United States Mint. They tested it, found it was gold right enough, and bought it from him over the counter. Between April and December, 1897, they purchased between six and seven hundred ounces of his gold—close on eight thousand dollars’ worth of gold at the price then current. And that’s no newspaper yam.”
“Not pulling my leg, really?” Colin demanded suspiciously.
“Not in the slightest.”
“But why didn’t someone else repeat the experiments and——”
“Suppose you yourself made a discovery of that sort,” Northfleet interrupted, “what would you do? If you were a pure dyed-in-the-wool scientific man with no interests beyond the search for truth and the advancement of knowledge, you’d publish your method and throw the thing open to the world. But science is a dashed poorly-paid industry, let me tell you. Wouldn’t you be just a trifle tempted to stick to your discovery and make money out of it, instead of giving the show away? I don’t mind admitting that I’d suffer a qualm or two if I had to come to a decision myself about that. And, besides, it might be made well worth your while to keep your jaw shut. The gold industry has a lot of ramifications, and some people might prefer to pay you for secrecy—pay high, too.”
“Hadn’t seen that side of it,” Colin admitted handsomely.
“Emmens made no bones about it,” Northfleet went on. “He went into the thing purely as a case of Mammon-seeking. He said so himself: ’No disciples desired and no believers asked for’; that was his attitude when Crookes tackled him about his process. Now if you’d been in Emmens’s shoes, what line would you have taken?”
“Keep it dark, I suppose, and go on selling the gold.”
“And suppose the newspapers got hold of it and made a mild stunt of your alchemy, what then?”
“Keep on saying nothing, and let them tire of it.”
“Or else publish a wholly misleading account of your process to keep the really dangerous people—your fellow-chemists—clean off the track. Keep them guessing as long as you could. And, if they bothered you, tell them that science could go and cook itself, for all you cared. In fact, behave in a wholly unscientific manner, with a dose of rudeness thrown in.”
“And was this stunt really run at a profit?” Colin asked in a less sceptical tone.
“His figures show that he made a profit of one pound six shillings on every ounce of silver transmuted, after all costs had been deducted. Nowadays, with gold up in price, the profits would be far bigger.”
“H’m!” Colin ejaculated thoughtfully.
“I only spoke of Emmens to knock some of that cocksureness out of you, Trent,” Northfleet explained. “You can forget about him now. He hasn’t the remotest connection with the present affair. I just want you to realise that gold-making is quite on the cards, and that economical gold-making isn’t an impossibility. You can’t rule it out entirely; we’ve got a bit more careful about saying ‘Impossible!’ nowadays in chemistry. Now, does the name of Leven suggest anything to you. F. A. Leven, with a lot of the alphabet after it.”
“Lemme see.” Colin pondered. “D’you mean the scientific fellow?”
“He was Professor of Chemistry at the Westem Adelphi College in Bayswater, in our day.”
“Oh, yes!” Colin had a sudden recollection. “I remember. Didn’t he get into a row with the police over some pretty ladies in the street and get hauled off to the lock-up, once?”
