"You don't know that he's any valuables of any sort on him," retorted
Lorrimore. "That's all supposition. I say that if my man Wing was on
this vessel--as I'm sure he was--he was on it for purposes of his own.
He might be with this felonious lot, but he wouldn't be of them. I
know him!--and I'm off to get on his track. Lay you anything you
like--a thousand to one!--that I find Wing at my house!"
"I'm not taking you, Lorrimore," said I. "I don't mind laying the
same."
Scarterfield looked curiously at the two of us. Apparently, his belief
in Chinese virtue was not great.
"Well," he said. "I'm on his track, anyhow, and I propose to get away
to the beach. There's nothing more we can do here. These naval people
have got this job in charge, now. Let's leave them to it. Yet," he
added, as we left the galley, and with a significant glance at me,
"there is one thing Middlebrook!--wouldn't you like to have a look
inside those two chests that we've heard so much about?--you and I."
"I certainly should!" I answered.
"Then we will," he said. "I, too, have some curiosity that way. And if
Master Wing has repaired to the doctor's house he's all right, and if
he hasn't, he can't get very far away, being a Chinaman, in his native
garments, and wounded."
The chests which had come aboard the yawl with Miss Raven and myself
the previous afternoon--it seemed as if ages had gone by since
then!--still stood where they had been placed at the time; close to
the gangway leading to the main cabin. Lorrimore, Scarterfield, the
young naval officer and I gathered round while a couple of handy
blue-jackets forced them open--no easy business, for whether the
dishonest bank-manager and Netherfield Baxter had ever opened them or
not, they were screwed up again in a fashion which showed
business-like resolves that they should not easily be opened again.
But at last the lids were off--to reveal inner shells of lead. And
within these, gleaming dully in the fresh sunlight lay the monastic
treasures of which Scarterfield and I had read in the hotel at Blyth.
"Queer!" said the detective, as he stood staring meditatively at
patens and chalices, reliquaries and pyxes. "All these, I reckon, are
sacred things, consecrated and all that, and yet ever since that
Reformation time, they've been mixed up with robbery, and now at last
with wholesale murder! Odd, isn't it? However, there they are!--and
here," he added, pulling the parchment schedules out of his pocket
which he had discovered at Baxter's old lodgings in Blyth, and handing
them to the lieutenant, "here is the list of what there ought to be;
you'll take all this in charge, of course--I don't know if it comes
within the law of treasure trove or not, but as the original owners
are dust and ashes four hundred years ago, I should say it
does--anyway, the Crown solicitors'll soon settle that point."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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