“You must needs shave off that beard of yours, Alexis,” he said to his
companion. “With it he would recognize you on the instant. We must
separate here in the hour, and when we meet again upon the deck of the
Kincaid, let us hope that we shall have with us two honoured guests who
little anticipate the pleasant voyage we have planned for them.
“In two hours I should be upon my way to Dover with one of them, and by
tomorrow night, if you follow my instructions carefully, you should
arrive with the other, provided, of course, that he returns to London
as quickly as I presume he will.
“There should be both profit and pleasure as well as other good things
to reward our efforts, my dear Alexis. Thanks to the stupidity of the
French, they have gone to such lengths to conceal the fact of my escape
for these many days that I have had ample opportunity to work out every
detail of our little adventure so carefully that there is little chance
of the slightest hitch occurring to mar our prospects. And now
good-bye, and good luck!”
Three hours later a messenger mounted the steps to the apartment of
Lieutenant D’Arnot.
“A telegram for Lord Greystoke,” he said to the servant who answered
his summons. “Is he here?”
The man answered in the affirmative, and, signing for the message,
carried it within to Tarzan, who was already preparing to depart for
London.
Tarzan tore open the envelope, and as he read his face went white.
“Read it, Paul,” he said, handing the slip of paper to D’Arnot. “It has
come already.”
The Frenchman took the telegram and read:
“Jack stolen from the garden through complicity of new servant. Come at
once.—JANE.”
As Tarzan leaped from the roadster that had met him at the station and
ran up the steps to his London town house he was met at the door by a
dry-eyed but almost frantic woman.
Quickly Jane Porter Clayton narrated all that she had been able to
learn of the theft of the boy.
The baby’s nurse had been wheeling him in the sunshine on the walk
before the house when a closed taxicab drew up at the corner of the
street. The woman had paid but passing attention to the vehicle, merely
noting that it discharged no passenger, but stood at the kerb with the
motor running as though waiting for a fare from the residence before
which it had stopped.
Almost immediately the new houseman, Carl, had come running from the
Greystoke house, saying that the girl’s mistress wished to speak with
her for a moment, and that she was to leave little Jack in his care
until she returned.
The woman said that she entertained not the slightest suspicion of the
man’s motives until she had reached the doorway of the house, when it
occurred to her to warn him not to turn the carriage so as to permit
the sun to shine in the baby’s eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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