“I wonder if that ass Cheyne put the cops on to us,” went on Sime to the company generally. “James talked to him like a father and he seemed to swallow it all down as sweet as milk. Lordy! But you should have heard old James spouting. He rattled off his patter like a good ’un. Fresh absurdities each time and all that. Didn’t you, James?” “He didn’t give much trouble,” Price replied. “I shouldn’t have believed anyone would have given in as soft as he did. I pitched him a yarn about yours truly being heir to the barony of Hull that wouldn’t have deceived an oyster, and he sucked it in like a sponge. But it wasn’t that that worked. It was keeping him without water that did the trick. When I offered him another day to think it over he collapsed like a pricked bubble.” “So would you if you had been in his shoes,” Susan declared. “I’d like to see you standing out for anything against your own comfort.” “You wouldn’t have seen me get into his shoes,” Price retorted, fitting a dark slide into the camera. “Now, Sime, if you’re ready.” Price pressed the bulb uncovering the lens and at the same time Sime burned a length of magnesium wire before the document on the door, while Cheyne writhed with impotent rage at the discovery that he had been duped in still another particular. “We’ve done uncommonly well,” Parkes remarked when the photograph had been taken, “but we’re not by any means out of the wood yet. In fact, the real work is only beginning. We don’t even yet know the size of the problem we’re up against. We’ve got to find that out and then we’ve got to make a plan and put it through, and all the time we’ve got to lie low in case that infernal ass has reported us to the police.” “We’ve got to get these photographs taken and then we’ve got to get our supper,” retorted Price. “For goodness sake let’s have one thing at a time, Blessington. If you’d lend a hand instead of standing there preaching, it would be more to the point.” Here was another alias. Parkes’s real name was Blessington. Cheyne was beginning to wonder what Price and Susan were really called, when the next remark satisfied his curiosity. Parkes—or Blessington—took Price’s remark easily. “Now that’s where you make the mistake, Mr. James Dangle,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Miss Dangle and I do the real work in this joint: don’t we, Miss Dangle? We supply the brains, you and Sime only rise to the muscles. Eh, Miss Dangle?” But Miss Dangle was not in a mood for pleasantries. “We shall want all the brains that you can supply and more,” she answered irritably, and then turning lazily to the others demanded if they weren’t ever going to be done messing with the darned camera.