“I think, out of _that_, you might manage to stand me a swimming-bath as well as a gymnasium, eh?” whispered Bob Hines.
Mr. Brentin returned to us radiant. “Well, gentlemen, what do you think of it all now?”
“They are coming,” I ventured to say, and the band of brothers nodded.
“But, I say!” spluttered Masters, who had for the most part kept silent—“who is Mr. Bailey Thompson? Who knows anything about him? Who can guarantee he won’t give us away to the Monte Carlo people, and have us all quodded before we can even get a look in?”
Mr. Brentin frowned. “I will answer for Mr. Thompson with my life!” he cried. “He is a gentleman of the most royal integrity. I have studied him in every social relation, and I never knew him fail.”
“Oh, well, that’ll do,” interrupted Bob Hines, who had all along shown some impatience at Brentin’s long speeches. “We only want to know somebody is responsible for his not selling us, that’s all.”
A responsibility Mr. Brentin undertook with the greatest cheerfulness and readiness, and that, mind you, for a man who turned out to be Scotland Yard personified—who, but for his inane jealousy of the French police and his desire to effect our capture single-handed, would have been the means of casting five highly strung English gentlemen, and one excitable American, into lifelong chains; and who, on the very morning after his interview with us (as he afterwards confessed to me), was actually at Whitehall concerting plans with the authorities there how best to catch us _in flagrante delicto_!
How, on the contrary, we caught _him_, and had him deported to the southernmost point of Greece, forms one of my choicest memories, and will now soon be related at sufficient length.
MONTE CARLO—MR. VAN GINKEL’S YACHT _SARATOGA_—WE PROSPECT— FORTUNATE DISCOVERY OF THE POINT OF ATTACK—FIRST VISIT TO THE ROOMS
IT was a brilliant January day, mild and sunny, when Mr. Brentin, Parsons, and I were standing in the old bastion on the point of Monaco, straining our gaze for a glimpse of the _Amaranth_. In front stretched the flickering, shifting pavement of the Mediterranean, of a deep, smooth sapphire, ruffled here and there, as the nap of a hat brushed the wrong way. Nothing to be seen on it but the one loose white sail of a yacht drifting out of harbor past the point.