Page:The Firm of Gridlestone (1890).djvu/179

Rh safe? It would serve him right if we collar the lot. It'll teach him that if he ain't honest by nature he's got to be when he deals with the like of us. I like straightness, and by the Lord I'll have it!" He brought his great fist down upon the table to emphasize this commendable sentiment.

"It's not an easy matter," Farintosh said thoughtfully. "When he goes out he locks his door, and there's no getting in at the window. There's only one chance for us that I can see. His room is a bit cut off from the rest of the hotel. There's a gallery of twenty feet or more that leads to it. Now, I was thinking that if the three of us were to visit him some evening, just to wish him luck on his journey, as it were, and if, while we were in the room something sudden was to happen which would knock him silly for a minute or two, we might walk off with the stones and be clean gone before he could raise an alarm."

"And what would knock him silly?" asked Williams. He was an unhealthy scorbutic-looking youth, and his pallid complexion had assumed a greenish tinge of fear as he listened to the clergyman's words. He had the makings in him of a mean and dangerous criminal, but not of a violent one—belonging to the jackal tribe rather than to the tiger.

"What would knock him senseless?" Farintosh asked Burt, with a knowing look.

Burt laughed again in his bushy, red beard. "You can leave that to me, mate," he said.

Williams glanced from one to the other and he became even more cadaverous. "I'm not in it," he stammered. "It will be a hanging job. You will kill him as like as not."

"Not in it, ain't ye?" growled the navvy. "Why, you white-livered hound, you're too deep in it ever to get out again. D'ye think we'll let you spoil a lay of this sort as we might never get a chance of again?"

"You can do it without me," said the Welshman, trembling in every limb.

"And have you turnin' on us the moment a reward was offered. No, no, chummy, you don't get out of it that