Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/143

 wool. Whoever's been clever enough to find it will know how to keep it."

"I must have it!" broke out the Major. "It's a gift for Her Majesty the Queen. It's in this ship. I look to you, sir, as master of this vessel, to recover the property which some one of the people under your charge has robbed me of!"

"I'll accompany you to your cabin," said the captain; and they went down the steps.

I stood motionless, gaping like an idiot into the yawn of hatch down which they had disappeared. I had been so used to think of the diamond as cunningly hidden in the Major's berth, that his disclosure was absolutely a shock with its weight of astonishment. Small wonder that neither Captain North nor I had observed any marks of a workman's tools in the Major's berth. Not but that it was a very ingenious stratagem, far cleverer to my way of thinking than any subtle, secret burial of the thing. To think of the Major and his two Indians sitting idly for hours in that cabin, with the captain and myself all the while supposing they were fashioning some wonderful contrivance or place for concealing the treasure in! And still, for all the Major's cunning, the stone was gone! Who had stolen it? The only fellow likely to prove the thief was the steward, not because he was more or less of a rogue than any other man in the ship, but because he was the one person who, by virtue of his office, was privileged to go in and out of the sleeping places as his duties required.

I was pacing the deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri's gift to the Queen of England, with all sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the captain returned. He was alone. He stepped up to me hastily, and said:—

"He swears the diamond has been stolen. He showed me the empty case."

"Was there ever a stone in it at all?" said I.

"I don't think that," he answered, quickly; "there's no motive under Heaven to be imagined if the whole thing's a fabrication."

"What then, sir?"

"The case is empty, but I've not made up my mind yet that the stone's missing."

"The man's an officer and a gentleman.'

"I know, I know!" he interrupted, "but still, in my opinion, the stone's not missing. The long and short of it is," he said, after a very short pause, with a careful glance at the skylight and companion hatch, "his behaviour isn't convincing enough. Something's wanting in his passion and his vexation."

"Sincerity!"

"Ah! I don't intend that this business shall trouble me. He angrily required me to search the ship for stowaways. Bosh! The second mate and steward have repeatedly overhauled the lazarette: there's nobody there."

"And if not there, then nowhere else," said I. "Perhaps he's got the forepeak in his head."

"I'll not have a hatch lifted," he exclaimed, warmly, "nor will I allow the crew to be troubled. There's been no theft. Put it that the stone is stolen. Who's going to find it in a forecastle full of men—a thing as big as half a bean perhaps? If it's gone, it's