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CHAPTER NINE

The Thirty-Nine Steps

'Nonsense!' said the official from the Admiralty.

Sir Walter got up and left the room while we looked blankly at the
table. He came back in ten minutes with a long face. 'I have spoken
to Alloa,' he said. 'Had him out of bed--very grumpy. He went
straight home after Mulross's dinner.'

'But it's madness,' broke in General Winstanley. 'Do you mean to tell
me that that man came here and sat beside me for the best part of half
an hour and that I didn't detect the imposture? Alloa must be out of
his mind.'

'Don't you see the cleverness of it?' I said. 'You were too interested
in other things to have any eyes. You took Lord Alloa for granted. If
it had been anybody else you might have looked more closely, but it was
natural for him to be here, and that put you all to sleep.'

Then the Frenchman spoke, very slowly and in good English.

'The young man is right. His psychology is good. Our enemies have not
been foolish!'

He bent his wise brows on the assembly.

'I will tell you a tale,' he said. 'It happened many years ago in
Senegal. I was quartered in a remote station, and to pass the time
used to go fishing for big barbel in the river. A little Arab mare
used to carry my luncheon basket--one of the salted dun breed you got
at Timbuctoo in the old days. Well, one morning I had good sport, and
the mare was unaccountably restless. I could hear her whinnying and
squealing and stamping her feet, and I kept soothing her with my voice
while my mind was intent on fish. I could see her all the time, as I
thought, out of a corner of my eye, tethered to a tree twenty yards
away. After a couple of hours I began to think of food. I collected
my fish in a tarpaulin bag, and moved down the stream towards the mare,
trolling my line. When I got up to her I flung the tarpaulin on her
back--'

He paused and looked round.

'It was the smell that gave me warning. I turned my head and found
myself looking at a lion three feet off ... An old man-eater, that was
the terror of the village ... What was left of the mare, a mass of
blood and bones and hide, was behind him.'

'What happened?' I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a true yarn
when I heard it.

'I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also my
servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.' He
held up a hand which lacked three fingers.

'Consider,' he said