n find
one. 'Time flies,' as the anarchist said when he blew up the clock
factory. Let's toddle."

They "toddled" forthwith, but on a fruitless errand, as it proved.
Nevertheless, they "toddled" again the next day as hopefully as
ever; and the next after that, and the next again, yet at the end of
the fourth they were no nearer any clue to the whereabouts of Dutch
Ella and Diamond Nick than they had been in the beginning. If, as
Cleek sometimes fancied, they had not merely passed through England
on their way to the Continent, but were still here, housed like
hawks in a safe retreat from which they made predatory excursions
under the very noses of the police, there was nothing to signalize
it. No amazing jewel theft, no affair of such importance as one
engineered by them would be sure to be, had as yet been reported to
the Yard; and for all clue there was to their doings or their
whereabouts one might as well have set out to find last summer's
roses or last winter's snow as hope to pick it up by any method as
yet employed.

Thus matters stood when on the morning of the fifth day Cleek
elected to make Hampstead Heath and its environments the scene of
their operations, and at nine o'clock set forth in company with the
superintendent to put them into force in that particular locality,
with the result that by noontime they found themselves in the
thick of as pretty a riddle as they had fallen foul of in many a day.

It came about in this way:

Turning out of St. Uldred's road into a quiet, tree-shaded avenue
running parallel with the historic heath, somewhere in the
neighbourhood of the Vale of Health district, they looked up to
discover that there was but one building in the entire length of the
thoroughfare--a large, imposing residence set back from the road
proper, and encircled by a high stone wall with curiously wrought
iron gates leading into the enclosure--and that before that
building two copper-skinned, turbaned, fantastically clothed Hindus
were doing sentry duty in a manner peculiar unto themselves--the one
standing as motionless as a bronze image before the barred
gateway, and the other pacing up and down before him like a
clockwork toy that had been well wound up.

"The Punjab for a ducat!" declared Cleek as he caught sight of them.
"And the insignia of the Ranee of Jhang, or I'm a Dutchman. I knew
the old girl was over here for the coronation, to be sure, but I'd
no idea of stumbling over some of her at