te to the Bank of
England?"

The second, the taller man of the two, laughed at this; but the first
seemed very uneasy, and it was not lost upon me that he glanced to the
right and the left of him as though afraid that someone would come up
and hear what his friend had to say next.

"I guess it's neither one nor the other," the first speaker went on.
"We're playing theatricals at the Hampstead Town Hall to-morrow night,
and these are the dresses. We want you to take them up to the Boundary
Road, St. John's Wood--I'll show you the house when we get there; but
it's called Bredfield, and you'll know it by a square-toed lamp up
against the side-track. Perhaps you can give us a hand with the
baggage--and say, have you any objection to gold when you can't get
silver?"

He passed up a sovereign and I put it inside my glove. Moss had told
me to collect the shekels before I drove them a mile, and so I told the
pair of them as I was getting down the luggage ladder, which
fortunately I had brought, not knowing the job. A bit to my surprise
they paid up immediately, but I made no remark about that; and when I
had signed the receipt by the light of my near-side lamp, I helped them
up with the basket and soon had it strapped to the rails in a way that
satisfied even the nervous little man with the saucer eyes.

Many have asked me if I had no suspicions about that basket, was not
curious as to its contents, and remarked nothing as we hoisted it up.
To these I say that the men themselves were the chief actors in the
business; that they lifted the baggage from the pavement, and that my
task was chiefly to guide it to the rails and to make it fast when I
had got it there. Otherwise, this basket was no different from any
dress-basket you may see upon half a dozen four-wheelers the first time
you look in at a railway station; and I should be telling an untruth if
I said that I thought about it at all. Indeed, it was not until we got
to the Boundary Road, and I stopped at the house called Bredfield, that
so much as a notion of anything wrong entered my head. There, however,
I did get a shock, and no mistake; for no sooner had I pulled up than I
discovered that I had come on alone, and that neither the big man with
the Yankee accent nor the little man with the saucer eyes had deigned
to accompany me.

Well, I got down from the driver's seat, opened and shut the door as
though to be sure that neither the one nor the other was hidi