ern. It's much the
shorter way. I wish you had known of it before."

"I'm all the better pleased you came that way," I told him. "It will
help to disorganise the chase."

He bent over, picked up a live coal in his bare fingers and applied it
to his pipe before replying.

"I rather think," he said slowly, "that it will have just the opposite
effect."

"You can't have any nerves in those fingertips of yours," I said. "Why
will it?"

"I don't seem to have any, do I? I think I saw one of the men at Great
Western."

"You don't know them," I said. "How could you?"

"Mr. Bryce described them in his letter," Cumshaw answered. "This man
fitted the description of one of them, a dark sort of chap."

"Spanish type?" I queried.

Cumshaw nodded. "I wonder why it is," he ran on, "that we're always more
suspicious of that sort of man than, say, a fair type?"

"Relic of the Armada, I suppose," I suggested. "Tell me all about the
man you saw."

"I was coming along the roadside," Cumshaw began, "past one of the
vineyards, when I noticed a man working close at hand. I was just going
to pass by when it struck me that he was the only person about. I
thought that rather queer and I gave him a second look. Then I saw that
he wasn't digging, as I had thought at first, but that he was scratching
aimlessly at the ground. One of those queer feelings that seem
altogether unrelated to fact crept over me. Call it second sight or any
other fancy name you please, the fact remains that I suddenly knew--not
thought, mind you; I knew--that he did not want me to notice him and
that he was pretending to be one of the workmen, just so that I would
pass him by without more than a cursory glance. When I came to think it
over afterwards, I remembered that it struck me when first I saw him
that he was the only man I had seen in the vineyards for miles. Of
course I had that idea in my mind when I looked at him the second time.
That doesn't explain how I understood that I was the very man he did not
want to see. He had his head bent down naturally, his hat well drawn
over his face, and he went on scratching and scraping as if his very
life depended on the energy with which he worked. I didn't get more than
a passing glimpse of him, and that wasn't too good--you can't go over to
a man and pull off his hat just because he looks suspicious--but I'd
swear on a stack of Bibles that he's one of the men we'll have to deal
with."

"Perhaps so," I said. "A