I likes to see things honest an' above board betwixt man an' man, and this pitchin' of them as has helped ye over ain't that."
Farintosh lowered his voice and bent further over the table. His companions involuntarily imitated his movement, until the three cunning, cruel faces were looking closely into one another's eyes.
"Nobody knows that he holds those stones," said Farintosh. "He's too smart to let it out to any one but ourselves."
"Where does he keep 'em?" asked the Welshman.
"In a safe in his room."
"Where is the key?"
"On his watch-chain."
"Could we get an impression?"
"I have one."
"Then I can make one," cried Williams triumphantly.
"It's done," said Farintosh, taking a small key from his pocket. "This is a duplicate, and will open the safe. I took the moulding from his key while I was speaking to him."
The navvy laughed hoarsely. "If that don't lick creation for smartness!" he cried. "And how are we to get to this safe? It would serve him right if we collar the lot. It'll teach him that if he ain't honest by nature he's got to be when he deals with the like of us. I like straightness, and by the Lord I'll have it!" He brought his great fist down upon the table to emphasize this commendable sentiment.
"It's not an easy matter," Farintosh said thoughtfully. "When he goes out he locks his door, and there's no getting in at the window. There's only one chance for us that I can see. His room is a bit cut off from the rest of the hotel. There's a gallery of twenty feet or more that leads to it. Now, I was thinking that if the three of us were to visit him some evening, just to wish him luck on his journey, as it were, and if, while we were in the room something sudden was to happen which would knock him silly for a minute or two, we might walk off with the stones and be clean gone before he could raise an alarm."
"And what would knock him silly?" asked Williams. He was an unhealthy, scorbutic-looking youth, and his pallid complexion had assumed a greenish tinge of fear as he listened to the clergyman's words. He had the makings in him of a mean and dangerous criminal, but not of a violent one--belonging to the jackal tribe rather than to the tiger.
"What would knock him senseless?" Farintosh asked Burt, with a knowing look.
Burt laughed again in his bushy, red beard. "You can leave that to me, mate," he said.
Williams glanced from one to the other and he became even more cadaverous. "I'm not in it," he stammered. "It will be a hanging job. You will kill him as like as not."
"Not in it, ain't ye?" growled the navvy. "Why, you white-livered hound, you're too deep in it ever to get out again. D'ye think we'll let you spoil a lay of this sort as we might never get a chance of again?"
"You can do it without me," said the Welshman, trembling in every limb.
"And have you turnin' on us the moment a reward was offered. No, no, chummy, you don't get out of it that way. If you won't stand by us, I'll take care you don't split."
"Think of the diamonds," Farintosh put in.
"Think of your own skin," said the navvy.
"You could go back to England a rich man if you do it."
"You'll never go back at all if you don't." Thus worked upon alternately by his hopes and by his fears, Williams showed some signs of yielding. He took a long draught from his glass and filled it up again.
"I ain't afraid," he said. "Don't imagine that I am afraid. You won't hit him very hard, Mr. Burt?"
"Just enough to curl him up," the navvy answered. "Lord love ye, it ain't the first man by many a one that I've laid on his back, though I never had the chance before of fingering five and thirty thousand pounds worth of diamonds for my pains."
"But the hotel-keeper and the servants?"
"That's all right," said Farintosh. "You leave it to me. If we go up quietly and openly, and come down quietly and openly, who is to suspect anything? Our horses will be outside, in Woodley Street, and we'll be out of their reach in no time.