He had never got near it when it came back from town; then it always went
straight into the Tower and had the key turned on it forthwith.

But the Sergeant, although slow-witted as well as ugly, had had his
experiences; he had carried weights both in the army and in other
institutions which are officially described as His Majesty's, and had
seen other men carry them too. From the set of Beaumaroy's figure as he
arrived home on at least two occasions with the brown bag, and from the
way in which he handled it, the Sergeant confidently drew the conclusion
that it was of a considerable, almost a grievous, weight. What was the
heavy thing in it? What became of that thing after it was taken into the
Tower? To whose use or profit did it, or was it, to inure? Certainly it
was plain, even to the meanest capacity, that the contents of the bag had
a value in the eyes of the two men who went to London for them and who
shepherded them from London to the custody of the Tower.

These thoughts filled and racked his brain as he sat drinking rum and
water in the bar of the _Green Man_ on Christmas evening; a solitary man,
mixing little with the people of the village, he sat apart at a small
table in the corner, musing within himself, yet idly watching the
company--villagers, a few friends from London and elsewhere, some
soldiers and their ladies. Besides these, a tall slim man stood leaning
against the bar, at the far end of it, talking to Bill Smithers, the
landlord, and sipping whisky-and-soda between pulls at his cigar. He wore
a neat dark overcoat, brown shoes, and a bowler hat rather on one side;
his appearance was, in fact, genteel, though his air was a trifle
raffish. In age he seemed about forty. The Sergeant had never seen him
before, and therefore favored him with a glance of special attention.

Oddly enough, the gentlemanly stranger seemed to reciprocate the