'It is,' concurred Mr. Immelbern, and suddenly scowled at him. 'What's that?' he added.
Somewhat vaguely, the Colonel was inclining his head. But the remarkable point was that he was not looking at Mr. Immelbern.
'What is what?' he inquired, making sure of his ground.
'What's that you're staring at with that silly look on your face?' said Mr. Immelbern testily.
'That young fellow who just came in,' explained the Colonel. 'He seemed to know me.'
Mr. Immelbern glanced over the room. The only man whom he was able to bring within the limits of his partner's rather unsatisfactory description was just then sitting down at a table by himself a few places away—a lean and somehow dangerous-looking young man with a keen tanned face and very clear blue eyes. Instinctively Mr. Immelbern groped around for his hat.
'D'you mean he's a fellow you swindled once?' he demanded hastily.
Uppingdon shook his head.
'Oh, no. I'm positive about that. Besides, he smiled at me quite pleasantly. But I can't remember him at all.'
Mr. Immelbern relaxed slowly. He looked at the young man again with diminished apprehension. And gradually, decisively, a certain simple deduction registered itself in his practised mind.
The young man had money. There was no deception about that. Everything about him pointed unobtrusively but unequivocally towards that one cardinal fact. His clothes, immaculately kept, had the unostentatious seal of Savile Row on every stitch of them. His silk shirt had the cachet of St. James's. His shoes, brightly polished and unspotted by the stains of traffic, could never have been anything but bespoke. He had just given his order to the waiter, and while he waited for it to arrive he was selecting a cigarette from a thin case which to the lay eye might have been silver, but which Mr. Immelbern knew beyond all doubt was platinum.
There are forms of instinct which soar beyond all physical explanations into the clear realms of clairvoyance. The homing pigeon wings its way across sightless space to the old roost. The Arabian camel finds the water-hole, and the pig detects the subterranean truffle. Even thus was the clairvoyance of Mr. Immelbern.
If there was one thing on earth which he could track down it was money. The affinity of the pigeon for its roost, the camel for the water-hole, the pig for the truffle, were as nothing to the affinity of Mr. Immelbern for dough. He was in tune with it. Its subtle emanations floated through the ether and impinged on psychic aerials in his system which operated on a super-heterodyne circuit. And while he looked at the young man who seemed to know Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon that circuit was oscillating over all its valves. He summarised his conclusions with an explicit economy of verbiage which La Bruyere could not have pruned by a single syllable.
'He's rich,' said Mr. Immelbern.
'I wish I could remember where I met him,' said the Colonel, frowning over his own train of thought. 'I hate to forget a face.'
'You doddering old fool!' snarled Mr. Immelbern, smiling at him affectionately. 'What do I care about your memory? The point is that he's rich, and he seemed to recognise you. Well, that saves a lot of trouble, doesn't it?'
The Colonel turned towards him and blinked.
'What do you mean?'
'Will you never wake up?' moaned Mr. Immelbern, extending his cigarette-case with every appearance of affability. 'Here you've been sitting whining and moping for half an hour because we don't get a chance to make a click, and when a chance does come along you can't see it. What do I care where you met the man? What do I care if you never met him? He nodded to you, and he's sitting two yards away— and you ask me what I mean!'
