Carrados waited until the fury had passed.

“Continue, if you please, Mr. Draycott,” he said.  “Just what you thought it best to tell me is just what I want to know.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” apologized the man, colouring under his tanned skin.  “I ought to be able to control myself better.  But this business has shaken me.  Three times last night I looked down the barrel of my revolver, and three times I threw it away....  Well, we arranged that I should come to London to interest some financiers in the property.  We might have done it locally or in Perth, to be sure, but then, don’t you see, they would have wanted to get control.  Six weeks ago I landed here.  I brought with me specimens of the quartz and good samples of extracted gold, dust and nuggets, the clearing up of several weeks’ working, about two hundred and forty ounces in all.  That includes the Magdalena Lodestar, our lucky nugget, a lump weighing just under seven pounds of pure gold.

“I had seen an advertisement of this Lucas Street safe-deposit and it seemed just the thing I wanted.  Besides the gold, I had all the papers to do with the claims—­plans, reports, receipts, licences and so on.  Then when I cashed my letter of credit I had about one hundred and fifty pounds in notes.  Of course I could have left everything at a bank, but it was more convenient to have it, as it were, in my own safe, to get at any time, and to have a private room that I could take any gentlemen to.  I hadn’t a suspicion that anything could be wrong.  Negotiations hung on in several quarters—­it’s a bad time to do business here, I find.  Then, yesterday, I wanted something.  I went to Lucas Street, as I had done half-a-dozen times before, opened my safe, and had the inner case carried to a room....  Mr. Carrados, it was empty!”

“Quite empty?”

“No.”  He laughed bitterly.  “At the bottom was a sheet of wrapper paper.  I recognized it as a piece I had left there in case I wanted to make up a parcel.  But for that I should have been convinced that I had somehow opened the wrong safe.  That was my first idea.”

“It cannot be done.”

“So I understand, sir.  And, then, there was the paper with my name written on it in the empty tin.  I was dazed; it seemed impossible.  I think I stood there without moving for minutes—­it was more like hours.  Then I closed the tin box again, took it back, locked up the safe and came out.”

“Without notifying anything wrong?”

“Yes, Mr. Carrados.”  The steady blue eyes regarded him with pained thoughtfulness.  “You see, I reckoned it out in that time that it must be someone about the place who had done it.”

“You were wrong,” said Carrados.

“So Mr. Carlyle seemed to think.  I only knew that the key had never been out of my possession and I had told no one of the password.  Well, it did come over me rather like cold water down the neck, that there was I alone in the strongest dungeon in London and not a living soul knew where I was.”