e protested. "If you haven't anything
better to do than coming round wakening--"

"Oh, don't get on your hind legs," Hilliard interrupted with another
ecstatic chuckle. "What I say is right-enough. Look here, it's perfectly
simple. We thought brandy would be unloaded! And what's more, we both
sat in that cursed barrel and watched it being done! But all we saw
coming ashore was pit-props, Merriman, pit-props! Now don't you see?"

Merriman suddenly gasped.

"Lord!" he cried breathlessly. "It was in the props?"

"Of course it was in the props!" Hilliard repeated triumphantly. "Hollow
props; a few hollow ones full of brandy to unload in their shed, many
genuine ones to sell! What do you think of that, Merriman? Got them at
last, eh?"

Merriman lay still as he tried to realize what this idea involved.
Hilliard, moving jerkily about the room as if he were a puppet
controlled by wires, went on speaking.

"I thought it out in bed before I came along. All they'd have to do
would be to cut the props in half and bore them out, attaching a screwed
ring to one half and a screwed socket to the other so that they'd screw
together like an ordinary gas thimble. See?"

Merriman nodded.

"Then they'd get some steel things like oxygen gas cylinders to fit
inside. They'd be designed of such a thickness that their weight would
be right; that their weight plus the brandy would be equal to the weight
of the wood bored out."

He paused and looked at Merriman. The latter nodded again.

"The rest would be as easy as tumbling off a log. At night Coburn and
company would screw off the hollow ends, fill the cylinders with
brandy, screw on the end again, and there you have your props--harmless,
innocent props--ready for loading up on the Girondin. Of course, they'd
have them marked. Then when they're being unloaded that manager would
get the marked ones put aside--they could somehow be defective, too long
or too short or too thin or too anything you like--he would find some
reason for separating them out--and then at night he would open the
things and pour out the brandy, screw them up again and--there you are!"

Hilliard paused dramatically, like a conjurer who has just drawn a
rabbit from a lady's vanity bag.

"That would explain that Ferriby manager sleeping in the shed," Merriman
put in.

"So it would. I hadn't thought of that."

"And," Merriman went on, "there'd be enough genuine props carried on
each trip to justify the trade.