Cargo of Eagles by Margery Allingham Page A

do I believe any of it? No, sir.’
    â€˜Yet something undoubtedly happened. What is your suggestion?’
    Morty considered. ‘Oh, something set the tongues wagging sure enough. Almost certainly a freak storm, purely local. It probably raised a small whirlwind, the sort we call a Dust Devil in the States. They can cause quite a bit of damage and certainly look kind of strange if you haven’t seen one before. That would be my reading of it. But you’ve got nothing to worry about. I’d hate to spoil a good story by supplying a simple corny explanation.’
    â€˜You’d be wrong to do so. Doubly wrong, because although there was no whirlwind there
was
a great deal of damage to property.’
    Wishart settled his elbows more comfortably on the rock andMorty was again aware of the man’s hunger for more sophisticated conversation than his patrons at the inn could provide.
    â€˜The truth about the Saltey Demon,’ he said at last, ‘is better than fiction—funnier, if you like. It would be a pity to spoil a good legend for the sake of a poor joke but this is a risk I am going to take. It is for your researching mind alone, so you must respect my confidence.
    â€˜June 7th 1895 was the day of the Royal review of the troops and militia in the grounds of Sparrows Manor at Nine Ash. It was a sort of a local Field of the Cloth of Gold, with bands, marquees, pageantry, the flags of all nations and of course a royal Prince and Princess. No one in the district had talked about anything else for weeks and nearly every able bodied man, woman and child was determined to be there. Charabancs—horse drawn wagonettes in those days—were hired, dog carts were polished, brakes repainted and those who couldn’t afford to ride went on foot. By eight o’clock in the morning, with a few notable exceptions, Mob’s Bowl and Forty Angels were as deserted as the central Sahara.
    â€˜It was a very hot day, the middle of a heat wave in point of fact, and what is more important it was a Wednesday.’
    â€˜I don’t get the significance of that.’
    â€˜You will, my friend, you will. Wednesday was always a baking day in the village and every housewife made her own cakes, but few had the right ovens for the operation. The mixtures in their pans were brought by the ladies every Wednesday morning to the baker, whose name by the way was Septimus Kytie, a relation of the old lady up the road. His custom was to bake the cakes during the day and have them ready for collection in the evening, thus saving a great deal of valuable fuel. This practice continued here until the advent of the mass produced rubbish which is called bread today. Mr Kytie was therefore excluded from the exodus.
    â€˜Now there was a second absentee and he was a predecessor of mine, the landlord of what was then The Foliage, a henpecked and unhappy individual called Waters. I picture anidyllic scene, the sunshine, the deserted village, only the call of the gulls to underline this unique peace. I am improvising a trifle here, but the deduction is inescapable. Mr Waters called on his friend Mr Kytie to comment on the beauty of a world without women and to give an additional quality to the occasion he brought with him a couple of bottles of brandy, probably from a private reserve. We sometimes have such trifles in these parts.
    â€˜One thing led to another, most agreeably, and by mid-afternoon they were both fast asleep. The oven and the precious cakes were forgotten. Then the terrible moment arrived when the smell of burning aroused them. They were faced with disaster and inevitable exposure. Fifty potential Furies were about to descend on them and they had perhaps half an hour to save their skins. It was a situation which could well ruin both men for life.
    â€˜But one of them, and I suspect that this was Septimus Kytie, had an idea. There was a wretched child hanging about the place, a miscreant who had been