The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus by Michael Kurland Page B

told Barnett. "Welcome to London. Welcome to my household. I trust you had an acceptable trip."
     
                  "Not very," Barnett said, going down the last few steps and crossing the room to Moriarty's desk. "I was smuggled across the Bohemian border in a caravan of wagons loaded with fresh-clipped wool being taken to be combed and washed. The smell was indescribable."
     
                  "It kept away the border guards," Moriarty said.
     
                  "I was carted across Rumelia with four other people in a pox-wagon," Barnett said.
     
                  "Nobody tried to stop you," Moriarty commented.
     
                  "From Bosnia through Austria we became a traveling team of acrobats. I couldn't tumble, so I caught the others and held them up. My shoulders and my legs still ache."
     
                  "Nobody ever looks at the low man," Moriarty said.
     
                  "In Italy we finally caught the train," Barnett said. "It was a fourth-class local. Have you ever traveled fourth class from Trieste to Milan?"
     
                  "You would have attracted attention in first class with your clothing," Moriarty said. "And you would have attracted more attention trying to buy other clothing."
     
                  "In Milan we became part of a circus and spent a couple of weeks reaching Paris. I cleaned the animal cages in the menagerie."
     
                  "It sounds like an enriching experience," Moriarty said.
     
                  "And they wouldn't let me go to my apartment in Paris."
     
                  "Does it strike you as brilliant for an escaped felon, wanted for murder, to stroll over to his apartment to collect his clothes?" Moriarty took a small notebook from his pocket and consulted its pages. "In Rumelia you picked a fight with the wagon driver," he said, "a fact that I find incomprehensible, since you had no language in common. On the train outside of Milan a farm woman accused you of stealing a chicken, and you argued with her until the conductor was called."
     
                  "I didn't steal her chicken," Barnett said. "It squeezed through the wicker cage and flapped its way out of the carriage. It's a wonder she didn't lose the other six."
     
                  "And as I pointed out, in Paris you had to be restrained from going to your apartment to get a change of clothes."
     
                  "You should have told me that you were having all my things brought here," Barnett said. "How did you manage to get by the concierge?"
     
                  "I had a letter from you," Moriarty said dryly, "authorizing my agent to remove your belongings. You paid her an extra month's rent in lieu of notice."
     
                  "I did?" Barnett said. "I see." He looked around for a chair. "May I sit?"
     
                  "Of course," Moriarty said. "There is a stool under that table. Pull it over."
     
                  Barnett retrieved the long-legged work stool which was lying on its side, set it up, and straddled it a few feet from Moriarty's desk. "You were having me watched as I crossed Europe," he said.
     
                  "The three who accompanied you are in my employ, as you should have surmised," Moriarty said. "They conceived it to be part of their function to send me a report on your behavior. Actually, there are many favorable points in the report. I would like to have seen the way you smiled and mumbled inanely at that Austrian border guard until he gave up and let you through. And you acquitted yourself quite well in dealing with the conductor on that Italian train, although you should have arranged things so that he was never called."
     
                  "That woman called me a thief," Barnett protested.
     
                  "There is no