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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ambrotox and Limping Dick, by Oliver Fleming
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ambrotox and Limping Dick
+
+Author: Oliver Fleming
+
+Release Date: December 16, 2006 [EBook #20119]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMBROTOX AND LIMPING DICK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Mary Meehan, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  AMBROTOX
+
+                                    AND
+
+                                LIMPING DICK
+
+                              BY OLIVER FLEMING
+
+                                   1920
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+       I.--THE VISITOR'S SHADOW
+
+      II.--THE HEN WITH ONE CHICK
+
+     III.--"HUMMIN' BIRD'S WESKIT"
+
+      IV.--COFFEE
+
+       V.--AMBROTOX
+
+      VI.--AMARYLLIS
+
+     VII.--PERFUME
+
+    VIII.--THE SWINE THAT STANK
+
+      IX.--THE POLITICAL COVES
+
+       X.--THE GREEN FROCK
+
+      XI.--THE WINDOW
+
+     XII.--THE STAIRS
+
+    XIII.--THE KNIFE-THROWER
+
+     XIV.--PENNY PANSY
+
+      XV.--THE LIZARD
+
+     XVI.--"THE GOAT IN BOOTS"
+
+    XVII.--THE UNICORN
+
+   XVIII.--THE SERANG
+
+     XIX.--SAPPHIRE AND EMERALD
+
+      XX.--A ROPE OR SOMETHING
+
+     XXI.--THE BAAG-NOUK
+
+    XXII.--LORD LABRADOR
+
+   XXIII.--FALLING OUT
+
+    XXIV.--KUK-KUK-KUK-KATIE
+
+     XXV.--WAITERS
+
+    XXVI.--PRISONER AND ESCORT
+
+   XXVII.--AN INTERIM REPORT
+
+
+
+
+AMBROTOX AND LIMPING DICK.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE VISITOR'S SHADOW.
+
+
+Randal Bellamy's country house was a place of pleasant breakfasts. From
+the dining room the outlook was delightful; grass, flowers and sunshine,
+with the host's easy charm, made it almost as easy for Theophilus
+Caldegard to drink his tea fresh, as for his daughter Amaryllis not to
+keep her host, Sir Randal, waiting for his coffee.
+
+This morning, while she waited for the two men, the girl, remembering
+that this was the eighteenth of June, was surprised by the ease with
+which the five weeks of her stay had slipped by; and she wondered,
+without anxiety, at what point the guest merges into the inmate.
+
+"I can't live here for ever," she thought; "but as long as there's room
+for his test-tubes, and his dinner's good, dad thinks it's all right for
+a girl."
+
+And, as if it was all right, she laughed--just in time for Randal
+Bellamy to get full benefit of the pleasant sound.
+
+"Laughing all alone?" he said.
+
+"That's when the funny things happen," replied Amaryllis.
+
+Bellamy looked down at her, as if asking a share in her merriment.
+
+"After all, I don't know why I laughed," she said. "I was only thinking
+it's five whole weeks since we came here, and----"
+
+"And you want to go somewhere else?"
+
+Amaryllis shook her head. "And it's gone like five days, I was going to
+say."
+
+She took her seat at the table and poured out his coffee. "I'm not going
+to let you wait a moment for father this morning; it was two o'clock
+when he went to bed."
+
+"How do you know that, you bad girl?" said Bellamy.
+
+"Because dad can't get out of the habit of putting his boots outside his
+door," she replied. "And when he's pleased with his work, he throws 'em
+out."
+
+"I've heard them," he said, laughing. "But last night I was in bed
+before twelve; I suppose he took advantage of that and sneaked back to
+the laboratory again."
+
+"But I thought," said Amaryllis, after a pause, "that Ambrotox was
+finished and ready to make its bow to the public."
+
+"God forbid!" said Bellamy, in a tone of such intensity that the girl
+was astonished.
+
+"But surely you've been helping him to finish it--you wanted it
+finished," she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, but not published," said the man.
+
+The girl's next eager question was cut short by the entrance of the
+parlour-maid with the morning's letters; and after her came Theophilus
+Caldegard.
+
+His person was as unlike the popular conception of a man of science as
+can well be imagined. His sturdy figure, thick white hair, and the ruddy
+complexion of his face, where the benevolence of the mouth attracted
+attention before the keenness of the eyes, suggested rather the country
+gentleman than the man of genius whose discoveries might move a world.
+
+He kissed his daughter, and, "Tea quick--the kettle's boiling, Amy," he
+said. "Morning, Bellamy."
+
+And, as Bellamy made no response, "First time I ever saw him absorbed by
+a letter," he remarked:
+
+"Best one I've had for six months," said Bellamy, looking up. "That
+young brother of mine's coming down by the three-ten."
+
+"Rolling down, you mean," said Caldegard.
+
+"Can't roll any longer--covered with moss," retorted Bellamy. "Aunt
+Jenny died and didn't leave me a cent."
+
+"Why didn't he come before?" asked Caldegard.
+
+"Been looking for something to do," said the brother. "Now he's been a
+soldier, I don't believe there's anything left."
+
+"How long was he in the Army?"
+
+"Twelve months in the trenches, two years in the Air Force, and, one
+time with another, ten months in hospital," replied Bellamy.
+
+"And as soon as he's clear of the Army, he finds he's got money to
+burn," chuckled Caldegard. "No wonder it's six months before he pays a
+visit to his respectable big brother."
+
+Amaryllis gathered up her half-read letters, and walked absent-mindedly
+to the open french-window.
+
+"Oh well," continued her father, "I'm afraid there aren't many
+sensations left for your rolling stone."
+
+Amaryllis went slowly down the steps into the garden, Bellamy watching
+her until she was out of sight.
+
+"Look here, Caldegard," he said, turning quickly. "Your daughter knows
+it's a secret, but she does not know it's a deadly one."
+
+"Well?" said Caldegard.
+
+"My brother," continued Bellamy, "doesn't know there is a secret, and is
+coming to live in the middle of it. I think that your daughter should
+know the whole story; and, when you've met him, I hope you'll think it
+good business to trust my young 'un as completely as I trust yours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE HEN WITH ONE CHICK.
+
+
+Under the cedar tree on the south lawn of Bellamy's garden sat Amaryllis
+Caldegard. On the wicker table at her side lay a piece of needlework
+half-covering three fresh novels. But when the stable-clock on the other
+side of the house struck noon, it reminded her that she had sat in that
+pleasant shadow for more than an hour without threading her needle or
+reading a line.
+
+Her reflections were coloured with a tinge of disappointment. Although
+her life, passed in almost daily contact with an affectionate father,
+who was a man of both character and intellect, had been anything but
+unhappy, it had lacked, at one time or another, variety and beauty. But
+the time spent in the exquisite Hertfordshire country surrounding the
+old Manor House had been, she thought, the pleasantest five weeks in her
+memory.
+
+The worldly distinction of Sir Randal Bellamy gave point to the pleasure
+she felt in his courtesy to her father and his something more than
+courtesy to herself. She did not tell herself in definite thought that
+she counted with Randal Bellamy for something more than the mere
+daughter of the man whom he considered the first and most advanced
+synthetic chemist of the day; but there are matters perceived so
+instinctively by a woman that she makes no record of their discovery. If
+not without curiosity as to the future, she was in no haste for
+developments; and Bellamy's announcement of an addition to their party
+cast an ominous shadow across the pleasant field of the indefinite
+future.
+
+On the twelfth stroke of the clock Amaryllis laughed in her effort to
+brush aside the clouds of her depression. Expecting her father to join
+her about this time, she was determined to show him the smiling face to
+which he was accustomed.
+
+When he came,
+
+"What d'you think of the news?" he said.
+
+"What news, dad?" she asked.
+
+"Somebody coming for you to flirt with, while the old men are busy," he
+replied.
+
+"Flirt!"
+
+"Well, I don't think it's likely that this Jack-of-all-trades has left
+that accomplishment out of his list," said the father.
+
+"Rolling stones get on my nerves," objected his daughter, having known
+none.
+
+"From what his brother says, this one's more like an avalanche."
+
+Amaryllis laughed scornfully.
+
+"Positively overwhelming!" she said. "But I'm sure I shall never----"
+
+"Hush!" said Caldegard, looking towards the house. "Here's his brother."
+
+Sir Randal was turning the corner of the house, with an envelope in his
+hand.
+
+"Telegram," said Amaryllis softly. "P'r'aps it's the avalanche
+deferred."
+
+"D'you mind having lunch half an hour earlier, Miss Caldegard?" asked
+Sir Randal, as he came up. "Dick--my brother--is coming by an earlier
+train. Just like him, always changing his mind." And he smiled, as if
+this were merit.
+
+Caldegard laughed good-humouredly. "You're like a hen with one chick,
+Bellamy," he said.
+
+"No doubt," said the brother. "Do you see, Miss Caldegard," he went on,
+sitting beside her, "how the pursuit of science can harden a generous
+heart? Both Dick and I were born, I believe, with the adventurous
+spirit. I was pushed into the most matter-of-fact profession in the
+world, which has kept me tied by the leg ever since. But Dick was no
+sooner out of school than he showed the force of character to discover
+the world and pursue its adventures for himself."
+
+"But, Sir Randal, hasn't your brother ever followed any regular
+occupation or business?"
+
+"As far as I know," chuckled the man, "he's followed most of 'em, and
+there are precious few he hasn't caught up with. Two years before the
+war certain matters took me to South Africa. One evening, in the
+smoking-room of the Grand Hotel at Capetown, a queer-looking man asked
+if my name was Bellamy, and, when I told him it was, inquired if Limping
+Dick was my brother."
+
+"Limping Dick?" exclaimed Amaryllis.
+
+"Yes," said Sir Randal. "That was the first time I ever heard the name
+he is known by from Soeul to Zanzibar, from Alaska to Honolulu."
+
+"Why do they call him that?" asked the girl.
+
+The man smiled. "Because he has a limp," he said. "But how he came by it
+is more than I can tell you. I told the fellow that I had indeed a young
+brother Richard, and that my young brother Richard certainly had a limp.
+We were saved the trouble of further description by the interruption of
+a high-pitched voice:
+
+"'Not a shade shy of six foot tall; shoulders like Georgees Carpenteer's
+when he's pleased with life in the movies; hair black as a Crow Injun's;
+eyes blue as a hummin' bird's weskit; and a grip--wa-al, he don't wear
+no velvet gloves: Limpin' Dick Bellamy!'
+
+"'That's him,' said the queer man. I agreed that the portrait was
+unmistakable, and asked if either of them could tell me where he was
+now, as I hadn't seen him for a long time. So the queer man told me that
+two years before Dick, who was then overseer of a large rubber
+plantation north of Banjermassin in Borneo, had given him a job. He
+added, however, that my brother had left Borneo some six months later.
+The American had first met him four years before in Bombay, and they had
+joined forces in a pearl-fishing expedition which took them somewhere in
+the Persian Gulf--the Bahr-el--Bahr-el-Benat Islands, I think; they had
+separated four months later and had not met again for more than three
+years, when the American had run across him as part owner of a cattle
+ranch in Southern Paraguay."
+
+Amaryllis was interested in spite of herself; but her father had heard
+these things before, and was thinking of others.
+
+"Jack-of-all-trades," he said, turning towards the house.
+
+"And master of most," called Bellamy after him.
+
+"What a good brother you are!" said Amaryllis softly.
+
+"He's all the family I've got, Amaryllis," he said. "Besides, I'm almost
+old enough to be his father, and I often feel as if I were."
+
+"From what you've told me, he must be thirty at least," objected the
+girl, "and I'm sure you're not fifty."
+
+"Over," said Bellamy.
+
+"You don't look it," she answered.
+
+"Thank you."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"You make it easier."
+
+"What easier?"
+
+"What I'm going to say to you."
+
+Amaryllis looked up, surprised.
+
+"Before I met you, Miss Caldegard, I had got thoroughly into the way of
+thinking of myself not as an elderly man, but as a confirmed bachelor.
+For more than a month I have been enjoying your company and admiring
+your goodness and beauty more and more every day, without perceiving,
+until some few days ago, that I did so at great risk to myself. If I
+were twenty years younger I should put off speaking like this, in the
+hope of gaining ground by a longer association with you. But to-day I
+have made up my mind that my best chance of winning at least your
+affection lies in telling you simply and at once how completely you have
+conquered mine."
+
+That this must come sometime, Amaryllis no doubt had foreseen; yet at
+this moment she felt as much surprised and embarrassed as if she had
+never read the signs.
+
+If a woman, mother or sister, could have asked her yesterday whether she
+were willing to marry Randal Bellamy, she might, perhaps, have answered
+that she liked him awfully, that she valued his love, and felt very sure
+of being happier as his wife than as an old maid; but now, with the
+famous lawyer's kind and handsome face before her, and that pleading
+note mixing unexpectedly with the splendid tones of his voice, her
+delicacy rebelled against taking so much more than she could give.
+
+Twice she tried to speak; but, instead of words to her tongue, there
+came a tiresome lump in her throat and a horrid swimminess over her eyes
+which she was determined should not culminate in tears.
+
+"What a dear you are, Sir Randal!" she said huskily. "But--but--oh! I do
+like you most awfully, but--I can't say what I mean."
+
+The new beauty in the face which he had from the first thought so
+lovely, the new brightness of tears in the dark-brown eyes, and the
+womanly tenderness which he had never before found in her voice, made
+his heart quicken as never since he was thirty. That extra beat, if it
+told him that he was still young, warned him also of the pain which is
+the tribute imposed on conquered youth.
+
+But before he found words, Caldegard appeared on the terrace, shouting
+that it was five minutes past one, and lunch waiting.
+
+The pair walked side by side to the house.
+
+"Don't answer me to-day, Amaryllis," he said, "but just turn me and it
+over in your mind now and then between this and Friday."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+"HUMMIN' BIRD'S WESKIT."
+
+
+At a quarter past two that afternoon, Amaryllis, with her bull-dog, set
+out for a walk.
+
+Her father was in the laboratory, ostensibly at work, and Sir Randal,
+beaming expectant, had driven off to St. Albans.
+
+Tea-time, or even dinner was early enough, thought Amaryllis, to meet
+the new-comer; and then, in spite of the mixture of bewilderment, pride
+and regret which oppressed her, she remembered the words of the American
+in the Cape Town bar: "Eyes blue as a hummin' bird's weskit."
+
+"How absurd!" she exclaimed, laughing to herself.
+
+Then she sighed, and was quite sure she really wanted to be alone, and
+set herself, as she strolled down through the hazel copse towards the
+London road, to think seriously of Randal Bellamy and his offer.
+
+But the trouble was that Miss Caldegard had never seen a humming bird,
+and therefore found herself brooding on the blueness of all the blue
+things in her experience, from willow-pattern china to the waters of the
+Mediterranean, instead of considering the answer which she must give to
+Randal on Friday.
+
+A quarter of a mile of winding path led her downward to the level of the
+road. When she reached the stile, her thought was still far from the
+matter she had promised to consider.
+
+She turned to call her dog, and, knowing his insatiable curiosity, was
+less surprised than annoyed to find that she had let him stray. She
+could not remember whether she had last seen him behind her, in front,
+or blundering through the undergrowth, still confident, in spite of
+perpetual disappointment, in his power to overtake a rabbit.
+
+Now the dog's temper, admirable with his friends, was uncertain with
+strangers, and Amaryllis was accustomed to keep him close at heel in
+public places. So, having whistled and called in vain, she crossed the
+stile and looked down the road towards Iddingfield.
+
+There was the tiresome beast, if you please, a hundred yards away,
+gambolling clumsily round the legs of a man walking towards her.
+
+Her second whistle brought the animal to a sense of duty, and he trotted
+towards her, with many pauses to look back reluctantly at his new
+friend.
+
+She caught the dog's collar with the crook of her stick, and bent down,
+slapping his muzzle in mild reproof.
+
+As the stranger passed, his glance was downward, for the dog, rather
+than the woman. As she stood erect, she saw him standing with his back
+towards her, in the middle of the road, with face turned to the stile
+she had just crossed.
+
+Then he swung round, raising his hat as he approached her.
+
+"Please tell me if that path leads to the Manor House," he said.
+
+Amaryllis saw a tall, well-made figure, a face clean-shaven and deeply
+sun-burnt, and under the lifted hat caught a glimpse of sleek black
+hair. But when she saw his eyes, she knew his name, for they were the
+bluest she had ever seen.
+
+"Yes," she said. "I think you must be Mr. Richard Bellamy."
+
+"I am," he said. "How did you know?"
+
+"Sir Randal Bellamy was telling us about you," she answered. "I am Miss
+Caldegard. My father and I are staying with Sir Randal. Yes, over the
+stile is your quickest way to the house." And she looked down the road.
+
+"Aren't you coming, too?" asked Dick Bellamy.
+
+Amaryllis looked at him for a moment.
+
+"Perhaps I'd better," she said, going towards the stile.
+
+"Why 'better'?" he asked.
+
+"There is no one to receive you," she replied. "Besides, the village
+isn't very interesting."
+
+"Awful," said Dick. "Worst beer in England."
+
+Amaryllis did not reply. When they were amongst the trees, he spoke
+again.
+
+"I know Randal was to meet me at St. Albans, but I 'phoned from
+Iddingfield and told 'em to send him back at once. I got my car back
+from the vet. at mid-day, and if I hadn't had a bit of a smash just
+outside Iddingfield, I'd have got here before."
+
+Amaryllis was a quick walker, and had set a good pace up the slope from
+the stile. Suddenly she remembered her companion's nick-name, and,
+slackening her speed, involuntarily glanced down to see if indeed this
+man were lame.
+
+He came up beside her.
+
+"It's all right, Miss Caldegard," he said kindly. "My action's a
+blemish, not a handicap."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Bellamy!" she said. "I never even noticed it until this
+minute."
+
+"I thought that was how you recognised me in the road," said the man.
+
+"It wasn't that," said Amaryllis, and in fear of further questioning,
+whistled her dog back to the path.
+
+"Silly old thing," she said. "He won't believe that Mr. Bunny is too
+quick for him; he's never caught one yet except in his dreams."
+
+They were making their way towards the house when they heard the car
+drive up to the front door, and before they reached the windows of the
+dining-room, Randal Bellamy turned the corner.
+
+Amaryllis stood apart watching with a certain curiosity the meeting of
+the brothers.
+
+The elder's face was beaming with welcome, the younger's she could not
+see, but something in his bearing suggested a pleasure no less. All she
+heard, however, was: "Hullo, young 'un!" and "Hullo, Bill!"
+
+And, when they came towards her, the expression of the two faces was
+that of men who, having breakfasted together, had met again at luncheon.
+
+"Somebody's forestalled my solemn introduction, I see," said Randal.
+
+"Gorgon performed the ceremony," said Amaryllis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+COFFEE.
+
+
+Randal Bellamy at fifty was the most successful patent lawyer of his
+day. He had taken silk before he was forty, and for many years had
+enjoyed, not only the largest practice, but a distinction unrivalled in
+his own country and unsurpassed in the world.
+
+Such a man's knowledge in physics, chemistry and biology, though less
+precise, is often wider than that of the individual specialist. His
+friendship with Theophilus Caldegard, begun at Cambridge, had lasted and
+grown stronger with the years.
+
+On the evening of his brother's arrival he dressed for dinner later than
+was his custom. His bath had filled him with a boyish desire to whistle
+and sing; and now, as he tied his bow and felt the silk-lined comfort of
+his dinner-jacket, he heard with a throb of elation the soft sound of a
+skirt go by his door.
+
+He murmured as he followed:
+
+      "--lentus in umbra
+    Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas."
+
+But before he reached the stairhead, all other sounds were drowned by
+shouts of laughter from the billiard-room--good laughter and familiar;
+but the smile left his face and his pace slackened. He was, perhaps, too
+old to wake the echoes, and Dick's laugh, he thought, was infectious as
+the plague.
+
+In the wide, comfortable hall used instead of the drawing-room which
+Bellamy hated, he found Amaryllis smiling with a sparkle in her eyes, as
+if she too had been laughing.
+
+"Did you hear them?" she asked.
+
+Randal nodded.
+
+"Father hasn't laughed like that for years--billiards!" she said. "Your
+brother is just telling him shocking stories, Sir Randal."
+
+"How d'you know?" he asked.
+
+"I dressed as quickly as I could, and went to the billiard-room. Father
+couldn't speak, but just ran me out by the scruff of the neck."
+
+At this moment her attention was distracted by the bull-dog, sliding and
+tumbling down the stairs in his eagerness to reach his mistress.
+
+"Gorgon's behaving like a puppy," said Randal, smiling.
+
+"Oh, he's been laughing, too," said Amaryllis, fondling the soft ears.
+"And he wants to tell me all the jokes."
+
+And then Caldegard and Dick Bellamy came down the stairs together.
+
+"What have you been doing to Gorgon?" asked Amaryllis.
+
+"Never mind the dog," said her father. "It's what this 'vaudeville
+artist' has been doing to me!"
+
+"Oh, Gorgon, Gorgon! If those lips could only speak!" laughed the girl.
+"Don't you think Gorgon's a good name for the ugly darling, Mr.
+Bellamy?" she said, as they went in to dinner.
+
+"Surely the Gorgon was a kind of prehistoric suffragette," objected
+Dick.
+
+"There you are, Amy," said her father, and turned to him. "Your brother
+and I have quite failed to convince my illiterate daughter that the word
+_Gorgon_ is of the feminine gender."
+
+"Anyhow," said Amaryllis defiantly, as she took her seat at the
+dinner-table, "I looked it up in the dictionary, and all it said was: A
+monster of fearful aspect.'"
+
+"He deserves it," said Dick.
+
+"He seems to have taken a great fancy to you, Mr. Bellamy," said the
+girl.
+
+"Dogs always do," said Randal.
+
+"Always at the first meeting?" asked Amaryllis.
+
+"Nearly always. But that doesn't prove that I don't travel without a
+ticket when I get the chance," replied Dick.
+
+"What _do_ you mean?" asked the girl.
+
+"Oh, the dog-and-baby theory's not dead yet. But I assure you, Miss
+Caldegard, that the hardest case I ever met couldn't walk through a town
+without collecting every dog in the place. That's why he never succeeded
+in his first profession."
+
+"What was he?" asked the girl.
+
+"Burglar," said Dick.
+
+"That's all very well," said his brother. "I know nothing about babies,
+but I've noticed that the man whom all dogs dislike is no good at all."
+
+"That's quite true," said Caldegard. "Remember Melchard, Amy?"
+
+Dick Bellamy caught the quiver of disgust which passed over the girl's
+face before she answered.
+
+"Horrible person!" she said. "Trixy bit him, the dachshund next door
+always ran away from him, and Gorgon had to be chained up."
+
+"Who is this Melchard, Caldegard?" asked Randal.
+
+"He came to me about eighteen months ago, and stayed about nine; a very
+capable practical chemist; had worked for some time in the factory of a
+Dutch rubber company. Sumatra, I think, or the Malay Peninsula. Tried
+unqualified dentistry after he came home, went broke and got an
+introduction to me. That's what he told me. An accurate and painstaking
+worker, and never asked questions."
+
+Dick began to be interested.
+
+"But I really can't see anything horrible in all that," said Randal.
+
+"At first it was what he was, not what he did," said Caldegard. "Tall,
+slender, effeminate, over-dressed, native coarseness which would not be
+hidden by spasmodic attempts at fine manners, and a foul habit of
+scenting his handkerchiefs and even his clothes with some weird stuff he
+made himself; left a trail behind him wherever he went. It smelt
+something like a mixture of orris-root and attar of roses."
+
+Amaryllis wiped her lips, and Dick Bellamy thought her cheeks nearly as
+white as the little handkerchief.
+
+"What did the fellow do?" asked Randal.
+
+"For one thing, I discovered that he carried a hypodermic syringe; so I
+watched him--morphia--not a bad case, but getting worse. And then," said
+Caldegard, looking towards his daughter, "he had the presumption----"
+
+"Oh, father, please!" cried Amaryllis.
+
+"I'm sorry, my dear," said her father. "I was only----"
+
+He was interrupted by a crash, a fumbling and a burst of flame. One of
+the four-branched candlesticks had been upset, and its rose-coloured
+shades were on fire. Very coolly the two Bellamys' pinched out the
+flames and replaced the candles.
+
+"Hope that didn't startle you, Miss Caldegard," said Randal.
+
+"Not a bit," said Amaryllis, smiling.
+
+"What a clumsy devil you are, Dick," he continued.
+
+"I was trying to get the sugar," said Dick.
+
+Randal tasted his coffee. "Cook's got one fault, Dick," he said. "She
+can't make coffee; and we've been spoiled."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Caldegard. "I've never in my life drunk black coffee
+to beat what your yellow-haired Dutch girl used to make."
+
+Randal turned to his brother. "Parlour-maid, Dick. Best servant I ever
+had. Didn't mind the country, and after she'd been here a fortnight
+disclosed a heaven-sent gift for making coffee. Took some diplomacy, I
+can tell you, to get cook to cede her rights."
+
+"Why haven't you got her now?" asked Dick.
+
+"Mother started dying in Holland," replied his brother, "and we miss our
+coffee."
+
+"I'll do it to-morrow night," said Dick.
+
+"What'll Rogers say?" said Randal.
+
+"Rogers? You don't tell me you've got Rogers still?"
+
+"Of course I have."
+
+"Not _my_ Mrs. Rogers!" exclaimed Dick. "Why, she'd let me skate all
+over her kitchen, if I wanted to."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Randal Bellamy, although he had a motor-car and used the telephone,
+lagged lovingly behind the times in less important matters. He was proud
+of his brass candlesticks, and hated electric light.
+
+While Amaryllis was saying good-night to her host, Dick Bellamy lighted
+her candle and waited for her at the foot of the stairs. When she
+reached him, she did not at once take it, so that they mounted several
+steps together; then she paused.
+
+"Good night, Mr. Bellamy. I hope you didn't hurt your fingers, putting
+the fire out. Are you a very awkward person?" she asked, looking up at
+him whimsically.
+
+"Shocking," said Dick. "I'm always doing things like that."
+
+"I believe you are," she replied softly. "Thank you so much."
+
+When he went to his room that night, Dick Bellamy was followed by a
+vivid ghost with reddish-gold hair, golden-brown, expressive eyes,
+adorable mouth, and skin of perfect texture, over neck and shoulders of
+a creamy whiteness which melted into the warmer colour of the face by
+gradation so fine that none could say where that flush as of a summer
+sunset first touched the snow.
+
+As he got into bed, he told himself that he did not object to being
+haunted up to midnight, nor even over the edge of sleep, by a spook so
+attractive. But if it should come to waking too early to a spectre
+implacable--well, that had happened to him once only, long ago, and he
+didn't want it to happen again.
+
+But the car would be all right to-morrow--there was always the car.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+AMBROTOX.
+
+
+Amaryllis found her father and Sir Randal at the breakfast-table.
+
+"I'm so glad I'm not the laziest," she said, as she took her seat.
+
+"I'm afraid you are, my dear," replied her father.
+
+"Dick's fetching his car from Iddingfield," explained Randal.
+
+The air was torn by three distinct wails from a syren.
+
+"How unearthly!" said Amaryllis, with her hands to her ears.
+
+"That's Dick," said his brother. "He would have a noise worse than
+anyone else's."
+
+Dick came in from the garden. "Morning, Miss Caldegard," he said, as he
+sat down. "How d'you like my hooter? Sounds like a fog-horn deprived of
+its young, doesn't it?"
+
+Amaryllis laughed.
+
+"I hate it," she said.
+
+Randal looked up from the letter he was reading.
+
+"I'm afraid you two will have to amuse each other this morning," he
+said, glancing from the girl to his brother as he handed the letter
+across the table to Caldegard. "That'll take a lot of answering, and I
+can't do it without your help. I'm afraid Sir Charles has got hold of
+the wrong end of the stick."
+
+"How are you going to amuse me, Miss Caldegard?" asked Dick.
+
+"I haven't the faintest idea," she replied.
+
+"Help me try my car?"
+
+"I should like to--if you can do without me, dad?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At half-past seven that evening Sir Randal went to his brother's room,
+and found him dressing for dinner.
+
+"Nice sort of chap you are," he said. "I ask you to amuse a young woman
+after breakfast----"
+
+"I did," said Dick.
+
+"And you keep her for eight hours. Where have you been?"
+
+"Miss Caldegard bought things in Oxford Street. We had lunch in Oxford,
+and tea at Chesham," said Dick, brushing his hair carefully back from
+his forehead. "You can't call that wasting time."
+
+"Not yours," said his brother. And they went to dinner.
+
+Before Amaryllis left the table, Dick rose from his seat.
+
+"Where are you going?" asked his brother.
+
+"To keep my tryst with Mrs. Rogers," said Dick, and went out.
+
+"I've told 'em we'll have our wine and coffee in the study, Caldegard,"
+said Randal. "I think it's the safest place for what we're going to talk
+about."
+
+Amaryllis rose to leave them together, but her father stopped her.
+
+"You'll come with us, won't you, my dear? You're one of the gang," he
+said.
+
+"What gang?" she asked, looking at him with eyes opened wide.
+
+"The Ambrotox gang," replied her father, lowering his voice almost to a
+whisper. "The only four people in the world, I believe, who know even
+that silly nick-name you invented, Amaryllis, are in this house. Sir
+Randal knows its properties. I know all about it. You know that I have
+spent two years in reaching it, and Dick Bellamy knows there is
+something in which we three are deeply interested. And so Sir Randal has
+advised me to take you younger people into full confidence."
+
+He slipped his arm through his daughter's, and led the way across the
+hall and down the narrow passage beyond the stair, to the study.
+
+Randal, with his back to the open door, was filling the port glasses,
+while Amaryllis and her father were gazing from the open french-window
+across the moonlit lawn, when all three were startled by a thin,
+high-pitched voice behind them.
+
+"Me lib for make one dam fine lot coffee, missy," it said.
+
+But, turning, they laughed to see only Dick, setting down the tray.
+
+"When does the seance begin?" he asked, turning to close the door.
+
+"Now," said his brother. "Better leave that open, and sit here where you
+can see right down the passage. Miss Caldegard," he went on, "please
+make Gorgon lie outside the window."
+
+Amaryllis stepped out upon the terrace, and the dog followed her. "Lie
+down," she said. "On guard."
+
+She came back into the room, and Randal drew the heavy curtains across
+the window. "Keep your eye on the end of the passage, Dick," he said.
+"There's no other door in it but ours."
+
+Then he sat down. "Coal-tar," he said, "the mother of wealth, the aunt
+of colour, and the grandmother of drugs, is a mystery to the layman. The
+highest, if not the best known, of its priesthood, is my old friend
+Caldegard. Some little time ago he penetrated too far into the arcana of
+his cult; and on one of the branches of that terrific tree he found and
+coaxed into blossom a bud which grew into the fruit which his daughter
+has named Ambrotox--as if it were a beef essence or a cheap wine. Tell
+'em its properties, Caldegard--in the vernacular."
+
+Between the first and second puffs at a fresh cigar, Caldegard grunted a
+sort of final protest.
+
+"You answer for him?" he asked, nodding to Dick.
+
+"Of course. And you for your daughter."
+
+"It is," began Caldegard, "the perfect opiate. As anodyne it gives more
+ease, and as anaesthetic leaves less after-effect to combat than any
+other. Morphia, opium, cannabis Indica, cocaine, heroin, veronal and
+sulphonal act less equally, need larger doses, tempt more rapidly to
+increase of dose, and, where the patient knows what drug he has taken,
+lead, in a certain proportion of cases, very quickly to an ineradicable
+habit. In wise hands, the patient's and the public's ignorance being
+maintained, Ambrotox"--and here he bestowed a little laugh on amateur
+nomenclature--"Ambrotox will be a blessing almost as notable as was
+chloroform in the fifties.
+
+"But there's another side: carry the thing a step further, and you have
+a life, waking, and dreams, sleeping, of delight such as has never
+been--I think never could be expressed in words; not because, as with De
+Quincey and his laudanum, the coherent story of the dreams and visions
+cannot be remembered, but because the clear sunshine of personal
+happiness and confidence in the future--the pure joy of being
+alive--which the abuser of Ambrotox experiences in his whole daily life,
+is incommunicable. It is a period of bliss, of clear head, good
+impulses, celestial dreams, and steady hope. These effects last, on an
+even dose, longer than with any other drug of which I have experience.
+And then there begins and grows a desire for action, the devil preaching
+that no good works have resulted from the faith, the hope and the good
+intentions. A little more, and we shall accomplish, he assures us, the
+full measure of our dreams. The dose is increased, confidence returns,
+and performance is still for to-morrow. I have never seen a victim of
+Ambrotox pursue this descent to the grave, but all analogous experience
+assures me that the final stages must be hell."
+
+"How do you know so much about the effects?" asked Dick.
+
+"There was only one possible subject for experiment--myself," replied
+Caldegard.
+
+Amaryllis sat upright in her chair, and drew in her breath sharply. But
+she did not speak.
+
+"Ghastly risk to take," said Dick.
+
+"Ghastly," assented Caldegard. "But it wasn't the first, nor the second
+time that I'd chanced it. The very memory of the horrors I went through
+in curing myself after a course of hashish, gave me faith in my power to
+push this tremendous experiment to the point I had determined upon,
+without overshooting the mark."
+
+"What was the mark?" inquired Dick.
+
+"The appearance," replied Caldegard, "of certain cardiac symptoms which
+I expected."
+
+"Oh, dad!" exclaimed Amaryllis. "That must have been the time when you
+sent for Dr. Greaves at three in the morning."
+
+Caldegard nodded.
+
+"For three weeks after that," went on Amaryllis indignantly, "I thought
+you were horribly ill."
+
+"That, my darling," answered her father, smiling at her, "was because I
+was getting better."
+
+"I've been wondering, Caldegard," said Randal, "how often and how
+strongly the remembrance of that incommunicable bliss cries out for an
+epicurean repetition of those early stages of your scientific
+experiment."
+
+Caldegard laughed. "Oh, she calls, and calls pretty loud sometimes," he
+said. "Let her call. It's all part of the experiment. Knowledge, you
+see, has the sweeter voice."
+
+Amaryllis had tears in her eyes, and for a moment the others waited on
+her evident desire to speak.
+
+"But do you think, father," she said at last, "that's it's really worth
+while to let the world know you have found a more delightful temptation
+than opium or cocaine, just for the sake of giving a few sick people a
+more comfortable medicine than they've been accustomed to. Ambrotox!"
+she sighed scornfully. "I wish I'd never given it that pretty name. I
+think it's horrid stuff!"
+
+"That's what I was going to ask," said Dick.
+
+"As for publicity, my dear boy," replied Caldegard, "Ambrotox will very
+probably do more harm than good if its properties become general
+knowledge. But the Home Office is drafting a comprehensive measure for
+State control of the manufacture and distribution of injurious drugs.
+You all know that the growth of the drug habit caused serious alarm in
+the early days of the war, and that even the amendment to the Defence of
+the Realm Act, forbidding the unauthorised sale and possession of
+cocaine and other poisons, did little to diminish the illicit traffic.
+Such contrabrand dealing is immensely lucrative, and prices rise in
+direct ratio with the danger. But the new Bill may contain a clause
+vesting in the State the formulae and the manufacture of all
+newly-discovered drugs of this kind. The Government is relying in this
+matter greatly upon the experience and advice of Sir Randal, and if a
+sufficiently stringent clause can be devised, it is probable that never
+more than three living persons, in addition to the discoverer, will be
+acquainted with the processes necessary to the manufacture of a newly
+discovered chemical compound which has been brought under State control.
+In regard to the good which may be done by Ambrotox--do you remember,
+Amaryllis, the two pretty little old ladies who lived in the small grey
+house with the red blinds? Don't say names, my child, nor mention the
+town. They were sisters and devotedly attached."
+
+The girl's face was a picture of curiosity.
+
+"Yes, father," she said. "And they grew pale and anxious. One of them
+came to see you, and then the other, several times; and once, just
+before I went to Scotland, they both came together. I remember how
+dreadfully ill they looked. But when I came home, their cheeks were pink
+again, one always laughed when the other did, and their garden was full
+of roses."
+
+"What about 'em?" asked Dick.
+
+"This," said Caldegard: "For several years each of those old women had
+been taking morphia; each had been concealing it from the other; each
+had suffered in conscience the torture of the damned; each confessed to
+me her vice, and the dreadful failure of her struggle to overcome it.
+Experimentally I treated each with Ambrotox, in gradually decreasing
+doses. The return to health was quicker and more complete than I had
+dared to hope; the craving for morphia has not reappeared, and I do not
+think it will."
+
+"Oh, you darling!" cried Amaryllis. "I always thought you'd something to
+do with it."
+
+"It is the story of two cases only, I admit," continued Caldegard. "But
+I am convinced that I have found a means of releasing at least unwilling
+slaves from that bondage."
+
+"But what do you gain by telling us?" asked Dick.
+
+"Secrecy," said Caldegard. "You and my daughter know now the importance
+of my two years' work, and you cannot fail to see the danger of a rumour
+that 'Professor Caldegard, we understand, has achieved an epoch-making
+discovery in the history of science. An anodyne with more than all the
+charms and few of the dangers of opium will bring comfort with a good
+conscience to thousands of sufferers in this nerve-racked world.' Every
+chemist in the country that knows my line of work will be searching in a
+furious effort to forestall the new legislation by discovering and
+putting on the market new synthetic opiates. There is not, perhaps, much
+fear that chance shooting will achieve the actual bull's-eye of
+Ambrotox. But there is a greater danger than commercial
+rivalry--criminal! The illicit-drug interest is growing in numbers and
+wealth. Every threat of so-called temperance legislation stimulates it.
+We have lately heard much of crime as a policy. Soon, perhaps, the world
+will learn with startled disgust, that crime went into trade two years
+ago.
+
+"There are men in every big city to whom thousands of pounds and the
+lives of many hirelings would be a small price to pay for the half-sheet
+of paper and the small bottle hidden in the safe in that alcove.
+
+"Knowing a little," he concluded, turning to Dick, "you might have told
+too much. Knowing everything, you will tell nothing at all."
+
+There was a silence in the room, so heavy that it seemed long. And then,
+
+"Some dope," said Dick Bellamy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+AMARYLLIS.
+
+
+A little after noon on the following day, Amaryllis and Dick Bellamy,
+followed by Gorgon with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, entered the
+hall by the front door, clamouring for drinks, to find Caldegard
+swearing over a telegram.
+
+"What's the matter, dad?" she asked.
+
+"Sir Charles Colombe," replied her father. "He will be deeply indebted
+if I will call at the Home Office at one-thirty p.m. I should think he
+would be! If the message had been sent in time I could have caught the
+twelve thirty-five. It's a quarter past now, and it can't be done."
+
+"Yes, it can," said Dick. "Grab your hat and tie it on, while I get my
+car."
+
+Randal, coming from his study, was in time to see the car vanish in a
+cloud of dust.
+
+"Where are they going?" he asked.
+
+"To catch the twelve thirty-five," replied Amaryllis. "Dick says he can
+do it in seven and a half minutes."
+
+Randal not only noticed the christian name, but also the girl's
+unconsciousness of having used it.
+
+"They want father at the Home Office. Who's Sir Charles Colombe, Sir
+Randal?" she asked.
+
+"Permanent Under Secretary," he answered. "I suppose Broadfoot is making
+trouble again."
+
+And he looked at her as if he were thinking of Amaryllis rather than of
+permanent or political chiefs of Home Affairs.
+
+"This is Friday, you know," he said at last.
+
+"Yes," replied the girl, and Randal thought her face showed
+embarrassment--but of what nature, he could not tell.
+
+"I won't spoil your lunch, my dear child," he said, looking down at her
+with eyes curiously contracted. "But if you'll give me half an hour in
+the afternoon----"
+
+"Of course I will," she replied, with frank kindness. "And, oh! may I
+have a lemon-squash?"
+
+A little later, as he watched her drink it, he admired her more than
+ever before. Since he first met her he had taken increasing pleasure
+from the tall figure, of which the fine lines and just proportions hid
+the strength and energy he had seen her upon occasion display; and he
+had often asked himself in what attitude or action her inherent grace
+appeared most charming. Sometimes it was driving from the tee, at
+another taking a swift volley which she must run to meet; or, again,
+just pouring out his coffee. But now, lounging on the old leather sofa,
+with her head tipped well back for red lips and white teeth to capture
+the slip of ice sliding to them from the bottom of the long tumbler, he
+thought her the very perfection of innocent freedom and symmetry.
+
+And when the ice was crunched and swallowed, she laughed joyously,
+showing him that the teeth he had cried pity on were sound as ever; so
+that he raked his mind for jest and anecdote just that he might see them
+flash yet again.
+
+But there was a difference in her to-day--a softer touch, as of
+happiness to come, flinging backward in her face a clouded reflection
+from the future. The image in that distant mirror, however, he could not
+see, and his gaiety failed him.
+
+"I'm awfully untidy," she said at last, springing to her feet and
+pushing back loosened hair. "It's nearly lunch time--I hope so, at
+least, because I'm horribly hungry."
+
+Perhaps it was best, after all, standing a little to one side, to see
+her mount that flight of broad, shallow steps; yet, being unable at once
+to make up his mind, he waited there at the stair's foot to see her come
+down again.
+
+She came at last, with so new a smile on her lips, that criticism was
+lost in curiosity. Its subtle curves blended expectancy, fear and
+tenderness, seen through a veil of restraint.
+
+Then he saw that she was looking over his head, and turned to see his
+brother standing in the doorway, with the sunlight behind him.
+
+The half-hour she had promised him left Amaryllis little less unhappy
+than Randal Bellamy.
+
+Tea under the cedar was over, and Amaryllis could not eat even another
+eclair, when he had said to her, "It's half-past five."
+
+"Oh, yes," she replied, and folded her hands in her lap.
+
+"So I've got till six o'clock," he went on.
+
+"Yes," said Amaryllis, adding, a little uneasily, "and as much longer as
+you like, Sir Randal."
+
+He smiled at her mistake, and shook his head in resignation.
+
+"You don't mean that--not in my sense," he said. "But look here, my
+dear: I do really think it wouldn't be a bad thing for you to marry me.
+You have no idea how good I should be to you. I have money and position.
+You like me, and you will like me better. And for me--well, it hardly
+seems fair to tell you what it would mean to me."
+
+"Why not fair?" asked the girl, pained by his eagerness, and wishing it
+all over.
+
+"I've always thought that appealing _ad misericordiam_ was taking a mean
+advantage. If I do it now, don't listen to me. But, if I'm worth it to
+you, Amaryllis, take me, and you shan't regret it."
+
+"You are worth anything--everything!" she cried, much distressed. "Worth
+ever so much more, dear Sir Randal, than I could give. But I'd give you
+all that I am--indeed I would--if it wasn't for--for----"
+
+"Yes?" he asked. "Go on. Wasn't for what?"
+
+"If it wasn't for something that says 'don't!' Oh, please understand. I
+like you awfully, but it says it, and says it--I don't know why."
+
+For a moment neither spoke.
+
+"You _do_ understand, don't you?" she asked at last.
+
+"I believe you, my dear," he answered; then added gently: "There's a
+happier man somewhere, I think."
+
+Amaryllis opened her eyes wide, almost, it seemed, in fear.
+
+"Oh, no, no!" she cried. "Truthfully, I don't know any more than I've
+told you."
+
+When he was gone, she sat for a long time, wishing she could feel alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Several times between lunch and dinner that day had Amaryllis wondered
+why Dick Bellamy was so taciturn--silent and sombre almost to
+moroseness. But Randal had no doubt that he knew.
+
+Dick, the least sullen and most even-tempered of men, was for once at
+war with himself. The midnight phantom had become a daylight obsession.
+
+Although he thought he knew what women were, he had never reached a
+definition of "being in love." For, having more than once believed
+himself in that condition, he had as often found himself too suddenly
+free.
+
+Before this English girl had seized upon his thoughts so that nothing
+else interested him, he had said there was always the car in which to
+run away.
+
+He was not afraid of offending his brother, for Randal knew him as he
+knew Randal. But a man does not throw himself into the sea just because
+there is a lifebuoy handy. Secure, therefore, in his power to escape, it
+was not until this afternoon that he found decision forced upon him. If
+he went, there was good chance of freedom; if he stayed, no chance at
+all.
+
+He was lying on his back, looking up through the branches of a huge
+tree, when he reached what he considered this clear alternative. He was
+a man who seldom lied to himself; so now it was with a sudden sharpness
+that he felt the sting of self-deception.
+
+"I've been trying to kid myself that I'm like the damn fool who runs
+away from the girl he's getting fond of because he's afraid of marriage.
+But I'm not. I'm the coward who's up to his knees, and funks letting
+himself all in for fear of not being able to reach what he's at least
+able to swim for."
+
+At dinner, Amaryllis, in sheer kindness of heart, shone with good
+humour, readiness of reply and flow of conversation. Randal, while he
+felt that she now and then forced the note, caught her motive, and
+responding, smoothed her way. But Dick, having from childhood accepted
+Randal's immunity from love as an axiom, took it all in good faith, and
+emerging by quick degrees from his taciturnity, soon had his share of
+the talk and laughter.
+
+He too had noticed at first a certain strain and effort in the girl's
+manner; but put it down to the absence of her father from the table. And
+so, when the trunk-call came to tell them he was dining with the
+Secretary of State and would be home late, and Amaryllis seemed to
+"settle into her stride," Dick thought of the matter no further, but
+only of her.
+
+After coffee in the hall, Randal excused himself on the plea of
+letter-writing, and Amaryllis, alone with his brother, fell silent.
+
+For a minute he watched her unobtrusively, and wondered why the life had
+gone out of her.
+
+"Sleepy, Miss Caldegard?" he asked at last.
+
+"No," she replied. "Tired--a little--and worried. Everybody's so keen on
+something. Father on--you know what. You, though I've never seen you do
+anything, look keener than any man I ever saw; and Sir Randal's keen
+about horrid business-letters. Generally I don't even want to open
+mine."
+
+"'Cause you don't want to answer 'em," suggested Dick.
+
+"Yes," admitted the girl, laughing--and suddenly stopped.
+
+"What's up?" asked Dick.
+
+"You've reminded me," she answered, pressing the bell beside her, "that
+there's one of my letters this morning that I never looked at. We were
+talking such a lot. I remember the look of the envelope. I haven't a
+notion what was in it."
+
+"Might be money," suggested Dick.
+
+"Or bad news," said Amaryllis. "I hate letters. When you want them, they
+don't say enough. When you don't, they say too much." Then, to the
+parlour-maid she had summoned: "I have left some letters on my table. If
+there's one that hasn't been opened, please bring it to me." And to
+Dick: "I wonder what it's like having dinner with Home Secretaries."
+
+"Nearest I've been to it was having breakfast with a Prime Minister," he
+answered. "It was soon over, and not so bad as it might have been. The
+omelette was dispersed by shrapnel, and a machine-gun found the range of
+the coffee-pot."
+
+"What did the Prime Minister do?" asked the girl.
+
+"Forgot where the door was, and went out of office by the window."
+
+"Was it a war?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Dick. "Only Mexico."
+
+The parlour-maid returned with a sealed letter. Until she was gone,
+Amaryllis eyed the writing on the envelope with reluctant displeasure;
+then looked at Dick.
+
+"Please do," he said.
+
+When she had glanced at the letter.
+
+"I wish you'd said don't," she complained. "Neither money nor bad news.
+Foolishness from an unpleasant person--that's all."
+
+On the point of tearing it, she checked herself.
+
+"It's dad's business after all," she murmured, more to herself than
+Dick; and rising, went upstairs quickly, as about to return.
+
+As she disappeared from the eyes which could not help watching her,
+Randal came up the narrow corridor from the study. Dick sank back into
+his chair and looked up at his brother.
+
+"Billiards?" said Randal. "Give me fifty, and I'll play you a hundred
+up."
+
+Dick shook his head. "Too lazy," he answered.
+
+"Miss Caldegard gone to bed?" asked Randal.
+
+"Looked as if she was coming back--though she did say she was tired."
+
+"Then I'll practise that canon you were showing me. See you again," said
+Randal, and went upstairs.
+
+In the passage above he met Amaryllis. The sound of their voices, but
+not their words, trickled down to Dick in the hall.
+
+Then she came; and the man, lest he should show in his face the pleasure
+that came with her, did not look at the girl until she was at the foot
+of the stair; and when he did raise his eyes, it was to find hers
+averted, and to see her turn at once to her left and make for the study.
+Just as she was disappearing into the narrow corridor, he saw, or
+thought that he saw, her white shoulder shaken by a sob without sound.
+
+With an eager instinct he sprang to his feet--and sat down again. If she
+wanted his help, she would ask for it.
+
+Almost at once, however, he rose again, unsatisfied and restless; and
+hardly knew what he was doing before he found himself at the study door,
+and in his ears a sound which told him that he had read her shoulders
+correctly.
+
+He went in, closing the door as softly as he had opened it.
+
+Randal had left his shaded lamp burning on the writing-table. And there,
+shining head bent over the table and lit by the broad circle of light,
+her body shaken with suppressed sobbing, was Amaryllis.
+
+Dick was close to her before he realized that she had not heard his
+approach. Gently he touched her arm.
+
+Without starting, she looked round at him, and he saw the tears on her
+face.
+
+"Excuse my butting in," he said. "Do tell me what's the matter."
+
+The girl tried to speak and failed.
+
+"I'm a stranger to almost everybody here," he said. "When you're in a
+hole, the stranger's about the best man to take troubles to."
+
+Amaryllis shook her head.
+
+"Come, let's see if I can't help," pleaded Dick.
+
+In her mind Amaryllis, as she felt the tender concern of his voice, and
+looked up into the brown face above the white shirt-front, was struck
+with a consoling sense of protection, and knew that, while he was the
+last person she could "take her trouble to," yet his was the sympathy
+which would most surely soften, if it could not remove, any misfortune
+which could ever befall her.
+
+"I can't--I can't! I wish I could," she said, winking her eyes. "But I'm
+going to be good. Please be a dear, Mr. Bellamy, and go back to the
+hall. I shall be all right soon."
+
+"Promise?"
+
+"Honest," said Amaryllis.
+
+Dick closed the door behind him, and walked up the passage with the limp
+which was always more strongly marked in moments of preoccupation.
+
+The balls were clicking in the billiard-room upstairs, and he hesitated
+with a foot on the lowest step. But the bond of the protection which had
+been accepted even while confidence had been withheld, seemed to tie him
+to the post she had assigned him.
+
+He lit a cigar, sank into the very chair he had left, and let his mind
+revert to his discontented mood of the afternoon, laughing softly as he
+admitted that it had needed only the trace of trouble on that charming
+face to convince him that he was indeed "all in."
+
+Something in the girl's face as she looked up at him had planted a seed
+of hope.
+
+A clock somewhere struck softly and many times. The cigar had been a
+dead stump between his teeth for how long Dick did not know.
+
+Randal's voice broke his reverie.
+
+"I'm sick of knocking the balls about," he said. "Come and give me a
+game, you slacker."
+
+"Eleven!" exclaimed Dick. "Of course I'll play. Let's go and fetch Miss
+Caldegard and I'll play the two of you."
+
+"All right," said Randal. "Where is she?"
+
+"In your study," replied Dick, leading the way. It was an hour since he
+had left her and he was anxious to rouse the girl from her depression.
+
+He opened the door, entered quickly, and stopped.
+
+"Good God, she's gone!" he exclaimed.
+
+"What d'you mean?" asked Randal.
+
+"I left her here about an hour ago," said Dick. "She's not come out this
+way. There's something wrong."
+
+"My dear boy, don't excite yourself," said his brother. "Here's the
+french-window. I expect she's out there."
+
+"With bare shoulders and thin dress? It's been raining like hell since
+ten o'clock. I tell you there's something wrong," said Dick, taking one
+stride to the table, and lifting the lamp above his head. He glanced
+swiftly round the room.
+
+"Look at your safe," he said.
+
+Randal, impressed by his brother's tone, went quickly to the alcove,
+between whose looped curtains showed the green door of a safe embedded
+in the wall. Before he touched it,
+
+"My God! There's a key!" he said.
+
+"Where's yours?" snapped Dick.
+
+"Here," said Randal, pulling a bunch from his pocket.
+
+"Look inside."
+
+Randal turned the key, swung back the heavy door, groped for a minute,
+and swung round with a face like death.
+
+"What's gone?" cried Dick.
+
+"Caldegard's drug-bottle and formula!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+PERFUME.
+
+
+Search of house and grounds was fruitless.
+
+Before half-past eleven the rainstorm was over, and a bright moon
+lighted the brothers and the men-servants to the discovery of just
+nothing at all.
+
+Except to give an order, or make a suggestion, neither Bellamy spoke
+until they stood alone together in the hall.
+
+They looked at each other like men who from dreams of hell have waked to
+find it.
+
+Then the elder groaned, beside himself.
+
+"The poor girl!" he said. "To think of her ill-used--murdered, perhaps!"
+
+The younger man cut him short with a glance, which even through his
+agony pierced Randal as if the livid lightning of a god had been
+launched at the ineptitude of human compassion.
+
+"Cut it out," said Dick. "That's a car coming. The father. Take him
+right back to town in it. You've got the pull. You can make the
+political coves get Scotland Yard and the police of the world working,
+before you'd get the county bobbies into their trousers."
+
+The car drew up in front of the house.
+
+"How shall I tell him?" said Randal.
+
+"I shall," answered Dick. "You get into tweeds--jump." And he went to
+meet Caldegard at the door.
+
+"Good God!" said the old man, when he saw the young one's face. "What's
+happened?"
+
+"I'll tell you," said Dick. "Is that a good car?"
+
+Caldegard knew how to obey. "It's Broadfoot's--Rolls-Royce, six
+cylinder," he replied promptly.
+
+"Tell the man he must take you back to town."
+
+When the order was given, the lover, in curt and terrible phrases, told
+the father what had happened. And Caldegard's face, as he listened
+without a word, was a tragedy which Dick Bellamy, heeding it not at all
+for the moment, remembered all his life.
+
+"Set every dog in the world on the men who've stolen Ambrotox," he said
+in conclusion, "and you'll find Amaryllis. A trace of one is a track of
+the other; news of either is news of both. Leave the local work to me."
+
+Caldegard looked into the strange face, and almost flinched from the
+terrible eyes.
+
+"I'll do all you say," he replied simply.
+
+Then Randal came, pulling on his coat. His brother made him swallow
+whisky and water, forced the elder man to do the same, and before they
+left, demanded money of Randal.
+
+"There's a hundred and twenty pounds in notes, in the small right-hand
+drawer in the safe," he replied, "--unless they got that too."
+
+"No," said Dick. "They were hustled. Let her rip," he said to the
+driver, and went back into the house.
+
+Trembling with excitement and keeping back genuine tears for Amaryllis,
+a guest to serve whom had been pleasure, the parlour-maid fetched him
+cold meat, bread and beer. When he had changed his clothes, he ate
+hastily in the hall, swallowing doggedly what he could not taste.
+
+"Twenty-five minutes--they'll be in town. Another fifteen and the
+wires'll be humming," he calculated. "Twenty more--the local police will
+be here, and rub out every trace. Is there a trace, a mark--a print--a
+smell, even? I've got an hour."
+
+He sent all the servants to bed, except Randal's chauffeur, whom he
+summoned to the hall.
+
+"My car's fit to travel, Martin," he said. "Shove in as many tins of
+petrol as she'll hold. I may want her to-night. Run her out into the
+drive, put on an overcoat and sit inside till I come."
+
+Then he went to the study, lit all the candles and another lamp, opened
+the safe with the duplicate key, and found, as he had expected, the
+money in its drawer.
+
+"Mostly one-pound notes," he muttered, as he locked the safe.
+
+Turning to leave it, he stood suddenly stock-still, head up and sniffing
+the air, puzzled by an intangible association of sense and memory.
+
+Failing to fix it, he left the alcove, and went to the writing-table,
+choosing the chair she had sat in, when she could not, or would not,
+give reason for her tears. And now he gave a flash of thought where
+before he had refrained even from speculation. Could it have been the
+forgotten letter that had made her weep? Yet there had been no trouble
+in her face while she read it, and it seemed certain that the
+handwriting was unfamiliar.
+
+While he mused his eyes were fixed on the alcove at the end of the room.
+The light of the candle he had left there outlined sharply the edges of
+the two curtains which hung from the rod crossing the recess. At the
+ceiling their edges met, but, at a height of some two and a half feet
+from the floor, their folds were looped back to the wall in a style
+formally old-fashioned. And now, even before his mind became concerned,
+his eye was irritated by a lack of symmetry in the draping; for the
+drooping fold of the right-hand curtain was out of shape. Again, his
+thought ran, if thieves playing for so great a stake as Ambrotox had
+found a woman in their way, their best card was prompt murder. If they
+could abduct in silence, they could have killed silently. And this made
+clear to him the soundness of what had been hitherto a merely
+instinctive conviction; since they had not left her body dead, they had
+taken it away alive--and with no intent to kill elsewhere. For, if
+murder were to be done, the dead was safest of all behind them in the
+place of the theft.
+
+Then again--while the distorted loop of the curtain haunted his
+subconscious mind, so that with imaginary fingers he was adjusting its
+curves, even while his mind pulled and twisted the elements of his
+problem--then, again, he thought, this thief--had he shrunk from murder,
+or merely from _this_ murder?
+
+"If I could know that!"
+
+And before he was well aware of what he did, he was in the opening of
+the alcove, handling that awkward fold--and again he drew breath, deep
+and slow through the nose; again the vague memory--again the elusive
+association. Was the scent--sweet as well as musty--was it in the
+curtain? But as he stooped, he saw what made him forget that vague
+odour: a crumpled bunch of the soft linen had been squeezed together,
+and was not yet recovered from the strain of some violent compression.
+Gently stretching the stuff, and bringing it closer to the light, he
+found the almost regular marks, above and below, as of some serrated,
+semi-trenchant tool which had been closed upon the doubled piece of
+cloth.
+
+"Teeth, by God!" said Dick. "Tried to gag her with it--shoved a bag of
+it in with his fingers, gets 'em out, and stoppers the lot with his
+hand. Before she faints, she bites--here and there she's gone clean
+through the stuff."
+
+Indecision gone, he took the smaller lamp in his hand, and made a tour
+of the room.
+
+At an angle to the fireplace was a broad-seated, high-backed oaken
+settee, covered with cushions. The back almost hid the hearth from the
+french-window. The silk pillow nearest the alcove still kept the impress
+of a head.
+
+"When they came in," he reasoned, "the back of that thing hid her. She'd
+lain down to rest, and stop that sobbing before she came back to me.
+Fell asleep--women'll do that, happy or wretched, before they know where
+they are. They reached the safe, and that arm at the end would hide even
+her hair. While they're messing round with the safe, she wakes and peeps
+at 'em--was it cold feet or sand kept her from yelling? What next?"
+
+He was back at the alcove now, on hands and knees, the lamp set on the
+ground, searching the thick pile of the carpet for signs of the struggle
+there must have been. And again the smell--near the right hand curtain
+where the wool of the carpet was rubbed.
+
+Roses--attar of roses! Where had he heard of attar of roses combined
+with--with what? And again the two wires would not touch--but they were
+throwing a spark across the gap.
+
+Yes, it was Caldegard--Caldegard had said something--something of a foul
+man and a rotten stink. It was some story he'd been telling that first
+night at dinner.
+
+Then a glitter in the carpet. Half-hidden--trodden in amongst the
+roughened wool, he found it--a morsel of bright steel--the needle of a
+hypodermic syringe. Who had spoken lately of a morphinomaniac that
+carried his syringe always with him?
+
+Why, Caldegard, Caldegard!
+
+"Melhuish?--Melford?--Meldrum?--Melcher?-_Melchard!_ By God, the swine
+that stank!"
+
+And he remembered how he had upset the silver candlestick, setting fire
+to the shades, to cover the girl's discomfort, and the smile she had
+paid him with. Then it was this particular murder from which the thief
+had shrunk.
+
+Melchard, the chemist, had guessed at the direction of Caldegard's
+research. Discharged at a moment when his hope of mastering a valuable
+secret was at its height, he had found means to track Caldegard's
+movements, and even, it seemed, to discover the hiding-place of the
+perfected drug and its formula.
+
+"Agent--or, p'r'aps, a leading member of the Dope Gang Caldegard hinted
+at. He lays his plans to grab the stuff and the formula. Just as he gets
+his fingers on it, up pops the only being on earth he'd give a damn
+about knifing. Twenty years' clink if he leaves her to talk. Takes her
+with him--hell's blight on him! Wouldn't have been dosing himself on a
+game like this. Used the syringe on her."
+
+To find Melchard was to find Amaryllis. The first thing to do,
+therefore, was to find Melchard's address, and the first man to ask was
+Caldegard. If Caldegard could not give it to him, it meant a long hunt
+with the police. Anyway, he must begin with Caldegard.
+
+He crossed to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and, hearing no
+tinkle, blew into the transmitter with the receiver at his ear. Hearing
+nothing, he hung it up with a curse.
+
+Sitting at Randal's desk, he wrote rapidly the following note:
+
+     "Got the money. Enclose key. Melchard's the man we want. Get his
+     address. 'Phone cut outside. Wire me address P.D.Q.--DICK."
+
+Through the window he went to his car in the drive.
+
+"Martin," he said, "get out Sir Randal's car and take this note to him.
+Go to New Scotland Yard. They'll tell you where he is. Drive like hell."
+
+He went back into the house, ran upstairs, lit a candle in his room,
+stuffed one pocket with handkerchiefs, and into another dropped a tin of
+tobacco and an electric torch.
+
+Why hadn't he brought a gun? Oh, well, it only meant five minutes at his
+flat in Great Windmill Street.
+
+As he came down the passage, his eyes, obeying a new habit which seemed
+already old, lingered a moment on Amaryllis' door. But it was not
+sentiment which checked his feet.
+
+"There might be something," he muttered, and, without hesitation,
+entered the room.
+
+An oppression of silence weighed upon him painfully as he felt for his
+match-box. When the candle showed it, the pretty room was a cruel jest.
+
+His examination was made with business-like care. On the dressing-table
+was nothing but the pretty things which served her toilet; but on the
+writing-table in the window lay a pile of letters. The topmost he
+recognised at once for that which she had read in his presence after
+dinner.
+
+As he pulled the stiff sheet from the envelope, he was aware once more
+of the odour which he had smelt first in the alcove of the study.
+
+He spread the letter open. It was signed "Alban Melchard."
+
+It was written on good paper, stamped with the address, and read as
+follows:
+
+     "Rue de la Harpe, 31,
+     "Paris,
+     "_June_ 18_th_.
+
+     "MY DEAR MISS CALDEGARD,
+
+     "I fear that you will be surprised at my venturing to write to you,
+     considering the distressing circumstances under which we parted.
+     Although the small request I have to make of you is of some
+     importance to me, I should not have the presumption to make it, if
+     it were not that it gives me the opportunity to assure you that the
+     passage of time has made a wiser man of me--and a grateful one, for
+     the delicate forbearance with which you taught me my place.
+
+     "I have recently met with good fortune in my profession, and am
+     settling down as a man of business in the neighbourhood of
+     Millsborough, with considerable prospect of success.
+
+     "In the happy days when it was my privilege to pick up unconsidered
+     scraps of your father's scientific wisdom, I kept, jotted down in a
+     notebook, many items for future use. Until recently I have had no
+     occasion to refer to these notes, which I now find are essential to
+     the success of my most promising scheme. I must have left the
+     memoranda behind me with some other things, when I departed so
+     suddenly last September.
+
+     "If you can have this notebook found for me, I will ask that it may
+     be posted to me at The Myrtles, Grove End, near Millsborough, as I
+     shall only be in Paris for three days longer.
+
+     "I heard, quite by chance from a friend, that Professor Caldegard
+     was staying with Sir Randal Bellamy in Hertfordshire, so I have
+     ventured to use his address.
+
+     "Thanking you gratefully in anticipation,
+
+     "I remain,
+     "My dear Miss Caldegard,
+     "Yours very sincerely,
+     "ALBAN MELCHARD."
+
+"H'm, in Paris, is he? No more in Paris than I am. Wrote this in case he
+should be suspected, but didn't count on having to cart the girl along.
+False addresses wouldn't help him. These two are straight goods. Clever
+move, if it hadn't been for the girl. Your alibi'll hang you, Alban
+Melchard. That fixes Millsborough."
+
+Savagely he cranked up his engine and jumped into the driving-seat. The
+car rushed forward.
+
+When St. Albans was behind him the confusion of excitement began to
+settle, and his thoughts presented themselves clear as those of a
+dispassionate spectator. For him, in all this tangle, there was one
+thing, and one thing only, that mattered; to be in time. He did not fear
+murder; but the very reason of her security from death was the cause of
+a fear so horrible, that he knew inaction would have been torture past
+endurance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THE SWINE THAT STANK.
+
+
+When Amaryllis left her bedroom, having laid Melchard's letter on her
+table, she had intended returning at once to pleasant and frivolous
+conversation with Dick Bellamy. For to-night she was nervous--a little
+unstrung, it may be, by the pain she had given to his brother; and Dick,
+with his quiescent vitality, his odd phrases and uncompromising
+directness of expression, seemed to her at that moment the most restful
+companion in the world. If she could only get him started, he might
+amuse and interest her as on the long drive the day before. And then, he
+seemed to be one of those people who understand even when you don't
+talk--and she remembered how he had cut into her father's chatter about
+Melchard by upsetting the candles.
+
+But Sir Randal had met her between the door and the stairhead.
+
+"Dick tells me I've got to play billiards all alone," he said; and
+though his self-pity was merely playful, it struck the girl painfully.
+
+"What a shame!" she began--and then a stupid lump came in her throat,
+and Randal saw the change in her face.
+
+"My dear," he said, "you mustn't. I'm all right. Believe me, if it does
+hurt a little, it won't spoil things for me as it might for a young
+fellow. The world's a very interesting place, and I'm going to be jolly
+in it, just the same."
+
+He looked at her for a moment anxiously.
+
+"Be jolly too--there's a good girl. And, I say," he added with simple
+eagerness, "you won't go running away from here to some dreadful aunt,
+will you?"
+
+"I'll stay just as long as you and father want me to," she replied; but,
+finding speech difficult, finished with the best smile she could
+command, and went down the stair, avoiding Dick and seeking refuge in
+Randal's study.
+
+There the tears overcame her--though she tried to hide from herself
+their full reason.
+
+Randal she had known for many weeks, and for Randal she was indeed
+tenderly grieved; but the other man, with his abruptness, his humour,
+and his lurking intensity, she had first seen the day before yesterday;
+and although she knew nothing of Mr. Richard Bellamy's opinion of
+herself, and admitted in regard to her own future no more than that she
+found him interesting, she was too well aware to deny, even to herself,
+that he had pushed his brother out of his chance.
+
+To say this, she told herself, was but to confess that the younger man
+had unconsciously reminded her of possibilities and dangers; but it
+seemed to be not only unkind but unjust that Sir Randal's misfortune
+should arise out of the very eagerness of his affection for this weird
+brother of his.
+
+And then her father! He had said nothing, implied nothing, but she
+foresaw disappointment.
+
+It was all rotten, and the tears flowed.
+
+Then came that hand on her shoulder, whose touch, although they had
+never, she remembered, even shaken hands, she knew before lifting her
+eyes to his.
+
+When he had left her, although her tears were soon dry, she felt a
+curious restlessness of mind, and what she would have called "an excited
+tiredness," and she stretched her body on the cushions of the settee for
+a moment's relaxation, which slipped at once into half an hour's sleep.
+
+A whisper awoke her. She raised her head. The voice was behind her.
+Cautiously, kept silent between fear and curiosity, she rose and turned
+her face to the alcove.
+
+A man was there, with his back towards her--not one of her men. His
+clothes were grey; his right hand was on the open door of the safe, the
+left holding a small parcel wrapped in white paper, and, separate, an
+envelope.
+
+Amaryllis knew what he held, and the courage rose in her to hold back
+the scream which was coming, until she should have tight hold of the
+thief--the fingers of both hands, she hoped, fast in his collar.
+
+She was close behind him, and he was locking the safe, when suddenly he
+felt or heard her presence and swung round.
+
+It was the face of Melchard; astonishment and disgust for a fatal moment
+took away her breath. Before she could scream, his hands were on her
+mouth and naked neck, pushing her roughly backward until she was against
+the right-hand curtain and the corner of the wall. From behind the
+curtain, it seemed, two small, soft hands stole over her shoulders and
+gripped her neck, squeezing it savagely.
+
+Melchard took his left hand from her mouth, and as she tried in vain to
+scream in spite of the double grip on her throat, he crammed a handful
+of the linen curtain between her tongue and palate with his long
+fingers.
+
+"Take your cat's claws off her neck," she heard him mutter. "I'll keep
+her quiet."
+
+And that was all before she fainted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her next sensation was of half-sitting, half-lying in an uneasy
+arm-chair--a chair which jolted, slid and swung, and then again glided
+smoothly. There was something hairy over her face, and she drew her
+breath with difficulty.
+
+She was in a car--the weight on her face was the hairy side of a rug.
+Movement seemed impossible, and the fur now and then hurt her eyes. With
+an effort she managed to close the lids, and as tears slowly refreshed
+the eye-balls, she was so much relieved that she might have fallen
+asleep, but for Melchard's detested voice sounding above her.
+
+"I think that's Escrick we've just run through. York in ten minutes
+about. When I say 'now,' down you go under the rug again. I'm the only
+passenger through the town."
+
+"Why not go round York?" asked another voice, which Amaryllis had heard
+before; but where, she could not remember.
+
+"We mustn't waste any time," answered Melchard. "Besides, if more people
+see you in the streets of a town, fewer look at you than in the country.
+You'll have to duck in a minute, and I shall pile the bags and things on
+top."
+
+"They hurt me last time," said the softer voice.
+
+"A thousand apologies," replied Melchard carelessly. "But it's all in
+the good cause. By the way, you'd better have a look, and see if the
+girl's all right before I cover you over."
+
+"Oh, damn the girl!" answered the woman. "What's it matter if she dies?"
+
+"If I'd wanted that, I'd have left her dead in her lover's study."
+
+"Lover! Old Bellamy!" said the woman--and laughed.
+
+"Not old enough, I guess, to help it."
+
+"Nor you, Alban, to hide it," she retorted, groping at the rug which
+covered Amaryllis. "You gave her enough to keep her quiet another hour
+or two, didn't you?"
+
+"It's hard to tell with a new subject," he answered. "Morphine is tricky
+in opiate doses."
+
+Then Amaryllis knew she had been drugged, and to appear as when they
+last saw her, she half-opened her eyes, showed her teeth between drawn
+lips, and managed to keep her face rigid without even the quiver of an
+eyelid.
+
+The rug was lifted for a moment and a face peered at hers; and she knew
+it for that of Sir Randal's late parlour-maid and lamented coffee-maker.
+
+"She's just the same," said the woman. "Quite insensible, but not dead
+yet. Blast her!"
+
+Melchard laughed. "The green-eyed monster as per usual," he said. "You
+ought to know me by this time, but you always mistake my universal
+admiration of beauty for the tender passion."
+
+"Don't be a fool," she answered. "What are you going to do with her?"
+
+Melchard was silent, and the woman spoke again.
+
+"Look here," she said, "I'm going to be right in this. I found the
+stuff for you. I got the key. And if I hadn't been with you to-night
+you'd have been lagged. I'm not so sure that you won't be, now, with
+that ---- letter of yours from Paris."
+
+"What's wrong with the letter?" asked Melchard.
+
+"It would have done well enough if we hadn't had to bring this
+red-haired wench of yours with us. Now that the girl's disappeared,
+it'll only attract attention."
+
+"My sweet child," retorted Melchard, "that letter is a masterpiece. I
+did leave a notebook behind. Legarde and Morneaux, besides swearing to
+it themselves, would bring a dozen others, all most respectable men, to
+say that I did not leave Paris until the twenty-second, the day after
+to-morrow."
+
+"H'm!" said the woman. "M'yes, perhaps. And anyhow," she went on, with a
+chuckle of relish, "by the time we've shipped the girl to Holland, she
+won't remember her own name."
+
+Then at last horror seized the soul of Amaryllis, and consciousness left
+her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE POLITICAL COVES.
+
+
+For the better part of their journey to town Caldegard and Randal
+Bellamy ate their hearts in silence. The road was good, and they had it
+almost to themselves.
+
+As they were nearing London, Caldegard spoke.
+
+"Bellamy," he said, "that brother of yours won't stop at killing if----"
+
+"He'll begin with it," replied Randal, "if he gets a fair chance."
+
+"It gives me unreasonable hope," said Caldegard.
+
+"Men who've trusted Dick would call your hope reasonable."
+
+"Yet he's sent us after Ambrotox," complained the father, "and my
+heart's breaking for my little girl."
+
+"His argument convinced you, anyhow," said Randal.
+
+At New Scotland Yard Sir Randal's card gained them instant admission to
+the presence of the Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation
+Department.
+
+He listened without a word to Randal's compact and lucid statement of
+the facts.
+
+"It's a good thing I was kept here so late to-night, gentlemen," he
+said. "We shall act without losing a moment in the matter of your
+daughter's disappearance, Dr. Caldegard. But the theft of your secret,
+of which both Sir Charles Colombe and the Home Secretary have spoken to
+me, is a matter of such tremendous importance, that I am obliged to
+communicate immediately with both these gentlemen and the Commissioner.
+And you will be doing me a great kindness if you will both remain here
+until I hear from them."
+
+An hour later a sombre group of six, after protracted discussion, seemed
+almost to have exhausted the evidence, suggestion and counsel which
+could be brought to bear upon a crime so sudden and so obscure.
+
+Sir Charles Colombe looked anxiously round him as he spoke.
+
+"That is the danger," he said, "which we have to face: that these foul
+pests of society should escape with Professor Caldegard's discovery and
+master his secret--a peril to which all the dangers mankind has run
+since the world began from greed, bigotry, alcohol and opium are child's
+play. The bill of which Sir Gregory has just spoken would give us powers
+to lay hands on all these local branches of what Superintendent Finucane
+has described as 'the Dope Gang.' We know already some twenty-five or
+thirty of them. If we were as well advanced in our knowledge of their
+central organisation, we might even now do something fairly vigorous
+under the law of conspiracy. As it is, we can only proceed against
+individuals trafficking in and supplying certain specified drugs. The
+secret of this greatest drug of all must not, if human power can prevent
+it, come into the hands of the inner ring before we have our grip on it.
+Needles, before now, have been successfully hunted in haystacks, and
+perhaps even you, Professor Caldegard, have no adequate conception of
+how close the meshes are in the net Superintendent Finucane is
+spreading. And I should like you to understand, sir," he said, drawing
+nearer to the old man who sat staring with fixed eyes out of a ghastly
+face, "that, though our duty makes us think of millions where you can
+think only of one, every effort which the Criminal Investigation
+Department makes, every trap it lays, every device it contrives to
+recover your property is equally adapted to finding your daughter. In
+your fear for her safety you have forgotten your drug; in our fear for
+the drug we cannot let your daughter out of our minds."
+
+"She may be--dead," said Caldegard.
+
+The Superintendent answered him.
+
+"I don't believe it," he declared. "You see, sir, the thief's plan
+worked smoothly, bar the one unexpected factor--the young lady in the
+room. If he didn't kill her then, he don't mean to kill her."
+
+"That's my brother's argument," said Randal, adding his word of comfort.
+
+There was a tap at the door, and a constable entered.
+
+"Sir Randal Bellamy's chauffeur, sir," he said to Finucane. "He has
+brought this letter. Says it's from Mr. Richard Bellamy."
+
+Randal glanced at the note and then read aloud:
+
+     "Melchard's the man we want. Get his address. 'Phone cut outside.
+     Wire me address P.D.Q."
+
+"From my brother Richard," he said. "Dr. Caldegard knows this Melchard,
+I believe."
+
+When Caldegard had told them all he knew of the man, the Superintendent
+looked at the Commissioner,
+
+"I think, sir," he said, "we'd better inquire about Mr. Alban Melchard."
+
+"Rather a wildgoose chase," grumbled the Home Secretary.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder, sir," replied Finucane, "if Mr. Richard Bellamy
+isn't a very wideawake young gentleman."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE GREEN FROCK.
+
+
+Seven miles south of Millsborough, just before you come to the
+cross-roads, whose eastern branch runs to the coast some thirty miles
+away, there stands, the only house in sight, a little roadside inn
+called "The Coach and Horses."
+
+At half-past seven on the morning of Saturday, June the twenty-first,
+there drew up before it a long, low two-seater car.
+
+The landlord, a sharp-faced little man with kindly eyes and a shrewd
+mouth, came to the door.
+
+"Looks like you've been travelling all night, sir," he remarked
+pleasantly.
+
+"It looks right," said Dick Bellamy. "I want a house called The
+Myrtles."
+
+Turning to the north, the landlord waved his hand towards the right.
+
+"Two mile, mebbe more, mebbe less. Lies in a bit of a hollow. But you
+won't see no myrtles--less they've growed in the night--just a low stone
+house with a bit of a copse back o't. Mr. Melchard you're seekin', like?
+He's a girt man wi' the teeth," said the landlord, chuckling.
+
+"Big eater?" asked Dick.
+
+"Dentist's my meanin', sir. They do say he keeps seven shops in
+Millsborough district, and never drew tooth in his life. Just drives
+round so free, takin' t'money. But I reckon, if you're goin' to
+t'Myrtles, you know the gentleman."
+
+"I'm going to leave my car here. Don't know how long, but I'll pay you
+five shillings a day. I want some food and I've only got five minutes.
+Can you manage it?"
+
+Waiting, he scribbled a note in pencil, tore the leaf from his notebook,
+demanded an envelope, addressed it, and attacked the cold beef and beer
+hurriedly set before him.
+
+"Can you post this?" he asked.
+
+"You passed t'box quarter mile back," said the landlord.
+
+"Half-a-crown if you'll take it yourself."
+
+"All right, sir. But there's no stamp in the house."
+
+"Post it without," said Dick, well pleased.
+
+He laid down his knife and fork.
+
+"Walkin'?" inquired the landlord. "Then you'd better take path across
+t'moor. I'll show'ee."
+
+Alone on the heath, Dick felt he had at last a few minutes to consider
+his position. Plans must come with events. Though besieged still by the
+fear which had haunted him throughout the night, he found comfort,
+however indefinite, in the daylight. Time was everything; but if he were
+indeed in time, it was well to have the day before him.
+
+The letter to his brother, which he had posted in York at three o'clock
+in the morning, though it gave the address of the man he was hunting,
+could not, any more than that which he had just entrusted to the
+landlord of "The Coach and Horses," reach Scotland Yard in time to bring
+help in the immediate danger which he foresaw--danger which he would
+never have run the risk of bringing upon Amaryllis Caldegard but for his
+conviction of that worse peril threatening her. He was, indeed, sure
+that his course, rash as it would be accounted in the event of failure,
+offered the best, and perhaps the only chance of taking home with him an
+Amaryllis as happy and full of laughter as he had known on the road
+between Oxford and Chesham.
+
+Twenty minutes' walking led him up a sharp rise to the level of the
+road, from which he looked down into the corresponding hollow on the
+other side. And there he saw what the little man of "The Coach and
+Horses" had described: a long, low stone house of two stories, facing
+south-west; windows neatly curtained, and fitted--an exotic touch--with
+_persiennes_; gravelled walks and smooth grass plots, a tree or two,
+shrubs and a few garden saplings; a garage big enough for one car which
+would look bigger than its envelope as it came out; and a pretentious
+gate--suburban villa half-heartedly aping country house--guarding the
+drive.
+
+He stood in the road, boldly looking down at the blinded windows,
+thinking how common these houses were; in many parts of England he had
+seen them, grinning, sulking, boasting, counterfeiting, smirking at a
+world that would not look twice.
+
+But this house seemed to leer at you through a filthy parade of modesty.
+
+On a bench in the shade of a large tree not more than thirty yards from
+the road was a patch of colour: a woman's garden hat, bound with an
+orange scarf. Since it was not hers, it seemed the best thing in sight.
+
+Fearing observation, he turned from the house, walking eastward.
+
+The copse of which he had been told lay not only behind the building to
+the north-east, but encroached on its eastern side so as to intervene
+with the tops of its younger trees between him and the back of the
+building.
+
+He followed the highway until he came to a field of ragged oats running
+from the road northward behind the little wood. Vaulting the stone fence
+at the roadside, he scrambled down the steep bank. Soon he was among the
+trees, making his way to the left towards the rear of "The Myrtles."
+Bushes and tree-trunks gave him cover until he was within five yards of
+the low wall of unmortared stone which made an irregular and dilapidated
+fence about the back of the house.
+
+From the wood's edge to the wall he crawled with the speed and silence
+of a Houssa scout, and, once in shelter of the stones, was not long in
+finding a crevice roughly funnel-shaped, which gave him, with small
+eyepiece, a wide outlook.
+
+Wretched grass-plots trodden into patches of bare earth, ashes, bones,
+potato-parings, a one-legged wheelbarrow; a brick dustbin overfilled
+till its rickety wooden lid gaped to show the mouthful it could not
+swallow; a coal-shed from whose door, hanging by one hinge, a blackened
+track led across the dying grass to a door standing open outwards from
+the structural excrescence which must be kitchen or scullery: these made
+the sordid complement of the hypocrisy which exuded from the front.
+
+That open door tempted him.
+
+If only he could find some indication of her room! For that Amaryllis
+was in that house he had less doubt than proof.
+
+From the front the windows looked out at no great distance on the high
+road. Signals were possible. They would lodge--imprison her at the back,
+and surely on the upper floor. But even that, on this side, had six
+windows, and he searched their flat glitter in vain for a peg to hang a
+guess upon.
+
+He had almost made up his mind to creep to that open scullery door and
+try his luck when, from the third window from the right, behind the
+glass there shone something white.
+
+Now the first window in this row was next the end of the house; the
+second, over the roof of the scullery; and the third had beneath it a
+straight drop--some seventeen feet of unbroken wall--to the ground.
+
+There was, indeed, three feet below the window-sill a rough
+string-course, which might give to a fugitive a moment's finger-hold
+before dropping to earth. But the fall between shoes and ground would be
+some two and a half yards--a serious matter even for an acrobat so
+placed that he could not watch his feet.
+
+And how should man or woman escaping get even the moment's grasp of that
+two-inch projection of stone?
+
+It was, then, a safe room for a prison.
+
+Bad glass refracted grotesquely the white shape behind it, but could not
+make its movement unfeminine; and, when the lower sash was slowly raised
+until it jammed about a foot above the sill, and two hands showed their
+fingers under the frame straining to force it higher, Dick's heart leapt
+to the belief that they were those pretty, expressive hands he had
+watched so often in lazy pleasure.
+
+He was upon the point of making a signal above the edge of his cover
+when a footfall checked him.
+
+A woman, dressed in a blue overall and carrying an empty japanned
+bucket, was hurrying from the scullery along the grimy track to the
+coal-shed.
+
+This out-house was so near to the watcher, that he could hear the
+pretty, eager, flaxen-haired, savage-faced little woman muttering to
+herself as she scraped and shovelled. He could, after a fashion, speak
+the Taal, and knew her more distinct phrases for European Dutch.
+
+"Not used to the job," reasoned Dick. "And no skivvy in the house _this_
+week." And he remembered the garden hat with the orange band.
+
+Half-way back she set down her load, straightened her back, and glanced
+at the upper part of the house.
+
+The sight of the partly-opened window and the white figure now drawn
+back a little into the room seemed to fill her with rage. She ran
+forward and, standing a few yards from the house, shook her fists
+furiously, pouring out a stream of abuse and threats of which hardly an
+articulate word reached Dick's ears. Having come to a climax with a
+shriek, hoarsely suppressed, she ran back to the bucket and with it
+stumbled quickly into the house.
+
+Dick was over the wall almost before she was out of sight; but
+clattering of coal-shovel and fire-grate told him she had not yet
+started on her way upstairs, and he followed with extreme caution.
+
+The door which stuck out into the yard soon hid him from the open
+doorway, and enabled him to bring his eyes above the sill of the window,
+which must be passed to reach the house, without fear of attack from
+behind.
+
+In the scullery, at the end further from the main building, was a small
+hobbed grate. By this the woman with the flaxen hair had set her coals,
+and was now lighting a fire, of which the paper was flaming high and the
+wood began already to crackle.
+
+In this commonplace task she seemed so unnaturally absorbed that Dick
+watched her with intense curiosity, his head held horizontally, so that
+one eye only topped the lower edge of the window-sill, thus making the
+least possible exposure of his head above it.
+
+Every now and then she would turn and pick out with her fingers little
+lumps of coal and drop them in the hottest crevices among the sticks;
+and each time he saw a face of cruelty more determined.
+
+He thought of Amaryllis, and knew that it was of Amaryllis that this
+little Dutch devil also was thinking.
+
+"Melchard's!" he thought; and knew that for him, Dick Bellamy, she must
+be, in what was coming, not a woman but a tiger or a bad man.
+
+The fire now glowed under its blaze. She took a shovel and strewed a
+thin layer of small coal over all. Next she spread a doubled sheet of
+newspaper on the stone floor, and laid on it small sticks and again
+small coal.
+
+Several times during this fire-lighting Dick had seen her glance, as she
+turned, at a small mound of stuff which lay on the further side of the
+hearth. She now lifted it, holding high, with a finger and thumb
+pinching each shoulder-strap, a woman's frock--a light, slender slip, of
+these latter days, to add the last exquisite grace.
+
+The fire flared, and shed its changing light on the green silk, so that
+by its iridescence of interwoven colours, chasing each other as the
+garment wavered in the draught, he knew it. Amaryllis had worn it at
+dinner last night.
+
+Under the light of the big lamp in the hall it had made her figure turn
+colour like an opal. And again, as she ran with that letter to her
+bedroom, crimson, purple, peacock blue and a green never the same, had
+chased each other down the swaying folds of her skirt.
+
+The little Dutchwoman eyed the frock, hating while she admired; then
+suddenly she pushed a fold of the silk into her mouth, and pulled with
+hands and tore with teeth until long streamers of silk flickered their
+reds and greens towards the fire.
+
+At last, with a sound between purring and growling, she bunched the
+stuff together and pushed it down on the coals, lifted the paper tray of
+fuel from the floor, laid it in the grate over the silk, turned away,
+threw off her overall and ran cat-footed into the house and out of his
+sight.
+
+And with her vanished Dick's last shadow of hesitation.
+
+He crept from behind the door, faced its outer edge, laid a hand from
+each side on its top, set his right foot on the inside knob of the
+handle, raised his left to the outer, and thence with a quick movement
+sprang astride of the top.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE WINDOW.
+
+
+When Amaryllis awoke from a sleep in which the remains of the drug
+Melchard had given her had happily combated the restlessness of fear,
+she had no memory of how she came to the room in which she found
+herself.
+
+Under the shock of the strange surroundings she sprang from the bed, and
+as her feet touched the floor, last night came back to her.
+
+She tried the door--locked!
+
+She went to the window, and had already raised the lower part until it
+jammed, when there came running beneath an angry woman, threatening with
+gesture and unintelligible words.
+
+It was Fridji, who was once Sir Randal's parlour-maid, and last night
+Melchard's companion in the car.
+
+Amaryllis drew back and looked round the room for her gown--the green
+silk she had worn at dinner last night. It had been taken from her body
+before she was laid on the bed. The rest of her clothes she still wore,
+even to the evening shoes which were hurting her feet. But the green
+frock was gone--an added precaution, no doubt, against her escape.
+
+Fear thrilled in her heart, and grew so terrible that, if the window had
+given her any prospect but that foul yard and the dark pine trees behind
+it, she would have broken its glass and screamed for help.
+
+Almost in despair, she sat trembling on the bed, and thought of her
+father and of the two Bellamys, and of what they would do, when they
+caught them, to the men who had stolen Ambrotox and the woman they
+loved.
+
+All the three? Well, two at least. Yet somehow she felt that it would
+not be surprising if the worst vengeance should be Limping Dick's.
+
+And inside her she smiled, and the shaking of her body began to subside.
+
+But before her courage was firm in the saddle there came footsteps in
+the passage--a foot that she knew. The key grated, the door opened, and
+Melchard entered the room, dressed in a soft, new-looking suit of
+purplish grey; the jacket too long in the body and too close in the
+waist, the wide, unstarched cuffs of the mauve shirt turned back--an
+embryo fashion--over the coat-sleeves.
+
+And with him came the miasma of that nauseating perfume.
+
+The mercy of God sent her anger, and she forgot that she rose before
+this intruder covered only in white princess petticoat, green silk
+stockings and high-heeled bronze shoes.
+
+The petticoat was cut low on neck and shoulders, and the white of the
+lace shoulder-straps showed bluish between the warm cream-colour of neck
+and of arms. The face, a moment before pale and worn almost to
+haggardness, was now flushed with the indignation which gave point and
+edge to the words which overwhelmed for a moment even the shameless and
+commercialized criminal.
+
+Of what he was, she knew little, but what she thought of him he could
+not escape hearing.
+
+Yet, when she paused in, rather than concluded her invective, he had
+already recovered his effrontery.
+
+"My dear Miss Caldegard," he said, "we were compelled last night, for
+your own good, to exhibit a mild opiate. Your health required it. It has
+impaired, I fear, your memory of the circumstances which have brought
+you under my care. When you have had a few weeks in which to benefit by
+the devoted care and scientific attention which we shall bring to bear
+on your case, you will learn to look on me as what I am--your medical
+attendant, and to forget--or--or----" and here he ogled her horribly
+with his fine eyes--"or remember in a new fashion your old lover."
+
+And with this disgusting phrase he came close up to her.
+
+"Lover still," he said, "though discarded and trampled upon."
+
+Amaryllis could not know that her very truculence was a fan to his
+flame.
+
+"Go out of my room," she cried, and struck him on his mouth and cheek.
+
+The blow was delivered with the action of a slap, but the fingers were
+clenched, and the arm was swung from the shoulder.
+
+Melchard seized her by the elbows, cruelty and joy making in his
+countenance a horrible mixture of emotion.
+
+With his face close to hers, he said:
+
+"Oh, yes, I'll go--soon! That tawny hair of yours, Amaryllis, is
+splendidly voluptuous against your skin of live, creamy satin. I long to
+run my fingers into its meshes."
+
+And actually he would have touched it--her hair!--but for a voice which
+spoke sharply through the partly-open door:
+
+"You're wanted, Alban. Come!"
+
+And Amaryllis, in spite of fear and disgust, almost laughed at the
+disgust and fear in his face as he released her.
+
+"My men downstairs," he said. "Soon--soon I shall see you again."
+
+Then, at the door, he turned to add: "There are four of them, prompt,
+even rash fellows--all armed but faithful and devoted to me. I beg you
+to wait until your breakfast is sent up. Attempts to escape are
+dangerous."
+
+Again the key was turned, and Amaryllis flung herself on the bed,
+shaking with rage and horror.
+
+But her attention was distracted from herself by the absence of
+departing footsteps.
+
+The man must be still at the door--listening, spying through some
+crevice, perhaps.
+
+No--he was talking--listening--replying, in a voice too low for the
+words to reach her.
+
+And then an answering voice, which rose by swift crescendo, until it
+drove the man with hasty steps down the passage, followed by a screaming
+final curse.
+
+Fridji the parlour-maid was jealous, was angry, and was making her
+Melchard a scene! Oh, but how funny things would be if they weren't so
+beastly!
+
+But Dutch Fridji, having no humour, entered the room in the worst temper
+of a depraved woman.
+
+"You want breakfast?" she said, locking the door and taking out the key.
+
+Amaryllis looked up with disdainful laziness.
+
+"Of course," she said, "please be quick."
+
+"If you cannot wait," replied Fridji, "you must go without."
+
+"You must not speak to me like that. You know very well that
+parlour-maids say 'ma'am' and are expected to be respectful."
+
+"Parlour-maids! I am no parlour-maid."
+
+"Indeed?" said Amaryllis.
+
+"Here--I am mistress!"
+
+"Oh!" said Amaryllis.
+
+"And you are prisoner--I tell you."
+
+"Yes?" said Amaryllis. "I'm afraid you've let yourself be dragged into a
+very wicked crime for which you will be severely punished."
+
+"Punish! To punish _me_! Drag in! But me? Me? Me? I am not dragged. I
+lead."
+
+"Really?" said Amaryllis.
+
+"The head is mine. I plan. And, because you will never leave this place
+I do not mind to tell you that it is I have done it. All this. We have
+the New Drug. I hold the man that shall make it and sell it. I am the
+leader. I get the key. I catch you by the throat, there in The Manor
+House, my pretty, red-haired mistress! I catch you while my Melchard,
+who is clever, prick your arm with the needle. I--I--I!"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Amaryllis. "But I do not think you are wise to tell all
+this to me."
+
+"Because you tell again? Oh, no, ma'am! I squeeze harder next time--and
+there are other things. This is good old establish firm, no risk taken."
+
+And Dutch Fridji came slowly towards Amaryllis.
+
+"You make love with my Alban," she said, "an' I stop it." Lifting her
+skirt, she fetched from a sheath in her stocking a sharp-pointed knife.
+"I have enough of you. Two months I must say 'ma'am'! And now, it is
+Alban!"
+
+"You mean to kill me?" asked Amaryllis.
+
+Dutch Fridji was like the nightmare vision of a Fury.
+
+For a moment Amaryllis was paralyzed. But Fridji liked the clatter of
+her own tongue.
+
+"It is that I mean," she said. "To kill you very slow. Your beautiful
+frock, it burn now. Soon your shoes, your stockings, your long
+petticoat, the corset shall burn, till there shall not be a shred they
+can say was yours. And then the body shall be burned--but first carve
+and chopped like meat at table."
+
+Amaryllis gasped and shuddered, giving fuel to the blaze, so that it
+crackled once more into fierce indiscretion.
+
+"I tell you things. Oh, yes, I tell. For the last one that died--it was
+a pity. He did not know before--knew not ever what was coming to him and
+to each part of him. That spoil the flavour of my dish, do you see?"
+
+A flourish of the knife put expressive finish to the words.
+
+Amaryllis backed into the corner between bed and door, speaking any word
+that came. On equal terms she would have fought for life like a cat, but
+the knife----
+
+"Mr. Melchard doesn't want me to be killed," she said.
+
+For a moment Fridji's rage choked her.
+
+"I'll scream, and he'll come with his men."
+
+"With this I have sent him running from your door," cried Fridji. "It is
+locked this side, and you will bleed to die before they break it."
+
+Not rushing, but creeping, Dutch Fridji approached.
+
+Amaryllis raised her eyes towards the window and the strip of sky it
+framed, in silent supplication. And already, half through the window,
+she saw her answer.
+
+And Fridji saw her victim's face flush with hope, and turned to see its
+cause.
+
+Through the opening which Amaryllis had left between sill and sash, his
+hands on the floor, his chin almost touching it, while his legs from
+knee to feet were still outside the window, she saw Dick Bellamy.
+
+Fridji, with blood in her mind, knife in her hand, and the proof of
+Amaryllis' face that this was an enemy, sprang to deal with the
+defenceless intruder.
+
+Amaryllis had seen the lank black hair, no longer sleek, and had
+received one gleam from the uplifted blue eyes; and now knew terror such
+as she had not felt even for herself.
+
+Nothing, it seemed, could come between the knife and Dick Bellamy--Dick
+who had come to her. And then she saw his left arm dart forward--an arm
+that seemed, on the floor, to shoot out to twice its natural length--and
+its fingers gripped Fridji's left ankle, jerking it towards him.
+
+The woman fell backwards, and Amaryllis caught her from behind.
+
+"Stop her mouth," said Dick from the floor.
+
+And the girl, her long hands almost meeting round Fridji's slender neck,
+squeezed with all her strength, forcing the head and shoulders to the
+ground.
+
+Fridji gaped for breath.
+
+"Stuff her mouth--blanket," said Dick, with his feet almost clear of the
+window-sill, yet keeping his hold on the ankle.
+
+Amaryllis forced the corner of the coverlet between Fridji's teeth and
+held it there, keeping up the pressure of the other hand on the throat.
+
+"That's what they did to me," she thought.
+
+Dick stood beside her.
+
+"Change with me," he whispered, and slid his left hand round the front
+of Dutch Fridji's neck. Amaryllis stood up.
+
+By the hold of his left, Dick raised the woman almost to her feet and,
+measuring his distance, struck her with his right fist on the left side
+of the neck directly below the ear--a short, sharp blow, the sound of
+which affected the watching girl with a pang of physical sickness.
+
+It might have been the noise made by a butcher flinging a slab of raw
+steak upon his block.
+
+Dick let the woman's body gently back to the floor, and Amaryllis saw
+that she was unconscious as a corpse.
+
+"Is she dead?" she said softly.
+
+"For five minutes--p'r'aps ten," he answered. "Where's the key?"
+
+Amaryllis picked it up from the floor.
+
+"Melchard said he'd got four men downstairs--armed," she whispered.
+
+"Heard him--but it's the only way--they've fixed that window. Just
+scraped in head first and we can't get out like that. Come on," said
+Dick, and put the key in the lock.
+
+"I've--I haven't got--haven't got any clothes." And there was no other
+expression of shame in her face than the two large tears that gathered
+slowly in her eyes.
+
+But Dick Bellamy ignored them, looking her up and down like a man
+considering the harness needed for a horse.
+
+"Take off her skirt," he said; then added: "Shoes might do." And with
+his back turned to the girl, he knelt and quickly unshod Dutch Fridji
+while Amaryllis unfastened the waistband of the skirt.
+
+"Yours wouldn't last a mile," said Dick, going to the window and looking
+out. "Put 'em on quick--say when."
+
+In a time wonderfully short, he thought, for a girl, she spoke.
+
+"I'm ready," said the small voice; and he turned to face a quaint figure
+in a skirt too short, and too wide on the hips. The brogue shoes would
+have looked better if the stockings had been of anything but green silk.
+
+But the pathos of sentiment and custom was in the bare arms and the two
+hands crossed on the chest and throat, with fingers spread in vain
+attempt to cover the whole; and in the plaintive simplicity of the voice
+which said:
+
+"But, oh, my neck! I can't possibly get into her blouse, and a blanket's
+too conspicuous."
+
+Dick stripped off his Norfolk jacket, holding it for her arms. As she
+hesitated, glancing at him, he frowned.
+
+"Please obey orders," he said, and she meekly slipped on the loose coat.
+He took from its pocket a folded white handkerchief, and tied it round
+her neck by two adjacent corners, so that it hung like a child's bib.
+Amaryllis pulled the collar up over the knot at the back, and began to
+button the coat over the linen.
+
+"Don't button it," he said, pulling off his necktie. "Cross the edges.
+Lift your arms."
+
+And he tied the dark green strip round her waist, knotting it in front.
+
+"Come on," he said; and, stooping, picked up Fridji's knife. "Where's
+the sheath?"
+
+"In her stocking," said Amaryllis.
+
+"Get it," said Dick, and unlocked the door.
+
+Amaryllis behind him whispered: "She moved a little," and brought him
+the leather sheath.
+
+They stepped silently into the passage. Dick locked the door and
+pocketed the key.
+
+"Quietly," he said, and as they crept towards the stairhead, he slid the
+sheathed knife into the pocket of the tweed jacket.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE STAIRS.
+
+
+The passage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a balustrade.
+
+The corridor was wider than the archway; and Dick, having made the girl
+hide behind its projection, stepped delicately out upon the square
+landing, and looked over the rails.
+
+The staircase mounted in a single broad flight from the floor of an
+entrance hall larger and more pretentious than he had expected. The
+attempt at an appearance of comfort was a failure, but money had been
+spent, and a sort of bad harmony between furniture and decoration forced
+itself upon the eye.
+
+Across the hall, to the left, the front door stood open to the sunlight.
+In the wall facing him and the stair's foot were two closed doors, and
+others, doubtless, to match them, beneath the gallery on which he stood.
+
+He had already made up his mind to lead the girl noiselessly down the
+stair and through the open door, and thence to make, if necessary, a
+running fight for it, with the chance of taking his pursuers in detail,
+when he heard a man's steps, accompanied by a faint tinkle of china,
+coming towards the hall, he judged, along the corridor immediately
+beneath that which he and Amaryllis had used.
+
+Something, he remembered, had been said of breakfast, to be sent up, and
+he waited until there appeared, first the tray and then the man that
+carried it; a thick-set fellow, with heavy boots, shabby clothes, and a
+bald spot among the rough sandy hair of his crown.
+
+It was plain that he was making for the stair, and Dick drew back behind
+the projection of the arch, opposite to Amaryllis. He saw the questions
+in her eyes and knew she could hear the approaching footsteps.
+
+He made a gesture for silence; a silence which seemed to Amaryllis to
+last immeasurable time, while tea-cup tinkled against milk-jug, ever
+nearer and nearer.
+
+She saw him take a swift glance through the arch at the comer she could
+not see, draw back three steps up the passage, and start forward again
+with a face that made her heart jump, and a terrific limping rush of
+three or four strides to the stairhead. And she craned forward just in
+time to see the man with the tray, two steps from the top, receive in
+his stomach a kick which lifted, it seemed, the wretched creature and
+all that he carried in a single flight to the bottom of the stair.
+
+After a little clash of plates and cups on the impact of the kick, there
+was a sensible silence before the appalling crash and thud at the
+stair's foot. Amaryllis held back a scream, but reeled as if fainting.
+
+Dick caught her by the shoulders and shook her, as women will shake a
+child.
+
+"Buck up," he said; and she clung to his hands a moment. Then,
+
+"I'm all right," she murmured, and stood alone.
+
+Even as she spoke it seemed that in the hall below three doors opened at
+once, and that from each rushed a man, clamouring questions; and then,
+having seen the clutter of tray and crockery, stood aghast.
+
+Dick, after one glimpse of the three so standing, took cover again,
+drawing the girl with him.
+
+"Looks as if he fell backwards right from the top," said a bass voice,
+which Dick ascribed to the big man with the black beard who had seemed
+to carry himself somewhat above the others.
+
+"Slipped 'is foot and pitched backwards, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."
+
+"But why backwards?" asked Black Beard. And Dick imagined a suspicious
+glance at the stairhead.
+
+"I guess 'e try save tray and lose _balanza_ of 'eemself," said a third,
+whose exotic voice and uneasy English affected Dick with an undefined
+reminiscence.
+
+"Carry the fool to his kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick
+heard the crushing under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and
+a shuffling of two pairs of feet.
+
+But they had not gone many yards with their burden, when he heard a
+fourth man enter the hall, and a voice in which langour strove in vain
+against asperity--Melchard's voice, which he had heard for the first
+time while he clung with his fingers to the window-sill of the bedroom
+and with his shoe-tips to the string-course below it, sinking his head
+even below his defenceless knuckles.
+
+At the sound of this voice Dick now stretched himself prone, and
+wriggled, Amaryllis thought, like some horrid worm, laying his left
+cheek to the floor until he reached a point where his right eye got its
+line of sight, between the uprights of the gallery's balustrade, on the
+four live men and the inert, midway between the door out of sight
+beneath him, and the place where the broken tea-pot had spilt its
+contents in an ugly pool near the lowest tread of the stair.
+
+"What's that?" Melchard had said. "Oh, put it down." And they laid the
+body on the floor.
+
+Melchard looked from Black Beard to the cockney, and back.
+
+"Is it beer again? I said not more than a tumbler of whisky before
+lunch. Beer always plays hell with him."
+
+"Then you should give 'im 'arshish, sir," said the cockney. "It's the
+Injin 'emp 'e needs. But 'e ain't smelt beer since we left Millsborough.
+Somethin's just appeared to 'im, and 'e ain't 'arf copped it."
+
+"Appeared? Tell me what happened," said Melchard, querulously.
+
+"Fell right down the stair, tray and all," said Black Beard, "just as if
+he'd been pushed."
+
+Melchard was stooping over the scarce breathing body.
+
+"He's not dead," he declared.
+
+"He will be," said Black Beard, "unless you 'phone to Millsborough for a
+doctor damn quick."
+
+"Don't be a fool, Ockley. Better let him die than bring a sharp-witted
+medical practitioner to _my_ house, to-day of all days."
+
+"If we have a death here in _your_ house," Ockley retorted, "they'll
+want to know _how_ and _why_ and _when_. And 'no doctor called'--and
+'this shady Mr. Melchard'--and all the damned things that always happen.
+Will that be good for your health--with the whole game in your hands,
+too?"
+
+Melchard was hit, and Dick thought that he saw his face lose colour.
+
+"Well?" he said nervously.
+
+"Either fetch medical aid," replied Ockley, "or bury him under the
+ash-heap. And that's going a bit far for an accident."
+
+"Was he pushed? I wonder," said Melchard; and the pair, with heads
+together, spoke in whispers inaudible to Dick, who writhed himself six
+inches back from the baluster, in fear of the upward glance which might
+come at any moment.
+
+He had heard enough, and his usual policy came into play.
+
+Amaryllis was able to watch him without exposing herself to the eyes of
+the enemy; for they had gathered round the injured tray-bearer so near
+to her side of the hall that the floor of the gallery shut off their
+view of anything below the top of the arch round whose side she peered,
+crouching low.
+
+Dick, then, she saw moving snake-wise to the stair; and she marvelled
+that, even in the hush of the voices below, no slightest sound of his
+movement reached her ear. Chin first, his head disappeared over the
+first step, the long body dragging after it, half-inch by half-inch,
+until all of him that she could see was the thick soles of his boots,
+clinging, as it appeared, by their toes to the edge of the highest step.
+
+Her heart shook for his danger, which now so closely embraced her own
+that she forgot its separate significance.
+
+The voices rose again.
+
+"But you're a qualified man yourself," said Melchard. "You'll be
+responsible."
+
+"Fat lot of good that'll do you," replied Black Beard. "Qualified, by
+God! When I can't prove it without proving also that I'm off the
+register, and that my name's not Ockley!" He broke off with an ugly
+laugh, then added: "Let's go up and see."
+
+And now Amaryllis saw her serpent shoot up to a great rod of vengeance.
+Before she could ask herself, "What is he going to do?" Dick Bellamy had
+done it; vaulting, even as he rose, over the rail of the stair, and,
+with an appalling scream which might have come from a maniac in frenzy,
+or the mortal agony of a wounded beast, literally falling upon his
+enemies.
+
+His right foot caught Melchard between jaw and shoulder, shooting him
+supine and headlong upon the polished floor until his head hit the
+corner of the stone kerb about the hearth; while the left knee
+simultaneously struck the cockney, who fell, with Dick's crouching
+weight full upon him, heavily to the ground; and Amaryllis, fear
+forgotten, leaning over the rail, heard at the same moment, but as
+separate sounds, the blow of the under man's head upon the boards and
+that of Dick's right fist on its left jaw.
+
+Then Dick was on his feet again, but barely in time. For in the clamour
+and rushing fall of this wild figure, clad in grey flannel trousers and
+blue shirt, with lank black hair flying stiffly up and away from the
+savage mouth and blazing blue eyes, Ockley had leapt back out of reach.
+But the little Spaniard, standing apart, was astonished; his dark eyes
+showed wide rings of white eyeball, and the open mouth teeth even
+whiter, as he stared, aghast yet curious, at the living thunderbolt
+which had fallen so near to him.
+
+Ockley, however, directly his eyes had taken in what he had leapt back
+from, had begun what even Amaryllis could see was the rush of an expert.
+He did not, indeed, catch Dick upon his knees, as she had feared, but
+left him little time to steady himself. She could see that the big man
+was brave, and as strong as a bull, so that hers looked slender by
+comparison.
+
+But Dick was less unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face
+vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right
+aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy
+left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely
+and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent him staggering against
+the balustrade of the stair.
+
+And now the Spaniard found what he had been looking for.
+
+"Por Dios!" he wailed, "it iss Limping Deek!" and so fled.
+
+Dick followed up his advantage, forcing the pace, but Ockley would have
+none of it until he had worked himself into the middle of the floor;
+then suddenly coming again, got home with a tremendous right which Dick
+failed to stop with anything better than his left cheek-bone.
+
+The blow was well timed and delivered with the full force of a strong
+man fighting scientifically, perhaps for his life; and Dick Bellamy knew
+that, hard as he kept himself, he could not afford to take another of
+its kind.
+
+Crouching, he watched Black Beard between his fists which protected his
+face, the perpendicular fore-arms guarding his body; and in the moment
+while his sight was clearing, he heard, from somewhere above him, a
+little agonized moan, and found himself again.
+
+Ockley, elated, pursued his advantage with a savage left drive which
+might have proved worse for Dick than the right which had just split his
+cheek, had he not, ducking to his right in perfect time, met the big man
+with a heavy left jolt in the mouth, and, simultaneously advancing his
+right foot and straightening his body, followed it up with a right to
+the jaw that knocked his opponent full length. He fell and lay beyond
+the projection of the hearth on the other side of which was Melchard,
+still as death.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE KNIFE-THROWER.
+
+
+With the sleeve of his shirt Dick wiped the blood from his cheek, looked
+down at Ockley, and then up at Amaryllis, half-way down the stair.
+
+"That's four. Where's the fifth?" he asked.
+
+"He ran out there," she answered. "You frightened him."
+
+"Come down," said Dick; and when she reached the floor, she found him
+kneeling by Melchard, searching his pockets.
+
+She came close and touched him on the shoulder.
+
+"Let's get out of the house--now, now!" she pleaded, lowering her voice
+in the presence of so much that looked like death.
+
+"Pocket these," said Dick, handing behind him some letters and a
+pocket-book.
+
+With a sharp tug he disengaged the side-pocket wedged between Melchard's
+body and the floor, and from it took out a small parcel wrapped in white
+paper. Of its two seals one had been broken. He peered into the opened
+end.
+
+"Small bottle--white powder," he said.
+
+"That's it," replied Amaryllis. "Do let's go--please."
+
+"Was there anything else?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, do come away. I'm frightened," said the girl, imploring.
+
+"So'm I--badly," said Dick, and rose to his feet.
+
+The letters from Melchard's pocket were still in her hand. He took them,
+and picked out a white envelope with no writing on it. The wax seal had
+been broken.
+
+He drew from it a sheet of paper, and unfolded it before her.
+
+"That's the formula--it must be," said Amaryllis.
+
+"Let's hook it, then," said Dick, buttoning the package and envelope
+into his hip-pocket, and slipping the rest of Melchard's papers into the
+side pocket of his own jacket, hanging loosely on Amaryllis.
+
+As they crossed the hall he missed Ockley.
+
+"My God!" he cried. "The black bloke's gone. Did you see him go--or hear
+him?"
+
+Amaryllis shook her head.
+
+"I thought I'd given him a five-minute dose at least," said Dick on the
+threshold, and taking her left elbow in his hand, began to run. "We've
+got to grease like hell. It's a mile and a half to my car."
+
+They were half-way to the pretentious gate, and Amaryllis was already
+distressed by the pace, when they heard behind them the thud of a
+revolver. A twig with two leaves, cut from a branch above and beyond
+them, fell into the road. Dick increased his pace, so that Amaryllis was
+only kept from falling by his firm hold of her arm.
+
+A second shot hit the drive behind them, spraying their backs with
+gravel.
+
+"High. Low, to left--jump!" yelled Dick, swinging the girl leftward past
+his body with a force so sudden that she fell on the grass at the
+roadside, in the shelter of an artificial knoll covered with shrubs; and
+this time Dick heard the bullet close on his right.
+
+He threw himself on the grass, sharing her cover.
+
+"All right?" he asked.
+
+Speechless for lack of breath, Amaryllis nodded, trying to smile.
+
+"You can't run to the gate," he said, rather as if speaking to himself
+than to her. "Wind's gone already, and it's a hundred yards without
+cover. To the bank of the road's only about twenty-five. Breathe deep.
+Is my cap in that pocket still?"
+
+Amaryllis found and gave it to him. Dick, unrolling it, rose slowly to
+his knees, facing the rhododendron bush.
+
+"Oh, don't!" exclaimed the girl.
+
+"Wouldn't, if I'd got a stick. Listen; he's using an Army Webley, I
+think. Six shots. He's fired three. If I can draw the second three
+before he fills up, it gives us a start while he reloads."
+
+On his knees, he peered through the bush.
+
+"Still at the door," he said. "Breathe deep. On the third shot we go for
+the embankment. I'll get you up it. Then over the road. There's timber
+that side as well as this."
+
+Again Amaryllis nodded, and Dick, rising a little higher, disposed the
+cap between two clumps of leaves, where he hoped it would seem supported
+by his head.
+
+"Real G. A. Henty stunt, ain't it?" he said. "But I've shaken him up a
+bit, and it's worth trying."
+
+He raised the cap slightly, let it drop back again on the rhododendron
+leaves, and laid himself full length on the ground.
+
+"Third shot--if it comes. Breathe deep," he repeated.
+
+There was a pause, agonizing to the girl; and then it came.
+
+Three shots, thumping in rapid succession, the last of them depositing
+the cap almost in her hands. Clutching it, she scrambled to her feet,
+and Dick, catching her by the arm beneath the shoulder, forced her into
+a thirty yards' sprint, in which, while her heart beat as if it would
+burst, her feet seemed to touch the ground barely half a dozen times
+before the grey stones of the embankment rushed to meet them almost in
+the face.
+
+How he managed to force her to the top and bundle her over the parapet,
+she could never remember, any more than she could forget Ockley's next
+shot, which was discharged as their figures showed against his sky-line
+for the two seconds which it took them to cross the road and fling
+themselves recklessly down the slope of its other side.
+
+"Brace up," said Dick at the bottom. "You've got some guts, anyhow; and
+once we're well into that undergrowth, your hairy friend may come after
+us with a Vickers and be damned to him."
+
+To get to it he had to lift her over a swampy patch in a hollow to a
+stony place beyond it; whereafter they were soon as well hidden from the
+road as its outline lay exposed to the search of their eyes.
+
+But Amaryllis at first left the watching to his, closing her own and
+lying still, in sheer womanly terror of being sick. Somewhere within was
+a doubt as to whether she did not already adore him, and a pitiable
+anxiety that "nothing horrid" should be associated in his mind with her
+person.
+
+Dick, lying at full length, turned his eyes every now and again from his
+watch on the road to look at the girl's face; and saw, with anxiety as
+well as pity, how pale it was, and how wasted already by hunger, fear
+and running--and perhaps by the drug they had given her the night
+before. He must ask no further exertion of her until she was fed and
+rested.
+
+His object was to make his way as quickly as possible to "The Coach and
+Horses," his car, and safety.
+
+But he dared not move from this shelter, nor even stand upright, until
+he knew what Ockley intended. Already he had tasted the man's quality,
+and, with the girl on his hands, held him in healthy fear.
+
+"They've gone too far," he reflected, "to back out."
+
+Had Black Beard been playing 'possum when he ought to have been laid
+out? He must, it would seem, have been pretty fit all the time to get
+away without making a sound.
+
+Then a thought which sent fear through him like a knife:
+
+"If he saw or heard what we took from that scented swine, no wonder he's
+shooting to kill. It's God's judgment on me for a fool--a fool that
+believed in peace and policemen. Limping Dick on a gaff like this
+without a gun!"
+
+And then he saw a figure, clear against the sky, standing on the road,
+at the head of the path by which, three-quarters of an hour ago, he
+himself had gone up to get his first view of "The Myrtles."
+
+It was Ockley; even at three hundred yards Dick could distinguish the
+black beard and heavy shoulders of the enemy, who was gazing from his
+high point, not in the direction of the fugitives, but along the
+moorland path to "The Coach and Horses"--the path which lay open to his
+eye for its whole length.
+
+"Easy to guess the way I want to go," Dick calculated, "and easier to
+see that I haven't dared take it." Then, as Ockley turned his head
+towards the trees, "and easiest of all," he added aloud, "to spot the
+only cover."
+
+Amaryllis opened her eyes, and he saw that her face was less grey.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"The Hairy One," said Dick, "looking for us."
+
+"But he can't see us, can he?"
+
+"No. That's why he knows where we are. He's coming down."
+
+"Don't be worried, Dick," said Amaryllis softly. "You'll get the best of
+him again. You've been splendid."
+
+"I've been a fool."
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"To be caught without a gun. I could have killed him."
+
+"Would you?"
+
+"It's he or us."
+
+Her answer surprised him. There was no fear in her face, but sympathy
+filled it; and a little colour came.
+
+"Then you will kill him," she said with assurance. "I'll do whatever you
+say, and we'll beat him."
+
+Dick nodded. "See those hazels?" he said. "We'll scrounge behind 'em to
+start with."
+
+By the time they were settled in the new cover they could hear heavy
+feet in the distance, crashing through the low tangle of undergrowth.
+And Amaryllis, fear cast out by trust, and her physical prostration for
+the moment counteracted by the intensity of her interest in him, and by
+her curiosity to see how next his versatility of resource would show
+itself, watched Dick's face as he listened to the feet of his enemy.
+Each step, she thought, had a different shade of meaning for him. His
+left ear seemed to follow, and his eyes seemed to see each stride of the
+hunter, and at last he spoke:
+
+"He's working along this side of the embankment. Now he's in the track
+that cuts through this copse. We're close to it here--see, through
+there, between the beech and the young oak. Hear his feet: stones,
+puddle, soft rut," he said rhythmically. "Caught his foot. He's
+following the path--going slower--walking, and trying to look both sides
+at once in the undergrowth."
+
+A pause, and then he said, with a jerk:
+
+"Take that coat off."
+
+Amaryllis obeyed, and lay still.
+
+Beside the rutted cart-track, a few yards from where they lay, was a
+pile of brushwood, cut and stacked for fuel. From this, with a cautious
+eye and ear on the bend where the track twisted out of sight in the
+direction of the high road, he took an armful of sticks and twigs and
+buttoned round it the Norfolk jacket. He tore grass in great handfuls
+and stuffed the ends of the sleeves, Amaryllis helping eagerly as she
+seized his purpose.
+
+He next took the Dutchwoman's knife from the dummy's pocket and dragged
+the rude torso to the side of the woodstack furthest from the expected
+approach, pushing it out across the track, so that, buttons downward,
+with left arm extended beyond the head which was not there, the right
+doubled beneath the breast, and the thrice-perforated cap, with a bunch
+of grass beneath it, dropped within the bend of the supposed left elbow,
+and the non-existence of legs concealed by the wood-pile, it might well
+be mistaken, by one coming down the wheel-track from the road, for a man
+stricken or sleeping.
+
+Behind them was a small, deep hollow, where the ancient stump of some
+great tree had rotted.
+
+"Get down there," said Dick. "Don't stand, roll in and curl up."
+
+And the last she saw of him as she obeyed, was the back of the black
+head and the blue shirt, rising erect some ten yards up the track from
+the wood-pile, making themselves small behind the largest tree-trunk in
+sight, and the gently swaying right hand poising in its palm Dutch
+Fridji's knife.
+
+Then she obeyed orders, curled up in her musty lair, and prayed.
+
+Heavily nearer came the footsteps--walking--walking--walking--until the
+girl feared she must cry out or faint. She bit through a lump of the
+handkerchief he had tied round her neck for a stomacher--and then kissed
+it.
+
+Suddenly came a hoarse voice, foul words uttered in furious exultation,
+and the feet were running--nearer--nearer--and once more--twice--the
+thumping note of the big revolver.
+
+Oh! the end was coming. Her breast was squeezed in, and her head
+bursting. Hardly knowing what she did, she peered over the edge of the
+beastly, uncovered little grave, just in time to see the black brute,
+red-faced, in the cart-track; to see the blue arm swing, and a long
+glitter in the air between them; to hear a horrible sound and see what
+sent her back into her hole, with hands over eyes to shut out what was
+already inside.
+
+And then Dick's voice, and his hand helping her out.
+
+Standing up, she looked at him. In his face there was no blood under the
+brown, but his eyes were more content than she had seen them since just
+before she opened the letter from Melchard--a hundred years ago.
+
+Her eyes asked him the question she could not put into words, and he
+nodded.
+
+"You said I should, you know."
+
+"You just had to, Dick," she answered.
+
+He looked at her keenly.
+
+"You're beat," he said. "Food's what you want; but 'The Coach and
+Horses' over there, where I left my car, is the only place. We must go a
+bit out of our way to keep out of sight of their damned house."
+
+He went to the dummy to free the coat of its stuffing.
+
+While he bent over, Amaryllis, fascinated yet repelled by what she could
+just perceive lying in the path, crept towards it--and wished she had
+not.
+
+She was turning away when her eye was caught by a dull blue gleam from
+something in the grass beyond the body lying face downward in the deeply
+rutted track; and there grew in the dazed mind of the girl an impulse to
+see what it might be.
+
+Averting her eyes from the dead body, she stepped delicately, as if
+fearing to wake it, to the other side of the way, and picked up the
+revolver which Ockley had dropped in his fall.
+
+Her heart gave a great pulse of delight. This was a thing which Dick
+needed, and Dick must have everything he desired.
+
+With an exclamation of pleasure she turned to take it straight to him,
+forgetting the fearful thing in the road; seeing it but just in time to
+avoid stumbling.
+
+At her feet was the back of the dead man's head, the face wedged into
+the wheel-rut, with the beard pushed up between the left cheek and the
+hardened edge of mud. The channel of the rut, where she could see down
+into it between ear and shoulder, seemed full of the blood which had
+dyed the shirt-collar and the shoulder of the coat.
+
+And aimed at her eyes, like an accusing finger, there stuck out from the
+hairy neck the point of Dutch Fridji's knife.
+
+An absurd sense of guilt, maudlin pity for mere death, and dread of the
+unknown, crowding in cruel rivalry to destroy her weakened self-control,
+sent her staggering to Dick over ground which seemed to rise and fall
+like the sea. For she was keeping hold on common sense by the thought
+that there was something that Dick wanted--what, she had forgotten--but
+she had it, and he must have it.
+
+He had seen her bending over Ockley, and went to meet her.
+
+Dimly she saw him, and stretched out her hands, lifting the pistol.
+
+"It's for you," she said; and fainted, falling forward into his arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+PENNY PANSY.
+
+
+Dick Bellamy lifted the girl and carried her to a spot where he could
+lay her down with head a little lower than heels; watched her until the
+colour of the face improved and the breath became more regular; and then
+made use of her insensibility to pay his last duty to the dead.
+
+Without moving the body, he went through the pockets, finding nothing
+worth keeping except a few letters and a bunch of keys; for revolver
+cartridges there were none.
+
+For a moment he regarded the grim dagger point, deciding to leave it
+where it was.
+
+"If Melchard finds it," he thought, "he'll think it's something to do
+with his little Dutch trollop."
+
+Returning to Amaryllis, he stood once more looking down at her.
+
+He could not carry her in her present state two miles across the moor in
+the growing heat, and with only one of their five enemies safely dead,
+while the four others hung on his flank, cunning and desperate, if able
+to think and act.
+
+And there was Fridji--she was surely herself again--either screaming or
+at liberty.
+
+His own stomach, in spite of his few mouthfuls at "The Coach and
+Horses," reminded him that Amaryllis had not eaten during the last
+thirteen, or fourteen hours.
+
+A little breeze had arisen, blowing from the south-east, and brought
+with it to his nostrils the smell of wood-smoke. He looked at the pile
+of cut wood.
+
+"I ought to have known," he thought; and stooping, raised the girl,
+still unconscious, tied the jacket by the arms round her neck, and
+lifting her so that her waist was against his shoulder, set out to
+windward, following the wheel-tracks.
+
+Ten minutes' steady walking brought him to a bend in the path which
+showed him the smoke he had been smelling, rising from the brick chimney
+of a squat stone cottage which, rather than to nestle among the woods,
+as well-behaved cottages should, seemed to shrink from the ragged timber
+which surrounded it.
+
+Beside the door, on a battered kitchen chair, sat a woman, reading what
+Dick took for a newspaper. As he drew nearer she rose, and picked up a
+tin wash-basin full of corn; and to the "Coop, coop, coop," of her
+melancholy voice came clucking and scrambling chickens and hens in grand
+flutter of greed.
+
+Her eyes were on them as she scattered the grain, and Dick could see her
+clearly enough to wish he had a man to deal with, before the sound of
+his steps rose above the clamour of the poultry, and the woman looked
+up.
+
+If he had taken, at that moment, any interest in his own appearance, he
+would have expected her to scream; for the chicken-feeder raised her
+eyes to see, limping towards her, clad in muddy boots, torn grey
+trousers and blue cotton shirt with streaks of drying blood down the
+left breast, a tall, dark-haired man, carrying a woman hanging across
+his shoulder.
+
+And on the man's left cheek was a bruised cut, swelled, and clotted over
+with dried blood, which had run down in a stream, flowing over the jaw
+and ending at the collar; and all the way the drying rivulet had clung
+to the dark stubble of a twenty-four hours' beard.
+
+For the rest, sweat, dust, fasting and sleeplessness had made of this a
+face whose horror was but increased by the alertness of the eyes, which
+shone with so shocking a blueness that the woman, finding them unlike
+any eyes which she had seen before, called them to herself, "evil
+eyes--the eyes of a desperate man."
+
+Being a person of some courage, she managed with an effort to keep her
+hold of the basin and to scatter the remaining grains among the fowls
+before addressing her terrific visitor.
+
+"You're trespassin'," she said, with harsh self-possession. And from the
+grass she picked up her cheap magazine and dropped it into the basin
+which she had just slapped down on the bench by the door.
+
+On the thin paper cover Dick read _The Penny Pansy_.
+
+"It is not trespassing, madam," he replied in a voice whose ingratiating
+quality was devoid of affectation, "--it can't be trespassing for a man
+in great need to come for help to the nearest house."
+
+"I'm too poor to help the poorest," objected the woman, "and I don't
+like your luggage, sir." And she wondered why she had _sirred_ a
+cut-throat looking ruffian such as this.
+
+Dick Bellamy wondered why the woman, in this lonely place, spoke so
+differently from the landlord of "The Coach and Horses." But he
+remembered _The Penny Pansy_, and felt for an opening.
+
+Her gaze reminded him of his blood.
+
+"It is not, madam," he said impressively, "a corpse that I carry; though
+how long the lady will survive, unless you can furnish us with
+nourishment and shelter, I dare not conjecture. This blood which you see
+is my own, spent in her defence."
+
+He sat down on a chopping-block not far from the door, sliding Amaryllis
+to his knees, and resting her head against his shoulder.
+
+"You can't sit there all day nursing a great, grown girl, like she was a
+child," said the woman.
+
+"That is indeed true," he replied. "And therefore I beg you to let us
+rest in your house until the young lady is fit to travel."
+
+"It's easy to talk of travelling," she objected with sour insolence.
+"But 'tis my belief that, once let the hussy in, I'll never be rid of
+her."
+
+"My desire to be gone," replied Dick, "by far outweighs any anxiety of
+yours, my good woman."
+
+"Are you her husband?" asked the woman, impressed, but trying to keep
+the severity from fading out of her face.
+
+"Not yet," replied Dick, assuming an expression of extreme solemnity.
+"About us two, madam, hangs a web of mystery. It is a story I should
+like to confide in you, for there is something in your face which
+reminds me of my old mother," and he brought a note of pathos into his
+voice, straight from the pages of "East Lynne," words and tone coming
+with an ease which surprised him.
+
+"There's naught preventing," said the woman, expectantly.
+
+"Except that the lady needs rest, I want a wash, and we both want food,"
+said Dick. "You just be as kind as you look, and I'll give you a pound
+for every half-hour we spend in your house, and, if there's time, a
+romance into the bargain. You know what's stranger than fiction, don't
+you, mother?"
+
+"The truth, they do say. But I dunno," she answered, doubtfully.
+
+"What has happened to me in the last twenty-four hours," said Dick,
+"would shame the most exciting serial in the _Millsborough Herald_."
+
+"'Tis the _Courier_ has the best," interrupted the woman eagerly.
+
+"Mine will knock spots off the _Courier_--if we have time for it," said
+Dick, in the tone of dark suggestion.
+
+"Bring her in," said the woman, curiosity prevailing. "I'll do my best
+for you both;" and Dick, rising with care not to disturb his now
+sleeping burden, carried it into the cottage.
+
+The little house consisted of a large kitchen and two bedrooms opening
+from it. The woman, now almost hospitable, opened one of the inner
+doors.
+
+"My son Tom's room," she said, with some pride. "He's away to
+Millsborough. Better put the lady in here. 'Tis a better bed than mine,
+and all clean and tidy for him against he comes on Monday."
+
+She sighed heavily over some thought of her son, and watched her strange
+guest lay his strange load on the bed.
+
+The idea that under this ill-fitting, already draggled skirt, and loose,
+ridiculous man's jacket were concealed the fine skin and well-tended
+person of a lady, filled her with expectation of romance. If the
+_Millsborough Herald_ had taught her to despise the "low moral tone" of
+those who ride in carriages and know not hardship, the _Penny Pansy_, in
+its own inimitable manner, had compelled her to believe that they
+possessed a distinction which she could not define.
+
+They were "dainty" in appearance, "delicate" in thought, and "very pale"
+in love or tragic circumstances.
+
+But this one--if lady indeed she were--was pale with exhaustion, perhaps
+hunger, as any woman might be; and yet through it all there shone dimly
+something which reminded her of the romance she had drunk from the
+shallow and sluggish channel of machine-made fiction.
+
+If this were a heroine, then the queer, persuasive man, bloody and
+blue-eyed, was the hero--and his kind she knew neither in _Penny
+Pansy's_ country nor her own.
+
+"Half a dozen eggs, please, laid to-day. I give half a crown apiece for
+eggs, if I like 'em," said Dick. "Got any brandy, whisky, or gin? And
+what's your name?"
+
+"Brundage, sir."
+
+"And the name of this place?"
+
+"Monkswood Cottage, near Margetstowe."
+
+"Well, then, Mrs. Brundage--about that brandy?"
+
+"There _is_ a drop of rum--for medicine, so to say," admitted Mrs.
+Brundage, with a cold simper.
+
+"Good medicine too," he said. "Lady Adelina will take some in the eggs
+I'm going to beat up for her. For me, get bacon and eggs, tea, and bags
+of bread and butter. See, she's opening her eyes. I'll leave you to look
+after her."
+
+Outside the cottage door, he examined the revolver Amaryllis had given
+him. Of its six cartridges, four had been discharged. But two might make
+all the difference; and, after all, he had only to get Amaryllis to the
+car, or the car to Amaryllis.
+
+And as he walked round the cottage, watching the woods, reflection led
+him more and more to believe that he had shaken himself free of his
+enemies. All but the Woman and the Dago were more or less damaged; none,
+it was probable, knew in what direction Ockley had disappeared; fear of
+the evidence he held against them might now prompt them rather to flight
+than pursuit; and what, he asked himself, could that yellow-haired
+she-devil, even if the little Dago that had bolted were faithful to his
+fellows, do against him now?
+
+Amaryllis should have her rest.
+
+Passing her window, he heard her talking rapidly, her words broken by
+sobs which pained him, and snatches of laughter which hurt him more.
+
+He met Mrs. Brundage at the door.
+
+"She's feared of me--pushes me away," she whispered. "Highsterical, you
+may call it. If you're Dick, sir, it's you she wants. I've got her in
+bed, but I don't promise she'll stay there."
+
+He pushed past her, saw the rum-bottle and the eggs set out on the
+kitchen table, took a tumbler and spoon from the dresser, and broke the
+first egg into the glass.
+
+"Sugar," he said, "and milk."
+
+Mrs. Brundage gave him both, with a quickness which pleased him.
+
+"Tell her Dick's coming," he said, and the woman went, leaving the door
+ajar.
+
+As he beat the eggs to a froth, he could hear her awkward attempts to
+soothe the girl's distress.
+
+When the mixture was ready, "I'm coming," he called. "Dick's coming to
+you, sure thing," and took it into the bedroom.
+
+"I think," he said, standing over her, "that you're making _rather_ a
+fool of yourself."
+
+"I know I am. But I can't stop." Then, sitting up, with tears running
+down her face, she sobbed out: "Don't _you_ be unkind to me too."
+
+He sat down on the edge of the bed, put an arm round her shaking body,
+and held the tumbler towards her.
+
+"Drink it up," he said; and the Brundage woman noted how adroitly he
+avoided the hand that would have pushed away the glass.
+
+"I don't want it. I want you. I'm safe with you."
+
+"It's both or neither. Drink it slowly. I'll stay to the last drop," he
+said, smiling down at her as she had never seen him smile before.
+
+She obeyed, looking up at him between the mouthfuls, with something like
+adoration in her eyes.
+
+When only a quarter of the mixture was left in the glass, she spoke:
+
+"You're good to me," she said.
+
+"Of course," he answered, and she laid her head on his shoulder and
+slept at once.
+
+So for a while he held her; and the watcher saw the strength and
+judgment with which, a little later, he lowered the head to the pillow
+so that the change of position never brought a quiver to the closed
+eyelids; and, feeling romance as never before, she let a man play
+sick-nurse to a maiden in bed without one censorious thought, and became
+dimly aware for a moment in her drab life that love and modesty,
+strength and beauty, safety and trust, spring to meet each other out of
+the hidden root of things.
+
+Dick laid the coverlet over the girl's shoulders, and walked out of the
+room with a silence of which the woman achieved only an indifferent
+imitation.
+
+"And him with that bad limp, too," she said to herself afterwards, "and
+them thick boots!"
+
+"Breakfast," said Dick, in that low tone of his which never whispered.
+"Leave her door open, and our voices will make her feel safe in her
+sleep. Give me a towel and soap. I'll wash at the pump while you make
+tea."
+
+When he had washed, eaten many eggs and drunk much tea, Mrs. Brundage
+thought her turn had come.
+
+"Lady Adeline----" she began, but Dick turned on her so sudden a stare
+that she stopped short. And no less suddenly he remembered.
+
+The woman's softening had made him almost willing to trust her with a
+condensed version of the facts. But her "Adeline" reminded him that he
+was already committed to a safer course.
+
+"Adelin_a_," he said, correcting her, "the Lady Adelin_a_, not Adeline.
+Her mother, you see, Mrs. Brundage, was an Italian lady of high birth,
+and her exalted family were very particular about the end of the name."
+
+To gain time he finished his tea, and lighted his pipe--his first smoke
+since he had left St. Albans.
+
+"The father is an Englishman of title, who has long set his heart on a
+great marriage for his daughter. For months, nay, years, the
+high-spirited Lady Adelina has resisted the idea of yoking herself with
+a man she dislikes and for whom she has no respect."
+
+"Poor young lady," sighed Mrs. Brundage. The familiar tale was alive
+with reality for her. "Now I'll lay the father's a baronet," she said.
+
+"You have great insight, Mrs. Brundage. But it is worse than that: he is
+a marquis. Well, just before I first met her, Adelina, worn out by her
+father's alternate cajolery and brutality, had yielded, almost promising
+to do as he wished. It was during the war----"
+
+"That war!" exclaimed Mrs. Brundage. "It's got a deal to answer for.
+Now, there's Tom; it's changed his heart from cows and horses to
+motor-cars and airyplanes."
+
+"It was in a hospital----" said Dick.
+
+"Them hospitals!" she interrupted. "I know 'em. And very dangerous
+institootions I consider 'em."
+
+"I see you do--so you will understand that part. When we had made the
+discovery that each was the only thing in the world to the other, and
+she had told her father, the Marquis of Ontario, that she would wed none
+but me, his anger was so terrible that I dared no longer leave her
+beneath his roof. There was nothing for it but----"
+
+"An elopement!" burst from Mrs. Brundage.
+
+Dick nodded.
+
+"We did it--last night, in my car. But about four miles from
+Millsborough, we had an accident. You've seen my face, Mrs. Brundage,
+but you haven't seen my car. And we knew that the Marquis was not far
+behind us. So we dragged ourselves along the ditch into which we had
+fallen, and hid. At dawn we saw him go tearing by in his sumptuous
+sixteen-cylinder electric landaulette. After that----"
+
+A crunching of gravel outside brought a not inconvenient interruption to
+this romance.
+
+Dick was out of the kitchen like a flash, his right hand in the pocket
+of his jacket.
+
+Mrs. Brundage heard a voice that was not his, and words of a language
+she had never heard before. Having no reason to fear anything worse than
+the Marquis of Ontario, she followed her hero with a stride as swift and
+almost as silent as his own.
+
+Before she reached the corner, she heard his voice in sharp command,
+answered by a rapid flow of words in a tongue and voice strange to her.
+
+She checked her advance suddenly and noisily, heard a second order
+jerked out, and showed herself.
+
+"Abajo las manos," Dick had said--just in time, for Pepe el Lagarto's
+hands hung by his sides once more when Mrs. Brundage came round the
+corner and caught her first sight of him.
+
+A small, dingy-faced man, with fear in the lines of his mouth, but a
+pathetic, dog-like trust in his eyes, stood looking up at the stern
+master who, it seemed, had caught him unawares.
+
+Mrs. Brundage did not like the new-comer, nor the aspect of this
+meeting.
+
+"Who is this man, Mr.--Mr. Dick?" she asked.
+
+He turned upon her with surprise so well-feigned that she fully believed
+he had not heard her coming.
+
+"He's my chauffeur, Mrs. Brundage," he said. "He is of Spanish blood,
+born in the Republic of La Plata. With the skill which is second nature
+to him he has tracked me to your house--to tell me that my car is
+already repaired, and that the Earl of Toronto--er--the Marquis of
+Ontario is sending out party after party to search the whole countryside
+for us. With your permission, Pepe el Lagarto will remain here until the
+Lady Adelina is able to proceed, when he will guide us to the place
+where the car is concealed."
+
+Dick led the way back to the Brundage kitchen, where he made this
+strange servant sit down, and set before him half a tumbler of rum.
+
+"I hope," he said magnificently, "that you will pardon my listening to a
+full account of his doings. It is in the interest of the Lady Adelina
+that I should know everything; and the conclusion of my narrative to
+you, Mrs. Brundage, must, I regret to say, be postponed."
+
+He turned to Pepe, and spoke in the lazy Spanish of the Argentine.
+
+"And now, you dog," he said, with manner as smooth as his words were
+harsh, "how dare you come fawning on me, after helping these filthy,
+misbegotten sons of Satan to kidnap a lady?"
+
+Pepe writhed with discomfort and apprehension, even while his eyes
+continued to adore his idol over the rim of the glass from which he
+sipped his rum. And this contradiction in expression interested Mrs.
+Brundage so much that she went quietly about her work, hoping by hard
+listening to steal some meaning from the soft words which came pouring
+out in exculpation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE LIZARD.
+
+
+Pepe el Lagarto was pleading his innocence of the only thing which he
+counted sin, and asseverating his devotion to the only being he loved;
+and this, condensed, is the story to which Mrs. Brundage attached all
+meanings but the right one.
+
+He had been in THEIR hands, oh! many months. He did what
+THEY would, so long as they paid him in coca-leaf to chew, a
+little cocaine when the leaves ran out, and enough food to live by.
+
+THEY could get coca-leaf--but the Lizard could get it from no
+other. Nothing mattered but the leaves--and Dicco el Cojeante. Five
+years it was since Pepe had seen him; Pepe had taken to the sea once
+more to find him, perhaps, in England.
+
+Oh, yes! Last night they had brought in a woman--a lady abducted. He
+would have put his knife in her, had THEY so bidden him--until
+he knew that she was El Cojeante's woman. Now, he would knife
+THEM, any or all, before El Cojeante's woman should lose a hair.
+
+As he knew the sun at his rising, so surely had he known El Cojeante
+when he had struck his first blow at the doctor that was a black bull.
+He had run from the house lest El Cojeante should slay Pepe before
+knowing him.
+
+Hidden as the Lizard they called him hides in winter, he had seen the
+black doctor in pursuit of El Cojeante escaping with his woman that was
+clad in Dutch Fridji's skirt and the loose coat of a man. And, since he
+knew that God and the Saints will take the side of the man whom none can
+outwit, Pepe crept back to the house.
+
+Here Dick interrupted:
+
+"You left your companero de grillos for fear of the Black Bull!" he
+exclaimed.
+
+Pepe smiled, shaking his head.
+
+"It was for fear of that which came to el toro erizado," he answered.
+"Very wise was I, and prudent, for but three minutes since did I see
+him, and in his throat la navaja de la ramera Holandesa." He made a
+movement with his hand, and added: "I remembered the days when I and
+Dicco threw the knife."
+
+He had gone back, he shamelessly continued, to learn how the land lay;
+for, should they be all dead, as he almost expected, for Pepe there
+would be pickings.
+
+To find Dicco el Cojeante again, time was plenty, for la senorita con el
+pelo rojo must set the pace.
+
+In the hall, Melchardo was not yet come back to his sense; that other
+that had fallen with him--Heberto, the London man--was pouring water on
+Melchardo's head, while upstairs screamed la Holandesa.
+
+And then came imperious clamour of the telephone. Pepe felt it was
+angry.
+
+Boldly he pushed past the London man and went to the room of the
+instrument.
+
+Through the machine spoke one Bayliss, teniente de Melchardo--chief of
+THOSE in Millsborough, having charge of the tooth-drawing--el
+negocio dental, that was a cloak to cover great traffic in cocaine,
+opium and hashish. And Pepe knew this Bayliss for a man, if less subtle,
+even more prompt and terrible in action than Melchardo himself. But when
+Pepe answered with a password of Melchard's, Bayliss replied with
+questions in a stream--what of the venture of yesterday? Had they found
+the new drug? Were they safe from pursuit?
+
+And it was well for Pepe that this questioning was broken by the hand
+that tore the instrument from his fingers and pushed him aside. It was
+Melchardo, the man of sweet odours, weak upon his feet, but strong in
+his mind.
+
+When Pepe would have sidled away, Melchardo bade him keep close. Driven
+desperate by his enemies, he must trust what friend was at hand. "Stand
+by lest I need thee," he had said. "For very soon there will be hell to
+pay, if I act not now and with vigour."
+
+So Pepe el Lagarto sunned himself in the window, and listened. And he
+heard Melchardo put the whole cuadrilla de morfinistas under orders to
+draw a net around the man who had fled with the precious powder of the
+new drug and the girl who knew too much.
+
+"For I tell you, Senor Dicco," he said, "that it is the web of a spider.
+He is the great Arana that sits in the midst, to run out and to seize
+and to devour. It began in the Millsborough and Lowport sleeping-houses
+of the slant-eyed men of the sea, and spreads every day wider and wider
+its meshes and stays. Some day the web will cover the great towns and
+countries of the world, unless----"
+
+"Unless a great Ticodromo come, Pepe. Tell thy tale quickly," said Dick.
+
+Five parties had Melchard sent out from Millsborough; two cars, as if
+going to the fair and cricket match at Ecclesthorpe, or the races at
+Timsdale-Horton, each with four men; and three motor-cycles with
+sidecars, two men apiece. And their five bases, as Pepe showed upon the
+table with bread-crumbs, were set at Gallowstree Dip, in the hollow
+half-way between "The Goat in Boots" and Ecclesthorpe; again, hard by
+the railway-junction of Harthborough; thirdly, at the joining of the
+Ecclesthorpe parish-road with the highway to London; fourthly, between
+this and Millsborough, at "The Coach and Horses" Inn; and fifth, by
+Margetstowe village, where the woodland track from Monkswood Cottage
+runs into the seaward road over against "The Goat in Boots."
+
+"And so, you are caught," said Pepe, "in a cage, with horse road and
+rail road beyond the bars."
+
+"And you heard all this, in the talk which Melchard made with his
+teniente through the telephone?" asked Dick.
+
+"All this," replied Pepe, "is what I tell you, from what I hear, from
+what I know, and from what I have seen."
+
+"Pepe, I have an automobile of great speed. It is over there at 'The
+Coach and Horses.' You must take us across the moor, I will creep in and
+get the car, while you keep the lady hidden. I will drive out, and----"
+
+"It is too late, Dicco. For while Melchardo talked and made commands,
+there was a sound from above of the breaking of wood and blows of a
+hammer, and the screaming of the woman was hushed. And before he had
+come to an end with the ordering, that Dutch Fury, set free by Heberto,
+springs into the room of the telephone, with blood in her eyes, and
+half-naked. When she knew what he was about, she asked him in her sharp
+voice:
+
+"'Have you told him first to find the man's car?'
+
+"'What car? What man?' says Melchardo.
+
+"'The devil that laid me out, and you fools too,' quoth Fridji. 'The man
+that knew who stole the girl; the man that knew where you'd taken her;
+the man who had her out of this house three hours after we fetched her
+in. He came--he _must_ have come in a car, and by the London Road. And
+he must have left the car near by,' she cried, cursing Melchardo. 'Give
+me a little writing on a paper, with a signature which none can
+decipher, saying that the gentleman sends for his car which he left in
+keeping, when the master of "The Coach and Horses" put him on the way to
+"The Myrtles." And give me money, so that I pay him more than was
+promised. If that devil get to his car, he will hang us all. But I will
+myself drive it half-way hither,' said la Holandesa, 'and send it over
+the road's edge by the way.'"
+
+And after these things, said Pepe, she went to clothe herself, Melchardo
+sat him down to write, and Heberto, the London man, was set to cleaning
+and preparing for the road that automobile in which they had fetched la
+senorita roja from the south; and him, Pepe, they despatched scouting
+after Ocklee the Bull, to learn what might have been his luck in dealing
+with El Cojeante and the girl.
+
+"And behind my teeth," he concluded, "I smiled, knowing well that I went
+to learn how thou hadst dealt with Ocklee."
+
+"And how, Lagarto marrullero, shall we now deal with ourselves?" asked
+Dick. "Tell me that."
+
+"Melchardo waits awhile for me and my news," murmured the Lizard
+thoughtfully, shifting his geographical bread-crumbs. "If I be too long
+away, he will move without my words to misguide him."
+
+Then he set forth how, since Bayliss had taken his orders, there had
+elapsed full time for each one of the pickets to reach its post, though
+perhaps not yet for regular contact to have been established by the
+patrols betwixt point and point. But the Senorita must be waked at once
+and take the road with Dicco, moving towards the best, or weakest, bars
+of the cage; for, though the net was spread, the great spider himself
+was not yet amove down its spokes and round the felloe.
+
+"Come soon," said Pepe, "and I will set you in the best way, and then
+back to send the Spider on the worst."
+
+And under his soft, dog's eyes Pepe for the first time showed white,
+smiling teeth.
+
+"Amigo de grillos," said Dick, in the voice which Pepe knew so well, but
+had never before heard unsteady, "she has not slept an hour since I
+thought her mind astray."
+
+Then Pepe, fumbling at an inner pocket, spoke swiftly what wisdom was in
+him.
+
+"Dicco must get gaiters, rough trousers, and a hat. La senorita must
+change the Dutchwoman's skirt for whatever this old dame can furnish.
+When I leave you, feed her always, a little at a time. Talk, make love,
+make laugh."
+
+"And if the strength fail altogether?" asked Dick, for a moment humble
+before this wizened wisdom.
+
+"Better the spur and the whip than the wolves should eat the mare,"
+answered Pepe. And he drew a little box from his pocket. "It is the
+leaves," he said. "They are not evil like the drugs of shops and cities.
+If she flag and is without strength by the way, let her chew a little,
+whilst you fill her mind with other thoughts. Then will she endure till
+Dicco wins."
+
+Dick turned to Mrs. Brundage, and, to her relief, spoke at last in
+English.
+
+"Madam," he said, "the Marquis and his myrmidons must be hoodwinked.
+Talking of hoods and winking suggests a sun-bonnet----"
+
+"Silly, old-fashioned things!" said the woman. "But mebbe I have one
+that I wore whilst Brundage was courtin'."
+
+"And a plain blouse?" Dick continued. "And perhaps a darker skirt----"
+
+"And hair in a plait down her back," cried the woman, greeting with a
+chuckle her first game of make-believe for many a long year; "your
+nobleman might pass his daughter twenty times like that, an' never would
+'e know 'er."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+"THE GOAT IN BOOTS."
+
+
+It was almost noon of Saturday, June the twenty-first, when a party of
+three halted in the shade of a few stunted hawthorns by the side of the
+sandy, half-made road which leads from Margetstowe village to the
+turnpike, which, branching from the main London Road fifteen miles to
+the south-west, runs north-eastward through Ecclesthorpe-on-the-Moor to
+the sea at the mouth of the great estuary.
+
+From this tree-clump could be seen, facing the junction of the sandy
+road with the metalled, the front and the swinging signboard of "The
+Goat in Boots." And here, that its two more ordinary-looking members
+might shed the oddity which they owed to the company of the third, the
+party was to separate.
+
+For in Amaryllis, sleep, Dick's care and Mrs. Brundage's wardrobe had
+worked transformation. From the dust and mud on the thick little shoes,
+up over five visible inches of coarse grey stocking to clumsy amplitude
+of washed-out, pink-striped cotton skirt, and thence by severity of
+blue-linen blouse to the face lurking in the pale lavender of the
+quilted sun-bonnet, the eye met nothing which was not proper to the
+country-girl, dressed a little older, when the tail of hair swung to her
+body's movement, than her sixteen years required.
+
+If the face was not so ruddy as a moorland girl's should be, and if the
+mark of the "smutty finger" beneath each eye suggested, out of Ireland,
+ill health--well, sickness and recovery are not restricted to the town,
+and the bright eyes, when the lids would lift, gave promise of returning
+health.
+
+Dick matched her well.
+
+With the cut cheek decently washed, the face shaved with Tom Brundage's
+worst razor, and a patch of flour congealing the blood of his wound, he
+looked very different from the ruffian who had disturbed, so short a
+while since, the lunch of the Brundage chickens. For his brown boots,
+brushed to the semblance of a shine, brown gaiters of the army cut,
+green cord riding-breeches which had delighted the heart of Tom Brundage
+until petrol prevailed over horseflesh and drove him into black; a
+striped waistcoat, of the old-fashioned waspish, horsey favour, partly
+buttoned over a grey army shirt and loosely covered by his own Norfolk
+jacket, with a knotted bandanna in place of collar, made of him an odd,
+but wholly credible nondescript of the lower sporting world.
+
+Men on the roads of that joyous Saturday might have asked was it
+whippets, horses, or the ring which best explained this lank, keen-eyed,
+humorous-lipped, uneven-gaited fellow; but none would have suspected a
+masquerade in the figure offered to their eyes with an assurance so
+entirely devoid of self-consciousness.
+
+Yet to Amaryllis it was perhaps the raffish green imitation-velours
+Homburg hat which did most to alter Dick Bellamy's aspect; so that she
+would wait for a glance of his eyes to assure herself that this was
+indeed her wonderful friend and champion, and no new man nor changed
+spirit.
+
+But Pepe, its one honest and unpretentious person, had made the whole
+trio bizarre and incredible.
+
+For though, on one word from Dick, Amaryllis had given her credence and
+trust to the Lizard, she yet felt that he suited so ill with any English
+surroundings that his incongruity would show up any boggled stitch in
+their two disguises. So, while she nibbled the biscuit which Dick had
+taken from the paper in his pocket and ordered her to eat, and listened
+to the unintelligible valedictory advice which Pepe was ladling out in
+Spanish, she was longing to be alone with the gentleman who looked so
+impossible, and free from the company of the man who the very pricking
+of her thumbs told her was a criminal, in spite of the modest bearing
+and the uplifted gaze at his idol.
+
+Did she also adore her Limping Dick, as Pepe his Cojeante? Was the one
+worship antagonistic to the other? Why then--but Amaryllis, like many
+another woman, was so good a logician that she knew when to halt on the
+road to an awkward conclusion.
+
+Pepe at last swept off his hat in profound obeisance to "la senorita
+roja," took Dick's hand with reverence and his generous wad of notes
+without shame, and hurried back on his road to "The Myrtles."
+
+She looked at Dick's face as his eyes followed the Lizard, and read in
+it an expression so strange and so mixed, that she turned again to take
+her own last sight of the man she was glad to be rid of.
+
+Pepe had vanished utterly.
+
+"Yes," said Dick, following her thought, and responsive even to the
+terms of her recent reflection, "he never would fit an English landscape
+till it swallowed him."
+
+"'Amigo de grillos'?" said the girl. "Why do you call him that? _Amigo_
+must be _friend_. But _grillos_?"
+
+"Irons--fetters," said Dick; and taking her by the arm, started in the
+direction of "The Goat in Boots," walking with a curiously swaggering
+gait which went far to mask his limp. "Amigos de grillos--fetter-pals.
+We were chained together for six months."
+
+"In--in prison? Oh, Dick!" she cried, "I knew he was horrid."
+
+"And me?"
+
+"I know you aren't," she replied.
+
+"I'm afraid he is, from your point of view," he replied. "But Pepe el
+Lagarto has one streak which interests me."
+
+"Tell me," said Amaryllis.
+
+And as they walked slowly towards the inn, he told her of Pepe and his
+coca-leaves; of the Peruvian Indians' use of them to resist hunger and
+fatigue; and of how the little man had given his all, which he could not
+replace, to help la senorita roja over the roughness of her way.
+
+"I had to keep a little in a bit of paper to satisfy him," said Dick.
+
+"Then he's kind to women, at least," said Amaryllis.
+
+"When I met him, he was in for five years--murdering his wife."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Found her in company he wasn't fond of," said Dick, "so he threw her
+out of window."
+
+"And the--company?"
+
+"Pepe slit its throat."
+
+Amaryllis shuddered.
+
+"No," resumed Dick, "you won't find any pretty Idylls of the King
+gadgets about Pepe. He gave you all his coca-leaves because he regarded
+you as El Cojeante's woman--that's all."
+
+"Do you?" asked Amaryllis, and her colour for the first time matched her
+head-gear.
+
+"For to-day--of course," he answered. "You're my daughter--and don't you
+forget it."
+
+Amaryllis, if the word may be used of a sound so pleasant, giggled.
+
+"Well, daddy dear," she replied, "I admit that your friend has a shiny
+streak running through his horridness. And I like him for worshipping
+you with his dog's eyes. And I shouldn't wonder if you often find those
+silver veins in queer places, dad."
+
+She said it like a question but received no response.
+
+"If I've caught on to Pepe's topography," he said, "the road to the
+right there runs on an easy downward grade for two miles, then dips
+sharply for another. At the lowest point--they call it Gallowstree
+Dip--there's another road, to the left, which runs straight to
+Harthborough Junction--the place we want. But at Gallowstree Dip, says
+Pepe, we shall find a motor-bike and side-car with two men ready to put
+our lights out on contact--if there aren't too many witnesses. So when
+we pass them we've got to be a larger party than two. So we start by
+going into the bar here, and you're going to swallow bread and cheese
+and beer, there's a good daughter."
+
+Amaryllis nodded. "But, Dick," she said, "if they aren't at Gallowstree
+Dip?"
+
+"We've got to make our plans as we go, and change 'em when we must. It'd
+seem incredible, wouldn't it--if it weren't for what you've seen and
+suffered since last night. England! And you and I as much cut off from
+Bobbies and Bow Street as if we were in Petrograd or Central New Guinea.
+Suppose we _could_ find a village constable in a cottage--they'd kill
+him as gaily as they would you or me--but it isn't his at-home day, he's
+at Timsdale-Horton Races. When this gaff's over, the belated soothsayers
+will tell me: 'you ought to have roused the police and laid your case
+before them,' in one of the three great towns that I drove through last
+night. And what yarn was I to pitch? That there might be murder going to
+be done at a place called 'The Myrtles'? And what time had I to tell it
+in? And where'd you be now, daughter, if I'd been two minutes later than
+I was?"
+
+Ever so gently Amaryllis squeezed his arm against her side in gratitude,
+and then quivered a little, remembering the horror of Dutch Fridji and
+her knife--and where last she had seen it.
+
+But Dick went on, as if he had noticed nothing, to tell her of the two
+letters which had barely yet, he supposed, reached Scotland Yard. He had
+no certainty, indeed, that the second, given to the landlord of "The
+Coach and Horses," had even been posted. Before nightfall, at the
+earliest, therefore, no help could be counted upon from the police.
+
+"Either," said Dick, "we must break through the bars of Melchard's cage,
+or keep hidden inside it. The bosses of this mob, you see, won't give a
+damn how many of their people get strafed as long as they suppress us,
+and get back what I've got in my pocket."
+
+They were now not fifty yards from the horse-trough in front of "The
+Goat in Boots."
+
+A little way from the entrance, drawn up opposite to the stable-yard,
+stood a long, clumsy wagonette-brake with coats and green-carpet
+cricket-bags lying about its seats. Two horses were at the pole,
+seriously bowed over their nose-bags. A swingle-tree hung at the pole's
+end, and a second pair of reins was fast to the driver's seat, the four
+cheek-buckles lying crossed over the wheeler's backs.
+
+"Fower-in-hand, and leaders in staable! Sick, likely, or more gradely
+stuff," said Dick, musing aloud.
+
+Amaryllis, whose eyes were on the signboard, started as if a stranger
+had spoken at her side. She looked quickly in his face, and found it so
+altered in expression that she knew the words had come from his lips.
+
+"Oh, Dick!" she whispered. "You're wonderful. But whatever shall I do?
+If I open my mouth, I shall give us away."
+
+"Howd tha mouth shut, then, 'Minta, lass," he said. Then, lowering his
+tone, he added in his own language: "I'll account for you. Don't forget
+your name's Araminta. You've been ill, and the doctor's ordered open-air
+treatment."
+
+As they reached the threshold, the roar of Millsborough dialect came to
+them through the windows of the bar-parlour.
+
+Dick pointed to the bench by the door.
+
+"Set there, lass, and Ah'll fetch t' grub," he said aloud. "'Tis bad air
+for 'ee in tap-room."
+
+As if the world were his, he swung into the bar, where he found two
+yokels listening to the half-drunken lamentations of a middle-aged,
+plum-cheeked fellow in a shabby blue livery coatee with shabbier gilt
+buttons; and even while he was giving his order for a glass of mild, and
+a bit of bread and cheese on plate for daughter--who'd been main sick,
+and would likely throw her stomach if she sat in tap-room, for doctor
+said for her open-air treatment was best medicine--he was listening
+patiently to the man he guessed to be the driver of the cricketers'
+brake.
+
+He took the glass and plate and a pat on the shoulder to 'Minta.
+
+"You just make un go doan, lovey," he said. "More eaten, more stomick
+next time. Eat slow and steady, says Dr. Pape."
+
+Back in the bar, he buried his nose in his tankard.
+
+For the tenth time Plum-face summed up his woes.
+
+"Boy and man, nineteen year Ah've tooled St. Asaph's Eleven to
+Ecclesthorpe June Fixture. Four-in-'and's historical, like goose to
+Michaelmas. But to-day, Old Grudgers--ye know Grudger's Bait, far end o'
+Mill Street? To-day, old Grudge, 'e says, 'You hitch Fancy Blood
+near-lead,' and I says 'im back, 'If 'ee puts 'er 'long o' Tod Sloan,
+Fancy'll go dead lame afore "T'Goat in Boots."' And dead lame she
+stands in staable here, first time six month. Not offerin' lame, mind
+you, with a peck an' a limp when she keeps 'er mind on 'er wicked
+meanin', but sore up to the off fore pastern, and the hoof that hot
+it'd light a lucifer. Fancy's a female, she is, same as your wife or
+mine; and Tod, 'e just sours 'er blood, and there ye are. Ah tell
+'ee, boys, Ned Blossom's shamed, 'e is, if he comes slatherin' into
+Ecclesthorpe-on-the-Moor wi' two sweatin' wheelers in twentieth year o'
+the match."
+
+By this time Dick had received from the tapster his second order, a
+tankard of old ale, laced with a surreptitious noggin of unsweetened
+gin.
+
+"And what-like nature o' a nag may this Tod be?" he asked, speaking with
+so easy a familiarity, and holding the pewter so invitingly that Ned
+Blossom responded as to an old friend.
+
+"Gradely bit o' stuff sure-ly," he replied. "And do love to fill his
+collar; but sulky-like he's been on t' road this day, wi' Fancy doin'
+nowt to share."
+
+"Then leave Fancy in staable," said Dick, "and drive owd Tod unicorn
+into Ecclesthorpe wi' style."
+
+Ned Blossom chuckled foolishly, and took the tankard Dick was offering,
+handle free, to his fingers.
+
+"Like t' owd flea-bitten mare used to stand bottom o' Church Hill out o'
+Water Street, waitin' for t' bus comin'. They'd take the bar offen 'er
+back, hitch it to pole, an' away she'd go, scratchin' and scramblin' up
+to moor, like cat on roof-tiles. Ha! ha!" laughed Ned, and took a pull
+from the pewter. "But, say, who be you, standin' drinks like an owd
+friend?"
+
+"Forgotten Doncaster races, nineteen five, hast tha, Ned? Well, Ah'm
+pained in my choicest feelin's. Here Ah finds 'ee in misfortune, order
+the stuff tha needs, pay for it, give 'ee good counsel and call 'ee Ned,
+and 'tis not till ale's drownin' t' sadness of 'ee where it bides, that
+'ee call to mind you've forgotten Sam Bunce."
+
+"Sam'l--ay, Sam'l Ah remembers. 'Twas t' Bunce as came 'ard like. But
+nineteen five? Challacombe's Leger, that was. Ay, Bunce fits into it.
+This ale clears the wits wunnerful."
+
+Dick was at the bar, money passing to the tapster.
+
+"There's another, owd cock, where that came from," he said, turning to
+Blossom. "Mebbe the next pint'll make 'ee call to mind how Challacombe's
+win cleaned me out--and me bound to get south away to Coventry?"
+
+"Ay," said Ned again, politely remembering all that he was told. "See'd
+'ee off by t' train, I did."
+
+"Good old Blossom you be," said Dick, laughing kindly, "sayin' nowt o'
+the two jimmies you lent to get me home--an' us both that full we forgot
+all about where I was to send the blunt! But it's not Sam Bunce'll
+forget what he owes a man, and Ah knew as Ah'd meet 'ee again."
+
+And he pushed three one-pound notes into the fuddled Ned's hand, who saw
+no reason in denying a friend of this kind.
+
+"'Most gone out o' my head, the money," he muttered. "But Ah knew 'ee
+meant paying."
+
+Then, as he awkwardly separated the notes, puzzling over the third, "Bit
+of interest for the waitin'," said Dick. "Put 'em away, while I go and
+get that Tod Sloan hitched single to lead your pair."
+
+"I'll never drive 'im," objected Ned mournfully. "Ah've been turned all
+ends up, wi' this 'ere 'appening. Tod, 'e'll turn an' laugh at me."
+
+"'Tis easy, owd man, if you keep 'im canterin' from start."
+
+"Tried 'im tandem once, they did--oh, Gawd!"
+
+"What you needs, owd Ned, is a kip, e'en if 'ee can't sleep. Who's
+Captain of o' this St. Asaph's cricketin' lot?"
+
+"Rev'runt Mallaby--Dixon Mallaby. Gradely chap. Champion bat 'e be,
+nobbut 'e's a parson."
+
+"Then I'll drive 'em," said Dick, "and you get a lift o'er to
+Ecclesthorpe later, an' tool 'em home. 'Long about that time you'll be
+rested, an' Tod'll be after his oats."
+
+Blossom nodded, lifting his tankard and waving it on the way to his
+mouth, in feeble farewell.
+
+As he went out Dick glanced sideways at Amaryllis. The sparkle in her
+eyes stopped him.
+
+"Oh, daddy!" she murmured, "what a liar you are!"
+
+"Cha-ampion!" said Dick, adding, as he left her: "Rubberneck!"
+
+Already the cricketers were gathering about the rear of the brake,
+amongst them a gentleman.
+
+To him Dick touched his hat.
+
+"T' driver, sir, be o'ercome with near leader fallin' la-ame. He be an
+owd pal. Seems me tryin' t' buck 'im oop's gone wrong way down. So be
+you offers no objection, sir, I'll drive 'ee myself. Sam'l Bunce I'm
+called, and 'tis Ecclesthorpe where us wants to go."
+
+The Reverend Mr. Dixon Mallaby looked him up and down with good-humoured
+scrutiny.
+
+"I can't object to being pulled out of a hole," he replied. "And I don't
+think I should enjoy driving Mr. Grudger's cattle myself."
+
+"Then if ye'll bid landlord have Ned Blossom sent on t' Ecclesthorpe
+when he be sober, I'll get t' three-cornered team hitched up."
+
+And Dick went towards the stable, but turned back.
+
+"Ought t' 'ave said, sir," he explained, "as I'll drive 'ee, so be as
+there's room for my daughter."
+
+"The pretty girl on the bench there? Why, of course there's room. Does
+she want to see the match?"
+
+"Doctor's orders she's to take all the fresh air there be, sir, and
+we're paying for't in shoe-leather. By same token, she looks after me
+too. Wouldn't let me out 'lone to-day, 'cos yesterday Ah went too free,
+an' got into a bit o' rough house."
+
+"I see," said the clergyman. "That's a nasty cut on your cheek."
+
+Dick laughed.
+
+"One o' them others got a worse," he answered, and went in search of Tod
+Sloan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+THE UNICORN.
+
+
+When Sam Bunce returned, he had a straw in one corner of his mouth, and
+was leading a sturdy roadster, with whom he seemed already on terms of
+intimacy.
+
+Mr. Dixon Mallaby, meantime, had introduced himself to Amaryllis,
+getting, for his pains, but the Araminta of the sun-bonnet; and Dick,
+when he and the ostler had harnessed Tod in his lonely distinction, went
+round to find her the centre of an admiring group competing, it seemed,
+for her company in the brake; the girl answering with "Na-ay!" "Na-ay,
+thank 'ee kindly," and "Thank 'ee, sir, Ah'll ask feyther," with a
+genuine flush on her face due to fear of speech rather than of men,
+which did much to heighten her attraction for these kindly labourers and
+mechanics.
+
+"You be set on box 'long o' me," said Dick, and took her not too gently
+by the arm.
+
+But his way was barred by a red-faced cricketer in strange flannels.
+
+"'Tis not every Ecclesthorpe fixture," he said, "as we gets a comely
+wench for maascot. Us be trustin' our hossflesh to you----"
+
+"Hosses is Grudgers', an' t' lass is mine," interrupted Dick, smiling.
+
+"But there be Parson Mallaby to make we mind our manners," objected
+Redface.
+
+"T' cloth," said Dick, "is a good thing. And blood's a better," and so
+marched his daughter to the front of the brake.
+
+As the last of the team were climbing to their seats, a motor-cycle with
+a side-car, coming from the north, pulled up behind them.
+
+"Don't turn your head," whispered Dick on the box to Amaryllis beside
+him. "They'll pass us soon, if they're Melchard's men. I had to yank you
+up here, you little devil, or you'd have cooked the whole show by
+laughing. You were shaking like a jelly, and they thought you were
+afraid of me. You! With your 'Naays' and your 'Thank 'ee kindlys!'"
+
+A tall man in motor-cycling overalls, goggles pushed up over his cap,
+sauntered leisurely past the brake from behind, on its off side. From
+the near-side box-seat Amaryllis saw him, and then looked down at the
+splash-board, shaking her head.
+
+"Nay, daddy, na-ay!" she said in a clear drawl, imitating Dick's.
+"Always feared, Ah be, o' talkin', when there's a many men makin' simple
+jests. That were a gradely word o' yourn, 'Cloth be a fine thing, but
+blood's a better!'"
+
+And she finished with a low, cooing chuckle.
+
+Then, loud and clear, came the parson's voice.
+
+"You can let 'em go now, Mr. Bunce," he said.
+
+The stableman stood away from Tod's bridle, and the three horses put
+their necks into their collars like one.
+
+A little chorus of approbation rose from the body of the brake; the man
+in the middle of the road jumped aside, cursing.
+
+As they passed him, gathering pace, "That's one of 'em," muttered Dick.
+
+"He'll go into 'The Goat in Boots' and hear all about us," said
+Amaryllis.
+
+"I don't think he'll want to draw too much attention to himself," said
+Dick. "But if he does go in, Ned Blossom and the two hayseeds in the
+bar'll tell him all about Sam Bunce."
+
+"Do you think he really believes in Bunce?" asked the girl.
+
+"He believes already in three pounds, and the next drink'll make him
+believe in everything."
+
+"You _are_ clever," said Amaryllis, "and it's awfully funny."
+
+"You," said Dick, "are astonishing."
+
+"Why?" asked the girl.
+
+"You laugh all the time, as if----"
+
+"As if I weren't afraid? I'm not," she answered. "But it's not courage.
+It's you. I feel safe."
+
+For a moment Dick was silent; then he said:
+
+"My leader's a good little nag, isn't he?"
+
+"Yes. He likes you."
+
+"How d'you know?"
+
+"He feels you through the lines. He's not used to being all alone out
+there, but he's only tried to look round once, and then all you did was
+to talk to him, and he said to himself: '_He's_ all right'--waggled his
+head a little and broke into his jolly canter again."
+
+"I'll show you what they can do, after that side-car has passed."
+
+"Will they come after us?"
+
+Two or three back-fire explosions answered her, and very soon the
+motor-cycle and side-car tore past the brake, alarming with its insolent
+speed even Dick's sober and industrious leader.
+
+The machine was soon out of sight.
+
+"Did they mean to scare poor Tod?" asked Amaryllis.
+
+"He's only disgusted. No," said Dick. "All that fuss and stink is to get
+'em to Gallowstree Dip before we pass it."
+
+"But they don't know we're here," she objected.
+
+"They don't know anything. If we turn off towards Harthborough Junction,
+or if anyone leaves the brake to walk that way, they'll follow."
+
+"Wasn't there to be a picket at Harthborough itself?" asked the girl.
+
+"Yes. But they haven't made contact with it yet, and don't even know
+whether it's arrived. If it hadn't and we went that way, we could nip
+into the first train and get clean away. But when this picket sees us
+driving straight on to Ecclesthorpe, they'll sit down at the Dip to wait
+till we never come. I shall spring the Dip at such a pace that these
+flannelled fools'll yell like a school-treat, and the picket'll forget
+'em."
+
+"But why should they even suspect?"
+
+"They're ordered to suspect everything. They've never seen either the
+man or the woman they're after. They see one woman and a lot of men on a
+beanfeast, and she's got to pass on to the next picket to be accounted
+for."
+
+"Then why didn't you make Mother Brundage dress me up as a boy?"
+
+"Because like this you may be somebody else. In trousers, these blokes
+would shoot you on sight. My dear child," said Dick, "there are a good
+many men that could masquerade as women, but not one young woman in ten
+thousand can look anything but painfully ridiculous in a suit of
+dittoes."
+
+Amaryllis was not quite sure whether or not to be offended, but
+remembered her hair, and was comforted.
+
+The road now began to drop away in front of them so sharply that Tod had
+no work to do. A little further, and the slow trot, which gentle use of
+the foot-break had made possible, was reduced to a reluctant,
+pastern-racking walk, with slack traces and strained collar-chains for
+the wheelers; while the leader, too much at leisure, began to remember
+his loneliness.
+
+And then, as they rounded an acute bend at the steepest point of the
+grade, Amaryllis saw below her, just beyond the bridge of grey stone
+from which their road began its ascent to the moor, a single ancient
+oak-tree, from the twisted trunk of which was stretched out across the
+by-road which followed the course of the bridged stream, that cruel,
+heavy arm, upon which in one day were hanged fifteen of Sir Thomas
+Wyatt's rebels in days popularly supposed merrier than ours.
+
+Near the foot of this evil old tree, worthy of its huge bough, the girl
+saw the two men whose behaviour had offended Tod, pretending themselves
+occupied with some defect of side-car or cycle. By the time that Dick
+had brought his team within a hundred and fifty yards of the bottom, he
+could see that the interest of his two enemies had been diverted from
+their own vehicle to his: they stood erect with their backs to the oak,
+each hiding a hand in a right-side pocket.
+
+Whether they had gathered matter of suspicion at "The Goat in Boots,"
+whether they would dare, here in peaceful English country, so desperate
+an attempt as shooting him and Amaryllis as they passed the Dip, were
+questions Dick could not answer. But the goggles were down, masking the
+faces, while he and the girl, perched high on the box, made fine targets
+for a pair of Brownings.
+
+He turned in his seat and spoke to his passengers, catching Dixon
+Mallaby's eye.
+
+"Ah be goin' to show 'ee, sir," he said, "how three ornary hacks,
+rightly drove, can take a dip an' a rise, even with a load like you
+gentlemen makes. Howd tight."
+
+Then to Amaryllis he said, with paternal tenderness:
+
+"Don't you be fallin' off now, my dear. And grab t' rail, not me, when
+they bump into their collars."
+
+Simultaneously he lifted his foot from the break, uttered an exotic,
+mournful cry, and for the first time brought his long lash across his
+horses--Tod first, then the wheelers; and as the three shot down the
+remnant of the slope, he kept Tod's traces tight while the heavy load at
+their tails compelled the pair to run from it for their lives.
+
+What he had foretold befell; the men in the body of the carriage broke
+into a boyish cheer of delight, which drowned for all his passengers but
+Amaryllis the words of that stream of polyglot invective, exhortation
+and endearment which the driver poured out over his cattle; a lost
+jeremiad, for Dick says he does not remember, and Amaryllis that, though
+she heard it all, there was much that she did not understand and a great
+deal more which nothing on earth will ever induce her to repeat.
+
+As they rattled across the little stone bridge, Dick glanced to his left
+at the Hangman's Oak, the motor-cycle and the two men; saw foolish,
+innocent grins break through the suspicion on the two bad faces, and,
+jovially lifting his whip, waved them a salute.
+
+In response, the two right hands came out of their pockets, forgetting
+for that moment what they left there.
+
+The circling lash took each wheeler in turn, while the load still ran
+light behind them, and Tod, honest worker, answered relief with fresh
+effort.
+
+By the time that the hill had reduced them to a straining walk,
+Gallowstree Dip was out of sight, and Dick let out his breath with a
+little hissing noise between the teeth. Amaryllis heard it and
+understood.
+
+"Dad!" she said.
+
+"Ay, lass?" he answered.
+
+"Those two men," she said, lowering her voice and speaking in her
+natural manner: "as we were coming down to the bridge they pushed up
+their goggles, and their faces were beastly--just as if they meant," she
+whispered, "to kill somebody."
+
+Dick nodded.
+
+"And then the men behind began cheering, and those two horrid faces grew
+quite silly and good-natured. And when you waggled your whip at them
+they grinned and waved their hands, and one of them shouted something
+meant to be jolly."
+
+"It just means, lovey," he answered, "that they made up their minds it
+was a beano after all, and that they'd got wind up about nothing. The
+mongrel sportsman and the bashful wench in a sun-bonnet were after all,
+they thought, a genuine substitute for Ned Blossom."
+
+"Did you play for that?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, well!" he answered vaguely; then added: "Don't worry, my lass. 'Tis
+all well for a while."
+
+He kept his horses on a steady strain until the long rise was topped,
+and then climbed down from his seat and let them breathe, tightening
+this and feeling that about their tackle, until each horse was tricked
+into believing itself the object of especial interest; a belief of which
+Amaryllis saw the effect in three pairs of swivelling ears. At last,
+having lighted a cigarette dug from a yellow packet which he must have
+bought, she was sure, at "The Goat in Boots," he climbed back to her
+with this unusual ornament hanging stickily from his under lip.
+
+The team started again willingly as he drew the reins softly in through
+his fingers; but for a while he kept them walking.
+
+Then he turned to Mr. Dixon Mallaby.
+
+"Parson," he said, "Ah've Ned Blossom's repitation to consider. Ah'll
+take 'em along easy-like, leastways if you're not in a hurry. Then you
+gives me the word when us be nobbut half mile from tha pull-up, an' I'll
+let 'em out champion."
+
+"You don't know Ecclesthorpe, then?" said Dixon Mallaby.
+
+"I dunno this ro'd," replied Dick. "If 'ee play match in Rectory field,
+Ah be to drive 'ee there, Ah reckon."
+
+"They've got the Green in excellent shape again. The Ecclesthorpians,"
+said the parson, "don't like the match outside."
+
+All this and more Dick knew already; for he had ears as keen as his
+eyes, and words travel better to the coachman than from him.
+
+"Then Ah'll drive 'ee to t' 'George,' sir," he said.
+
+Twenty minutes later the St. Asaph's brake, wheelers at a swinging trot
+and the leader cantering in his best form, bowled through
+Ecclesthorpe-on-the-Moor, and drew up with a clatter and a scrape before
+"The Royal George."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+THE SERANG.
+
+
+The inn stood midway in one side of the village green, which was already
+surrounded with walking groups as well as stationary ranks awaiting
+patiently the opening of the game. For Ecclesthorpe had a name in its
+county, owning two families of hereditary professionals, as well as a
+lord of the manor, who, before the war, had kept wicket in three Test
+Matches, while the workman's club from Millsborough, captained this year
+by Dixon Mallaby, a 'Varsity Blue, had already a quarter of a century's
+repute of being hard to beat. So from far and wide those who had not
+gone to Timsdale-Horton races came always on the third Saturday in June
+to the "Ecclesthorpe Fixture."
+
+As he brought his horses to a stand, Dick perceived that, while some
+notice was given to the oddity of his team, scarce a glance was bestowed
+on its unusual driver. The visiting eleven were the objects of interest
+to the straggling crowd in front of "The George."
+
+When he had helped Amaryllis down from her perch, he lit a fresh gasper
+from the yellow packet, and methodically assisted the ostler to unhitch
+the horses; but just as the leader stepped free, a smart motor, coming
+from the south-west, hooted impatiently for space to reach the door of
+the inn.
+
+The ostler, leaving Dick with his detached horses, hurried bandily to
+shift a farmer's gig, drawn up and abandoned in front of the porch.
+
+Dick caught one glimpse of the car's driver, and took his wheelers by
+their bridles.
+
+"Hey, lass!" he said. "Move tha legs a bit, now, an' lead Tod into
+staable."
+
+By his tone she knew something evil was near, and obeyed with never a
+look round, but disappeared with Tod into the stable-yard, Dick
+following with his pair.
+
+They found empty stalls, unbridled and haltered the horses without a
+word, and, just as Dick had found the few he must say to her, there was
+the ostler in the doorway.
+
+"You be more helpin' like," he said, "'n owd Ned Blossom. I thank 'ee
+kind, I do--and you, miss."
+
+"Ah'll thank 'ee, owd hoss, to pass no word agen Ned Blossom. My friend
+'e be."
+
+Then, to the vast surprise of Bandy-legs, Dick pushed a half-crown into
+his hand, and added, pleasantly as you please:
+
+"Give nags feed an' rub down. And, when Ned comes rolling along to trot
+'em home, tell 'im Sam Bunce won't forget Town Moor and Challacombe's
+Leger."
+
+Crossing the stable-yard with Amaryllis, "Don't walk like that--bit more
+flat-footed, but don't clown it," said Dick. "And don't turn your face
+towards the door of the inn--mind. Know why I made you lead Tod?"
+
+The girl's face seemed shrunken, and shone white in the bluish shade of
+her bonnet.
+
+"There was a car," she stammered softly. "I didn't look. Was it----"
+
+"Looked like Melchard driving," answered Dick. "I'd half a mind to take
+you out into the lane at the back. But it's safest amongst the crowd.
+And I must know whether----"
+
+The crowd had grown dense before the open gates of the stable-yard, and
+Dick's words were interrupted by the sudden outbreak of a quarrel in the
+heart of it.
+
+To a running chorus of jeers, expostulation, and fierce incentives to
+retaliation, there came in sight, pushing his way through the crush, a
+creature whose appearance immediately struck Dick and Amaryllis as
+ominous of danger.
+
+The man, although of middle height and erect carriage, had so vast a
+spread and depth of chest, development of the deltoid muscles so
+unusual, and length of arm so unnatural as to establish the effect at
+once of power and deformity; to which the yellow skin, high cheek-bones,
+small eyes, and the thin black moustaches, drooping long and
+perpendicular from each corner of the broken-toothed mouth, added an
+expression of cruelty so unmitigated that Amaryllis turned sick at the
+sight, closing her eyes in dreadful disgust; while the European leather
+and cloth costume of a chauffeur not only added horror to the outlandish
+figure, but gave Dick Bellamy almost the certainty that here was yet
+another accomplice of Alban Melchard.
+
+As the monster drew near, making his way savagely towards the stables,
+there thrust himself in the way Bob Woodfall, the good-natured champion
+of the village--six feet two inches and fourteen stone of bone and
+muscle, good cricket and five years' war record, dressed in country-made
+flannels, ready for his place in the Ecclesthorpe team.
+
+"Hey, man!" he cried good-naturedly. "Be no manner o' sense bargin'
+thro' decent throng like a blasty tank into half battalion o' lousy
+Jerrys."
+
+Then, quite close, the Malay turned his face full on Amaryllis, and Dick
+saw that its right ear had a large gold ring hanging from a hole in the
+lobe--a hole that was stretched by the mere weight of the metal to three
+times the size of its thickness.
+
+But on the left side of the head was no ring to match, for the reason
+that no ear was there to support it. In some unclean strife in Hong-Kong
+or Zanzibar it had been torn away, leaving, to mark its place, only the
+orifice in the head, staring in ghastly isolation most horrible of all.
+
+Amaryllis saw the face again, this time in its full lopsided
+monstrosity, and turned to Dick, clutching him and hiding her eyes
+against his shoulder.
+
+Hearing her gasp, a woman in the crowd cried out:
+
+"Howd t' heathen! He flays t' lasses, and he'll curd t' milk."
+
+"Gi' 'im a flap on jaw, Bob Woodfall," cried a youth. "One's all '_e_'ll
+take."
+
+It was. Bob, perhaps, was too kindly to put his full weight into the
+blow, and got no chance for a second.
+
+With a savage cry, between a grunt and a squeal, the Malay ran in,
+clutching with his great horny sailor's hands. Too quickly for any eye
+but Dick's to see how it was done, he had Bob Woodfall by the nape of
+the neck and the band of his trousers and lifted the long body high
+above the crowd at full-length of his terrible arms, brandishing it
+helpless, like some Mongolian Hercules a Norse Antaeus; took three steps
+to the stone wall of the stable-yard, and would have flung the village
+hero over it to break upon the cobble-stones, but for a gloved hand laid
+upon his shoulder, and a soft, high-pitched voice, saying: "_Taroh, plan
+plan, Mut-mut_!"
+
+And the monster obeyed the voice and touch of his master, restoring
+Woodfall to his feet with a docility that made him, if possible, more
+hateful to the crowd than before.
+
+"_Akau baleh_," continued Melchard. "_Dan nante sana_."
+
+And Mut-mut, the crowd yielding passage, made his way to the car, and
+sat at the wheel.
+
+Arrived at the gates of the stable-yard almost simultaneously with
+Melchard, was Dixon Mallaby; and Dick observed not only that there was
+acquaintance between them, but also that, while the parson endured
+recognition, Melchard sought it.
+
+"I'm ashamed of that fellow of mine," he said. "Yet I cannot help being
+attached to the ruffian. He would die to serve me; but the ribaldry of
+an English crowd is too much for his temperament."
+
+"If you don't want him to die without serving you, Mr. Melchard,"
+replied the parson, "I should advise you to keep him in better control."
+
+"Ah, well! I owe him so much already, you see. The strange fellow saved
+my life in the Persian Gulf. Serang--boat's swain, you know, to the
+Lascar crew. Sharks in the water--horrible!"
+
+The parson thought that even in this the serang had done the world poor
+service.
+
+Having delicately wiped his face with a ladylike handkerchief in memory
+of his danger and gratitude, Melchard tried again.
+
+"I saw you arrive with your quaint team, sir," he said; "the unicorn, I
+mean, not the eleven."
+
+But the parson allowed no outsider to poke fun at the St. Asaph's
+cricket club.
+
+"Handled his horses in fine style, your driver. Why!" exclaimed
+Melchard, as if noticing Dick and Amaryllis with her head on his
+shoulder for the first time, "there he is--and pleasantly occupied. I
+mean the fellow with the girl in his arms, and the cut on his face. I
+wonder how he got it."
+
+Amaryllis heard the voice and the words, and, to keep her breath from
+gasping and her body from trembling, she caught and ground between her
+teeth a wrinkle of Dick's coat.
+
+Melchard, she felt, had taken a step towards her.
+
+"I don't know how he got it," the clergyman was saying. "But something
+painful, I understand, happened to the other man. The girl is his
+daughter, recovering from an illness."
+
+Melchard took another step towards the couple.
+
+"Better let well alone, Mr. Melchard," said Dixon Mallaby sternly. "Your
+servant has already made trouble enough."
+
+Throughout these few strained moments Dick had borne himself as a man
+concerned only with his daughter. But at this moment Dixon Mallaby
+caught a gleam from his eyes which assured him that the least
+familiarity or impertinence of Melchard's would be resented in a manner
+likely to divert the crowd's lingering anger from Mut-mut to his master.
+Much as he disliked Melchard and his indefinitely unpleasant reputation,
+he was not going to have his match spoiled by the beating and kicking to
+a jelly of a scented and dandified Millsborough dentist.
+
+So, ignoring Melchard, he went up to Sam Bunce.
+
+"I am afraid your daughter is hardly as strong as you thought, Mr.
+Bunce," he said.
+
+Melchard, with a finicking air of nonchalance, stood where he was left,
+lighting a cigarette.
+
+"'Tis nowt but she's frit with that flay-boggart of a Chinaman," said
+Dick, "wi'out it be she trembles lest 'er daddy gets fightin' agen.
+There, then, little lass," he said, stooping to her ear, and coaxing
+back courage, thought the parson, with a voice extraordinarily tender.
+"Way out o' t' crowd her vitals'll settle back to rights and she'll foot
+it another six mile singing."
+
+"Then you won't see our match, Mr. Bunce?"
+
+"'T' lass knows nowt o' cricket," replied Dick. "'Mornin' seemed like
+she relished going to t' fun and press o't. But now she's feared o'
+seein' that blasted ogre again. So, thankin' you, sir, for your lift and
+your good heart to us, we'll just foot it along o'er t' moor."
+
+Dixon Mallaby shook hands with him; the girl, as she drew away from Sam
+Bunce's arm, bobbed the parson a curtsey. But she never turned her face
+to him, and Mallaby, thoughtfully watching the pair down the road to the
+south-west, observed that she never once looked back; for even when,
+being almost indistinguishable among the moving crowd at the corner of
+the green, they were hailed by the ostler, toddling quickly from the
+yard, waving a handkerchief and crying: "Hey, Mr. Bunce, Mr. Sam'l
+Bunce!" it was only the man who turned his head, waving his hand as if
+in reply to a belated farewell.
+
+The parson swung round in time to see Melchard snatch the handkerchief
+from the ostler's hand.
+
+Feeling the clergyman's eyes upon him, he muttered: "Looks like one of
+mine," and ran the hem quickly through his fingers, prying into the
+corners.
+
+At the third, he found a mark, and dropped the handkerchief on the
+stones.
+
+"Of course not," he said, and laughed. "Stupid of me, when I hadn't been
+in the stables."
+
+Dixon Mallaby picked it up.
+
+"Tis t'yoong wumman's," objected Bandy-legs. "Dropped un inside,
+stablin' t' 'osses."
+
+But the parson put the handkerchief in his pocket.
+
+"I am acquainted with Miss Bunce," he said. "Perhaps I shall see them
+again."
+
+With a feeling which he found unreasonable, that he had protected a good
+woman from a bad man, Mr. Dixon Mallaby went to the dressing-room in
+"The Royal George."
+
+Out of Melchard's sight, he examined the handkerchief--a lady's, marked
+with the embroidered initials A.C., and it struck him, once more with a
+sense of unreason, not only that the beastly dentist had discovered that
+these letters did not stand for Araminta Bunce, but that he knew the
+names which they were here intended to represent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+SAPPHIRE AND EMERALD.
+
+
+"What is it?" asked Amaryllis, as Dick turned to a shout, waving his
+hand.
+
+"I don't want to know what he wants, so I take his antics for good byes.
+Come on--let's get into the thick of this lot."
+
+"Was he suspicious?" she asked, when a bend in the road had hidden "The
+Royal George" and even the village green.
+
+"Melchard? Yes--on general principles. No more than that--unless----"
+
+"There's that cut on your cheek, Dick," said Amaryllis.
+
+"And there's the colour of your hair, la-ass," he answered, laughing.
+
+"He never saw under the bonnet," and she whisked the pig-tail forward
+over her shoulder. "Look at that," she said.
+
+"How did you make it that common brown?" he asked, astonished.
+
+"Mother Brundage," said Amaryllis, "greased her hands from the
+frying-pan and rubbed it down hand over hand as if she were hoisting a
+sail. The Marquis of Ontario," she said, "would _know_ I wasn't his
+daughter, with that-coloured hair."
+
+"Then why did you go all to pieces," asked Dick, "at the sound of
+Melchard's voice?"
+
+"It was that frightful man made me feel queer. Just as I was getting
+better, I heard Melchard, and I thought the best place for my
+aristocratic nose was on my daddy's shoulder. Dick!" she cried, looking
+up at his solemn face, "I really couldn't help feeling bad."
+
+"Most girls 'd've fainted. You're clever as paint," he said, "you turn
+your two-spots into aces, and leave him in baulk every time. Poor,
+shaking kid! And I'd brandy in my pocket, and couldn't give it to you!"
+He pulled out his flask. "Have some--you'd better."
+
+Amaryllis with a little tender wrinkle somewhere in her beauty, laughed
+in his face.
+
+"Do I look," she asked, "as if I needed Dutch courage?"
+
+Colour of skin and splendour of eye answered their own question.
+
+"You _look_ top-hole," he said. "But you've had a heavy call on your
+strength."
+
+"What about you, then?" and she touched her left cheek, meaning his.
+"One like that," she said, "and I should have been in bed for a
+month--or dead."
+
+"Pepe said I was to keep on feeding you," he continued, passing over, as
+he always did, she observed, her reference to himself, "and there's been
+no chance but that beer and cheese. I meant to stuff you again at 'The
+George.'"
+
+On their left, in the very outskirts of Ecclesthorpe, was a little stone
+house, roofed with stone slabs, and surrounded with gardens, bee-hives
+and flowers. Upon a wooden arch connecting its stone gate-posts was
+written "Cyclists' Rest. Tea, Minerals."
+
+"Um!" said Dick. "'Minerals' always makes me think of museums, but it
+only means ginger-pop and wuss. Tea's the thing, if brandy isn't."
+
+He pushed the gate open; the hinges screamed, and a young woman came to
+the door of the cottage. As they went towards her through hives and
+wallflowers,
+
+"How the bees do bumble!" said Amaryllis.
+
+"Pot o' fresh tea, miss," said Bunce to the round-faced, soft-eyed girl
+at the door. "And pikelets and parkin an' anything you've got to hand.
+We've nobbut ten minutes now forth to eat an' drink."
+
+He put two half-crowns on the table.
+
+"An' Ah'll never take change, my dear," he added, "so be 'tis ready in
+three."
+
+In two and a half they were drinking it, Bunce-like, from the saucers;
+and Amaryllis once more in danger of the giggles.
+
+"Ma lass and self, miss," said Bunce, between gulps, "be footin' it to
+Harthborough Junction. Bain't there a train, five summat wi' another
+five in it?"
+
+"Five fifteen," said the girl. "Lunnon way."
+
+"That'll be it. We're takin' 't easy-like o'er moor. Now, Ah do call to
+mind there be a track to left, some way down t' ro'd, as'll take 'ee
+gentle and pleasant 'tween two gradely hummocks down into Harthborough.
+But how far out o' Ecclesthorpe that track takes off the pike, I can't
+bring to mind. 'Tis not a ro'd proper but indistink like an' wanderin'.
+So Ah be feared o' missin' it."
+
+"T' owd Drovers' Track, tha meanst. 'Tis easy findin'," said the girl.
+"Thou turn'st off to left by two thorns wi' a white stone by root o' t'
+girt 'un. But they stand a long mile down t' road. Now, if 'ee likes to
+go through house an' cross t' paddock, Ah'll put 'ee in sheep path
+that'll take thee to Drovers' Track where un runs up 'tween t'
+rocks--Bull's Neck, they call it."
+
+When they had finished their tea, and Dick, from the sweetstuff counter,
+had crammed into already burdened pockets two half-pound packets of
+chocolate, the girl led them to the further gate of her father's
+paddock, whence she indicated the highest point of the ridge over which
+"T' owd Drovers' Track" threaded its way.
+
+"Howd eyes on t' lofty knob of 'un," she said, "and thou'lt not stray."
+
+For two or three hundred yards the pair walked in silence; and now that
+terror had passed with the imminence of danger, and that no strange eyes
+surrounded her for which she must play a part not learned nor rehearsed,
+the terrible pressure which had brought Amaryllis so close to her
+companion was relaxed--not annihilated, but withdrawn to lurk in sky and
+air, instead of squeezing the very life and breath out of her physical
+body.
+
+Dick, therefore, though not two feet from her side, seemed all at once a
+hundred miles away. The man whose arm had held her, and whose coat she
+had rubbed her face against, she now found herself too shy to touch or
+speak to. Yet she wished to hear his voice, and even more, longed to
+feel that he was really there--the same man, no other than she had found
+him.
+
+She fixed her eyes upon him, hoping he would feel them and respond--help
+her somehow to bridge this silly gulf. But he strode on, at a pace which
+made her run lest she should fall behind.
+
+His eyes were set straight forward, his head a little bent. No smoke
+came from the pipe in his mouth, and the whole expression of face and
+figure was of dogged endurance. A little trickle of blood had started
+afresh from the wound on his cheek. She wondered what had set it flowing
+again. Could it have been some clumsiness of her own in her convulsive
+clinging to him?
+
+A woman's compassion, more easily aroused by a cut finger than by a
+suffering mind, narrowed the chasm between them, until a small, soft
+voice bridged it.
+
+"Dick!" she cried. "Oh, Dick."
+
+But the stiff face remained rigid, so the frightened girl quickened her
+pace until she was well in front; then, turning, she saw that their lids
+covered two-thirds of the eye-balls, and that the mechanism of the man
+was driven by an impulse of which, if it were his at all, he was surely
+not conscious.
+
+As he reached her side, she laid a hand on him, and, "Dick!" she cried
+again.
+
+The man started, turning his face the wrong way.
+
+The eyes did not open, but the jaw muscles relaxed, letting the cold
+pipe fall from his teeth. The blind effort which he made to catch it
+overbalanced the automaton.
+
+He pitched forward, and would have fallen on his face, but for the
+shoulder which stopped his head, and the arms that clutched his reeling
+body.
+
+Accurate instinct loosened her joints as the weight struck her, and she
+came slowly to her knees, sinking back until she sat upon her heels, so
+that the man received no shock. She had turned halfside-ways as she went
+down; and kneeling, held him across her, with the uninjured cheek
+strained upon her left shoulder, and his heels far away to her right.
+
+She looked down into the face, where the eyes were now wholly covered.
+
+The dark semi-circles under the closed lids and the deepened lines of
+the thin face moved in her compassion as tender as she felt for the
+bleeding bruise on the cheek. She remembered how he had nursed her, and
+given her, by his mere sympathy and control, that hour's wonderful
+sleep. She remembered him crawling, at the acme of her terror, through
+the slit of the window; saving her from the Dutch woman; turning his
+back while she dressed; leaping like a heaven-sent devil over the
+stair-rail; fighting Ockley with his fists--and refused to remember that
+same enemy brought utterly to an end of his enmity.
+
+Her heart swelled, and beat heavily with the sense of ownership and the
+dread of losing what was her own; it was a fear more poignant than any
+other of the fears which she had suffered in a long chain since she fell
+asleep in Randal Bellamy's study--only last night!
+
+Was it death--death which she had seen once already to-day--was it that
+coming to her here against her heart? Or was it but with him as it had
+been with her in the Brundage bedroom--the awful need of sleep.
+
+She bent her ear close over his lips, and heard the breath long, and
+regular.
+
+She forgot his wasted features in the beauty of the long eyelashes
+touching his cheeks; and just because she could not see what the lids
+were hiding, she remembered her walk down through the wood below the
+Manor House, and that foolish phrase, "blue as a hummin-bird's weskit,"
+which had then haunted her, till she found him playing with Gorgon in
+the road; and from that to her bewilderment twenty-four hours later,
+when he had called the dog Zola. She had reproved the enormity of the
+syncopated pun, but Dick had insisted that Zola fitted an animal whose
+expression was always either disgusted or disgusting.
+
+She must not keep him here, so near the stone cottage, and the road.
+They might be seen.
+
+He had offered her brandy. Carefully she felt his coat. The right
+outside pocket she could not reach, but there was a hard lump in it,
+pressing against her cramped knees.
+
+She leaned over sideways, twisted her legs in front of her, and made a
+lap into which, by edging away from the heavy body, she let the head
+slide gently. She got the flask out, pulled the metal cup from its base,
+and into it poured a little brandy. With tender force she managed at
+last to send a trickle of the spirit into his mouth.
+
+He choked, tried to swallow, coughed violently, and then opened his
+eyes.
+
+"I told you," he said, "that you needed brandy, not to kill me with it.
+What's happened?"
+
+"You were walking in your sleep," she began.
+
+"Sleeping in my walk, perhaps," he admitted. "Bad enough, but very
+different."
+
+His senses coming back to him, Dick felt a wet drop on his forehead,
+brushed it away, and glanced at the sky, but not, as Amaryllis expected,
+at her.
+
+"Well," she said, "I was frightened."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You dropped your pipe, tried to catch it, and fell on your face,"
+explained Amaryllis.
+
+Dick felt his nose and eyebrows. "No, I never!" he declared indignantly.
+
+Amaryllis laughed shakily.
+
+"You see, I'm softer than the ground. You fell on me." And she patted
+her left shoulder.
+
+"Your fault, I'm afraid. Must have tipped you right over."
+
+"No, I just subsided--quite neatly. And you never got a bump, Dick. But
+I was afraid--afraid, you know."
+
+"I must be in rotten condition, going to pieces like that. Why, look at
+you--been through twice as much."
+
+"Oh, no," she answered, snatching greedily at the opportunity of telling
+a little of what she had been thinking. "Did I drive two hundred and
+fifty miles in the dark, at fifty miles an hour? Did I climb and crawl,
+and fight, and nurse a squealing girl after carrying her for miles?"
+
+"Three hundred yards," said Dick dryly. "And you must have been shamming
+to know anything about it."
+
+"Mrs. Brundage told me," she answered, "that you came through the wood
+carrying me in your arms."
+
+And so was he in hers--the reversal of their cases struck him like a
+soft, heavy blow on the heart.
+
+And so much puzzled was Amaryllis by the strange intensity of his eyes
+lifted to hers that she found the gaze hard to endure, and moved
+uneasily.
+
+"We ought not to stay here, Dick," she said.
+
+He started scrambling to his feet, but Amaryllis was before him, and
+giving him a hand, helped him to rise with a pull of which the vigour
+surprised him.
+
+"You're strong," he said, swaying unsteadily for a moment.
+
+She flushed with pleasure at male praise.
+
+"I'm awfully strong. I've felt perfectly safe, you see, ever
+since--since I was such a fool and you made me sleep and be sensible."
+
+Dick looked about him, and caught sight of the stone roof of the cottage
+where the bees bumbled.
+
+"I didn't get far before I crumpled," he said. "Let's get a move on."
+
+As they walked with their eyes on the cleft knob of the ridge, he
+reverted to her last words.
+
+"Not scared any more? Then what price Melchard?" he asked, "and
+malingering pig-tailed wenches that hide their faces and sob on their
+daddies' shoulders?"
+
+"It was that frightful Chinaman, Dick. Yes, I was afraid then. I was
+afraid--afraid you'd----"
+
+"Take him on? Nothin' doing," he answered. "I should've stood just a
+dog's chance against the village hero, my dear girl, and the Malay made
+just one bite of him. Next time that lopsided serang looms on the
+horizon, you won't see me for dust and small stones."
+
+The tone, perhaps, more than the words in which the man of whom she
+could not help making a hero seemed to disparage himself, annoyed Miss
+Caldegard.
+
+It was as if one good friend of hers had maligned another, and she could
+not quarrel with the traducer without falling out with the traduced.
+
+"But it was Melchard's voice that made you take a lump of me between
+your teeth and bite a hole in my coat," he went on. "There's a hideous
+wound just under this." And he picked at two broken threads on his
+shoulder.
+
+"That was just hate and disgust, not fear. And it's horrid to say I bit
+you, when you know I didn't. But I was afraid, Dick, that you'd have to
+do something to that huge dwarf-thing, and get hurt--and----"
+
+"Well, I've told you I'll bolt if he shows his face," he repeated, more
+gently. But seeing her flush and frown angrily, "What's wrong,
+Amaryllis?" he asked, and drew nearer to her side as they walked.
+
+But she kept the distance undiminished.
+
+"I don't like the way you speak of yourself," she replied hotly. "It
+makes me feel angry--as if someone else had done it."
+
+"Done what?"
+
+"Lied about you--said you were afraid of a hideous freak out of a
+circus. You!"
+
+The brown eyes blazed on him with the anger meant for his hypothetic
+slanderer. And Dick, between the joy with which her annexation of his
+honour filled him, and his weakened control, found himself on the edge
+of an explosion of feeling; but brought back common-sense and
+good-humour to them both with a touch of his antiseptic cynicism.
+
+"Can you swim?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said the girl, round-eyed.
+
+"If you couldn't, would you jump in after another fool that couldn't?"
+
+"Another? Oh!" exclaimed the girl.
+
+"Well, you would be, if you couldn't. But you can. Now, would you jump
+in?"
+
+"No. I should run for a rope or something."
+
+"That's me," said Dick. "Next time that crop-eared, chrome-coloured
+coolie shows against the sky-line, I run for a rope or something."
+
+The wrinkles disappeared from her forehead, and once more Amaryllis
+slipped her hand through the bend of his arm. She did it as for
+friendship or support, but her thought was for him. His rest had been
+nothing, and at any moment that deadly sleep might seize him again. She
+made up her mind that next time, even should they have to finish their
+walking by night, his sleep should be at least as long as that he had
+given her.
+
+"I'm a pig to be cross," she said. "But I'm only not cross now because
+you make me laugh with your ridiculous good temper. But, Dick----"
+
+She had felt that, without her linked arm, his steps would already be
+wandering.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"Next time it's too much for you, I'm going to let you sleep. You must."
+
+He looked at his watch.
+
+"It's a quarter to three," he said. "If we missed that train at
+five-fifteen, we should have to wait till ten for the next."
+
+"And it'd be much safer," Amaryllis broke in, "to wait on the moor, than
+in a village or a station where people could see us."
+
+"Yes. I'm not clear-headed enough now to see into Melchard's mind, but I
+can still calculate on what I know. If he didn't suspect us, he'll go
+the round of his pickets, beginning with Gallowstree Dip. If he did
+suspect, he'll come this way after us, and run down towards the London
+road and look across the moor, along the Drovers' Track from the
+hawthorns and the white stone. He won't see us--we are in a fold till we
+get a mile further at least. He'll go on towards the main road, but when
+he meets his picket that nobody like us two has passed, he'll come back
+and try the Drovers' Track."
+
+"He didn't suspect," insisted the girl.
+
+"We'll bank on that, then," said Dick, "--if we can find a bush or a
+ditch to hide in."
+
+The faint path they were following here reached the lowest point of the
+depression which hid them from the road and from the cottage by whose
+back door they had left it, and soon began to rise.
+
+The ascent, as they topped it, proved, however, to be concerned merely
+with crossing a spur, below which the path wound about the edge of a
+bowl-shaped hollow, rimmed and lined with dark-green, close-cropped
+grass; and at the bottom lay a tiny tarn.
+
+So steep were the sides that a broad band of green was reflected to the
+eyes bent down upon the still water. And this circle of mirrored green,
+embracing a disc of the sky's azure, stared up at them like a pupil-less
+blue eye.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Amaryllis, "it's a sapphire set in emerald!"
+
+Down a winding path, vague as a wrinkle on a young face, and worn, said
+Amaryllis, by ghostly hoofs of departed sheep, they crept to the pool's
+edge.
+
+They sat on a little irregular terrace, a few feet above the water, and
+Dick, taking the cup from his flask, and having dipped, tasted, rinsed
+and filled again, passed it to Amaryllis.
+
+"Good water," he said, watching her drink. Amaryllis smiled on him as
+she finished, and plunged into the ample pocket of Mrs. Brundage's skirt
+for her chocolate. She broke off a lump and gave him the cup to fill
+once more.
+
+"It's lovely water," she said, munching; then poured out half the water
+he had given her. "But I'm going to spoil yours," she went on, and
+poured in brandy till the cup almost brimmed. "Just obey meekly for
+once."
+
+"That's easy," said Dick.
+
+"For brandy, or for me?" asked the girl.
+
+But Dick was drinking.
+
+"Now lie down along the ledge. Be quick. I can't enjoy my chocolate till
+you do."
+
+He looked at her with heavy eyes.
+
+"I must," he said. "The brandy's finished me."
+
+Without rising, he drew up his legs to the terrace level, stretched them
+out, said: "Wake me, if the chocolate makes you sleepy," and rolled full
+length on his left side.
+
+"Lift your head a little, and I'll spread a bit of my skirt under it.
+There's plenty of it," said Amaryllis, shifting towards him as she sat.
+
+She got no answer. He was dead asleep.
+
+Five minutes she gave him to sink deeper into the unknown, while she
+hovered above his dreams like a seagull over the course of a stream
+which has disappeared into a tunnel.
+
+At last she lifted his head and drew a fold of her skirt beneath it; but
+was not yet content; for she knew the weariness of lying on the side
+when the unsupported neck and heavy head increase the pressure on the
+under shoulder. So once more, to slip her knee beneath the neck for a
+pillow, she raised the head--and there came to her heart and breath a
+flutter which seemed to make its attack through fingers and up the arms.
+She felt, with a difference, the strong, subtle, ineffable thrill of a
+woman's early handlings of her earliest child.
+
+In spite of her terror in the night, her danger of the early morning,
+the men fighting and the man dead; in spite of the excitement and risks
+of the afternoon, shaking the heart in relief only less than in
+encounter, and in spite of aching head and limbs, stiffening to cramp
+while she still sat and the man still slept, Amaryllis knew herself
+happier than ever in her life before.
+
+Not rejoicing in the future--neither in hope nor in fear of what the
+sleeper might feel, what ask for, when danger was behind him and
+fighting once more a splendid thing belonging to newspapers and books;
+instinctively aware, perhaps, that his spirit had moved already half-way
+to meet hers, yet so far from asking, even of her own mind, whether Dick
+Bellamy loved her or no, that she did not even mentally formulate the
+idea of love to explain her own feelings, Amaryllis sat in blissful,
+unphilosophic enjoyment of service and protection.
+
+Was she not at once his pillow and his defence? Was he not sleeping like
+a little child whose fever has abated? And had she not a dog's ears and
+a sailor's eyes for his enemies? And did she not know just where to lay
+her hand on the butt of Ockley's pistol, how precious were its two
+cartridge's, and how near, therefore, to use each with effect, she must
+let an enemy approach?
+
+She was happy, then, and time was nothing, until the man's head moved on
+her numbed thigh, and a deep sigh came from his chest.
+
+She leaned over him and lifted the lock of straight black hair which had
+fallen over the left eye, stroking it back as he would have brushed it,
+and murmuring, "Lie still, dear, lie still," in just such words and
+tones as some day she would use to a smaller man on a softer pillow.
+
+But the instinct of the man of many wilds had told him that his hour's
+rest was over.
+
+He sighed again, turned on his back, and opened his eyes.
+
+He saw her face hanging over him--upside down, it seemed. Yet even
+inverted, and seen through the mists of sleep, that face conveyed
+something which he did not understand, something so strange that he
+caught his breath, gasping, and blundered to his feet.
+
+The girl still sat, looking up at him.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, sharply.
+
+But Amaryllis had forgotten herself altogether, and did not know that he
+found his wonder in her face.
+
+"What is what?" she asked, simply.
+
+"Your face----" he began, and could find no more words.
+
+"My face," she echoed, puzzled, and feeling blindly for a handkerchief.
+"It's all right, isn't it?"
+
+"It's glorious--shining with happiness," he answered, his voice sounding
+like that of a man in pain.
+
+"Weren't you glad," asked Amaryllis, "when you'd got me off to sleep,
+and when I woke up all alive again? I know it didn't make you look
+anything but stern and pre-occupied and business-like; I felt as if you
+were pleased, though. I'm different, and show things in my face, I
+suppose."
+
+"But you were looking like that when I opened my eyes."
+
+"Well?" said Amaryllis.
+
+"You hadn't had time to know whether I was well or ill, strong or weak.
+And you looked as if it had been there a long time."
+
+"What?" she asked again.
+
+"The--the expression," said Dick, his tone as fierce as his words were
+lame.
+
+Very sweetly, and with no taint of derision in the sweetness, Amaryllis
+laughed.
+
+"The gloriousness? I'd been watching you all the time, you see, and I
+knew it was doing you lots of good--and--and I was proud of being
+useful, perhaps. So, of course I looked happy and shining."
+
+"When did you take my head on your knees?" he asked, sternly.
+
+But this time she understood every furrow of his frown.
+
+"As soon as you were asleep," she answered.
+
+He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock.
+
+"And I never moved?" he asked.
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor you?"
+
+"No, Dick."
+
+"An hour and a quarter! My God!" he exclaimed, "you must be as stiff as
+a pious book. And I'm damned if you're not sitting there because you
+can't get up!"
+
+"Oh, yes, I could. But give me a hand," she answered; and he pulled her
+to her feet.
+
+She staggered, and he caught her by an elbow.
+
+"One of them's as fast asleep as you were," she said. "It'll go off in a
+minute."
+
+But for Dick Bellamy, caught at last on the ebb of his resistance, one
+elbow was not enough. So he seized the other, and by the pair held her
+off from him, looking into her eyes.
+
+"Tell me what it meant," he said, "--your face."
+
+"I've told you," she replied, with serious eyes.
+
+"I saw it. It must have meant a great deal more than your words, or a
+great deal less than it looked. If you were taking a cheap pleasure in
+being charitable, your face is a liar, Amaryllis. If you find great
+happiness in being loved, _you_ are."
+
+She ignored the accusation, merely answering:
+
+"I might."
+
+But she was still so serious that Dick could not speak.
+
+"It wasn't exactly that, though," she explained. "I want to be as
+truthful as my face--if you could read it right."
+
+"Tell me, then."
+
+"It was my half, I think, that made me so awfully contented."
+
+"Your half? That means--if you mean anything at all--you mean, your half
+was loving me?"
+
+She nodded, and spoke before he could answer the nod.
+
+"Of course I might not have stayed contented long, if you hadn't been
+like that too. You are, aren't you?"
+
+His hands had slipped up her arms to her shoulders, and it sent a pang
+of wild joy through her content to feel them trembling while they held
+her.
+
+"Contented? No, by God, I'm not! _Contented's_ as much as saying I could
+have enough of you. But I've loved you ever since I heard you calling
+Zola in that wonderful voice of yours. Before I even saw your face
+close, your 'Gorgon! Gorgon!' gave me a pain I was afraid of, because I
+wanted to be hurt again. It made me angry. You've been waking me up at
+four in the morning and never letting me sleep again. You've filled my
+head with pictures--a whole cinema of pictures; and my ears with sounds!
+Your dress on the stairs; your voice calling 'Dad! dad!' from the
+garden, and humming little tunes I'd never heard till you sang 'em,
+coming in with your arms full of leaves and flowers. Seems like months
+you've filled me, and it's only four days. No, I'm not contented,
+Amaryllis, but I'm damned happy."
+
+Then his arms crossed each other round her body; and it seemed to
+Amaryllis that she sank away into space filled with an ecstasy; and
+that, after a while, which was not time, she was fetched back into time
+and to earth by hands so strong that they had brought the ecstasy with
+them also.
+
+There were kisses, not all his.
+
+Then, to focus her joy, she thrust it away from her; and, seeing Dick
+Bellamy's countenance, she remembered how he had spoken of what he had
+found, when he awoke, in hers.
+
+His eyes shone upon her as she now knew she had always wished them to
+shine. Splendid eyes, she had called them in that part of herself where
+she had for a long time--quite two days--made pretence of deafness; eyes
+very blue and firm, but seldom, until now, to be long held.
+
+"Dick," she said, "that's the first time--just what I wanted."
+
+"What?" he asked.
+
+"Your voice has spoken to me, your ears have heard me, your eyes have
+looked at me. But now, your eyes are listening to mine. Oh, Dick!" she
+exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," he answered gravely, "it's great to be free."
+
+"Tremendous!" said Amaryllis.
+
+Her hands were looking for her handkerchief in the Brundage pocket. They
+encountered a comb, the half-packet of chocolate, a pair of white cotton
+gloves which raised a moment's hope, and Dick's pipe, which she had
+picked up as they started again on their way; but no handkerchief! And
+her cheeks were wet with half-dried tears, and Dick was coming nearer.
+
+"Oh, please," she cried, "do lend me a hanky. You made me a bodice of
+one--in that beastly room with the woman--and you took it from a bundle
+of them, out of your coat pocket. I felt them there when I wore it. I
+left the one you gave me behind, and I've lost my own."
+
+The pathetical-comical expression of a pretty woman in danger of using
+elementary means to dry her tears, made Dick Bellamy chuckle with
+laughter of a quality that Amaryllis had not heard from him before,
+while he chose the least rumpled handkerchief from his stock of four,
+and shook it open for her.
+
+She took it, blessing him as women will bless a man for such relief;
+and, as she used it, there struck him, like a smack in his face, the
+memory of her hand and another handkerchief.
+
+"I saw you use your own," he said, "on the box of that Noah's Ark of a
+wagonette. I remember your pretty fingers and action. I hoped nobody
+behind us would see that it was a lady blowing her nose. It was a little
+handkerchief--your own," he insisted. "When did you lose it?"
+
+Amaryllis perceived that the question bore upon their safety, and
+puckered her forehead, thinking.
+
+"I wiped my fingers with it, after I'd taken Tod Sloan's bridle off,"
+she answered, "There was a sticky mess of hay and chaff on them from the
+bit, and I remember wiping it off with my handkerchief."
+
+"Seen it since?" he asked.
+
+"No," said the girl. "Does it matter? Even if I did drop it then,
+Melchard wouldn't go in there. He hadn't any horses."
+
+"The ostler called after us, you remember. He was waving something
+white."
+
+"Oh! You didn't tell me. And you'd given him half a crown!" said
+Amaryllis.
+
+"Seemed a grateful sort of bloke, didn't he?" said Dick, ruefully.
+
+"And wanted to give it back to me? Oh, Dick! Melchard was there, close
+by, talking to the handsome clergyman."
+
+"Was it marked."
+
+"An embroidery-stitched A.C. That's all," said Amaryllis.
+
+"C doesn't stand for Bunce. Let's get out of this," said Dick Bellamy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+A ROPE OR SOMETHING.
+
+
+As they reached the level of the moor and the Drovers' Track, to join
+which ancient road their path stretched on for yet a mile, they turned,
+moved by a common impulse, to look down on the green hollow which had
+been the nest of so great a happiness.
+
+"Emerald, you said, Amaryllis?"
+
+"And blue, Dick, from the sky."
+
+When they had tramped a half-mile or more in silence which seemed to
+Amaryllis very close communion, Dick spoke; for already he was feeling
+the stones of the world beneath their feet.
+
+"We put our money on the wrong horse, dear. They didn't suspect--they
+knew. And they're near us," he said.
+
+"I don't care. If they kill me now, Dick, I don't care."
+
+He agreed--nodding more sympathetically, she thought, than any man
+before him had ever nodded.
+
+But after another silence, he said:
+
+"And yet that makes it all the more necessary to come out top dog this
+time. Where d'you think they are?"
+
+"If the Drovers' Track's good enough for a car," she answered, "I should
+guess--after all, it's all guessing, isn't it?--I should guess that they
+turned off the road at the hawthorns and the white stone, and drove
+straight on to Harthborough."
+
+"They've had time to go and come back," said Dick. "If we had food with
+us, we might hide all night on the moor. But you'd be ill by the
+morning."
+
+"Let's go on," said Amaryllis.
+
+"You lead me to luck," he answered, "so what you say goes. A train's the
+safest place for us, and, if Melchard's seen his picket there after
+driving right over this ground, he won't be expecting to find us on the
+way back."
+
+"He may be between us and Harthborough now," said Amaryllis.
+
+"If we can pass him, then," said Dick, "his Harthborough picket won't
+give us much trouble. Our other way is the London road. There we might
+run into Melchard plus his picket. The railway's at Harthborough, so
+Harthborough's got it."
+
+"And here," said the girl, "is the Drovers' Track."
+
+Before they knew it, they had stepped into a way wider and more clearly
+marked than the path which had brought them across the base of the
+triangle of which the apex was the white stone by the hawthorns they had
+never seen.
+
+"It's a derelict Roman road," said Dick, as they walked along it towards
+the cleft in the ridge. "See the small paving stones--here--there--and
+you can feel 'em through the turf, here at the side. Most of this grass
+has come since the railways took the cattle and the goods wagons off the
+road. If the track is as good as this all the way----"
+
+"What's that?" exclaimed Amaryllis, stopping and listening.
+
+They were not more than three hundred yards from the point where the
+road began to rise from the broad, level space of the moor spreading on
+both sides of the old paved causeway in firm, close-nibbled grass,
+interspersed with tufts of ling and heather, varied by rarer clumps of
+gorse.
+
+Not within a hundred yards in any direction could Dick find possible
+cover from eyes descending the Bull's Neck.
+
+The pair stood motionless, their hearts in their ears.
+
+What they heard was unmistakable.
+
+"A motor," said Amaryllis. "It's coming down."
+
+She laid a hand on his shoulder, lifting her face to him.
+
+When he raised his own from it, it was to watch the point where the
+descending road took its last bend in the passage by which it had
+traversed the ridge: the point where the approaching car must appear.
+
+With flushed face and unflinching eyes, Amaryllis stood beside her
+lover, her right hand still lying light on his shoulder, her sun-bonnet
+fallen back, and the beauty of hair and features open to the coming
+enemy.
+
+As the blue car pushed its nose round the corner, and, turning, made
+straight for the lower plateau, she glanced at Dick's face once more; to
+see there an impersonal serenity which she might have found inhuman, had
+she been a mere spectator of the drama which was coming. Being, however,
+one of its persons, she felt herself enwrapped, and uplifted from fear
+by the consciousness that a calm mind and a swift brain were supporting
+each other in her service.
+
+In her soul she cried already, not _Nous les aurons_, but _Il les a_.
+
+"They'll see us," said Dick. "When I say 'run!' make for that
+gorse-bush. I'll be behind, overdoing my limp. When I say 'down!'
+fall--sprained ankle. I try to pull you up. You grip your ankle and
+yell. They'll be out of the car and after us. When they're close, I
+shall bolt across the road. Yell out 'don't leave me.' They won't touch
+you--they're after me--I've got the stuff. When they're well away, get
+back to the car. Get in. Can you drive her?"
+
+"Yes, it's a Seely-Thompson."
+
+"Get her round, head to the rise, ready to pick me up. Got it?"
+
+"Yes," said Amaryllis.
+
+From the car came a queer animal cry. The machine shot suddenly forward.
+
+Deceived by the immobility of the waiting pair, the driver had increased
+his pace.
+
+"Run!" said Dick, and Amaryllis leapt the ditch at the roadside and ran
+in the direction he had given. He followed clumsily, exaggerating his
+lameness.
+
+The car shot by them, as they ran obliquely in the opposite direction,
+so adding, before the driver could pull up, a hundred yards to their
+start.
+
+It was, therefore, not until Amaryllis was at the rise of the ridge that
+they heard behind them the two pairs of feet in pursuit.
+
+"Down!" said Dick, close behind her; and with a well simulated shriek of
+pain, the girl fell in a heap.
+
+"Oh, my foot!" she cried.
+
+Dick's chief fear was that shooting should begin too soon.
+
+But he heard Melchard's high voice shouting angrily to Mut-mut in his
+own tongue.
+
+"Jagun pakai snapong. Brenkali akau mow pukul sama prempuan."
+
+And Dick smiled, turning his head in time to see Mut-mut tuck away his
+revolver.
+
+He leaned over Amaryllis, with pretence of trying to pull her to her
+feet.
+
+"All right. It works. He's telling Crop-ear not to shoot, 'fear of
+hitting you."
+
+Amaryllis pushed his hands away, clutched her ankle and moaned aloud.
+
+Dick turned from her and, at a better pace than before, hobbled across
+the road, pursued by entreaties from Amaryllis so agonized and lifelike
+as almost to deceive the very author of the scheme.
+
+As he began, with increased appearance of lameness to labour up the
+slope, he once more heard Melchard's voice:
+
+"Jagun pakai snapong, kalau dea ta mow lepas. Kita mow dapat."
+
+Labouring still more, Dick glanced behind him and saw the two pursuers
+straining every nerve to overtake him, and for the moment giving no
+thought to Amaryllis.
+
+Something more Melchard said, but this time Dick could not catch the
+order. Mut-mut, however, interpreted, by altering his course and running
+along the foot of the ridge towards a place where the ascent appeared
+less steep. By this, it seemed, he intended to cut across Dick's line of
+flight, and to drive him back upon Melchard.
+
+Melchard, meantime, was toiling up the slope in Dick's footsteps with a
+determination unexpected in a man of his appearance and mode of life.
+
+On the other side of the ancient causeway, at the very foot of the
+slope, Amaryllis, full of courage and calculation, but with a heart
+beating painfully until her moment for action should come.
+
+This, she had resolved, must be the moment when she should lose sight of
+the last runner; and by turning her head sideways, though never raising
+it, she could see that Dick had the same idea; for he had so directed
+his flight that he and Melchard were soon hidden from her, while the
+lumbering Mut-mut, wasting huge force, it seemed, upon each short
+stride, pounding along the lower ground, vanished only when, reaching
+his chosen line of ascent, he began to mount the hill.
+
+Then Amaryllis rose, lifted the voluminous skirt, tucked the hem into
+the waistband, and ran, with long flashes of grey stocking, for the
+abandoned car.
+
+Dick, still leading his enemies on, saw her in one of his calculating
+looks behind him. And his heart leapt into his throat for pride of the
+woman that could listen to, comprehend and interpret orders--and carry
+them out with a stride like that.
+
+He prolonged his backward look, and Melchard, below him, observed that
+it was directed over his head, and turned his eyes in the same
+direction.
+
+He saw the girl running, pulled a weapon from his hip and tried a long
+shot.
+
+The crack of the Browning had hardly reached her ears before Amaryllis
+was in the driving-seat. But not for a flicker did she turn her eyes
+from the business of the moment.
+
+Melchard, with his left hand on his hip and the barrel of the automatic
+resting on the upturned elbow close to his chin, was on the point of
+firing again at the very moment when Mut-mut, having reached the top of
+the ridge, was running back to meet Dick, and Dick, coming down the
+slope at the best of his prodigious though uneven stride, was within two
+paces of Melchard's back.
+
+At the sound of his rushing approach, and in the very act of firing,
+Melchard started. The shot went wide, and the man turned himself and his
+weapon on the enemy that was nearer even than he guessed.
+
+In the very moment of wheeling about, he received a rugger hand-off on
+his right jaw, which launched him many yards, sideways down the slope,
+to land and turn literally heels over head as he fell.
+
+His pistol fell more slowly and further, after describing a wavering arc
+over his head.
+
+And then Dick Bellamy ran; ran as he had not run since he broke the tape
+in a certain sprint of four hundred metres at Buenos Ayres, in forty
+nine and a quarter seconds. But that was when his legs were an equal
+pair.
+
+Amaryllis saw it all; Mut-mut on the sky-line of the ridge, hesitating;
+Melchard and his pistol in eccentric parabolas; Dick, with a wisp of
+black hair over his wounded cheek, "flying," she called it, down the
+last of the slope, and crossing the level ground to her and the car; a
+wild man running, she thought, with the pace of a racehorse, and the
+movement, not of a runaway, but of a winner. "And, oh!" she would say to
+him afterwards, "your funny eyes! How they blazed!"
+
+Within four strides of the car.
+
+"Let her rip," he grunted, and taking the low door of the tonneau in his
+stride, landed on the back seat.
+
+The car rushed forward.
+
+Dick looked round him. Melchard was on his feet, bent and searching the
+long grass and scrub of the lower slope.
+
+"The beast's got some guts," muttered Dick.
+
+Melchard stood erect and began to run towards them, slowly and
+painfully.
+
+"He's found his gun," said Dick.
+
+A raised arm and a sharp crack proved his words.
+
+"Throw in the top speed," said Dick. "We _must_ go through the Bull's
+Neck. No cover the other way."
+
+He looked up at the ridge. Mut-mut was not there nor anywhere in sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+THE BAAG-NOUK.
+
+
+The car rushed at the slope, and the shoulder of the cutting hid it from
+Melchard the fraction of a second before his next shot was heard.
+
+Amaryllis took the double bend of the little canon with an assurance
+which satisfied Dick of her ability.
+
+The sprint had exhausted his reserve of nervous force, for the moment
+slender; and he lay back in the ample seat of the tonneau scarcely more
+than half-conscious.
+
+The road straightening before her and still climbing, Amaryllis glanced
+at him over her shoulder.
+
+"There's some brandy left," she shouted, her eyes again on her work, "in
+your left pocket. Finish it."
+
+Her voice roused him; with an effort he found and unscrewed the flask.
+
+He had hardly drained it before sight came back to his eyes and he
+remembered the danger ahead.
+
+Mut-mut!
+
+They had reached a strip of road level and straight, some two hundred
+yards in length, which crossed the breadth of the ridge, on its way to a
+descent as steep as the climb already accomplished. But even this, the
+highest part of their road, ran in a cutting, or natural cleft, in the
+spine of the ridge; and rocks and bushes, with a few stunted trees, rose
+in jumbled terraces on both sides of the car.
+
+Cover was there for a hundred Mut-muts; and for Dick Bellamy one was
+more than enough, while he could not see him.
+
+With his heart in his mouth and Ockley's gun in his hand, he sat
+waiting.
+
+But Amaryllis, in the false belief that both enemies were behind her,
+and well taught in the handling of a car, was not going to begin an
+unknown descent at full speed. About half-way across the level, she
+slackened the pace, turning her face a little to the left, as if to
+speak to the man behind her.
+
+And in that moment, with the words in his mouth to bid her quicken, not
+relax the speed, Dick saw the bestial one-eared Malay, erect upon a
+boulder, not more than three feet on the off-side distant from the car.
+
+The brute was on the point of leaping down upon them.
+
+The girl saw Dick's revolver go up, turned, and saw its target.
+
+The horrors of the morning, coming to a climax in this shock like a
+nightmare's crisis, seemed to stop her heart. With instinctive memory of
+her instructor's, "If you're taken bad, miss, throw out your clutch, jam
+on your breaks and faint comfortable," she stopped the car and lost
+consciousness.
+
+In the same moment Dick fired.
+
+The bullet was too late to stop that gorilla-like spring, and Mut-mut,
+with a glitter of steel flashing in one of his outspread palms, launched
+himself upon them, landing, like some huge and horrible cat of dreams,
+on all fours in the body of the car.
+
+His left ribs were pressed against Dick's knees, his right hand tearing
+at and ripping the cloth and leather of the car's side-linings as he
+struggled to rise.
+
+What was fastened in that right hand Dick had seen, and with Ockley's
+last bullet he blew out Mut-mut's brains.
+
+Before even freeing himself from the weight of the corpse, he felt for
+its hip-pocket, and pushed what he found into his own belt.
+
+Then, cursing himself for having finished the brandy, he searched the
+locker under the cushion of the seat and found, amongst a confusion of
+odds and ends, a sealed bottle of whisky and a corkscrew.
+
+"Robbie Burns, Three Star, All-malt, Pre-War, Liqueur Highland Whisky,"
+said the label, gay with pseudo-tartan colours, which, in happier hours,
+would have scared him worse than the words.
+
+When he had stretched Amaryllis, still unconscious, in the road, with a
+cushion under her head and two beneath her feet, he let her lie awhile.
+Then, encouraged by the faint colour creeping back to her cheeks, he sat
+beside her in the road and lifted her shoulders in his left arm, coaxing
+her to life and forcing between her pale lips burning drops of "Robbie
+Burns."
+
+So that, when her eyes came open, and a little sense into her ears, this
+was the kind of thing that she heard:
+
+"Oh, yes, but you must! It's three stars, and there's only a pair of
+twins in your eyes. Proof strength, and yours isn't, you darling! Drink,
+will you, you wicked girl? I tell you, it's all-malt, and not a jim-jam
+to the cask. That's the way, my beauty! Now another! It's
+Pre-War--fitting prize for Our Brave Women Who Showed The Tommies How To
+Fight!"
+
+"How silly you are, Dick, dear!" she said at last, wiping her lips. "And
+what perfectly beastly brandy!"
+
+Dick tasted the stuff, and frankly spat it out.
+
+"I suppose it might be worse, seeing its called whisky, and allowing for
+the label," he said. "Young woman, I'm going to kiss you somethin' crool
+in a minute. 'Course I'm silly! What was it you did, when I was only
+taking a snooze?"
+
+"Cried," she answered.
+
+"And I laugh to see you all right again."
+
+But Amaryllis was looking about her.
+
+"Is it gone, that awful thing?" she asked, whispering.
+
+"Gone for good," said Dick.
+
+"And, oh! the car? How did you ever stop it?"
+
+"You stopped it, you wonder-child. And there's a great deal more 'how'
+about that."
+
+"Then--then it's the same thing as last time?" she said, her face paling
+once more.
+
+"The same thing," admitted Dick. "It was him or us, you know. And
+there's not much egoism in saying we're better worth keeping, is there?"
+
+Though she shuddered again and bore a grave face, he could see that she
+was relieved.
+
+Rising with the help of his hand, she tried to smooth her rumpled
+feathers, and said:
+
+"Hadn't we better go on?"
+
+"I've got to move something from the car first," he replied, with
+ambiguity merely euphemistic. "You stand here and keep a look-out
+towards Harthborough."
+
+"All right," she answered, understanding very well what he had to do.
+She turned away, and then, with an effort, her face still averted,
+"Can't I help you, Dick?" she asked.
+
+"Yes--by sitting on that stone and not turning round till I let you."
+
+And he went back to the car, taking the "Robbie Burns" with him.
+
+In his shaken and exhausted condition, the task of dragging that
+revolting corpse from the car was not easy. Heavy he had known the body
+would be, but when he had opened the door on the off-side, and would
+have pulled the dead thing out by the heels, he was surprised to find
+that he could not move it. On a second effort the slight yielding of the
+mass was accompanied by a sound of rending and he remembered Mut-mut's
+right hand, armed with a weapon of unspeakable cruelty, which only once
+before in his life had he seen--the Mahratta baag-nouk, or Tiger's Claw.
+
+He went round to the car's-near side, and there found, as he had
+expected, the dead right hand anchored to the lining-cushions by what
+was, he supposed, a unique specimen, made to the fancy of the creature
+that wore it; for, in addition to the leather strap across the back of
+the hand, two rings were welded to the instrument, through which to pass
+the second and third fingers, thus keeping in position the four short,
+razor-edged steel claws hidden in the palm.
+
+Dick loosened the buckle of the strap, and drew the hand, already cold,
+from the rings; picked the baag-nouk from the cushion, wrapped it in a
+greasy cloth out of the tool-box, and hid it under the seat.
+
+The thought of that gruesome weapon, more frightful than the unsheathed
+claws of the royalest Bengal tiger, hanging over the head of his chosen
+among women, stung Dick Bellamy to very unceremonious removal of the
+body, which, after rifling it of a handful of cartridges, he flung by
+the roadside; and then, lest Amaryllis should see the awful head again,
+even in death, he covered the whole corpse with an overcoat of
+Melchard's from the car.
+
+The engine had run down. As he cranked it up, Dick was seized by a
+sudden savage desire to have in his hands the man who had brought all
+his outrage, suffering and terror to the girl whose uncovered head and
+patient back he could see waiting for him down the road.
+
+A fierce rage, such as he had seldom felt, and never since boyhood,
+flooded his body with a dry heat, and stimulated his intelligence.
+
+For with these thoughts of the evil Melchard came sudden insight into
+the man's purpose at the foot of the Bull's Neck, and his probable
+action at the present moment.
+
+"He was shooting to drive us into Mut-mut's arms, and to make us believe
+our danger was all behind us," he reasoned. "And it's a white elephant
+to a dead rat he's trudging up this road now to find what Mut-mut's left
+of us. Perhaps he's heard the two shots, and me cranking up."
+
+Not daring to call Amaryllis, he trusted her precise obedience to his
+orders, and sank, almost as swiftly as Pepe into the landscape.
+
+Crouching, crawling, worming himself on his belly from tree-stump to
+boulder he mounted some ten feet above the road on the side away from
+the car, and then, invisible from the road level, continued his course
+until he had retraced about fifty yards of the way they had travelled.
+
+Then he stopped, lying prone where two rocks, standing so little apart
+that they seemed long years ago to have formed a single mass, gave him
+view of the road's whole width.
+
+He laid one ear against the rock, and over the other a hand.
+
+After a minute's waiting, footsteps; three more, and a weary figure came
+in sight where the level road began.
+
+The joy he felt kept him patient until Melchard, unmistakable, was right
+beneath him.
+
+"Hi! Melchard!" he cried.
+
+Melchard started, stopped, and looked anxiously round.
+
+"Never heard the voice before? You'll hear it often, and lots of it,
+soon, Melchard. Pull out your gun."
+
+The man in the road made no attempt to obey. From Mut-mut's revolver
+Dick sent a bullet which threw up the dust at Melchard's feet.
+
+"Two inches to the right of your feet."
+
+He fired again. Again the little puff of dust.
+
+"An inch and a half to the left of your feet," he sang out cheerfully.
+"The next'll be half-way between and three feet higher. Put down your
+gun."
+
+Melchard produced his automatic and dropped it.
+
+"Kick it away from you."
+
+Melchard obeyed, and his weapon lay three yards out of reach.
+
+"Move an inch, and I'll put a hole in your slimy heart."
+
+Melchard stood, still game enough to control in some measure the
+trembling which had seized him.
+
+Then Dick raised his voice.
+
+"Miss Caldegard!" he shouted.
+
+"I'm coming," came the clear voice in reply, and a patter of light feet.
+
+Dick could just see the car, and Amaryllis when she reached it.
+
+"Where are you?" she called, bewildered.
+
+"Keep straight on. You see a thing something like a man, standing in the
+road, don't you?"
+
+"Yes," answered Amaryllis.
+
+"Near it you will find an automatic pistol, on the ground. Pick it up,
+please, and go back to your seat," shouted Dick.
+
+Amaryllis obeyed him. But, after going a little way, she called back to
+him and instinctively she imitated his formality in presence of the
+unclean.
+
+"Mr. Bellamy!" she cried. "Please--not this one."
+
+To this allusion Melchard had no clue. But there was in her tone
+something which turned the blood cold in him.
+
+The invisible Dick, however, answered in a laughing voice so joyous that
+Amaryllis was vaguely distressed.
+
+"Rather not," he replied. "I've something much better for this guy."
+
+With intense pleasure, while his observation-slit gave him sight of her,
+he watched the girl returning to her post.
+
+Then he shot a fresh order at the prisoner.
+
+"Turn round," he said.
+
+Melchard obeyed.
+
+"If you move a foot or lift a hand before I speak again, it's a bullet
+between the shoulders."
+
+Judging this to be the position most demoralizing, Dick descended with
+more haste than precaution. Melchard, his entrails shaking, stood, to
+all appearance, firm as a rock. When Dick tapped his shoulder, he
+turned, showing a face white and drawn.
+
+"The man Bunce!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Silly liar!" said Dick. "You knew who I was the moment you saw my
+cheek--guessed I was the man who was queering your game. I have queered
+it, and I'm going to queer you. Walk in front of me, and don't forget,
+that, if I have to disappoint myself by killing you, I shan't lose any
+sleep about it."
+
+Melchard walked silent and erect, with the unseen pistol-barrel behind
+him.
+
+Dick could see even in the shoulders before him the ripple of fear
+controlled, but not conquered.
+
+And the sight brought, not indeed compassion, but a separated measure of
+respect.
+
+When they had almost reached the car, he called a halt.
+
+"I shan't keep on threatening you," he said "You're down and out.
+Understand, once for all, that, on the least movement, I shoot to kill."
+
+He pointed to the coat spread over what had been Mut-mut.
+
+"That's yours," he said. "Put it on."
+
+The man was reeking with sweat, exhausted and in mortal fear. A chill
+might endanger the success of Dick's design.
+
+Melchard, guessing well what it covered, lifted the fawn-coloured
+overcoat with resolution; but the earless side of that frightful head,
+with another and bloody hole making a pair of dead eyes to stare up at
+him, was too much for the shaken nerve, and Alban Melchard collapsed on
+his face in the road.
+
+Dick turned him over, lifted an eyelid, and, convinced that the man was
+unconscious, fetched from the car his bottle of the strange device, and
+poured a stream from its neck into Melchard's half-open mouth.
+
+For some moment's after, he was afraid that the fit of choked coughing
+his rough remedy had caused would compel him to leave a second corpse by
+the roadside.
+
+When it was over, however, it appeared that the stimulant had been
+partly assimilated, for Melchard was able to stand. When he had got his
+arms into the overcoat, Dick led him to the car.
+
+From the locker under the seat he produced a thick tumbler.
+
+"Get in," he said, and half-filled the glass from the bottle.
+
+Melchard lay back exhausted in the near-side corner, examining with dull
+eyes the havoc made by Mut-mut's claw.
+
+"Drink that," said Dick.
+
+Melchard shook his head.
+
+"I hate spirits," he objected feebly. "That's his stuff--Mut-mut's."
+
+"You'll hate it worse soon," was all the answer he got; and drank,
+gasping between gulps.
+
+Knowing that the man had not a kick left in him, Dick ventured, rather
+than fetch Amaryllis into sight of the uncovered corpse, to mount the
+front seat and drive the car to the place where she sat waiting.
+
+When she was beside him, he asked if she were fit to drive.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "But I nearly went to sleep waiting for you, Dick."
+
+"I don't think either of us is fit to drive her to town," he said,
+looking at his watch. "I'm pretty tough, but I'm nearly all in. How
+you've stuck it as you have, I can't understand. So we'll have a shot at
+that five-fifteen. We've about seven miles to go. Thirty m.p.h.--that's
+fourteen minutes. Bar hold-ups, that's good enough. It's just five to
+five now, but I must fix up my passenger."
+
+Amaryllis looked round at Melchard.
+
+"What are you going to do with him?" she asked, turning back upon Dick a
+face of disgust.
+
+"Take him up to town," said Dick.
+
+"How beastly!" said Amaryllis.
+
+"Doped, my child--most royally doped--with a kindly poison that he
+loathes."
+
+He left her and took his seat beside the prisoner. Amaryllis, not a
+little vexed by the addition to their party, started the car.
+
+As they glided down the wide bends of the descent, Dick plied the
+wretched Melchard with dose after dose of throat-rasping spirit. After
+the second half-tumbler the man wept, sobbing out entreaties for mercy.
+And Amaryllis felt a wave of cold fear run down her spine when she heard
+the voice and words of her lover's reply--words not meant for her
+hearing she knew for the voice was so low that it was only the precision
+of the speaker's passion which carried them, against the wind, to her
+ears.
+
+"Pity! Pity on a filthy creature that never felt it--not even for his
+own filthy servants! Pity for a lickspittle parasite that battens on the
+passions and vices of hopeless gaol-birds, abandoned women, jaded
+pleasure-hunters and terrified neurasthenics! Pity on a speculator
+calculating huge revenues from the festering putrefaction of human
+disease! I haven't hit you yet, because your flesh is foul to
+me--but--drink that down, or, by God! I'll smash every bone in your
+face."
+
+A gasp, a spasmodic sound of gulping, another gasp--and silence.
+
+Two-thirds of the bottle's contents was down the man's throat. Dick
+poured the remnant into his flask and sat watching the effects.
+
+Satisfied at last that he had induced complete alcoholic coma, he
+touched Amaryllis on the shoulder.
+
+"Stop her as soon as you can," he said. "I'll drive now."
+
+When they were off again, she asked, in a voice none too steady, what he
+had been doing to the wretched man behind her.
+
+"Made him absolutely blind--blotto," he answered.
+
+"You sounded rather dreadful, Dick," she said; adding, after a
+hesitation, "Cruel--almost."
+
+His face was set on the road ahead of him, and his profile, she thought,
+though not definitely vindictive in expression, was hard as stone.
+
+"Cruel?" he asked.
+
+"You said awful things in a very dreadful voice."
+
+"The awful thoughts I had account for the voice, beloved," he explained.
+"They couldn't be said to him. I thought of his hands touching you--his
+voice speaking to you--you, young as an angel, as beautiful as the
+goddess that floated in upon the world in a mother-of-pearl dinghy! As
+clever as that other one with the fireman's tin hat, as game as Jimmy
+Wilde, and as kind as Heaven. Spoke to _you_--touched you--looked at
+you--blasphemy, profanation and sacrilege! And barged into your bedroom,
+when--. My God! woman," cried poor Dick, as if a flame came from the
+marble lips of him, "I could have watched him through an hour of rack
+and thumbscrew, when I thought of you up in that room of his. It's the
+cruelty I haven't done that's my claim to the next vacancy in halos.
+Cruel? Just for pouring down him a few tumblerfuls of a mixture of
+arrack and spud-spirit that he'd bought for his damned Caliban! And I
+only did that because there weren't any handcuffs handy."
+
+Uttered in a voice wonderfully soft, yet vibrating with a quality which
+thrilled him like some tone of a celestial violin, her answering
+question reached him through the rush of their speed.
+
+"Do you love me like that?" she asked.
+
+To the short nod of his white silhouette he added curtly:
+
+"Be quiet, please. I'm driving."
+
+She chuckled softly to herself, thinking how well already she began to
+understand his ways--ways so odd and dear, she told herself, that never,
+she was sure, would she tire of them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+LORD LABRADOR.
+
+
+The Roman causeway ran into the macadam high road from Harthborough to
+Timsdale-Horton almost on the level, with still a slight fall towards
+Harthborough, the smoke of whose chimneys was already visible.
+
+Half a mile ahead of them was a knot of men, gathered about what might
+have been a wheelbarrow. A quarter of a mile further,
+
+"Three men," said Dick.
+
+"Motor-cycle and side-car," said Amaryllis. "Is it another picket?"
+
+Instead of answering, Dick replied with a command:
+
+"Hold tight. Don't turn to look at 'em. You're talking to me by the yard
+as we go by. We go right through. Shan't give 'em an inch."
+
+The car darted forward. The road ran between stone dykes, bordering
+pasture and arable enclosures. The pace, close upon fifty miles an hour,
+took them up to and past the suspected group so swiftly that it was
+impossible to note the faces of the men who formed it while their
+movements of recoil and surprise might have been due to the unusual
+speed alone.
+
+But a little later, Amaryllis, turning in her seat, thought she saw a
+small cloud of dust start up from the road; and Dick, on the assumption
+of a pursuit almost as swift as his flight, found himself involved in
+the solution of complex chances.
+
+The road he followed, as he had been able to determine from the higher
+ground, led directly to the railway station in the centre of
+Harthborough. It was now five minutes past five o'clock--ten minutes
+before the train's scheduled time of departure; which, allowing two
+minutes for reaching the station, would mean eight minutes to spend on
+the platform, even if the train were up to time.
+
+Eight minutes for the men with the side-car to reach the station and----
+
+And what?
+
+Even the intoxicated Melchard, should it come to gun-play on platform or
+in railway carriage, would be no protection to Amaryllis. If the picket
+had been able to distinguish their leader in his car as it flashed by
+them, they must have guessed him a prisoner, and, as such, the probable
+King's evidence to hang them.
+
+For his satellites, Melchard was safer dead than captive.
+
+Just ahead the road branched. Resolved to shorten his time of waiting,
+and hoping to mislead the chase, Dick took the right line of the fork,
+which bent to hide him, if only for a moment, from the side-car.
+
+"The station's down the other road," said Amaryllis.
+
+"Yes," said Dick. "Don't want more than three minutes there before the
+train pulls out."
+
+He slowed suddenly, having seen his expected by-road a little way ahead.
+
+"I'm turning back to the left here," he explained. "Look back as I
+swing, and see if they're in sight."
+
+"Not a sign," said Amaryllis.
+
+But as she spoke they heard the detonations of a back-fire, and
+pictured, though they could not see, Melchard's avengers plunging away
+southward, past the end of the lane into which Dick had turned.
+
+This lane between two rows of blunt cottage-fronts soon proved itself
+not merely a refuge, but an avenue.
+
+At eleven minutes past five Dick Bellamy stopped Melchard's car outside
+the booking-office of somnolent Harthborough's dead-alive station--the
+junction of the single-line track to Whitebay and its bathing machines
+with the double-track branch of the G.N.R. from York to Caterscliff.
+
+A hopeless porter languished against the hot bricks of the doorway. Dick
+came round between him and Melchard, peering down upon that sordid wreck
+of smartness. He turned to Amaryllis, who had followed him.
+
+"Pore old guv'nor!" he said tenderly; and Amaryllis with difficulty
+restrained her surprise at his change from the local dialect to that of
+the London cab-rank. "They 'aven't arf filled 'im up proper this time."
+Then, to the porter, despondently interested in this queer company, "Hi,
+chum! Give us a 'and," he said, pulling from his pocket a confusion of
+silver, and crumpled Treasury notes. "Is the London trine up yet?"
+
+"Signalled, she be," said the porter, peering at Melchard.
+
+"Keep yer eyes off wot's no blinkin' good to 'em" said Dick. Then,
+lowering his voice to oily confidence, he went on: "It's young Lord
+Labrador--Marquis of Toronto's 'opeful. Put 'im through the mill, they
+'ave, at yer three-legged race meetin' at Timsdale-'Orton. Made me larf
+shockin', it did. 'E's got to meet 'is lovin' pa, ten o'clock a.m.
+ter-morrer mornin', an' I said as I'd see 'im through, and get 'm a wash
+an' brush up. I train a bit for 'im--the young un, yer know."
+
+"Well, 'tain't noah business o' mine," said the porter.
+
+"'Ow much to make it yourn, sonny?"
+
+"Ah doan't rightly knaw."
+
+"Won't be less'n a dollar, mate--see?"
+
+The porter saw.
+
+Dick thrust notes into his hand.
+
+"Get us three firsts to King's Crawss, and 'ave a label ready to smudge
+on the winder, w'ile me an' my girl gets 'im through to the platform,
+nice and cushy."
+
+Supported on each side, with flaccid legs just able to move in turn,
+Melchard was guided to a bench some way down the platform, and seated
+between two bolstering forms to which the contact was disgusting.
+
+Fortunately they had the up-platform to themselves.
+
+The train was late, and the long minutes held each more of anxiety than
+the last.
+
+The porter came with the tickets.
+
+"'Eere's 'opeless 'Arry," said Dick, going to meet him.
+
+"Wi't'yoong spark in thot trim," said the porter, pocketing a tip of
+weight to gratify without astounding, "Ah'd'a' pushed onto Lunnon wi'
+'im in t'car."
+
+"Not if you'd borrered it, Mr. 'Opeless. She belongs to a Mr. Mills o'
+Melborough--Na-ow! _Melchard_ o' Millsborough. 'E's one o' them there
+painful dentisters."
+
+A sound like a smothered sneeze, followed by a syncopated gurgle, coming
+from behind him, warned Dick to tone down the comic relief.
+
+"You get the car run into cover, and keep an eye on 'er till that there
+Pluck-'em-W'ile-yer-Wait comes a sorrowing arter 'er. Tell 'im my
+address is No. 5, John Street, London, and I'll settle for the bit o'
+damage. There's no need to bring 'is young lordship in. There's plenty
+o' wailin' an' gnashin' comin' to 'im, any'ow."
+
+In a sad-coloured notebook, with a stump of dirty pencil, the porter
+solemnly noted that classic address.
+
+"An' that's more trouble for _you_, so 'ere's a few more bits o' wot we
+takes it for."
+
+Four minutes late, the train rumbled in.
+
+With less difficulty than it had taken to extract him from the car, Dick
+and the porter got Melchard into the corner of a first-class compartment
+of the last carriage on the train--behind the guard's van even, being
+the London "slip," the porter told them as he slapped his "engaged"
+label on the window.
+
+The guard was on the point of waving his flag when the staccato rush of
+a motor-cycle sounded hideously outside the little station.
+
+"Get in," said Dick to Amaryllis.
+
+The guard called to the porter:
+
+"Can't keep 'er. Five minutes behind already," and let his green signal
+flutter.
+
+Dick followed Amaryllis and closed the door.
+
+And even as the engine made its first slow movement, there came a rush
+of heavy feet on the wooden flooring of the booking-office, and two men
+in motor-cycling rig made a determined dash at the train.
+
+The station-master, eager for unpleasing duty, emerged shouting:
+
+"Stand back!"
+
+But the porter would not see nor hear him, and opened the door of the
+compartment immediately in front of that which his label had reserved.
+The runners scrambled in.
+
+Dick had been careful not to show his face until the door--the next, it
+seemed--was banged shut. But a rapid glance at that very moment showed
+him that it was indeed from the next compartment that came the
+half-crown which the porter caught as it fell.
+
+Dick settled back into his seat with the consciousness that the
+partition against which he leaned was poor protection from a
+revolver-bullet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+FALLING OUT.
+
+
+"Is it they?" asked Amaryllis
+
+"Two to one on," he answered.
+
+"Next compartment?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did they see us get in?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then how can they know?"
+
+"They saw the car outside, and the porter shutting this door. If they
+hadn't, they'd have bundled in right opposite the entrance, instead of
+running down the train," reasoned Dick.
+
+"Will they try to come in here, then?" she asked.
+
+"There's no corridor," said Dick.
+
+"But outside? There was a murder--I read about it----"
+
+"Take it easy, little wonder," he answered, with a smile which made of
+his patronage a tribute. "I haven't got this far to crack in the last
+lap. I'm thinking out a pretty story for the _Sunday Magazine_; so no
+murders, please. They make me nervous. We're all right for a bit--next
+station's fifteen miles ahead. They're getting their wind next door, and
+talking it over."
+
+He rose, and lifting Melchard's legs, made him lie at full length along
+the seat farthest from the engine and the motor-cyclists. Next, he drew
+down the little corner-blinds of each window, leaving the door-blinds
+up; then sat down again resuming his attitude of abstraction.
+
+In the silence which followed Amaryllis watched him until confidence
+crept into her unawares, and she found herself becoming sleepily
+interested in smaller matters than life and death. She did not believe
+any longer that anyone could prevail against "Limping Dick."
+
+She smiled to herself over the strange figure he cut, forgetting her
+own.
+
+His bulging pockets amused her into trying to remember all the things he
+had stowed away in them.
+
+The newest seemed to be an oily piece of cotton rag, sticking out from
+the side pocket of his Norfolk jacket, which looked already, since she
+had seen it first, three years older.
+
+At last she spoke.
+
+"Is the little plot finished?" she asked.
+
+"Very nearly," he replied
+
+"And is it decorous in episode, cheerful in tone, and forcible in moral
+tendency?"
+
+"All these it is, and more."
+
+"Then--please, sir, I have a question to ask."
+
+"Ask, maiden," said Dick.
+
+"I want to know why you keep that filthy cloth in your pocket."
+
+"And why this sudden curiosity about a trifle?" His hand felt the thing
+as if he had forgotten it.
+
+"Because," said Amaryllis, "I can't possibly sit closer to you if you
+don't throw it away."
+
+Dick rose, taking the bundle carefully from his pocket.
+
+"It's a curio--a relic. I'll show it you some day," he said, laying it
+in a corner of the rack.
+
+"Not now?"
+
+"Not now."
+
+And then there came over his face an expression of mixed humour and
+triumph.
+
+"By the bloomin' idol made of mud!" he cried, "you've given me the
+climax. It makes the story more moral than ever."
+
+And he murmured, as if only for himself: "Which side, O Bud! Which
+side?"
+
+A little later he put up both windows.
+
+"It'll be awfully hot," said Amaryllis.
+
+"Let's be absolutely silent for a bit," said Dick. "With our ears to the
+partition, we might hear something."
+
+With intense concentration, they listened for several minutes.
+
+"It's no good," said Dick at last. "Talking, talking all the time, but
+the train makes too much row, and the padding's too thick."
+
+"I heard something," said the girl. "Not words--but the different tones
+of two voices, arguing. One wants to do something, and the other
+doesn't. He's afraid, I think."
+
+"M'm!" grunted Dick.
+
+"The brave one's here--with his back to me. He's strong and heavy, I
+think, because his voice is growly, and he sits back hard now and then,
+and I can feel the partition bulge a little. And then--he keeps fiddling
+with something that clicks."
+
+"Clicks? How? Like the hammer of an empty gun?" asked Dick, puzzled.
+
+The girl leaned forward and touched the spring lock of the carriage
+door.
+
+"No. Heavier than a pistol. Clicky and thumpy, like this lock if you
+pull it and let go."
+
+Dick's face beamed with satisfaction.
+
+"Don't touch it--I know," he said. "I suppose you'll be wanting half the
+proceeds, and your name as part author."
+
+"What on earth d'you mean, Dick?"
+
+"Collaboration. You've completed the plot."
+
+He changed his seat to face her from the opposite corner; looked at his
+watch, and thereafter gazed steadily from the window with down-bent eyes
+for so long that Amaryllis grew bored and nervous.
+
+"Two minutes to do a mile," he said at last, having again looked at his
+watch. "It's fifteen minutes since we left Harthborough--seven miles and
+a half. That's another seven and a half to go--Todsmoor's the station, I
+think. They'll try it on within five minutes, or give it up. What did
+you do with that snoring beast's automatic?"
+
+Amaryllis thrust her hand deep into the Brundage pocket, rummaging.
+
+"What an awful pouch!" he exclaimed.
+
+"It is a bottomless pit, certainly. But it's much discreeter than yours
+are, Dick. They bulge so interestingly, and make you an awfuller sight
+than all the rest of your funny things together," she replied, laughing
+at him.
+
+Successful at last, she produced the Browning pistol which Melchard had
+surrendered on the Roman road. "But it bumped horribly when I
+walked--and it _would_ always knock the same place on my knee. Oh, Dick,
+shall we ever get into clothes that'll feel nice again?"
+
+"To-night, damsel, shalt thou sleep in fine linen, and to-morrow, so it
+please you, shalt fare homeward in thy father's chariot, leaving in that
+progress a ravaged Marshall and Snelgrove, an eviscerated Lewis, and the
+house of Harrod but a warehouse of mourning."
+
+Softly he let down both windows, fearing glass little less than bullets.
+
+"Sit there," he said, pointing to the corner opposite to Melchard's
+head; and, when she was seated, gave her back the pistol.
+
+"If anything comes, cover it with that."
+
+"But, Dick--," she faltered, "I know I'm silly, but I--I don't want to
+kill anybody. I'm afraid."
+
+"P'r'aps they'll funk it. But I've an idea they're more afraid of
+him--if they know we've got him--than of us." He glanced at Melchard,
+and then out of the window.
+
+The train was running on an embankment with steep, grassy sides--not a
+house nor a highway in sight.
+
+"This side would be safer to fall from," said Dick. "On yours it's the
+down-line rails. Tails up, dear! In three minutes it'll be over or off.
+Don't shoot--only show you're heeled, and look fierce."
+
+He reached for the oily cloth in the rack. Catching her fascinated eyes
+fixed on him:
+
+"Watch the window, will you," he snapped; and a sting of indignation at
+being so addressed gave Amaryllis the stimulant she needed.
+
+It should be obedience now, but a royal exhibition of displeasure
+afterwards!
+
+So, with the mouth and eyes of a goddess incensed, Amaryllis watched, in
+lofty silence, her rectangle of sunlight.
+
+But from the preparations of Dick Bellamy dignity was altogether absent.
+
+From the dirty cloth he unwrapped Mut-mut's baag-nouk, slipped his right
+hand into its straps and rings, and sank to his knees on the floor of
+the carriage, facing the door and its open, unblinded window.
+
+Leaning to his right, he lifted the corner blind away, bringing his left
+cheek against the glass; and from this spy-hole kept that eye on the
+point where the door of the next compartment should just show itself,
+were it opened at right-angles to the train in letting a man creep out
+upon the footboard.
+
+And then, as he waited, came a dreadful thought: the door on this side
+of the compartment, the train running on the left-hand track, was
+hinged, of course, upon its forward jamb, and must therefore be passed,
+by one creeping from the direction of the engine, before it could be
+opened so as to give entrance. On the other side the position was
+reversed.
+
+Might not this advantage of the door defended only by the girl have been
+noted by the men on the other side of that partition?
+
+And she? Her back was to the engine and her corner blind pulled down.
+She would see nothing till her door began to open; and even had she
+nerve for killing, she could not shoot; for, in pity of her white hands,
+he had fixed the safety-catch of Melchard's gun.
+
+He pictured the moment's wavering, and a struggle, ending, perhaps, in a
+double fall from the train.
+
+While still his eye was steady at the loophole, his mind reached the
+decision to change his dispositions. But before he could move to rise
+the black, upright line of the enemy's door swung slowly into his field
+of vision. His position at the window gave him a bare inch to see it in,
+but the sight lifted his fighting soul into the heaven of certain
+success.
+
+Still watching, he saw that the door's edge remained steady, fixed, he
+argued, by the hand of the man that watched his companion, too low for
+Dick's line of sight, handing himself along by the brass rail, nearer
+and nearer.
+
+While that door was held, Amaryllis was safe.
+
+Dick sank back upon his haunches, bowing his bare head to bring it below
+the level of the open window.
+
+There followed a stillness of waiting--stillness wrapped in the roar of
+the train.
+
+A brushing sound on the door's window-ledge!
+
+Throwing his head backwards, Dick saw, without raising his head, thick,
+dirty fingers on the split sill.
+
+Lightly he touched them with his left hand. A head came in sight, rising
+diagonally across the frame it entered; and as it rose, so rose Dick's
+right hand, showing the steel blades of the Tiger's Claw.
+
+The white face was jerked backward, the black-nailed fingers lost hold,
+and with a choked scream the whole body fell outward from the train,
+describing a curve towards the rear which just carried it free of the
+ballast, to land sideways on the turf of the slope, and roll.
+
+The bank was high and steep, and the body was still rolling, when Dick
+turned his head to the sound of a door closing. His remaining enemy had
+shut himself in.
+
+"Got 'em both," he said, facing Amaryllis, and dropping his greasy
+parcel once more in the rack.
+
+"What's happened? Oh, that horrid scream!" she said, shaking.
+
+"Your brave villain's taken a toss, darling," said Dick, sitting with an
+arm round her. "And the white-livered accomplice is dithering with funk
+in there." And he thumped the cushion of the partition. "We shall pull
+up at Todsmoor in a few minutes. Let's compose ourselves. You must be
+asleep in your corner----"
+
+He broke off, eyeing her face keenly; then finished his sentence
+tenderly with an "if you please, my dear."
+
+The girl blushed gloriously.
+
+"I hurt its tender feelings, didn't I, when I barked?"
+
+"Yes--for a moment. But it--it made me so angry, Dick, that I forgot to
+be frightened. You're so clever! I believe you did it on purpose for
+that." And, when he smiled at her, "I won't forgive you, then," she
+murmured. "I'll just say thank you instead."
+
+She kissed him.
+
+There came a groan and a heavy sigh from Melchard.
+
+"No, he's not awake, nor near it," said Dick, when he had examined his
+patient. "But I'd better give him another dose. There's going to be fun
+at Todsmoor, and I don't want any Millsborough back-talk mixed up with
+it. Look out of that window while I physic him. It's not nice to watch."
+
+It was nasty enough to hear, thought Amaryllis.
+
+By the time it was over the train was slowing down. Before it stopped
+Dick was out on the platform, and in two strides had caught the guard.
+
+"There's been an accident. Man fell out of this carriage--next to mine,"
+he said, in a low voice, speaking now in the assured tones of a
+gentleman accustomed to obedience. "Don't make a fuss. Fetch the
+station-master."
+
+The bearded autocrat hesitated, eyeing this strange figure with the
+"officer's swank," as he called it afterwards.
+
+"I advise you to hurry," said Dick, his eyes opening a little wider.
+
+The autocrat took the advice, and returned with another.
+
+Dick was standing with his hand on the door of the compartment with one
+traveller--the remaining motor-cyclist.
+
+"Look here, station-master," he said, beginning before the man could
+open his mouth; "I don't want to leave you with a nasty job like this on
+your hands, without telling you what I know. I am Major Richard Bellamy
+of the R.A.F. Never mind my clothes. Take it I've been celebrating. At
+Harthborough I got into the next compartment with a lady, and a man I
+have befriended. I am looking after him. He'll be all right to-morrow.
+Just as we left--the train had actually started--two fellows in overalls
+jumped into _this_ compartment. Half-way between this and Harthborough
+we heard a row going on--the lady and I. It got worse and worse, and I
+looked out of the window just in time to see one of the pair fall out
+backwards."
+
+Here Dick looked at his watch.
+
+"Twelve minutes ago, it was. I took the time then. He hit the grass bank
+and rolled. Shouldn't wonder if he's all right. Probably alive, anyhow."
+
+"Why didn't you pull the communication cord?" asked the station-master,
+pompously stern.
+
+Now Dick had forgotten the communication cord. But it would have been
+impossible for him to forget a few things he had once learned about
+railways.
+
+He glanced at the guard, and found uneasiness in his eye.
+
+"It's a slip carriage," he said, smiling, tolerantly superior. "Was the
+connection made?" he asked, looking hard in the guard's face.
+
+The man flushed an awkward red. "No," he said. "'Tain't worth the
+trouble for the little bit of a journey before we slip her."
+
+"H'm!" said the station-master.
+
+"Just so," said Dick, simultaneously. "So perhaps it'd be just as well
+for me not to have thought of the communication cord, eh?"
+
+The station-master said nothing. But the guard looked as if there were
+gratitude in him somewhere.
+
+"If the poor beggar's alive, he'll have gained by our not stopping,
+because he'll get a doctor and a stretcher all the quicker," Dick went
+on. "Now, I advise you to hold the fellow in this compartment here for
+your local police. Look at him. He's sat there like that ever since we
+ran in here. You can see he was in no hurry to give information
+concerning what had happened to his friend."
+
+The station-master turned to the guard.
+
+"Did you see anything?" he asked.
+
+"No. But I heard a door bang. I looked out, but I heard nothing. The
+gentleman's quite right, though, about the two chaps scrambling in as we
+pulled out of Harthborough."
+
+The station-master turned to Dick with a face diffidently serious.
+
+"I'm afraid you ought to wait here, sir," he said.
+
+"I know I ought not. Duty's duty, and you can't keep me, my good
+fellow," replied Dick, dredging the breast pocket of his coat and
+producing and opening his cigarette-case. "Here's my card. The address
+will always find me."
+
+The station-master looked at the card, hesitating still, and turning it
+about in his fingers.
+
+"I can uncouple the through carriage," he said.
+
+"And I can move my party to another," Dick blandly retorted. "And you'll
+only inconvenience everybody up the line that meant to use it. See here,
+man; I'm witness of what was possibly an accident. I give you the
+information, and add my private opinion that it was something worse than
+an accident. That's all. It's up to you to put your police on the job,
+not to disturb a traveller that wasn't even in the man's compartment.
+Ask this fellow here, who _was_ in it. Most likely he's got no ticket,
+running it fine as they did at Harthborough. That'll give you reason
+enough to make him miss the train while one of your men's fetching a
+constable. And the constable won't let him out of sight till you've
+found the other man, alive or dead. But he won't object to waiting,
+unless he wants to rouse suspicion. Now I do object." And here Dick
+laughed. "Why," he went on, "with your way of doing things, they'd have
+to arrest a hundred witnesses every time a lorry ran into a lamp-post."
+
+And he stood by, lighting his pipe, while the station-master attempted
+to extract information from the man in overalls.
+
+He proved docile enough; mumbled a halting tale of dozing in his corner
+when his friend, leaning from the window, had been launched from the
+train by the sudden opening of the door. Supposed it hadn't been
+properly latched; his friend had been fooling with the lock a few
+minutes before. No, there'd been no words--not to say quarrel; they'd
+talked a bit--nothing more. Oh, yes, of course he'd get out and wait
+over, and do his bit to help 'em find his chum--poor, silly blighter!
+
+The man cast one sly side-glance at Dick, and thought he was not being
+watched.
+
+But Dick saw, and gathered from that one flash of the eye that this was
+Pepe's "Heberto, the London man," and that 'Erb was not even yet sure
+whether this was or was not the wild man who had leapt upon him from the
+stairs in the hall at "The Myrtles," eight or nine hours ago.
+
+As the train ran out of Todsmoor, "I shouldn't wonder," said Dick
+comfortably to Amaryllis, "if that's the last fence, and a straight run
+home for us."
+
+But there was fear as well as disgust in the glance which Amaryllis
+threw at the gross slumber of their prisoner.
+
+She had felt his power stretched over half a county, and who should fix
+its limit for her?
+
+But she merely said:
+
+"What time do we get to King's Cross, Dick?"
+
+"Ten-thirty--on paper; but we're twenty minutes late already."
+
+"Then--what'm I going to do then? Eleven o'clock, and me so tired!"
+
+"You'll be all right. I'll see that you are," said Dick.
+
+Apparently satisfied by this pledge, Amaryllis had almost fallen asleep
+in her corner, now the furthest from Melchard, when Dick said:
+
+"What you want to-night, my prize-packet, is a fairy godmother."
+
+"She would save lots of trouble," admitted Amaryllis.
+
+"And all you've got is that mildewed chaperon, snoring there."
+
+Amaryllis shuddered.
+
+"I don't know even yet," she said, "why you brought it--a thing you
+might have left tied in a bundle by the roadside. He's only been
+dangerous and disgusting. And you said----"
+
+"Said it wasn't to take it out of him that I did it. Did I? If I did,
+it's right."
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"I suppose you could guess," said Dick, breaking it.
+
+"Was it because you thought of the harm that he does, making drugs and
+selling them to sad people and bad people, Dick?"
+
+"That might have been a good reason. It's not my line, though--if I'm on
+oath."
+
+"Oh, but you're not, Dick. You needn't say anything unless you want to
+tell me."
+
+"I do. That reason wasn't mine. I don't feel like that about people in
+the lump. And now they say _the_ people is free and democratic--doing
+things, you know, off its own bat, when it hasn't a cat's notion of
+cricket--now I think, as far as I think about the lump at all, that it'd
+better have a fair run at its own game. Result may be anything; might be
+a new and a good one. But I simply hate seeing the old professional
+groundsman pretending that the new mob of boys likes cricket, and
+sweating himself all for nothing.
+
+"As for the drug business, it cures in the end by killing, and
+grandmotherly legislation belongs to dear old tyranny; and I'm not at
+all sure, if five-eighths of the people said that the rest mustn't kill
+pigs to eat 'm, that you and I would be wrong to have an illicit rasher
+when we could get it. Anyhow, the immoral remnant of the nation doesn't
+trouble my dreams. It rubs itself out in the end. So, you see, it wasn't
+the dope evil that made me bind him in the chains of tangle-foot and
+force his putrid company on an angel. Guess again."
+
+"I'm too tired," said Amaryllis "to have a guess left in me. Tell me."
+
+"My dear," he answered, "the cherry's always been bigger than the bunch
+to me. You are just the greatest, and the roundest and the reddest, and
+the sweetest cherry on the big tree. And the cherry nearest to you----"
+
+"My dad?" she asked, interrupting with a catch of the breath.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Yes," he said. "It was for him I took the dope from that scented
+ape--because he'd have been hurt if it'd got loose to ravage the world.
+And when I got the chance I just pouched the ape too for the same
+reason--so that the man that cursed you shall not only feel that his
+patent curse hasn't done any damage, but has even helped to chain up a
+lot of rival plagues. These men of science are like benevolent Jupiters:
+Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday colloguing with Vulcan to forge heavier
+and sharper thunderbolts; Thursday, Friday and Saturday conferring
+anxiously with all Olympus as to how they shall be blunted and
+lightened, lest they hurt poor mortal fools too much.
+
+"This chap Melchard, properly handled, will give the show away, and the
+League of Nations or some other comic crowd'll corral the lot."
+
+"What lot?" asked Amaryllis.
+
+"The crew your father told us about. My dear, I wanted to please you by
+pleasing him. To do it I had to let you run a shade more risk and endure
+a lot more discomfort. Was that--was it----"
+
+For once Dick Bellamy could not find his words. Yet his eyes, it seemed
+to Amaryllis, were hardened--stabbing hers with steel points barbed with
+curiosity.
+
+She knew what he meant, and said so.
+
+"Of course it was nothing against me--against love," she answered. "It
+was just the hook, dear, that's going to hold this fish for ever."
+
+When they had expressed the inexpressible and explained the obvious, he
+returned to that fish-hook phrase of hers.
+
+"What made you put it like that, young woman?" he asked.
+
+"Your eyes, Dick. For a moment you were afraid, wondering whether I
+should toe the line exactly. Your eyes got hard. They stabbed right into
+me, and they had a sort of backward wings, like fish-hooks--father's got
+a horrid arrow like that--won't come out again without tearing. Yours
+won't ever, Dick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+"KUK-KUK-KUK-KATIE."
+
+
+Soft, even light filled the wide entrance hall of No. -- Park Lane.
+
+The single, expressionless footman appeared almost hopeful, knowing his
+release was near; for the time was only twenty minutes short of
+midnight.
+
+The road between the front door and the park railings was almost as
+peaceful as the houses on its one side, and the grass and trees on the
+other. Hardly a hoof on the wood, and but a rare motor rushing, at
+intervals, with soft, apologetic speed over the thoroughfare from north
+to south.
+
+But there came at last a taxi--Charles, in spite of thick door and
+perfect roadway, recognised its venal characteristics--a taxi which
+hesitated, stopped, started again, and came to rest at the very door of
+No. --.
+
+Though his ears could scarce believe it on that Saturday night, when
+there was not within earshot any function or reception going on, there
+came feet up those splendid, shallow steps--feet which seemed to halt,
+and even vacillate beneath a swaying body.
+
+The mere suspicion was shocking; but even worse, to that cultivated ear,
+was the clamour of the bell which followed.
+
+But when, having opened the door, Charles examined the ringer, he was
+astounded, not to say appalled.
+
+The man, though his eyes were heavy and his voice that of one driving
+himself to the limit of his strength, was certainly not intoxicated; for
+in that matter, Charles the footman knew and trusted the nicety of his
+own judgment. But the condition of the dress, the cut cheek-bone, the
+puffy eye above it, the dirty hands with raw knuckles, and the pockets
+grotesquely bulging, made a picture so painfully in contrast with the
+house and its quarter, that the footman's face lost its habitual
+expression of restrained good-humour under a mask of severity altogether
+tragic.
+
+For a moment he hesitated: to ask this scarecrow his business would
+concede him the right to exist; and the ruffian's undamaged eye and his
+assured carriage were plain warning against any concession whatsoever.
+
+The visitor, therefore, spoke first, even as if he had been respectable.
+
+"I want to see Mr. Bruffin," he said.
+
+"Not at home," replied Charles, trying to boom like a butler.
+
+"Then I'll wait till he comes," said Dick Bellamy, taking a step forward
+in spite of the door and the footman's hand upon it.
+
+"Impossible to see Mr. Bruffin to-night--sir," said Charles. "I'm afraid
+I must ask you to step outside."
+
+His vision of what might be in those bloated pockets was only a little
+less alarming than the reality.
+
+But Dick felt he had only a drop or so of physical energy left; and so,
+lest they should trickle from him, he used them now.
+
+And Charles, lifted most disconcertingly by the slack of his breeches
+and the stiffness of his resisting neck, was shifted quickly and
+painfully to the doorstep, to hear the door close upon him before he
+could turn to face it.
+
+The house was new, even to its owners. Its rebuilding and exquisite
+refitting had been a marvel for the magpie chorus of the occasional
+column. The public already knew more of his new house than George
+Bruffin could ever forget.
+
+But Dick, who never read more of a newspaper than he must, knew only its
+address and the day when George and his wife should go into residence.
+This, he had remembered, was the first day of their second week, and,
+even if George had already learned his way to his own study, Dick must
+find means to reach him more expeditious than geographical exploration.
+
+He looked about him, and his eye fell upon a thing of which George had
+told him with pride almost boyish; a framework of shell-cases, graduated
+from the slender treble of a shortened soizante-quinze to the deepest
+base of a full-length monster from some growling siege-gun.
+
+For George had done his portion of fighting and had collected this
+material for a dinner gong, on which one might play with padded stick
+anything from the "Devil's Tattoo" to "Caller Herrin'" or the "Wedding
+March."
+
+From the doorstep, the frantic Charles, with eyes rolling, saw the taxi.
+What was in it he could not see, for the chauffeur stood blocking the
+open window, watching, it appeared, whatever the cab might contain--wild
+Bolshevists with bombs, perhaps, or soft litters of pedigree pups.
+
+From Apsley House to Marble Arch, he felt, was never a policeman. He
+could have embraced the hoariest of specials.
+
+The service entrance was too far round. Before he could reach it all
+might be over.
+
+So, forgetting the bell, he turned and beat, with fists none too hard,
+upon the door that was anything but soft. And cursed, as he had never
+cursed man before, the architect whose enlightened scheme had found no
+place for a knocker.
+
+And with his first blow there burst out in the hall the wild, indecorous
+strains of "Kuk-kuk kuk-Katie," pealing out louder and ever louder as
+the musician found confidence.
+
+With his left hand supporting half his tired weight on the frame of
+these bells, translated by some twentieth-century Tubal Cain to a music
+so strangely different from the first they had uttered, Dick was
+absorbed in his rendering of such bars of the vulgar melody as he could
+remember, when he heard, far behind him, a slow, unimpassioned voice.
+
+"What's all this hell's delight?" it asked.
+
+A confused chorus of protesting explanation, interwoven with the yapping
+cries and hysterical laughter of women, was all his answer.
+
+In a fresh surge of enthusiasm "Katie" drowned it.
+
+Then George Bruffin shouted--almost, the servants felt, as if he might
+some day lose his temper.
+
+"How did this freak minstrel get in?" he roared.
+
+"Don't know, sir."
+
+"Who was on duty here?"
+
+"Charles, sir," chimed the chorus.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+The music died in a last tinkling "Kuk-kuk." And then, as the minstrel
+swung round to face his audience, the whole company heard the beating on
+the great door.
+
+"That," said Dick with a wave of his baton towards it, "is Charles."
+
+While George stared heavily at the intruder's battle-worn visage, the
+second footman flung open the door.
+
+With a face livid and distorted by passion, Charles made a rush at his
+enemy--to be brought up short by the sight of his master, wringing the
+rascal's hand and patting his disgraceful shoulder.
+
+"You silly goat," were all the words George could find for his laughter.
+
+"I had to see you," said Dick. "And I do."
+
+"Why couldn't you have me fetched decently?"
+
+The chorus had vanished; they two were alone, with Charles, abashed.
+
+"Your man wanted to put me out. I'm all in, George, so I just put him
+out, and rang the bells for you." He sighed wearily, and added: "Anyhow,
+it worked."
+
+George turned a heavy face on the footman, but Dick spoke first.
+
+"Charles is a damned good servant," he said. "I know what I look like.
+He was in the right, so I had to evict."
+
+"What's your trouble, Dick?" asked George, speaking, thought the
+servant, as if this Dick were the first of all Dicks and all men.
+
+"I've got a girl in a cab out there. She's worse beat than I am, George.
+I want you and Liz to look after her till to-morrow."
+
+Bruffin turned to his servant.
+
+"Lady Elizabeth is in my study," he said. "Ask her to come to me here."
+Then, to Dick, "Sit down," he went on, and disappeared, to return
+quickly with a tumbler in his hand.
+
+With half-closed eyes, Dick continued as if the other man had never left
+him.
+
+"She's mounting guard," he said, "with the shuvver to help, over our
+catch--the worst blackguard unhung."
+
+A handsome woman of some thirty years, with masses of darkest hair
+cunningly disposed, neck and shoulders beautiful beyond criticism, and
+dressed in a peignoir of delicate simplicity, came to her husband with a
+rush smooth as the full-sailed speed of a three-masted schooner.
+
+Charles, with recovered dignity, followed in her wake.
+
+"George! What is it, George?" she exclaimed, before she had even time to
+get her eyes focused upon his companion.
+
+"That," answered George, with a derisive gesture.
+
+"Why, it's--oh, _Dick_!" she cried.
+
+With her long, slender hands on his shoulders, she peered close and
+eagerly into the battered countenance.
+
+"Oh, Dickie dear, whatever have they been doing to its good old face?"
+she demanded, with tenderness for the one, and anger for the many
+mingling in her voice.
+
+"Nothing to what they got from him, Betsy--unless I'm an ass. But he'll
+tell us when that whisky's worked in his veins a bit. He's got a lady
+out there, waiting. Shall I fetch her in--or you?"
+
+Dick half rose from his chair. But Lady Elizabeth Bruffin pushed him
+back into it.
+
+"I will, of course," she said, and made for the front door so quickly
+that Charles only just had it open in time.
+
+As he told the butler before he slept that night, "It'd've done your
+kind heart good, Mr. Baldwin, to see how they were eating 'im with their
+eyes. His word law, you know, and do what he wanted, almost before he
+could say what it was, and it might be an hour before he could tell 'em
+why. And the terrible object he was--but with something strong and
+compelling, one might say, underneath."
+
+He was thinking, perhaps of the hand which had lifted him over the
+threshold.
+
+Charles had followed his mistress to the taxi.
+
+The driver, turning on her approach, stood back, touching his cap;
+amazed by this condescension of jewels and silk to beauty ill-clothed,
+draggled, dirty and exhausted.
+
+Suddenly Lady Elizabeth remembered that she did not know even the girl's
+name.
+
+"Open the door, please," she said to the driver. And then, to Amaryllis,
+"My dear, you're to come in," and stretched her hands out with a motion
+so inviting that the girl laid her own in them, taking all their support
+to rise and get out on the pavement.
+
+"Take my arm. Poor little thing, you're tired to death," said Lady
+Elizabeth, with what the girl called a coo in her voice.
+
+"You don't even know my name----" began Amaryllis.
+
+"I know something better--you're Dick Bellamy's friend. That is a
+passport and an introduction, my dear."
+
+Charles followed them up the steps. On the third his mistress stopped
+and turned. Charles halted on the second step.
+
+"There's a man in the taxi?" said Lady Elizabeth interrogatively.
+
+"Yes," replied the girl. "We're keeping him. He's drunk."
+
+"Charles," said Lady Elizabeth, "assist the driver in keeping the person
+inside from getting out."
+
+"Yes, my lady," said Charles; and, feeling that haply he was mixing in
+great matters, he went back to the cab and stood sentry very loftily
+over its further exit.
+
+When they were inside, Lady Elizabeth shut the big door.
+
+"George!" she said; and Bruffin took his eyes from Dick, to see his wife
+leading towards them a pale-faced, tear-smudged girl, with a battered
+sun-bonnet flung back on her shoulders and a great halo of untidy red
+hair topping a graceful, weary figure habited in clothes which, in their
+present state, would have disgraced the woman they had come from.
+
+George took a step forward, and Dick half rose in courtesy.
+
+"This is Miss ----" said Lady Elizabeth, and stuck.
+
+"Oh, Liz!" cried Dick. "Beginning an introduction, when you haven't been
+introduced yourself! Lady Elizabeth Bruffin, you have on your arm Miss
+Caldegard, daughter of the eminent Professor Caldegard. George, you
+behold the same. Miss Caldegard, Lady Elizabeth Bruffin, and her
+husband, Mr. George Bruffin. He is famous for immeasurable wealth which
+he can't use and a few brains which he uses in all sorts of queer ways,
+and hasn't yet spent."
+
+He limped towards the two women.
+
+"Liz, dear," he went on, "please put her to bed. She's had the deuce and
+all of a day. She'll tell you, only don't let her talk too much."
+
+Lady Elizabeth nodded.
+
+"Would you like to go to bed now, dear?" she asked.
+
+A smile, radiant on the tired face, illuminated Amaryllis.
+
+"Oh, please, yes. I can see it--all white!" she answered.
+
+And without a word from any of the four, the women left the men standing
+in the hall.
+
+It was empty when Lady Elizabeth returned. She found George in his
+study.
+
+Her eyes shone with a kind of maternal satisfaction, but she looked at
+her husband without speaking.
+
+"How's the young woman?" he asked. "She looked about done in."
+
+"She's had a bath. Suzanne's done her hair. She's in bed, so sleepy that
+I left Suzanne with her to keep her from spilling her bouillon and toast
+before she's finished it. Oh, George, she's a ripper--perfectly lovely,
+without all those horrid clothes."
+
+George took his cigar from his mouth.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder," he said.
+
+Lady Elizabeth ignored the interruption.
+
+"And I _believe_ she's Dick's," she went on. "Who is this Professor
+Caldegard?"
+
+"Scientific--coal-tar--big bug of the first magnitude," answered
+Bruffin. "Some day he'll synthesize albumen, and then all the farmers'll
+go into the workhouse."
+
+"But are they--what sort of people are they? It's _Dick_, George."
+
+"You've seen the girl, Betsy."
+
+"Yes," admitted Lady Elizabeth.
+
+"And when you catch Dick Bellamy making a break over a man, a horse, a
+dog or a woman, Bet, p'r'aps you'll let me know."
+
+Lady Elizabeth sighed contentedly, as if he had removed the last doubt
+from a happy mind.
+
+"That's quite true," she said. Then she looked round the room. "Is he in
+your bath-room, or in bed, or where? You oughtn't to leave him alone."
+
+"He's left me," replied George. "Wouldn't stay a moment after he knew
+Miss Caldegard was in your clutches. He's gone off with his intoxicated
+captive. He's made a conquest of Charles by pitching him out of the
+house, and the taxi-man would help him do murders."
+
+"Is he coming back to bed here?"
+
+"Didn't ask."
+
+"Oh, George, why not?"
+
+"He'll come if he wants to."
+
+"Didn't he tell you where he was taking his prisoner?"
+
+"Only said, 'Must get a move on. Got a man to be hanged,' and went."
+
+"Then it's Scotland Yard," said Lady Elizabeth.
+
+"I don't think that's where they turn 'em off, Betsy, but perhaps you
+know best."
+
+"I do, this time. Have a car out at once and drive there. Somebody's got
+to look after him. And, if you get on the track of the father, tell him
+about Amaryllis----"
+
+"Amaryllis!" echoed George, reflectively weighing the word.
+
+"And bring him along too, if he wants to have just a peep at her."
+
+George nodded and rang the bell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+WAITERS.
+
+
+Dick Bellamy's two letters, the one posted in York, the other in the
+country letter-box by the landlord of "The Coach and Horses," had been
+read at New Scotland Yard at about eight o'clock in the evening.
+
+The first note had contained merely the information that Alban Melchard
+was the man of whom Dick was going in pursuit, and Melchard's address,
+found that evening in the letter received by Amaryllis; the second, the
+few particulars concerning Melchard which he had gathered from the
+landlord.
+
+Superintendent Finucane, of the Criminal Investigation Department, had
+immediately put himself in telephonic communication with the chief
+constables of Millsborough and the County.
+
+To the Government, this fresh proof of the Opiate Ring's influence and
+power, and of its ramification even wider than had hitherto been
+ascertained, was matter of the first importance.
+
+Sir Charles Colombe had lost sight of the abducted girl in the theft of
+the drug and its formula; while the Secretary of State, Sir Charles's
+political chief, had suspicion so strong of liaison between certain
+European leaders of Bolshevism and the Opiate Ring, that the Drug, the
+Lost Lady, and even the Deleterious Drugs' Control Bill itself, had
+become secondary factors in the greatest struggle of the day.
+
+To net a Millsborough gallimaufry of decadents, criminals, and potential
+rebels had become in a few hours his absorbing desire. And in this short
+time he had almost frayed the smooth edges of the Permanent Under
+Secretary's official decorum.
+
+Randal Bellamy, with his affection for the girl, and his absorbing love
+of his younger brother, had as much interest in the affair as any other
+concerned. But he alone of them all had been really welcome at New
+Scotland Yard; for, whatever he may have felt, he had shown there on his
+first visit that Saturday--at about three o'clock in the afternoon--a
+face as smiling and unwrinkled as his excellent white waistcoat. And
+there was a refreshing serenity in the offer that he made to the
+commissioner himself, of laying him ten pounds to one on his brother
+Richard's success in any _shikar_ that he undertook.
+
+This wager, made in the superintendent's room, had so much pleased that
+official, to-day more oppressed by his superiors than by his work, that
+he had actually invited Sir Randal to give him a call after dinner. The
+others were merely expected.
+
+"After dinner" is an elastic appointment, and Randal stretched it as
+late as Caldegard's impatience would endure.
+
+At a quarter past eleven the father could bear suspense no longer, and
+forced his friend to go with him to the Castle where, between the
+Embankment and Parliament Street, Argus and Briareus dwell together in
+awful co-operation.
+
+As they walked down Whitehall, the father remembered that this was a
+lover at his side.
+
+"I don't see how you manage to bear it with all that _sang froid_,
+Bellamy," he said. "Another day of it'll drive me mad."
+
+"I'm banking on Dick," said Randal.
+
+"He's all you say, no doubt. But if you feel all you've told me for my
+girl, it's almost as terrible for you as for me. And your brother can't
+do the impossible, tracking without trace. _Vestigia nulla!_" And the
+father groaned, looking twenty years older than he had seemed
+twenty-four hours ago. "I watch every young woman in the street, half
+hoping she'll turn her face and show me Amaryllis. And all the time I
+know it's impossible."
+
+Then, again, "God, man!" he broke out, "these things don't happen in
+civilised communities. I suffer like the damned, without the
+satisfaction of believing in my hell."
+
+A few minutes later, as they turned out of Parliament Street, "You do
+take it easy for a lover, Randal," he repeated. "I don't understand
+you."
+
+At the moment Randal made no reply, but, as they waited for the lift,
+"Perhaps I ought to tell you," he said, "that I'm no longer in the
+running. I'm afraid it pained her kind heart, saying no to me."
+
+"When was that?" asked the father, speaking more like his ordinary
+self.
+
+"The last time we spoke of it was about an hour before we missed her.
+After that I think she went into my study to be alone, and possibly, as
+a woman will, shed a few tears over the matter; and then, perhaps, fell
+asleep, and was caught unawares--but it's no use guessing."
+
+The lift came down, and the escorting constable sidled up and entered it
+after them.
+
+As they left it, the discreet guide keeping well ahead in the gloomy
+corridor, Caldegard whispered:
+
+"Then it's even worse for you than I thought, Randal. You're a good man,
+and I'm an ill-tempered old one."
+
+"We shall have news, and her, soon--and something else," said Randal.
+
+"What?" asked Caldegard.
+
+"I thought you'd forgotten it! Ambrotox, of course. I'll tell her,
+Caldegard. I once heard a man tell his wife, after she'd been chattering
+to him for twenty minutes, that he'd forgotten to light his pipe all the
+time she'd been talking. She said it was the best compliment she'd ever
+had. I shall tell Amaryllis how you forgot Ambrotox."
+
+Superintendent Finucane felt his spirits rise at the sight of the urbane
+barrister, and received even the dishevelled person of the lost lady's
+father with a measure of cordiality. He showed his visitors Dick's two
+scrawled messages, and explained how he had acted upon their
+information.
+
+Caldegard complained: Dick should have telegraphed, should have gone
+himself to the police in the neighbourhood.
+
+"From what I have heard of him, Mr. Richard Bellamy is the kind that
+seizes on a big chance, and doesn't lose it by running after smaller
+ones," said Finucane. "If he has played against time and wins, they call
+him a genius."
+
+"_Will_ he succeed?" asked Caldegard.
+
+"I am inclined to think he will bring your daughter back," replied
+Finucane. "But I don't advise you to be too hopeful about the drug."
+
+"Oh, damn the drug!" interjected Caldegard.
+
+"He has appreciated his job," explained the superintendent. "He's not
+after side issues. He isn't even out to catch a man who's committed a
+crime--only to prevent a crime being committed."
+
+"Has he prevented it--tell me that?" cried Caldegard.
+
+And, as if in answer, the bell of Finucane's telephone jarred the nerves
+of all three men.
+
+While he listened to the one-sided interview between the superintendent
+and the instrument on his table, Caldegard's control was in danger of
+breaking down altogether.
+
+"Hold the line," said Finucane at last. "Dr. Caldegard, can you describe
+the dress Miss Caldegard was wearing when she disappeared?"
+
+"I dined in town," began the father, his face like white paper.
+
+"My brother and I," said Randal, "dined with Miss Caldegard. She wore a
+dinner-gown--silk--darkish green, which showed, when she moved, the
+crimson threads it was interwoven with."
+
+"And her shoes?" asked Finucane.
+
+Bellamy shook his head; it was Caldegard, now steady as a rock, who
+answered:
+
+"With that frock, my daughter always wore green-bronze shoes and green
+stockings."
+
+Finucane turned again to the telephone. After saying that Miss Caldegard
+had worn green silk shot with red, and green evening slippers, he
+listened for a time which kept his guests in torture of suspense. Then,
+"I'm here all night. But scrape the county with a tooth-comb," he said,
+and hung up the receiver. Swinging his chair round, he faced the two
+men, and spoke with gravity.
+
+"Millsborough got my information about eight-thirty p.m. By nine every
+available man was out on the hunt, to round up all Melchard's places,
+and to go through all the riverside dens and harbour slums. The county
+police, horse and foot, under the chief constable, were all over the
+place. Martingale--that's the man I've just been talking to--rushed a
+strong party of the Millsborough force out to 'The Myrtles' in cars.
+House deserted, except a fellow lying in bed, groaning. In the back
+kitchen a woman's frock had been burned. Unconsumed fragments were
+found--green silk shot with red. Upstairs, in a bedroom, pair of lady's
+shoes--shiny green leather."
+
+Caldegard rose from his seat, opened his mouth to speak, and sat down
+again.
+
+In relation to merely normal death the abandoned garment carries an
+intimate cruelty which will unexpectedly break down control proof
+against direct attack.
+
+But to hear, in these surroundings, of his daughter's little green
+shoes, and to remember how, the first time she had worn them, she had
+flourished at him from her low chair that pretty foot and reckless green
+stocking, and to catch himself now foolishly wondering where the green
+stockings themselves would be found, brought poor Caldegard to an
+embittered weakness which he fought only in vague desire neither to
+break into cursing nor decline upon weak tears.
+
+The great man of science had not attracted the superintendent of the
+Criminal Investigation Department; but the father grunting savagely:
+"Oh, damn the drug!" was another man. And Finucane, by no means himself
+convinced that the worst must be argued from these fragments of
+evidence, yet found himself at a loss for encouraging words. Pity,
+however, forced him to the effort, and he would have spoken, had not
+Randal Bellamy touched him on the arm.
+
+"Not now," he said. "You can't wash that picture from his mind. There'll
+be more news coming."
+
+With a tap on the door, it came.
+
+To the superintendent's consent there entered a police sergeant.
+
+"There's a gentleman wishes to see you, sir. Says he can't keep awake
+another ten minutes. Has important evidence, and a person he wishes to
+introduce to you. Name o' Bellamy."
+
+"Oh, hell!" said Randal, in a voice like his brother's, "fetch him up."
+
+The sergeant took no notice, but kept his gaze on the superintendent.
+Finucane's eyes twinkled. "Fetch him up," he said.
+
+"To save time, sir, he's standing outside."
+
+"Fetch him in," said Finucane.
+
+The sergeant moved himself three inches.
+
+"Superintendent Finucane will see you, sir," he said; and made room for
+the entrance of Dick Bellamy, holding by the arm, and both supporting
+and guiding the wavering steps of Alban Melchard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+PRISONER AND ESCORT.
+
+
+Dick presented to the expectant three the same disreputable and
+truculent aspect which had so deeply offended Charles of Mayfair--an
+aspect so extraordinary as to strike speechless for a moment even the
+three so deeply interested in his advent.
+
+"That chair with arms," said Dick to the sergeant, "or he'll fall off."
+
+The sergeant brought it, and Dick pushed the still tipsy wretch, a
+bundle of false elegance deflowered, into its embrace.
+
+Then Randal, with beaming face, caught his brother by the shoulders.
+
+"You grisly scallywag!" he cried.
+
+Finucane had risen, turning his own chair for the new-comer.
+
+"Sit down, sir," he said.
+
+And Dick, seeing only those who addressed him, dropped into the seat.
+
+"Don't hurry yourself, Mr. Bellamy. What'll you have?" asked Finucane.
+"Brandy--whisky?"
+
+"Tea," interrupted Dick. "A potful--and awfully strong."
+
+"See to that, will you, sergeant?" said Finucane.
+
+The man left the room, and Dick spoke again.
+
+"There are things I must tell you before I slack off." Then, a little
+more alert, he looked round him, and for the first time saw Caldegard
+glowering at him across the table with fierce curiosity.
+
+"I didn't see you, sir," he said, his heart warming to the old man's
+piteous face, "or I'd have told you before I spoke to anyone else that
+Miss Caldegard is perfectly well, though she's a bit done up."
+
+"Where is she?" asked the father, new lines of joy making havoc of a
+mask scored by inelastic sorrow.
+
+"In bed, I think. Asleep, I hope. If you'll let me get a few bits of
+information off my chest for the police, I'll tell you all about it--how
+I found her, how brave and clever she's been--lots of things."
+
+Then the bright spark came into the tired eyes again, as they searched
+the face of the father of Amaryllis--the spark which Amaryllis says,
+comes always just before he says something nice.
+
+But Caldegard spoke first.
+
+"You've had a devilish bad time of it, my boy," he said.
+
+"Nothing to what you've been through, sir. It's hell, I know, when one
+can't do anything."
+
+Caldegard stretched his hand across the table. Dick turned from his
+grasp to see Randal pouring terrific black tea into a thick white cup.
+
+When he had swallowed three burning gulps of it, he began:
+
+"That's Melchard," he said, pointing. "This bundle of letters I took off
+him. Amongst them you'll find useful information. Read 'em now,
+superintendent. You'll find there's a flat in Bayswater, where two or
+three of his crowd in the illicit drug traffic are expecting him
+to-morrow morning. That's the important one--the thick mauve paper."
+
+And he drank more tea, while Finucane ran eager eyes over the letter.
+
+"Good God!" he said, rising. "Go on with your tea, Mr. Bellamy--not your
+story. Back in three minutes."
+
+He pushed an electric button, and almost ran from the room.
+
+"You see, sir," said Dick to Caldegard, "as we were coming home in the
+train from our little day out, poor Miss Caldegard was so tired that she
+said I must find her a fairy godmother directly we reached town. So I
+took her straight to the only lady of that rank whom I know. I dare say
+you know her too--it's Lady Elizabeth Bruffin. George Bruffin's an old
+friend of mine--Mexico--and his wife's a connoisseur in pumpkins and
+rat-traps."
+
+Since all London that season was talking of the two Bruffins, and every
+newspaper, in direct ratio to the badness of its paper and print, was
+scavenging for paragraphs, true or false, concerning the "palatial home"
+in Park Lane, neither Caldegard nor Randal Bellamy could conceal
+round-eyed astonishment.
+
+"But Amaryllis? Did she look--well, anything like----"
+
+"Like me?" asked Dick, grinning all over the better side of his twisted
+face. "Well, sir, she hasn't been knocked about, you know. But her rig
+did her certainly less justice than mine does me. Nothing on earth could
+make her look like a tough, and the sun-bonnet certainly had an----"
+
+But Finucane was with them again.
+
+"Excuse me behaving like Harlequin in the pantomime, gentlemen," he
+said. "Now, Mr. Bellamy."
+
+"Can you take advice?" asked Dick.
+
+"From you, Mr. Bellamy," said Finucane, "who wouldn't?"
+
+"I'm so sleepy that if I don't give it now, I may forget it. Properly
+handled, that dirty thing in the chair there will give his show away.
+Keep him to-night as a drunk and disorderly. Better have a doctor to
+him. I tasted the stuff. Tomorrow I'll swear a dozen charges against
+him--burglary, abduction, instigation to murder, attempts to kill; and
+when he hears 'em read over, he'll be putty in your fingers."
+
+"Thanks," said Finucane.
+
+"Next: ring up the police and the station-master at Todsmoor. Tell 'em
+to keep tight hold of the man who fell out of the train between
+Harthborough and Todsmoor at five-forty p.m. and of the bloke that was
+with him, suspected of throwing him out."
+
+Finucane paid his guest the compliment of obeying without question.
+
+As he hung up the receiver,
+
+"The man's in hospital, all right," he said, "broken collar-bone. I was
+just in time to prevent them from letting the other go. They're to hold
+him on a charge of throwing his pal out."
+
+"I did that," said Dick. "At least, I scared the bird off his perch."
+
+Again Finucane rang.
+
+"And I'll send this one," he said, "to his nest."
+
+When Melchard had been removed, Dick gave his three listeners a rapid
+and, as their faces and exclamatory comment testified, a vivid sketch of
+his adventure from his detection of the perfume which pervaded the
+alcove in Randal's study and the corroboration of his suspicions given
+by Melchard's attempted alibi in the letter to Amaryllis, to the time
+when his train pulled out of Todsmoor station; and, in the course of his
+narrative, he laid on the table, each at its historic point, his _pieces
+de conviction_.
+
+Having told how Amaryllis had fainted at the sight of Ockley with the
+knife-point protruding from the back of his neck, he extracted the
+Webley from his overcrowded pocket.
+
+"That," he said, "is the man's gun, which Miss Caldegard found for me."
+
+Later, he produced Mut-mut's baag-nouk, laying it, talons upward, beside
+the Webley.
+
+"That was strapped to his hand. I gave him the first of my two shots
+before he jumped, the second I put through his head as he lay scrabbling
+in the car."
+
+At this point there entered the room a stout, bearded man with careworn
+face and irritable expression. Finucane rose respectfully, but the
+new-comer made a motion waiving ceremony, sat in the nearest chair, and
+became one of the audience.
+
+Dick, never observing the addition, continued his tale in a voice
+monotonous with fatigue.
+
+In their turn he added to the display the Malay's revolver, with which
+he had captured Melchard, and Melchard's automatic.
+
+And, after telling them how he had forced his prisoner to drink,
+
+"I couldn't bring the bottle--no room," he said, patting his shrinking
+pocket. "The tangle-foot all went down the pussyfoot's neck, so I left
+'Robbie Burns' in the car. By the way, don't forget to ring up about
+that car. Old Mut-mut cut the cushions to ribbons; that bit of evidence
+might save my neck."
+
+Finucane smiled pleasantly.
+
+"You seem to have left a trail of coroner's inquests behind you," he
+said.
+
+"All in the day's work," said Dick. "But not, thank God! in to-night's."
+
+And when he had carried his audience past Todsmoor station,
+
+"That's all," he said. "Can't I go home to bed now, superintendent?"
+
+But the bearded stranger intervened.
+
+"One of your clever young officers, I presume," he said to Finucane.
+
+"I wish to God he were, Sir Gregory," replied the superintendent.
+
+"A clever, and, I gather, somewhat high-handed amateur. The young lady,
+I hope, is safe."
+
+"She is, Sir Gregory--thanks entirely to the extraordinary rapidity of
+Mr. Richard Bellamy's intuition and action," said Finucane, speaking
+with unruffled respect, which yet did not hide, nor was intended to
+hide, a note of reproof. "Without him the Department would have been too
+late for the show. As it is, we are acting effectively--on information
+supplied by Mr. Bellamy."
+
+Now Dick stood in no awe of potentates, and he liked his superintendent.
+
+"It was my luck to be on the spot," he said. "There's nothing more in
+it."
+
+"Pardon me if I differ from you, Mr. Bellamy," said Sir Gregory. "There
+is this more in it: if the police had been given your opportunities they
+would not have limited their action to the rescue of this unfortunate
+young lady, but would have devoted themselves also to the recovery of
+what is, for the country--I might almost say for the world--of vastly
+greater importance. You are possibly aware that a sample of a new drug
+of great potentiality for good and ill was the object of the outrage
+which led to the abduction."
+
+The great man's beard and the great man's manner annoyed Dick Bellamy,
+stimulating him even through his shroud of somnolence.
+
+He rubbed his eyes and yawned; then looked up at Sir Gregory.
+
+"I don't know who you are, my good man," he said, "nor why you come
+barging into this. What more d'you want? Your Napoleon of crime is in
+the oubliette, two of his dastard accomplices are in clink at Todsmoor,
+three more are being tracked to their doom in Bayswater, two are
+dead----"
+
+Here Dick produced from inner pockets a small white packet and an
+envelope.
+
+"And these," he concluded, "are the dope and the book-o'-the-words."
+
+Both Finucane and Sir Gregory started forward as if to take possession,
+but Dick drew back.
+
+"No," he said, "I didn't go looting for my country's sake, nor the
+world's. I just happened to pick up two little things belonging to a
+friend of mine." And, turning, he put the Ambrotox and the formula into
+Caldegard's hand, smiling his crooked smile.
+
+"That's the lot," he murmured, and laid his head on his arms, folded
+upon the table.
+
+An uncomfortable pause was broken by the entrance of a constable with a
+card.
+
+"Gentleman wishes to know if Mr. Richard Bellamy is here," he said to
+the superintendent.
+
+But Dick did not move.
+
+His brother bent over him.
+
+"The boy's fast asleep," he said.
+
+Finucane passed the card to Randal.
+
+"'George Bruffin,'" he read out. "Better ask him up, superintendent, if
+you don't mind."
+
+Sir Gregory had been feeling himself pushed aside. He had taken the sow,
+it seemed, by the wrong ear. And now, the great Bruffin and his
+millions!
+
+George came in, ponderous and unsmiling; picked out the superintendent
+at once, and thanked him gruffly for admission to the "sanctum"; a word
+which George chose to please him--and succeeded.
+
+Sir Gregory pressing himself forward, Finucane was obliged to mumble an
+introduction.
+
+George replied vaguely, saying, "Oh, ah--yes, of course!"
+
+And then, his eye falling on Randal, he came alive.
+
+"You're Dick's big brother," he said.
+
+"I can't help that," responded Randal, holding out his hand.
+
+"Some people do have all the luck," said George. Then, looking down at
+the sleeper, he continued: "My car's outside. My wife's waiting till I
+bring him. You'd better come with us, Sir Randal, and help us tuck him
+up in bed."
+
+Sir Gregory tried again.
+
+"Game to the last!" he said, joining the group; "but not, I suppose,
+very robust. Evidently a case of complete nervous exhaustion."
+
+Caldegard had spoken little since Dick's entrance. He now rose as if
+shot from his chair by a spring, and spoke with a vigour that reminded
+Randal of their youth.
+
+"Five hundred miles--driving your own car in the dark! Climb the side of
+a house. Break in--save one woman from being knifed by another. Fight
+five armed men with your fists and boots. Knock out four of them. Run a
+mile, dragging a girl--from a man chasing you, and shooting at you with
+a revolver. Kill a murderer with a murderess's dagger. Nurse a girl with
+an attack of hysteria. Drive a coach, humbug a woman, a parson, a
+railway porter, a guard and a station-master. Kill a man armed with that
+steel-clawed thing there, steal a car, knock a man off a train, and
+bring home the exhausted woman alive and your chief enemy drunk and a
+prisoner--do all that without sleep for thirty-six hours, Sir Gregory;
+then, if you can drop off to sleep like that, instead of having your
+head packed in ice and babbling pink spiders and blue monkeys, you may
+call your constitution cast-iron. All exhaustion is nervous, Sir
+Gregory, and the man who can stand the biggest dose of it is the
+strongest man."
+
+"Oh, from that point of view--yes--of course," bleated the bearded
+politician.
+
+But George covered his final discomfiture.
+
+"I wish you'd tell me your name, sir," he said to Caldegard.
+
+Caldegard told him.
+
+"Thought so," exclaimed George, almost with enthusiasm. "We have the
+immense pleasure of looking after Miss Caldegard. My wife won't be happy
+unless you come round with me and feast your eyes on what she says is
+the prettiest sight in London--Miss Caldegard asleep."
+
+This time the father's countenance did him justice.
+
+Finucane told his wife that night that he had at last seen an old man
+perfectly happy.
+
+The potentate saw that flash of glory, and put himself "on-side."
+
+He went round to Caldegard, and saying, "Let me congratulate you," took
+the hand offered him, and went out.
+
+"Nothing in this meeting became him like----" began Randal.
+
+But Caldegard cut him short.
+
+"He meant it, Randal," he said.
+
+"Exactly. Requiescat. Let's see if we can get this neurasthenic down to
+the car without waking him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+AN INTERIM REPORT.
+
+
+Though maid to a lady accounted very fine, Suzanne, in presence of
+beauty unadorned, was a simple and kind-hearted enthusiast in her art.
+Before lunch-time next day she had done so well for Amaryllis out of
+Lady Elizabeth Bruffin's wardrobe, that she declared, with conviction to
+fill up the gap in evidence, "_que mademoiselle n'a jamais pu paraitre
+plus seduisante, plus pimpante qu'aujourd'hui_."
+
+"How can she know that?" asked Amaryllis laughing.
+
+"Because nothing possible could be, you pretty creature," said Lady
+Elizabeth, glowing with pleasure in the success of her nursing and in
+the quality of Dick Bellamy's conquest.
+
+She had, indeed, good reason: eleven hours' sleep, with redundant
+happiness and bodily health as elastic as a child's, had made Amaryllis
+scarcely more delightful to her new friends' eyes than to her own. For
+on this Sunday morning she looked into her glass for the first time
+through a man's eyes.
+
+In spite of her beauty, however, and of her joy in the man who was to
+see and praise it, there was yet in her heart a pricking as of
+conscience.
+
+In the night there had come to her, for the first time since Dick had
+saved her from the Dutchwoman and her knife, the memory of Randal
+Bellamy; of his kindness, of his favour with her father and of his love
+for herself.
+
+She did not now feel as she had felt in his study before she fell
+asleep; she did not even define the feeling which had then made her
+tears flow; and she understood, with the memory of Dick's kisses on her
+face, that Randal was not wounded as Dick would have been in losing her.
+
+She had not wronged Randal, nor had she any sense of wrong-doing; for to
+love Dick was a natural thing to do--and a wise thing. It was even a
+praiseworthy deed: for that this wonderful Dick of all men should go
+without any smallest thing which he desired, would have been wicked
+indeed.
+
+The sting was this: Randal did not yet know that she was Dick's, nor
+Dick that Randal would have had her his own. And she believed that it
+would hurt Randal less in the end to learn the tremendous news from her
+mouth than from her father's, Dick's or Lady Elizabeth's; and from Lady
+Elizabeth she knew she could not keep it long, having a suspicion, even,
+that she knew it already.
+
+She must see Randal before Dick should come to her. She must tell Randal
+the most wonderful and most inevitable thing of that terrible and
+glorious yesterday. And Randal must decide whether Dick was to know what
+Randal had asked and offered. And if Dick was to know, Randal must
+decide by whom, and when.
+
+If Randal wished it hidden, she could never tell it--not even to Dick.
+
+For Amaryllis, even before she had "put her hair up," had learned to
+hate the woman who tries to hide her nakedness with a belt of scalps.
+
+As these thoughts ran through her head, Amaryllis frowned between her
+eyebrows.
+
+"A fly in the ointment, after all?" asked Lady Elizabeth, smiling so
+that one knew there was none in hers.
+
+"Only something I remembered. I want----"
+
+"Won't ask, shan't have," said Lady Elizabeth.
+
+"Will Sir Randal Bellamy be here to lunch?" asked the girl.
+
+"I hope so, my dear. He's with Dick--or was--sitting on the bed to keep
+him down till the doctor came. He's like a hen with one chick over that
+brother of his."
+
+And Lady Elizabeth Bruffin laughed.
+
+"I think it's--it's beautiful," said Amaryllis, with a shade of
+indignation in her voice.
+
+"Yes--quite. That's why I laughed."
+
+"I know," replied the girl, unwrinkling her forehead. "I often want to
+laugh for that." And then, after a moment's pause, she added: "Please, I
+want to speak to Sir Randal for a moment, before lunch."
+
+"You shall. Heroines must have things made smooth for them, mustn't
+they, at the end of the book?"
+
+And she took the girl, fresh from Suzanne's finishing touches, to
+George's study.
+
+"George won't be coming in for half an hour, dear," she said. "There are
+heaps of papers and books, but no looking-glass. So you'll be able to
+forget your pretty self for a few minutes."
+
+And off went the fairy godmother--to meet Sir Randal Bellamy on the
+stairs.
+
+"But you're staying to lunch," she expostulated.
+
+"If you say so, of course I am," said Randal.
+
+"I've left Amaryllis in George's study. She wants you to see I have
+looked after her as well as if she'd been at home with her father and
+you."
+
+She passed him, but turned two steps above.
+
+"I wish you'd seen Dr. Caldegard looking at her fast asleep in bed last
+night," she said in a low voice, very tender. "It was a picture--the
+kind one keeps."
+
+"Yes," said Randal. "I was in the other room, you know, looking at
+mine."
+
+And he went down the stair, wondering how a woman he had seen last night
+for the first time had managed to get that sentimental speech out of
+him.
+
+Amaryllis rose as he entered, and almost ran to meet him.
+
+"Oh, Randal!" she cried.
+
+He had known his gentle doom on the Friday; and her "Randal," _tout
+court_, sealed it, for never had she used his name so to him before. It
+came now, he knew, not in his own right, but through Dick.
+
+In a single emotion, he was sorry and glad--more glad, he told himself,
+than sorry. For the sadness seemed to have been with him a long time,
+while the joy was new.
+
+A little while she babbled of the trouble and pain she had given them.
+
+"You and poor dad! If only I could have yelled out in time!"
+
+"To get a knife in you, my dear--no, it's been all just right. Why, we
+should never have got the Dope of the Gods back, without you."
+
+And when she laughed, he told her how her father had growled: "Oh, damn
+the Ambrotox!" and how he had lectured the potentate on nervous
+exhaustion.
+
+But when a little silence fell between them, Amaryllis took a deep
+breath and plunged, saying in a half-stifled voice, "I want to tell you
+something."
+
+"Tell away, child," he replied, smiling benignantly on her, though his
+heart beat heavily, telling him her tale beforehand.
+
+"It's--it's Dick," she said, and broke down.
+
+"Dick?" he responded. "Of course it's Dick--and Dick it is going to be;
+Dick for breakfast, Dick for lunch, and Dick for dinner."
+
+"Yes," said Amaryllis, tears running at last, but voice steady. "Dick
+for ever, I think. It feels like that, Randal dear."
+
+"If it depends on him it will be," said Dick's brother.
+
+"If it depends on me, it shall be," answered the girl.
+
+"Then what's the dear silly child crying for?" he asked.
+
+"I--I don't know," she replied weakly.
+
+"That's a dear silly little lie--you know as well as I do. Although
+you've been perfectly honest with me, you have a dear silly feeling that
+the things which have happened so suddenly have been unfair to me. When
+I spoke to you last, my dear, you were surer than ever that you'd never
+want me. You didn't know why you were surer than ever--because you were
+afraid to look and see. Young women all, I suppose, have a moment when
+they _won't_ look into that dear silly cupboard. But I looked at the
+blind door of it, and I--well, I guessed what was inside."
+
+The tears would not stop. There was no sobbing nor convulsion of throat
+or breath. They just ran out in tribute to the man's goodness.
+
+But Randal explained them with a difference.
+
+"The tears from your left eye come tumbling out over the edge of the
+well of your kindness for me," he said. "You would like me to have
+everything I want. But you know that Dick must have everything that you
+are. So there it is. But the tears out of your dear silly right eye are
+silly sham jewels, sparkling with dear injured vanity. You're afraid I
+shall somehow think you played a crooked little game with me. I don't."
+
+The silly little handkerchief was getting the best of it.
+
+"When you've quite turned that silly tap off," he went on, "I'll tell
+you something else."
+
+He got up and walked away from her, looked at two prints which he did
+not see, lit a cigarette which he could not taste, and came back to a
+pale-faced, dry-eyed Amaryllis--a girl with a smile on her face that was
+a woman's smile.
+
+"Tell me that other thing," she said.
+
+"I don't suppose that it'll be altogether news to you, any more than
+yours was to me. But it's this: For a good long time I resisted
+you--just and only because the more I admired you, the more I couldn't
+help thinking that Dick ought to have his chance--what I knew was one of
+the great chances. Then I got weak, and last Wednesday I tried to grab
+mine, before he'd even had a look in. I felt mean--and I couldn't stop
+myself. That afternoon he came, and--well, as it turned out, saved me
+from the agonies of gout. I always get it, when I've done anything off
+colour."
+
+"You!" said Amaryllis. "D'you know what he told me, the day we drove to
+Oxford?"
+
+"Some silly yarn."
+
+"A dear story, not a bit silly. He said he daren't admire a gun or a
+book or a horse of yours, for fear you'd force it on him. Said it was a
+mercy of Providence that your size and shape permitted him to admire
+your coats and trousers."
+
+"Well," asked Randal, "doesn't he deserve the best of everything?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" declared the girl eagerly.
+
+"This time," said Bellamy, "he's getting it. And it's God's truth, my
+dear, that it makes me unspeakably happy."
+
+Amaryllis put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.
+
+And then George came in with _The Sunday Telegram_.
+
+"Raid on a West-End Flat!" he grumbled. "Nice, respectable lot you are,
+getting me mixed up with a thing like this!" And he read out:
+
+"'In consequence of information which has come into the hands of the
+police----' and all the usual jabber. And the placards are screaming
+'Secret Dope Factories' all over this moral city. 'World-wide
+Organisation to be Broken Up.' 'Five Leaders Arrested.' They'll be
+getting me and Betsy into the witness-box."
+
+"Come off it, George," said Dick from the doorway. "You and Liz aren't
+going to get boomed in this stunt. Put your money into pars about your
+yacht and your stables, if the 'Palatial Home' gadget's wearing thin."
+
+His smile was almost straight again, Amaryllis thought, and there was
+little sign upon him of what he had been through, except the patch of
+black plaster on his left cheek, and the accentuated limp with which he
+came across the room to her.
+
+"Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed. "What a lovely coat!"
+
+"That's just what I was going to say about you," he answered, taking her
+hand. "We look a bit different, don't we?"
+
+"Sent me in a cab, as if I were his valet," said Randal, "to fetch his
+newest and purplest raiment from his beastly little flat."
+
+"Nothing like it," said George, "to take the taste of savagery out of
+the mouth. If the proletariat would only dress for dinner every night,
+we shouldn't have any labour troubles. The Nationalisation of the
+Dinner-jacket would be death to the Agitator. They say Abe Grinnel is
+drafting a bill to make it illegal."
+
+Lady Elizabeth came in with Caldegard. Amaryllis soon had her father at
+one end of the room in a subdued conversation of which the hostess had
+little difficulty in guessing the subject. The two brothers, she
+observed, had come together at the other end, and were looking out of
+the window across the park. She took George discreetly away from his own
+room.
+
+Of yesterday Randal and Dick had already talked much that morning; but
+of that adventure which he accounted the greatest, Dick had said
+nothing.
+
+"Amaryllis has told me," said Randal.
+
+"I'm glad," said Dick. "It didn't come easy to start the subject. I'm
+not used to it yet."
+
+"Neither of you could have done better," said the elder brother. "I
+congratulate you, dear boy. And I want to give you--to make you a
+present of a thing that isn't mine--couldn't have been mine, anyhow.
+But, all the same, I give it you."
+
+"Thanks," replied the younger. "But what the devil d'you mean?"
+
+Randal looked at him.
+
+"You don't mean--you----" began Dick, and stopped short, shocked by
+conviction.
+
+"Yes, I do. And I don't think I should ever have let you know it, Dick,
+but that it doesn't seem comfortable for a girl to carry about with her
+even a little thing like that which she can't speak of to her husband.
+So now you know. And there is a way of giving even what one could not
+withhold. She's perfect, Dick."
+
+"Like the giver," said his brother.
+
+And it was to Randal also that he owed the few minutes which he was able
+to get alone with Amaryllis before lunch.
+
+He went up to Caldegard.
+
+"Have you heard Bruffin describe Dick's solo on the dinner-bells--last
+night, you know? Well come and see if he's in the hall now," he said,
+and dragged the old man away.
+
+Left alone together,
+
+"It's like a dream," said Amaryllis; and, "Which!" asked Dick.
+
+"Yesterday," said the girl, peering at his calm face.
+
+"It's this that's like dreaming, to me," he answered. "When you're awake
+you make things happen. When you're asleep, things have the best of
+it--make you follow their lead. Yesterday, Amaryllis, I was some bloke,
+because I was useful to you. If I'd had time to think, I'd have thought
+very strong beer of myself. But now I'm--oh, a giddy little stranger
+that's taken the wrong turning and got in among the Birds of Paradise."
+
+And he touched gingerly the sleeve of her frock,
+
+"Lady Elizabeth's," she said. "You score. Dick. You've got your own, and
+they fit."
+
+"Do I fit?" asked Dick.
+
+"You don't really mean you feel strange and lost in _this_ dream, do
+you?" she asked a little anxiously.
+
+"I don't mean I feel strange in civilised life. That's only a variation
+on savagery--a mere matter of degree--and I like it well enough. I can
+talk the language, dear child, when I'm in the country. But you are my
+new life, and I'm--well, dazzled, let's call it. Yesterday I had to
+fetch you home and see that you didn't get hurt. Now, I've got to make
+you happier every day for the next fifty odd years. It's a tall order,
+and there's lots to do. I ought to begin."
+
+"You began when you found me crying in Randal's study, Dick."
+
+"Oh, it's easy to make people less wretched," he objected. "That's why
+yesterday was, on the whole, a success. But--are you happy?"
+
+"Awfully! Oh, just awfully!" murmured Amaryllis.
+
+"There it is!" sighed Dick, with the humour which she knew already for
+the natural shell of some wise little kernel. "And I've got to give you,
+as you give me, the keen edge of appetite for all the world and for all
+the people that play about in it. The stuff's all there, but----"
+
+"Why, Dick, it's the same thing, after all, as yesterday. You saved me
+from beasts and from fear and from myself. You made me laugh, and you
+made me love--even made me love Tod, and poor Pepe, and the bees, and
+the round-faced girl in the cottage they bumbled round; and 'Opeful
+'Arry; and you brought me home to a fairy godmother. If you could do all
+that in a day, Dick, just think what a lot of laughing and loving you'll
+be able to dig out of fifty years. And I won't let you off. Wake up,
+Dick. There's no dreaming about it all."
+
+So they woke up together.
+
+At the lunch-table, Amaryllis looked round her, and felt the last of her
+troubles was over.
+
+Randal showed, she thought, a face more serene and contented than she
+had ever before seen him wear.
+
+During the earlier part of the meal the talk went to and fro over the
+track of what George rashly called the _Amarylliad_.
+
+Randal told him the word was falsely constructed, _Iliad, Odyssey_ and
+_Aeneid_ being, he said, syncopated adjectival forms derived from their
+respective substantive stems.
+
+"Ours," said George, "has been a rag-time Dunciad."
+
+And when the coffee and George's elbows were on the table, and four of
+his irresistible cigars alight:
+
+"And us," he said, "not to get one little puff out of it all!"
+
+"Advertisement," said Randal, "is the false dawn of fame. You, Mr.
+Bruffin, do not, I believe, need it, and will certainly not get it out
+of the Dope Drama. Miss Caldegard and my brother, who are likely to get
+a great deal, will hate it."
+
+Amaryllis flushed a little at the coupling of names, but faced it
+bravely.
+
+Her father drew a crumpled newspaper from his pocket.
+
+"'Mysterious Murders near Millsborough,'" he read out. "'Injured Man in
+Empty House. Bearded Man Stabbed in Lonely Wood. Dead Chinaman on
+Deserted Roman Road. Abandoned Automobile.'"
+
+"Inquests!" said George.
+
+"Horrid!" said Amaryllis.
+
+"Rescued Damsel!" said Lady Elizabeth.
+
+"Scientist's Daughter Abducted!" cackled Caldegard.
+
+"Lightning Pursuit by Gallant Airman!" boomed George.
+
+"Dope Gang Baffled!" chuckled Randal. "And we understand that the
+interesting heroine will shortly reward----"
+
+Lady Elizabeth shot a keen glance at Amaryllis and Amaryllis answered it
+boldly.
+
+"Oh, of course!" she said.
+
+George, having caught the look, seized upon the words.
+
+"I wish to propose the health," he said, himself raising his glass, "of
+Miss Caldegard, coupling it with that of my ancient friend and
+fellow-filibuster, Limping Dick."
+
+When four on their feet had toasted the two sitting, Randal spoke
+seriously.
+
+"The inquests are likely to begin about Wednesday next," he said. "If
+you two children get yourselves neatly married on Monday, you will be
+pursued by _subp[oe]nas_ to the Isle of Wight, say, and able to show up
+and get your evidence begun at least at the second sitting, about a week
+later. There'll be a paragraph or two before that, and by the time the
+evidence is reported, you'll be a settled married couple, and the
+romance will have evaporated."
+
+"Oh, Randal!" said the girl reproachfully.
+
+"Evaporated from the print and paper, dear child," he explained
+paternally. "Take my advice, and you'll just about break the hearts of
+the reporters."
+
+"Amaryllis and I," said Lady Elizabeth, rising, "will withdraw and hold
+counsel. An interim report will be issued at tea."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ambrotox and Limping Dick, by Oliver Fleming
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