Part 18 (1/2)

”He had, after all!” he croaked. ”Little as I dreamt it yesterday, my unhappy boy, who had never to my knowledge pulled a trigger in his life before, was going about London with a loaded revolver in his pocket!”

”Had he brought it from school?” asked Thrush, with a covert frown at the transfigured Mullins.

Mr. Upton repeated what he had heard through the young Westminsters, with their father's opinion of p.a.w.nbrokers' shops as resorts for young schoolboys, of young schoolboys who frequented them, and of parents and guardians who gave them the chance. How the two gentlemen had parted without fisticuffs became the latest mystery to Eugene Thrush, whose only comment was that it behoved him all the more to do something to redeem the capital in the other's eyes.

”Now we know why my poor wife heard a shot!” was the only rejoinder, in a voice not too broken to make Mullins p.r.i.c.k up his ears; it was the first he had heard about the dream.

”I wouldn't say that, Mr. Upton. We know no more than we knew before.

Yet I will own now,” exclaimed Thrush, catching Mullins's bright eye, ”that the coincidence will be tremendous if there's nothing in it!”

But only half the coincidence was present in the father's mind; no thought of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist-apologised-and humbly entreated him to take a more hopeful view.

”There may have been an accident, Thrush, but not necessarily a fatal one!”

An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins and nods behind the poor father's back. Thrush looked at both men with the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being-looked and frowned again-frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as brightly as it lit him onward to its solution.

He was even man enough to refrain from reflecting it automatically in his face, as he put a number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. Upton about the missing boy. What was his character? what its chief points?

Was he a boy with the moral courage of his acts? Would he face their consequences like a man?

”I never knew him tell a lie in his life,” said Mr. Upton, ”either to save his own skin or any thing else; and it was a case of their young skins when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony was the most conscientious of them all, and I hear that's what they say of him at school.”

Thrush put one or two further questions, and then said he had a clue, though a very slight one, which he was rather in a hurry to follow up himself; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly of his own accord, with a dejected undertaking to be at his hotel when he was wanted.

”I don't like the look of our friend,” remarked Thrush, looking hard at Mullins when at last they were alone. ”He shapes none too well for the strain he's got to bear; if he cracks up there'll be a double tragedy, if not a triple one, in that family. We must catch our hare quickly, Mullins, or we may catch him too late.”

Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that Thrush had so resented a few minutes before; he took no notice of it now.

”You'll find your man,” said Mullins significantly, ”the very moment that I find mine, Mr. Thrush.”

”Meaning they're the same person?”

”To be sure.”

”That this lad is the actual slayer of the man Holdaway?”

”Surely, sir, it's as plain as a pikestaff now?”

”Not to me, Mullins-not to me.”

Thrush was twinkling behind his great round goggles.

”Then who do you think has done it, sir?” inquired Mullins, in deferential derision.

”Ah! that's another matter, my man; but I can tell you whom I hope to get arrested within another hour!”

Mullins looked as though he could hardly believe his ears; his jaw, black as a c.r.a.pe hat-band this morning, fell in front of his grimy collar.