Mr. Mellish would have walked straight off to the stables; but Talbot Bulstrode caught him by the arm.
“You may miss the man on the road, John,” he said. “He came last night after dark, and may come as late tonight. There’s no knowing whether he’ll come by the road, or the shortcut across the fields. You’re as likely to miss him as not.”
Mr. Mellish hesitated.
“He mayn’t come at all tonight,” he said; “and I tell you I can’t bear this suspense.”
“Let me ride into Doncaster, then, John,” urged Talbot; “and you stay here to receive Grimstone if he should come.”
Mr. Mellish was considerably mollified by this proposition.
“Will you ride into the town, Talbot?” he said. “Upon my word, it’s very kind of you to propose it. I shouldn’t like to miss this man upon any account; but at the same time I don’t feel inclined to wait for the chance of his coming or staying away. I’m afraid I’m a great nuisance to you, Bulstrode.”
“Not a bit of it,” answered Talbot, with a smile.
Perhaps he smiled involuntarily at the notion of how little John Mellish knew what a nuisance he had been through that weary day.
“I’ll go with very great pleasure, John,” he said, “if you’ll tell them to saddle a horse for me.”
“To be sure; you shall have Red Rover, my covert hack. We’ll go round to the stables, and see about him at once.”
The truth of the matter is, Talbot Bulstrode was very well pleased himself to hunt up the detective, rather than that John Mellish should execute that errand in person; for it would have been about as easy for the young squire to have translated a number of the Sporting Magazine into Porsonian Greek, as to have kept a secret for half an hour, however earnestly entreated, or however conscientiously determined to do so.
Mr. Bulstrode had made it his particular business, therefore, during the whole of that day, to keep his friend as much as possible out of the way of every living creature, fully aware that Mr. Mellish’s manner would most certainly betray him to the least observant eyes that might chance to fall upon him.
Red Rover was saddled, and, after twenty loudly whispered injunctions from John, Talbot Bulstrode rode away in the evening sunlight. The nearest way from the stables to the high road took him past the north lodge. It had been shut up since the day of the trainer’s funeral, and such furniture as it contained left to become a prey to moths and rats; for the Mellish servants were a great deal too superstitiously impressed with the story of the murder to dream of readmitting those goods and chattels which had been selected for Mr. Conyers’s accommodation to the garrets whence they had been taken. The door had been locked, therefore, and the key given to Dawson the gardener, who was to be once more free to use the place as a storehouse for roots and matting, superannuated cucumber-frames, and crippled garden tools.
The place looked dreary enough, though the low sun made a gorgeous illumination upon one of the latticed windows that faced the crimson west, and though the last leaves of the roses were still lying upon the long grass in the patch of garden before the door out of which Mr. Conyers had gone to his last resting-place. One of the stable-boys had accompanied Mr. Bulstrode to the lodge in order to open the rusty iron gates, which hung loosely on their hinges, and were never locked.
Talbot rode at a brisk pace into Doncaster, never drawing rein until he reached the little inn at which the detective had taken up his quarters. Mr. Grimstone had been snatching a hasty refreshment, after a weary and useless perambulation about the town, and came out with his mouth full, to speak to Mr. Bulstrode. But he took very good care not to confess that since three o’clock that day neither he nor his ally had seen or heard of Mr. Stephen Hargraves, or that he was actually no nearer the discovery of the murderer than he had been at eleven o’clock upon the previous night, when he had discovered the original proprietor of the fancy waistcoat, with buttons by Crosby, Birmingham, in the person of Dawson the gardener.
“I’m not losing any time, sir,” he said, in answer to Talbot’s inquiries; “my sort of work’s quiet work, and don’t make no show till it’s done. I’ve reason to think the man we want is in Doncaster; so I stick in Doncaster, and mean to, till I lay my hand upon him, unless I should get information as would point further off. Tell Mr. Mellish I’m doing my duty, sir, and doing it conscientious; and that I shall neither eat nor drink nor sleep more than just as much as’ll keep human nature together, until I’ve done what I’ve set my mind on doing.”
“But you’ve discovered nothing fresh, then?” said Talbot; “you’ve nothing new to tell me?”
“Whatever I’ve discovered is neither here nor there yet awhile, sir,” answered the detective vaguely. “You keep your heart up, and tell Mr. Mellish to keep his heart up, and trust in me.”
Talbot Bulstrode was obliged to be content with this rather doubtful comfort. It was not much, certainly; but he determined to make the best of it to John Mellish.
He rode out of Doncaster, past the Reindeer and the white-fronted houses of the wealthier citizens of that prosperous borough,
