Behind the fives-court, he thought, would be the spot. Nobody ever went there. It meant a run of three hundred yards there and the same distance back, and there was more than a chance that he might be seen by one of the Powers. In which case he might find it rather hard to explain what he was doing in the middle of the grounds with a couple of ferrets in his possession when the hands of the clock pointed to twenty minutes to eleven.
But the odds were against his being seen. He risked it.
When the bell rang for the quarter to eleven interval the ferrets were in their new home, happily discussing a piece of meat—Renford’s contribution, held over from the morning’s meal—and O’Hara, looking as if he had never left the passage for an instant, was making his way through the departing mathematical class to apologise handsomely to Mr. Banks—as was his invariable custom—for his disgraceful behaviour during the morning’s lesson.
XIX
The Mayor’s Visit
School prefects at Wrykyn did weekly essays for the headmaster. Those who had got their scholarships at the ’Varsity, or who were going up in the following year, used to take their essays to him after school and read them to him—an unpopular and nerve-destroying practice, akin to suicide. Trevor had got his scholarship in the previous November. He was due at the headmaster’s private house at six o’clock on the present Tuesday. He was looking forward to the ordeal not without apprehension. The essay subject this week had been “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” and Clowes, whose idea of English Essay was that it should be a medium for intempestive frivolity, had insisted on his beginning with, “While I cannot conscientiously go so far as to say that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, yet I am certainly of opinion that what is highly beneficial to one man may, on the other hand, to another man, differently constituted, be extremely deleterious, and, indeed, absolutely fatal.”
Trevor was not at all sure how the headmaster would take it. But Clowes had seemed so cut up at his suggestion that it had better be omitted, that he had allowed it to stand.
He was putting the final polish on this gem of English literature at half-past five, when Milton came in.
“Busy?” said Milton.
Trevor said he would be through in a minute.
Milton took a chair, and waited.
Trevor scratched out two words and substituted two others, made a couple of picturesque blots, and, laying down his pen, announced that he had finished.
“What’s up?” he said.
“It’s about the League,” said Milton.
“Found out anything?”
“Not anything much. But I’ve been making inquiries. You remember I asked you to let me look at those letters of yours?”
Trevor nodded. This had happened on the Sunday of that week.
“Well, I wanted to look at the postmarks.”
“By Jove, I never thought of that.”
Milton continued with the businesslike air of the detective who explains in the last chapter of the book how he did it.
“I found, as I thought, that both letters came from the same place.”
Trevor pulled out the letters in question. “So they do,” he said, “Chesterton.”
“Do you know Chesterton?” asked Milton.
“Only by name.”
“It’s a small hamlet about two miles from here across the downs. There’s only one shop in the place, which acts as post-office and tobacconist and everything else. I thought that if I went there and asked about those letters, they might remember who it was that sent them, if I showed them a photograph.”
“By Jove,” said Trevor, “of course! Did you? What happened?”
“I went there yesterday afternoon. I took about half-a-dozen photographs of various chaps, including Rand-Brown.”
“But wait a bit. If Chesterton’s two miles off, Rand-Brown couldn’t have sent the letters. He wouldn’t have the time after school. He was on the grounds both the afternoons before I got the letters.”
“I know,” said Milton; “I didn’t think of that at the time.”
“Well?”
“One of the points about the Chesterton post-office is that there’s no letter-box outside. You have to go into the shop and hand anything you want to post across the counter. I thought this was a tremendous score for me. I thought they would be bound to remember who handed in the letters. There can’t be many at a place like that.”
“Did they remember?”
“They remembered the letters being given in distinctly, but as for knowing anything beyond that, they were simply futile. There was an old woman in the shop, aged about three hundred and ten, I should think. I shouldn’t say she had ever been very intelligent, but now she simply gibbered. I started off by laying out a shilling on some poisonous-looking sweets. I gave the lot to a village kid when I got out. I hope they didn’t kill him. Then, having scattered ground-bait in that way, I lugged out the photographs, mentioned the letters and the date they had been sent, and asked her to weigh in and identify the sender.”
“Did she?”
“My dear chap, she identified them all, one after the other. The first was one of Clowes. She was prepared to swear on oath that that was the chap who had sent the letters. Then I shot a photograph of you across the counter, and doubts began to creep in. She said she was certain it was one of those two ‘la-ads,’ but couldn’t quite say which. To keep her amused I fired in photograph number three—Allardyce’s. She identified that, too. At the end of ten minutes she was pretty sure that it was one of the six—the other three were Paget, Clephane, and Rand-Brown—but she was not going to bind herself down to any particular one. As I had come to the end of my stock of photographs, and was getting a bit sick of the game, I got up to go, when in came another
