The Safety Pin | Page 9

flourishing place of amusement was revelling once more in purple and fine linen.
The two men nodded familiarly, and Hackdale paused on his way to his own sitting room.
"Heard any news?" he asked.
"Not an atom, my boy," replied Ebbitt. "Have you?"
Hackdale told him of what he had just heard; Ebbitt, carefully adjusting the opera hat in front of a mirror that hung over the fireplace, listened without any great show of interest.
"That must have been the stranger I noticed at our show on Monday night," he remarked. "Tallish, Spanish, grey-bearded chap, in a brown tweed suit: I noticed, too, he'd got a damned fine diamond in his cravat! Um!--Well, if elderly gentlemen with jewels like that on 'em will go walking abroad at midnight in country towns--eh?"
"Well, just mention it to anybody you come across tonight, will you?" suggested Hackdale. "Publicity--"
"My boy, the whole thing'll be all over the town before supper time!" declared Ebbitt; "Lord bless you! if the poll-parrot upstairs took it into her head to fly out of window, do you think all Southernstowe wouldn't know it in five minutes? Publicity?--trust country-town tongues for that!"
He wrapped a white silk muffler round his throat, gave the opera hat an extra tilt over his right ear, and swaggered out, and Hackdale, opening a door on the left of the hall, walked into the parlour which he and his brother shared as a sitting room. Simmons was there--the remains of his tea-supper before him, but he himself deep in a big law-book, on either side of which he had firmly planted an elbow. From between the knuckles which pressed against his temples, he looked up at John.
"Here's a nice job for you, Sim," said Hackdale. "Just suit you. You're going out, of course?"
"For a bit," answered Simmons, questioningly. "What's up?"
"This is up," replied Hackdale. He sat down, keeping his hat and coat on, and told his brother all about it. "So, if you're going to drop in at the club, mention it--mention it anywhere. Tell everybody you meet."
Simmons nodded. His sharp eyes grew thoughtful.
"That would be the girl who came to Shelmore this afternoon, just as we were leaving," he remarked. "Shelmore went out with her. Name of Pretty--Miss Cynthia Pretty."
"Anything like her name?" asked the elder brother. "Was she pretty?"
"Top hole!" declared Simmons. "Swell, too. Card said she lived in Cornwall, but I'll lay a fiver to a penny she didn't get her clothes in those wilds! London make--from top to bottom."
"Good lad," said Hackdale, approvingly. "Always cultivate your power of observation, Sim, and you'll do! Well-I'm off on my beat. See you at breakfast."
A small packet which he knew to contain sandwiches, and a flask in which he had stored a supply of weak whisky and water, lay on a side table; stowing these away in his pockets, Hackdale nodded to his brother and left the room. But instead of going out of the house by the front door, he went through a passage to the back-yard, and there released his dog, a pure bred Airedale terrier, known to the neighbourhood as Martin; with this valuable assistant at his heels he turned back towards the City Hall, and went off towards that part of Southernstowe which was just then under his charge.
Mellapont had reason when he spoke of the smallness of the city whose police arrangements he superintended. So old that its people boasted of it as being the oldest settled town in England; famous as possessing one of the most ancient of English cathedrals: interesting and notable to all lovers of archaeology and its ways, Southernstowe was utterly insignificant in point of size. A square half-mile held all there was of it, within its ancient and still well preserved walls, at any rate: you could walk in and out and all round it within an hour. It had but three streets; one, High Street, ran across it from east to west; another, North Bar, ran from High Street to the walls on the northward; the third, South Bar, ran from the centre of the town to the southern extremity. Out of these streets meandered, to be sure, almost aimlessly, various alleys, courts, and passages, but they were so narrow, and their entrances so often veiled by modern frontages, that only the inhabitants knew of them; in many cases they had no name.
Hackdale's beat lay on the north side of the city. Out there, once the walls were passed, there was a district of residential houses--mansions and villas standing in private grounds, with open country beyond. The principal people of the place lived up there; professional men, merchants, well-to-do tradesmen. His own employer, Mrs. Sophia Champernowne, the mayor, had a big place that way, Ashenhurst House, where she lived with her brother, a queer, apparently shiftless, do-nothing-at-all sort of