For reply the detective only gave a short, unpleasant laugh, and, touching his cap, turned abruptly down another street.
"Hold on!" cried the attorney; "you haven't told me anything about yourself yet. What have you been doing? and how long are you going to be in town?"
"A day or two, perhaps, possibly a week; I cannot say."
"How are you getting on?"
But the detective was lost in thought and apparently did not hear the question. "I suppose you read of the arrest of Brown, the coachman?" he remarked, abstractedly, after a moment's silence.
"The coachman? No! you don't say that he was really concerned in that affair?" the attorney exclaimed, excitedly.
"What affair, the Mainwaring murder? I don't know that I have said that he was concerned in that," Merrick answered, suddenly coming to himself and evidently enjoying the attorney's expression of blank perplexity; "he was mixed up in a shooting affair, however, which occurred about that time, and by holding him in custody we hope to get on to the principals. Oh," he added, carelessly, anticipating another inquiry from Mr. Whitney, "I'm getting there all right, if that is what you want to know; but I won't have somebody else dogging my tracks and then claiming the game by and by."
"Man alive! what in the dickens are you driving at? You are in one of your moods to-night."
"Perhaps so," Merrick replied, indifferently, then added quickly, "There is a sensation of some sort in there; see the crowd of reporters!"
They were standing on a street corner, near a large hotel, and glancing through the windows in the direction indicated by the detective, Mr. Whitney saw, as he had said, a crowd of reporters in the office and lobbies, some writing, some talking excitedly, and others coming and going. Just then one who was leaving the building passed them, and Merrick stopped him.