He lit his cigarette, and blew a ring in the air, and watched it until it had faded away.
"And now I'll explain why you are a fool. You are a fool because you lay in wait with a big stick to bang your enemy about the head. No one but a fool would do that, my dear Pyke; firstly, because he might not hurt his enemy——"
Jem Pyke scowled fearfully.
"Well, yes, you might hurt him, but—and that brings me to my secondly—you couldn't do it without its being traced to you. There might be a struggle, there would be blood and other unpleasant traces, and, all Lombard Street to a china orange, the police would have you by the heels before an hour was passed, and then——!" The speaker wound up the sentence by a playful gesture indicative of strangulation.
Pyke's face was a study. At first, from hate and the desire to crush his tormentor it displayed the emotion of murder, and then a reluctant admiration; and at last he stood, the stick hanging loosely in his hand, his small, evil eyes fixed with a fascinated stare on his companion's face.
"I am right, you see," said Austin Ambrose. "Now, if I owed a man a grudge—I don't, I am happy to say, for I have not an enemy in the world, my dear Pyke—but if I owed a man a grudge, I shouldn't set to work in your clumsy fashion. No; I shouldn't dog him and knock him about the head just outside my own door, because I should feel assured that the police would track me down. No; I should wait until he had got some distance off—to London, for instance, or another part of the country—and then, some dull evening, I should bring him down with a gun or a pistol from a safe distance, and then quietly"—he blew a cloud of smoke into the air and pointed to it—"vanish!"
The man stood and listened with every sense on the alert, absorbed and rapt.
Then he drew a long breath.
"That's what you'd do, guv'nor, is it?" he said at last, hoarsely.
Austin Ambrose nodded.