"You were right enough in London," said he, "when I told you I had tracked him down, as I swore to you both I should."
"Maybe," said the other, "I forgot, for the moment, what he was. I would sooner face a tiger."
He was a rough-looking man, with a red, untidy beard, and there was something about him of the sailor.
"Tut, man," said Amos; "you make a mountain of a molehill! I do not propose to set about this matter like a fool. He's lying yonder like an old dog-fox in his earth, and we'll send a terrier in to fetch him out."
"Me!" cried the red-bearded man, horror-stricken at the thought.
But, before Amos Baverstock could answer, the third man spoke for the first time; and my attention being thereby attracted towards him, I was at once astonished at everything about his individuality: his voice, his personal appearance, the words he used, his very attitude of carelessness and ease.
"Cave tibi cane muto."
That is what he drawled, and though I was then a schoolboy who had struggled through the dull prose of Cæsar to the loftier realms of Virgil, I must confess that fear had so deprived me of my wits that I understood no word, except the first.
The speaker lay flat upon his back, with his hands folded behind his head, and his face exposed to the sun--like a tripper who would go back to London nicely tanned. I observed that he had taken off his coat and rolled it into a pillow, and that the shirt he wore was of the softest, flimsiest silk.
He was dressed like a fop in the height of the fashion of that day, wearing a white tie, with a great gold pin in it, a well-curled moustache and those short side-whiskers which were then the vogue. He had light-blue eyes and fair, curly hair, and had it not been for the side-whiskers, would have looked much younger than he was. Everything about him suggested that he was--or should have been--a gentleman of means and leisure.