Just before dinner a gentleman called on Edward, and proved to be a policeman in plain clothes. He had been sent from the office to sound the ostler at the “White Lion,” and, if necessary, to threaten him. The police knew, though nobody else in Barkington did, that this ostler had been in what rogues call trouble, twice, and, as the police can starve a man of the kind by blowing on him, and can reward him by keeping dark, he knows better than withhold information from them.
However, on looking for this ostler, he had left his place that very morning; had decamped with mysterious suddenness.
Here was a puzzle.
Had the man gone without noticing the reward? Had somebody outbid the reward? Or was it a strange coincidence, and did he after all know nothing?
The police thought it was no coincidence, and he did know something; so they had telegraphed to the London office to mark him down.
Edward thanked his visitor; but, on his retiring, told his mother he could make neither head nor tail of it; and she only said, “We seem surrounded by mystery.”
Meantime, unknown to these bewildered ones, Greek was meeting Greek only a few yards off.
Mr. Hardie was being undermined by a man of his own calibre, one too cautious to communicate with the Dodds, or any one else, till his work looked ripe.
The game began thus: a decent mechanic, who lodged hard by, lounging with his pipe near the gate of Musgrove Cottage, offered to converse with old Betty. She gave him a rough answer; but with a touch of ineradicable vanity must ask Peggy if she wanted a sweetheart, because there was a hungry one at the gate: “Why: he wanted to begin on an old woman like me.” Peggy inquired what he had said to her.
“Oh, he begun where most of them ends—if they get so far at all: axed me was I comfortable here; if not, he knew a young man wanted a nice tidy body to keep house for him.”