“I consent,” said Mr. Hardie, “and thank you for abstaining from violence.”
“All right, my tulip,” said Mr. Green cheerfully, and drew his companions quietly away. But the next moment he began to run, and making a sudden turn, dived into a street then into a passage, and so winded and doubled till he got to a small public-house: he used some flash word, and they were shown a private room. “Wait here an hour for me,” he whispered; “I must see who liberates him, and whether he is really as innocent as he reads, or we have been countermined by the devil's own tutor.”
The unexpected turn the evidence had taken—evidence of their own choosing, too—cleared Mr. Hardie with the unprofessionals. Edward embraced this conclusion as a matter of course, and urged the character of that gentleman's solitary traducer: Alfred was a traitor, and therefore why not a slanderer?
Even Sampson, on the whole, inclined to a similar conclusion.
At this crisis of the discussion a red-haired pedlar, with very large whiskers and the remains of a black eye, put his head in, and asked whether Tom Green was there. “No,” said the Doctor stoutly, not desiring company of this stamp. “Don't know the lad.”
The pedlar laughed: “There is not many that do know him at all hours; however, he is here, sir.” And he whipped off the red hair, and wiped off the black eye, and ho, Green ipse. He received their compliments on his Protean powers, and told them he had been just a minute too late. Mr. Hardie was gone, and so he had lost the chance of seeing who came to help him, and of hearing the first words that passed between the two. This, he said, was a very great pity; for it would have shown him in one moment whether certain suspicions of his were correct. Pressed as to what these suspicions were, he begged to be excused saying any more for the present. The Doctor, however, would not let him off so, but insisted on his candid opinion.
“Well, sir,” said Green, “I never was more puzzled in my life, owing to not being near hand when he was untied. It looks all square, however. There's one little thing that don't fit somehow.”
They both asked in a breath what that was.
“The sovs. were all marked.”
They asked how he knew; and had he got them in his pocket to show?