“I should hope not,” said the official, shortly.
“So–in a way–however,” said Hibbs, clutching his verbal talisman at last, “it might be brown velvet in the dark.”
The Inspector replied to this helpful suggestion with some wonder. “But it was a moon, like limelight,” he protested.
“Yars, yars,” cried Hibbs, in a high tone that can only be described as a hasty drawl. “Yars–discolours everything of course. The flowers and things–”
“But look here,” said the Inspector, “you said the principal man’s hair was red.”
“A blond type! A blond type!” said Hibbs, waving his hand with a solemn lightness. “Reddish, yellowish, brownish sort of hair, you know.” Then he shook his head and said with the heaviest solemnity the word was capable of carrying, “Teutonic, purely Teutonic.”
The Inspector began to feel some wonder that, even in the confusion following on Lord Ivywood’s fall, he had been put under the guidance of this particular guide. The truth was that Leveson, once more masking his own fears under his usual parade of hurry, had found Hibbs at a table by an open window, with wild hair and sleepy eyes, picking himself up with some sort of medicine. Finding him already fairly clear-headed in a dreary way, he had not scrupled to use the remains of his bewilderment to despatch him with the police in the first pursuit. Even the mind of a semi-recovered drunkard, he thought, could be trusted to recognise anyone so unmistakable as the Captain.
But, though the diplomatist’s debauch was barely over, his strange, soft fear and cunning were awake. He felt fairly certain the man in the fur coat had something to do with the mystery, as men with fur coats do not commonly wander about with donkeys. He was afraid of offending Lord Ivywood, and at the same time, afraid of exposing himself to a policeman.
“You have large discretion,” he said, gravely. “Very right you should have large discretion in the interests of the public. I think you would be quite authorised, for the present, in preventing the man’s escape.”
“And the other man?” inquired the officer, with knitted brow. “Do you suppose he has escaped?”