“No, I can’t say that he’s a friend,” was the answer; “but I’ve travelled down with him several times, and always found him very pleasant company.”
I was glad to hear this, for it satisfied me that the fact of my having seen Mullen in the Southend train was not due to a chance visit which might never have been repeated. Had it been so the difficulty of my undertaking would have been enormously increased, for I should then have held a clue only to his identity, whereas I had now a clue to his whereabouts as well.
“But now you mention it” (which, as I had nothing to mention, was not the case), my companion went on, “now that you mention it—though it had never struck me before—it is rather strange that, though I’ve seen our friend several times in the train, I have never once seen him anywhere in Southend. In a place like that you are bound to see any one staying there, and in fact I’ve often knocked up against the same people half a dozen times in an evening, first on the cliffs, then on the pier, and after that in the town. But I can’t recall ever once seeing our fusee friend anywhere. It seems as if when he got to Southend he vanished into space.”
I looked closely at my companion, lest the remark had been made with intentional significance and indicated that he himself entertained suspicions of Mullen’s object in visiting Southend. Such was apparently not the case, however, for after two or three irrelevant observations he got upon the subject of politics, and continued to bore me with his own very positive ideas upon the matter for the rest of the journey.
If Mullen were hiding in the neighbourhood of Southend, the chances were that he was somewhere on board a boat. To take a house of any sort would necessitate the giving of references, and might lead to inquiries, and, on the other hand, the keepers of hotels and lodging-houses are often inconveniently inquisitive, and their servants are apt to gossip and pry. If Mullen had a small yacht lying off the town, and lived on board, as men with the yachting craze sometimes do, the only person who need know anything about his movements would be the paid hand, or skipper, and it would be comparatively easy to find a suitable man who was not given to gossip, and to engage him under some explanation which would effectually prevent his entertaining any suspicion as to his employer’s identity.
Before commencing my search for Mullen, I thought it advisable to look up an old friend of mine, Hardy Muir, a painter, who lives a mile or two out of Southend.
I was sure he would join heart and soul in an enterprise which had for its object the hunting down of such an enemy of the race as Captain Shannon; but to have taken him into my confidence would have been ill-advised, for had we succeeded in laying hands upon that arch-conspirator, no one could have prevented Muir from then and there pounding the monster into a pulp. Personally I had no objection to such a proceeding, but as I considered that the ends of justice would be better served by the handing over to the authorities of Captain Shannon’s person in the whole, rather than in pieces, I decided to withhold from my impetuous friend the exact reason for my being in Southend.
As a matter of fact, it was not his assistance that I needed, but that of a very quiet-tongued, shrewd, and reliable man named Quickly, who was employed by Muir as skipper of his yacht. It occurred to me that Quickly would be the very person to find out what I wanted to know about the boats, concerning which I was unable to satisfy myself. Men of his class gossip among themselves very freely, and inquiries made by him would seem as natural as the curiosity of the servants’ hall about the affairs of masters and mistresses, whereas the same inquiries made by me, a stranger, would be certain to arouse suspicion, and might even reach the ears of Mullen himself were he in the neighbourhood.
“All serene, my boy,” said Muir, when I told him that I wanted Quickly’s help for a few days on a matter about which I was not at liberty to speak for the present. “You’re just in time. Quickly was going out with me in the boat, but I’ll call him in.”
“Quickly,” he said, when the skipper presented himself, “this is my friend Mr. Max Rissler, whom you know. Well, Mr. Rissler’s a very particular friend of mine, and by obliging him you’ll be obliging me. He’s to be your master for the next day or two, and I want you to do just as he tells you, and to keep your mouth shut about it. Now Mr. Rissler’s going to have some lunch with me. In the meantime, you go into the kitchen and play ‘Rule Britannia’ on the cold beef and beer, and be ready to go into Southend with him by the next train, as he’s in a hurry and wants to set to work this afternoon.”