“Clean shaven?” I asked.
“Yes, clean shaved; or any’ow, ’e’d no ’air on ’is face.”
“That’s the man,” I said. “Well, come along, we’ll be off to the hotel. Do you know any one there, by-the-bye?”
“I knows the chief waiter. ’E often ’as five bob on a ’orse with me.”
“All right. Then you’d better go in first and see your friend the waiter and find out where Jeanes is. If he heard anybody asking for him by name in the hall he might think something was wrong and make a bolt. Then you’d lose your fifty pounds—which would be a pity.”
The Professor assented, and we started for the Railway Hotel, he walking in front as if without any connection with me, and I some twenty paces behind. When the swing doors closed upon his bulky figure I stopped, as we had arranged, and pretended to look into a shop window until he should rejoin me.
I had been nervous and excited when we set out, but now that the crisis had come, and I was so soon to stand face to face with Henry Jeanes alias James Cross, alias James Mullen, alias Captain Shannon, I was as cool and collected as ever I was in my life.
The next moment the Professor came hurrying out, with a face on which dismay was plainly written.
“’E’s been there, right enough,” he said, all in a burst, and with a horrible oath, his features working meanwhile with agitation, the genuineness of which there was no mistaking. “But instead of ’aving lunch, as ’e told me ’e should, the —— ’ad a glass of sherry and caught the 12.15 express to London, and ’e’s more than got there by now, rot ’im!”