The unlicked cub of a common constable seemed to eye me the more suspiciously for the flattering form of my address.
“Took a hansom,” said he at length.
A hansom! Then he was not following the others on foot; there was no guessing his game. But something must be said or done.
“He’s a friend of mine,” I explained, “and I want to overtake him. Did you hear where he told the fellow to drive?”
A curt negative was the policeman’s reply to that; and if ever I take part in a night assault-at-arms, revolver versus baton, in the back kitchen, I know which member of the Metropolitan Police Force I should like for my opponent.
If there was no overtaking the Count, however, it should be a comparatively simple matter in the case of the couple on foot, and I wildly hailed the first hansom that crawled into my ken. I must tell Raffles who it was that I had seen; the Earl’s Court Road was long, and the time since he vanished in it but a few short minutes. I drove down the length of that useful thoroughfare, with an eye apiece on either pavement, sweeping each as with a brush, but never a Raffles came into the pan. Then I tried the Fulham Road, first to the west, then to the east, and in the end drove home to the flat as bold as brass. I did not realize my indiscretion until I had paid the man and was on the stairs. Raffles never dreamt of driving all the way back; but I was hoping now to find him waiting up above. He had said an hour. I had remembered it suddenly. And now the hour was more than up. But the flat was as empty as I had left it; the very light that had encouraged me, pale though it was, as I turned the corner in my hansom, was but the light that I myself had left burning in the desolate passage.
I can give you no conception of the night that I spent. Most of it I hung across the sill, throwing a wide net with my ears, catching every footstep afar off, every hansom bell farther still, only to gather in some alien whom I seldom even landed in our street. Then I would listen at the door.
He might come over the roof; and eventually some one did; but now it was broad daylight, and I flung the door open in the milkman’s face, which whitened at the shock as though I had ducked him in his own pail.
“You’re late,” I thundered as the first excuse for my excitement.
“Beg your pardon,” said he, indignantly, “but I’m half an hour before my usual time.”