Thrush looked at him for a moment.
“But life’s one long collection of coincidences! That’s what I’m always telling you; the mistake is to look on them as anything else. Don’t you call it a bit of a coincidence that both these men should meet their death at the very hour of the morning when you’re on your way over here from Netting Hill, and in much the same degree of latitude, which you’ve got to cross somewhere or other on your way? Yet who has the nerve to say you must have gone through Holland Walk that other morning, and been mixed up in that affair because you are in this?”
“I don’t admit I’m mixed up in anything,” replied Mullins, with some warmth.
“I mean as a witness of sorts. I was merely reducing your argument to the absurd, Mullins; you didn’t take me literally, did you? It’s no use talking when we both seem to have made up our minds; but I’m always ready to unmake mine if you show me that young Mr. Upton carried a pistol, Mullins! Now I should like my breakfast, Mullins, and you must be roaring inside for yours. The man who’s been knocking up chemists all night is the man to whom breakfast is due; get your own and then mine, and after that you can tell me how you got on.”
Anything more genial than the garrulous banter of Eugene Thrush, at his best, it was impossible to encounter or incur; he had been, however, for a few minutes at his worst, and it was difficult to see why the pendulum should have swung so suddenly to the other extreme. Mullins went about his business with his usual sleek solemnity. But Thrush was yet another man the moment he was alone. His face was a sunny background for ideas, misgivings, and half-formed plans, one after the other, whirling like clouds across a crimson sky. But the sky was clear whenever Mullins was in the room. And at the breakfast-table there was not a cloud.
“To come back to those chemists, and this shop-to-shop canvassing,” resumed Thrush, as Mullins poured out his tea; “how many have you done, and how many have we still to do between us?”
Mullins produced a pocket-book that did him credit, and consulted notes as neat.
“Rung up when you were out at dinner—seventeen. Kept Cigarettes d’Auvergne—one. That was Thornycroft’s in Shaftesbury Avenue, where I’d just been when I met you down below in the street. In the night I knocked up other eight-and-twenty, all either in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square or else on the line of the Park.”
“Poor devils! I suppose you urged a pretty bad case?”
“A matter of life or death.”