An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins and nods behind the poor father’s back. Thrush looked at both men with the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being—looked and frowned again—frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as brightly as it lit him onward to its solution.
He was even man enough to refrain from reflecting it automatically in his face, as he put a number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. Upton about the missing boy. What was his character? what its chief points? Was he a boy with the moral courage of his acts? Would he face their consequences like a man?
“I never knew him tell a lie in his life,” said Mr. Upton, “either to save his own skin or any thing else; and it was a case of their young skins when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony was the most conscientious of them all, and I hear that’s what they say of him at school.”
Thrush put one or two further questions, and then said he had a clue, though a very slight one, which he was rather in a hurry to follow up himself; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly of his own accord, with a dejected undertaking to be at his hotel when he was wanted.
“I don’t like the look of our friend,” remarked Thrush, looking hard at Mullins when at last they were alone. “He shapes none too well for the strain he’s got to bear; if he cracks up there’ll be a double tragedy, if not a triple one, in that family. We must catch our hare quickly, Mullins, or we may catch him too late.”
Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that Thrush had so resented a few minutes before; he took no notice of it now.
“You’ll find your man,” said Mullins significantly, “the very moment that I find mine, Mr. Thrush.”
“Meaning they’re the same person?”
“To be sure.”
“That this lad is the actual slayer of the man Holdaway?”