“Maybe I do, and maybe the operations of the deteckative mind are none of your particular affair when conducted in the private seclusion of my laboratory,” said Gubb.
“Now, don’t get mad,” said Higgins. “It just struck me as funny. Looks as if you were hunting for fleas in a wisp of dog hair.”
Philo Gubb looked up quickly. As a matter of fact, he had but a moment before found a flea in the wool he was examining, and the wool was indeed a wisp of dog hair. The party Mr. Gubb had been engaged to find was a dog, and Mr. Gubb was—by the inductive method of detecting—trying to reason out the location of the dog. By the aid of the microscope, Mr. Gubb was searching for the slight indications that mean so much to detectives. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Gubb had not yet found anything from which he could deduce anything whatever, unless the flea in the wool might lead to the conclusion that the dog now, or once, had fleas.
“Tell you what I want,” said Mr. Higgins: “I want you to find Mustard.”
Detective Gubb swung suddenly in his chair and faced Mr. Higgins.
“I don’t want nothing more to do with that will!” he said.
“I’m with you there!” said Higgins, laughing. “When O’Hara made his will so that my client couldn’t get her rights at once he did a mean trick, and I dare say Mrs. Doblin will think so when she gets my bill. But, just the same, Gubb, you’re in the detective business more or less, and it strikes me you ought to take a job when it’s offered to you. You signed the will as a witness, and this man Bilton, commonly known as Mustard on account of his yellow complexion and hair, was the other witness, wasn’t he? Now, if you can’t give us the information we want, and Mustard can, it looks to me as if it was your duty, as a fellow witness, to hunt him up. But we don’t ask that. We’re willing to pay you if you find him.”
“Are you prepared to contract to say you’ll pay me just for hunting for him?” asked Mr. Gubb.
“We’ll give you two hundred dollars if you can produce Mustard here in Riverbank,” said Higgins.