"Eh! do you think so? Perhaps I'm like Touchstone, and use my folly as a stalking-horse behind which to shoot my wit. I'm not sure if I'm quoting rightly, but the moral is apparent. However, all this is not to the point—to my point, I mean—and if you have not got detective fever I have, so I will use you as a medicine to allay the disease."
"Fire away, old fellow," said Axton, turning his chair half round so as to place his tell-tale face in the shadow, thereby rendering it undecipherable to Fanks; "I'm all attention."
Octavius at once produced his secretive little note-book and vicious little pencil, which latter assumed dramatic significance in the nervous fingers that held it.
"I'm ready," said Fanks, letting his pencil-point jest on a clean white page. "Question first: Did you know this dead man?"
"Good heavens, no. I don't even know his name nor his appearance."
"You have never seen him?"
"How could I have seen him? I am exploring the neighbourhood, and generally start on my travels in the morning early and return late. This man arrived at five, went to bed at nine, and as I didn't come back till ten o'clock I didn't see him on that night; next morning he was dead."
"Did you not see the corpse?"
"No," said Roger, with a shudder, "I don't care for such 'wormy circumstance.'"
"Wormy circumstance is good," remarked Fanks, approvingly. "Keats, I think. Yes, I thought so. I see you don't care for horrors. You are not of the Poe-Baudelaire school of grave-digging, corpse-craving poesy."