I did. There we set the wires throbbing, and begun to scour the countryside for any traces of the Pirate. We did not give up our quest until eleven o'clock in the morning. I think we inquired at every house and cottage within a ten-mile radius of the scene of the outrage, but without finding a single person who had seen or heard of the Motor Pirate.
Once more he had appeared and disappeared without leaving the faintest clue to his identity.
CHAPTER XII
HOW WE EXCHANGE SHOTS WITH THE PIRATE
After the sudden flurry which the reappearance of the Motor Pirate caused, and quite as much in the country at large as in my own particular circle, we settled down once again to a condition of comparative quietude. Of course there were plenty of facts to keep the public interest alive and to fill the papers. The adjourned inquest on the victim found near Towcester supplied columns of copy, while the robbery of the Brighton Mail afforded unlimited scope for the descriptive reporter as well as for the special crime investigator, who at this time made his permanent appearance on the staff of nearly every paper of any importance in the British Isles. My life at home was made a burden to me by these gentlemen. I bear them no malice for their persevering attempts to interview me, but they were an unmitigated nuisance, since I had no wish to air my experiences in the newspapers at this stage of affairs. It was with the utmost difficulty I escaped the attention of the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate, for they even waited on my doorstep for the chance of button-holing me when I went out in the morning; and pursued me so assiduously, that I dared not look a stranger in the face, lest my glance should be translated into a column of glowing prose.
I have said that the Pirate left no clue to his identity upon his latest appearance, and, indeed, at the time, such was the opinion both of Forrest and myself. But in the light of after events we learned that there was a clue, had we been keen-witted enough to have discovered it. In the course of our inquiries around Crawley, we certainly did not succeed in finding any one who had observed the mysterious car which every one had learned to associate with the Pirate, but we had been told casually at Caterham—we had not returned by the direct road between London and Brighton—that we were not the only motorists abroad on that night, since another man had passed through the town early the same morning. When we learned, however, that he had been driving a car of the conventional shape with a tonneau body, we paid no further attention to the information, concluding that he was a sportsman, anxious like ourselves for a brush with the Pirate. Our blindness was to cost us dear before we had done.
There was another supposition which I could not get out of my mind in connection with the latest feat, and a couple of days afterwards I mentioned it to Forrest as we waited, according to our invariable custom, at St. Albans for news of the Pirate's reappearance.
"Don't you think it particularly strange," I remarked, "that in holding up the Brighton Mail, our friend at once searched for the registered parcels, and directly he laid his hands upon them at once made off?"