“I don’t, sir, yet. But even if I did, it’s a long bridge from here to Cornwall, and I might find them resting in one of the recesses. You leave it to me, sir. Good-day.
“Humph!” he added as he went out; “plain as a pikestaff. Women are womanly, and I have known instances of a woman sticking to a man for no reason whatever, except that he was a scamp, and sometimes the greater the scamp the tighter the tie. Pradelle’s my man, and I think I can put my thumb upon him before long.”
“No, Leslie, no. Louy wouldn’t look at him. That’s not the clue,” said Uncle Luke.
Chapter Fifty Eight.
The Needle in a Bundle of Hay.
A week of anxiety, with the breaks in it of interviews with Sergeant Parkins, who had very little to communicate; but still that little was cogent.
He had been down to Hakemouth, and by careful inquiry had tracked the missing pair to Plymouth, where he had missed them. But, after the fashion of a huntsman, he made long casts round and picked up the clue at Exeter, where a porter remembered them from what sounded like an altercation in a second-class compartment, where a dark young lady was in tears, and the “gent” who was with her said something to her sharply in a foreign tongue. Pressed as to what it was like, he said it sounded as if the gent said “Taisey.”
There the sergeant had lost the clue; but he had learned enough to satisfy himself that the fugitives had been making for London, unless they had branched off at Bristol, which was hardly likely.