The doctor looked surprised. “I wasn’t aware that he was ill,” he answered.
“But I heard he’d had a bad accident,” said the man, amazed.
The doctor smiled. “Reassure yourself, my dear sir,” he murmured in his best professional manner. “Captain Drummond, so far as I am aware, has never been better. I—er—cannot say the same of his friend.” He stepped into his car. “Why not go up and see for yourself?”
The car rolled smoothly into Piccadilly, but the man showed no signs of availing himself of the doctor’s suggestion. He turned and walked rapidly away, and a few moments later—in an exclusive West End club—a trunk call was put through to Godalming—a call which caused the recipient to nod his head in satisfaction and order the Rolls-Royce.
Meanwhile, unconscious of this sudden solicitude for his health, Hugh Drummond was once more occupied with the piece of paper he had been studying on the doctor’s entrance. Every now and then he ran his fingers through his crisp brown hair and shook his head in perplexity. Beyond establishing the fact that the man in the peculiar condition was Hiram C. Potts, the American multi-millionaire, he could make nothing out of it.
“If only I’d managed to get the whole of it,” he muttered to himself for the twentieth time. “That dam’ fellah Peterson was too quick.” The scrap he had torn off was typewritten, save for the American’s scrawled signature, and Hugh knew the words by heart.
plete paralysis
ade of Britain
months I do
the holder of
of five million
do desire and
earl necklace and the
are at present
chess of Lamp-
k no questions
btained.
AM C. POTTS.
At length he replaced the scrap in his pocket-book and rang the bell.
“James,” he remarked as his servant came in, “will you whisper ‘very little meat and no alcohol’ in your wife’s ear, so far as the bird next door is concerned? Fancy paying a doctor to come round and tell one that!”
“Did he say nothing more, sir?”