The other tool was not so simple—a lump of lead, weighing perhaps four or five pounds. It also had a staple to fit the rod top. It was in shape oblong and round, and in the centre of its smallest end was a diamond-shaped opening, big enough for a pea to drop in. With a long needle Hobbs measured the depth of this opening; it was four inches. To Constable Hobbs it stood revealed as a leaden handle without a blade.
“Here,” said he, speaking unintelligibly to his companion, “is my boy’s clothes-prop. With a narrow knife fixed in such a weapon, one could, with a little practice, easily stab a man ten feet away, particularly if that man was asleep. But it would be far more difficult to withdraw the blade; the weight of the lead from a good drop would drive it in, but there would be little power to withdraw it.
“So the blade fitted the handle loosely, and came away when it had done its work.
“All that is clear to me now—this that the old man saw with a single glance of his eye from a scratch in the paint! We have the evidence. Now for the man! Fortunately you cannot leave Australia by express train, and if he is ashore I will have him.”
Constable Hobbs’s first care was to go to the quays and shipping offices. Here he learned that a ship had sailed the previous evening for Batavia, besides several inter-colonial steamers.
“If he has had a good scare, as he seems to have had, he will try to go as far off as possible, likely enough he is on his way to the East Indies in the ship that sailed last night.”
And Hobbs felt his spirits sink with disappointment. To have got so far and to be beaten in the last step of his progress was humiliating, disgusting. He gained a little more hope, when he was told at the office that the Batavia ship had taken no passengers. If Gosper had gone by her it must have been as a stowaway.
Hobbs did not think this probable. A man with a pocketful of money would hardly resort to such means of escape.
At the last moment he learned, in answer to a chance inquiry, that a schooner had cleared that morning for the South Sea Islands, but they could not say if she had sailed.
Full of a fresh-born hope, Hobbs went to the telegraph office and wired the signalling office at South Head—