"Far from it," he laughed. "Come with me."
Less than an hour later we were at the Mahoney Detective Agency and a suave young Irishman was listening without emotion or eagerness to my story supplemented by Dibdin's interpolations. He seemed to care little for what concerned me most, but he was keen for personal details of Pendleton's appearance, height, build, clothes, lettering on his luggage and so on.
When it came to giving a detailed description of Alicia, my confusion was so pitiful that even the young detective glanced at me only once and then, like the gentleman he was, looked sedulously down upon the paper before him.
"Sixteen—in her seventeenth year!" he murmured in astonishment.
"But she is an unusual girl—well grown for her age," I caught him up.
"I see," he murmured gravely. "What's the color of her hair?"
I went on as best I could with the description.
"I could save you money," he smiled blandly, "by telling you that the girl is not with him—" and I could have wrung his hand like a brother's. "But," he added, "it won't cost much to pick him up. I'll have news for you to-morrow this time, I'm thinking."
As I sat down to lunch with Dibdin at his club, though in truth nothing was farther from my cravings than food, he suddenly burst forth into hearty laughter.
"So it's my thousand you gave Pendleton?" he chuckled. "That was sheer inspiration, Randolph—sheer, unadulterated genius! If you weren't so lugubrious just now, I could accuse you of a high ironic sense of humor that only a great man would be capable of!"