"No, sir," said Zachary, with as much severity as he had power under the conditions to assume. "The Hop Garden, sir; that's the name of the house, the Hop Garden."
"How had you passed your time till then?" asked Mr. Bailey.
Zachary recounted his day in no great detail, and in some fear lest his dignity should suffer as he told the story.
Mr. Bailey mused. To characters so wayward and loose the solid plans whereby great men of affairs achieve their ends are at once inexplicable and tedious. Mr. Bailey had no conception of what was toward. He might even have been ready, had Zachary remembered the circumstance, to believe the story the detective told about a sick child and the necessity for speed. As it was, he was merely bewildered, and was filled with a sort of instinctive muddled conception that somehow or other it had been worth somebody's while to shadow Zachary as far as the top of Bond Street and no further. But why on earth should any one want to shadow Zachary? He thought of burglars, but burglars do not become intimate with servants by exciting their suspicions. He thought of practical jokes; he thought of petty theft, but Zachary assured him he was only ten shillings out, and even then remembered that he had given the ten shillings to the chauffeur.
While he was in this sort of study, making neither head nor tail of the adventure, Zachary volunteered, a little nervously, for he was afraid it might sound like an explanation and not like the "information" his master was after:
"I'm sure he was a gentleman, sir—he knew where you lived."
Mr. Bailey was quite seriously concerned. To men of his intellectual calibre, utterly unworthy to compete with the great directing brains of our masterful time, and capable only of a superficial and purely verbal display, a sense of a force which knows them while they do not know it, is intolerable. Such men are the weak, hunted creatures of our powerful and creative generation—that is, when the hunt is worth the hunter's while. And the hunters—the successful hunters—are the financiers, the statesmen, the owners, the doers—the Hearsts, the Northcliffes, the Clemenceaus, the Roosevelts, the Levi Leiter Juniors—who make us what we are.
Mr. Bailey, who knew so little of reality, knew this at least, and with the instinct of all hunted things, he was troubled. He was much graver when he rose after this conversation and said:
"That's all right, Zachary, you'd better go to bed. Don't eat anything, and drink nothing beyond such cold water as you absolutely require. I'm sure it will be sufficient."
"I thank you humbly, sir," said Zachary. He went out of the room quite sober—such is the effect of coffee with a little salt—and crept up to bed.