"That's the wisest thing to do," he remarked. "Draft your wire."
I wrote out a message which I hoped would allay Mr. Raven's anxieties and handed it to him. He read it over, nodded as if in approbation, and went across to the other man. For a moment or two they stood talking in low tones; then the other man went over the side, dropped into the boat which lay there, and pulled himself off shorewards. Baxter came back to me.
"He'll send that from Berwick railway station as soon as he gets there, at six-thirty," he said. "It should be delivered at Ravensdene Court by eight. So there's no need to worry further, you can tell Miss Raven. And when all's said and done, Mr. Middlebrook, it wasn't my fault that you and she broke in upon very private doings up there in the old churchyard—nor, I suppose, yours either. Make the best of it!—it's only a temporary detention."
I was watching him closely as he talked, and suddenly I made up my mind to speak out. It might be foolish, even dangerous, to do it, but I had an intuitive feeling that it would be neither.
"I believe," I said, brusquely enough, "that I am speaking to Mr. Netherfield Baxter?"
He returned me a sharp glance which was half-smiling. Certainly there was no astonishment in it.
"Aye!" he answered. "I thought, somehow, that you might be thinking that! Well, and suppose I admit it, Mr. Middlebrook? What then? And what do you—a Londoner, I think you told me—know of Netherfield Baxter?"
"You wish to know?" I asked. "Shall I be plain?"
"As a pike-staff, if you like," he replied. "I prefer it."
"Well," said I, "a good many things—recently discovered by accident. That you formerly lived at Blyth, and had some association with a certain temporary bank-manager there, about whose death—and the disappearance of some valuable portable property—there was a good deal of concern manifested about the time that you left Blyth. That you were never heard of again until recently, when a Blyth man recognized you in Hull, where you bought a yawl—this yawl, I believe—and said you were going to Norway in her. And that—but am I to be still more explicit?"