The two men were fast friends in a very short time, and one of his lordship’s earliest instructions to Kenyon and the lawyer was to conceal his identity as far as possible by addressing him simply under his family name of Leigh, by which he had been known when a younger son, and, in all human probability, the reverse of likely to become a peer of the realm.
Months later, Leigh and Kenyon, with their full complement of native bearers, bade a long farewell to the shores of the mighty lake of Victoria Nyanza, and struck out boldly into central Africa, steering hard and fast by the equatorial line.
Leigh, as we shall continue to call Lord Drelincourt, was naturally curious to know why the detective, who held the compass and took all the observations, should be so extremely particular about his latitude, but that worthy either could or would give no explanation, and Leigh had already acquired such implicit confidence in every action of his self-constituted guide, that he let himself be led blindly whithersoever the American chose to take him, feeling that the man was either working confidently upon “information received,” or that his faculty of instinct was so finely developed that he was unlikely to make any very serious mistakes.
As a matter of fact Leigh was right to a certain extent, for starting with a theory of his own, which had the rooted belief of Zero’s complicity in the disappearance of Grenville for its point of departure, the American, whilst waiting the arrival of his patron from England, had worked up several slender clues, and had afterwards elaborated them in a manner calculated to have made his yet far-distant foe feel the reverse of comfortable, had he been conscious of the very tender interest taken by an outsider in the most trifling actions performed by him during the past, both distant and relatively near.
By careful watching, and by shadowing in a variety of inimitable disguises, Kenyon, who was an infinitely better actor than many a man who makes his living “on the boards,” had soon unearthed, become intimate with, and pretty well “weighed up”—to use his own expression—the gentleman who had exhibited such unequivocal signs of dismay when unexpectedly confronted with the advertisement concerning Grenville, and the detective had satisfied himself that this fellow, Crewdson Walworth by name, was a man with a history, could he but find it out—a history, moreover, which instinct assured him would prove to be of the greatest service to the Grenville search party at the present juncture. More, he also knew for a fact that his friend Crewdson corresponded in cypher with someone at Zanzibar, but even the cunning of Stanforth Kenyon had totally failed to ascertain who that someone was, or by what name he or she was designated, or, indeed, to get out of Master Crewdson Walworth anything else at all worth knowing.
The detective, however, had put two and two together, and had built up a theory in his usual cautious fashion, and every step of the ladder, though most rigidly and thoroughly tested, had thus far proved to be absolutely correct, and his deductions to be altogether justified by the course of events.