“I wonder you’ve come out with whole limbs, Tod.”
“Hold your peace, Johnny,” was all the retort I got; and his voice rose nearly to a shout in its desperate sorrow.
Morning came, but no news with it, no Hugh. Tod had been about all night. With daylight, the fields, and all other seemingly possible places, were searched. Tom Coney went knocking at every house in North and South Crabb, and burst into cottages, and turned over, so to say, all the dwellings in that savoury locality, Crabb Lane, but with no result. The Squire was getting anxious; but none of us had ventured to tell him of our especial cause for anxiety, or to speak of Alfred Arne.
It appeared nearly certain now, to us, that he had gone with Alfred Arne, and, after a private consultation with Mrs. Todhetley, Tod and I set out in search of the man. She still wished to spare the knowledge of his visit to the Squire, if possible.
We had not far to go. Mrs. Todhetley’s fears went ranging abroad to London, or Liverpool, or the Coral Islands beyond the sea, of which Arne had talked to Hugh: but Arne was found at Timberdale. In an obscure lodging in the further outskirts of the place, the landlord of which, a man named Cookum, was a bad character, and very shy of the police, Arne was found. We might have searched for him to the month’s end, but for Luke Mackintosh. When Luke arrived at Timberdale in the middle of the night, ordered there by Tod to make inquiries at the police-station, he saw a tipsy man slink into Cookum’s house, and recognized him for the one who had recently been exciting speculation at home. Luke happened to mention this to Tod, not connecting Hugh with it at all, simply as a bit of gossip: of course it was not known who Arne was, or his name, or what he had been waiting for.
We had a fight to get in. Cookum came leaping down the crazy stairs, and put himself in our way in the passage, swearing we should not go on. Tod lifted his strong arm.
“I mean to go on, Cookum,” he said, in a slow, quiet voice that had determination in every tone of it. “I have come to see a man named Arne. I don’t want to do him any ill, or you either; but, see him, I will. If you do not move out of my way I’ll knock you down.”
Cookum stood his ground. He was short, slight, and sickly, with a puffy face and red hair; a very reed beside Tod.
“There ain’t no man here of that name. There ain’t no man here at all.”
“Very well. Then you can’t object to letting me see that there is not.”