"Send her a wire! I'll pay!" Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger. "There's a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"
"Where is Snow Hill? I'm a stranger in London. As it happens, I came from Schwärz-Brettingen—it's a University town in North Germany—to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son." The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows.... adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's fortune—his son, who you say's missing, is the other—that is, he has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine.... For I didn't come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my twenty-third birthday. And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"
"I see! He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord! Good Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!—what a world it is!"
"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man, and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him as unpleasantly powerful. "Look here!—where is your key?"
"Just inside in the hall there.... I'd dropped it, don't you remember—I was looking for it when you—when you—said you smelt gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed on me."
"You did on me!—and I thought you'd gone crazy. Look here——" the other began.
"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown, adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add—I was effective! And if you've got it into your head that there's life in the poor old man yet—put it out again! For he shot himself last night just on the stroke of nine—and I could take my oath of it! I heard what must have been the—the noise—as I passed out at the gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.' And I thought it might have been thunder—for the weather observations in the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and South-Eastern England—and the winds have been blowing from south and south-east. And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the atmosphere—and she has been bad three days past."
"But let's do something—not stand here with our hands in our pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness. "I'm a surgeon—not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid in such a case as you've hinted at."
"My key's inside the house—as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown, "and unless we were to break down the door—which would bring the police upon us before they're wanted—or one of us could climb like a cat—so as to look in at that window and make certain——"
"Donnerwetter! Good idea!" said the shaggy young man, in whose conversation mingled interjectional scraps and snatches of a language not comprehended by Mr. Chown, but dimly conjectured to be German. In the same instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing the unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it—had thrown it upon the area-railings close to the row of bells that resembled organ-stops, and mounted upon it, shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and purposeful. An iron torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days when respectable citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen, jutted from the wall immediately above his head. He made a long arm and grasped it—and to the dazzled observation of the head-clerk appeared to walk up the wall like a housefly. But in reality he had wedged a toe in an ornamental border of sooty masonry of the brick-in-and-brick-out description, that outlined the doors and windows of the Inn buildings; and with a degree of skill and suppleness that testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted himself up. Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow ledge of stone running before those first-floor windows, and the head-clerk, holding his breath, saw him stoop and peer in over a wire blind.