His eyes darkened as he added: “And even for myself. It will be very awkward if that drunken brute puts his threat into execution—and he will, I believe. Innuendo is a glass stiletto, which, driven into the victim’s character, into his heart and then snapped off from the hilt, leaves no clue to the striker of the blow. And a demon like that Joyce, playing into the hands of a cur like Fletcher, may slay a fellow by a printed innuendo, and yet the pair may easily keep outside the reach of the law of libel.”
For the first time since the floating of the “Courier,” his spirits became clouded.
“Then, too,” he muttered, “there is this sudden breakdown of Marsden, and, for the life of me, I don’t know where to look for a fellow, whom I could secure at short notice, who is at all fit for the ‘Courier’s’ second.”
His face had grown moody. His eyes were full of an unwonted depression.
“If only,” he went on, “Bastin had been in England, and were to be got——” He sighed. There was perplexity in the sigh.
“Where on earth can Ralph be all these years?” he muttered.
He glanced out of the cab to ascertain his own whereabouts. In two minutes more he would be at the office.
CHAPTER X.
IN THE NICK OF TIME.
As Tom Hammond’s cab drew up at the office, another hansom drew up a yard ahead of his. The occupant alighted at the same instant as did Hammond, and glanced in his direction. Both men leaped forward, their hands were clasped in a grip that told of a very warm friendship. Like simultaneous pistol shots there leaped from their separate lips,—