"That's exactly what I have done," replied Dare.
"Pocket picked, eh?"
Dare nodded.
"Anything of consequence?"
"A very valuable snuff-box."
"Ah-ha! A noted neighborhood this for petty larceny. Hardly a worse anywhere. But come along with me to the office--I'm on my way there--and lodge a description of the missing property. Who knows but we may be able to recover it for you from the pawnbroker's or somewhere else."
Dare hesitated, and well he might, considering under what circumstances the box had come into his possession. But in the company of Mr. Tipway to have hesitated over a matter of that sort would have tended to provoke suspicion, and that was what he could not afford to do. So he accompanied the runner to Bow Street--not without a certain relish for the comedy of the situation--and there furnished a description of the stolen box, leaving an address, that of a humble lodging in a back street in Bloomsbury, at which any tidings of it might be communicated to him.
By that night's coach he started for the North in order to take up the quest to which he had vowed himself.
About a fortnight later the snuff-box was found in the possession of a swell-mobsman who had been arrested for another offence.
Now, it so fell out that Sir Peter Warrendale, who was much put about by the loss of his box--although he had himself almost thrust it into the hands of the self-styled Colonel Delnay--not only because it was intrinsically valuable, but because it was a cherished heirloom, had, on his arrival in town some weeks after his encounter with the highwayman, given a description of it at Bow Street, on the faint chance that it might turn up at one of the London pawnshops, or in some other fashion. A peculiarity of the box was that it had a false bottom, a fact which Dare had failed to discover. But it was a feature which Sir Peter, in his account of the box, had not forgotten to specify, so that the Bow Street official, who happened to be blessed with a good memory, found himself in possession of an article which was claimed by two different owners and was stated to have been stolen from both!