“Let’s talk about hanging him; that would be pleasant,” said Teddy.
“Would you be sorry if he was dead?” demanded Teddy, in his matter-of-fact way. “I say, Jeff, wouldn’t it be jolly if we could kill everybody we hated?”
“Wouldn’t it be jolly if every little boy who talked like a little donkey were to have his ears boxed?” said Jeffreys.
“I wish he’d been on the tricycle instead of mother,” continued Teddy, with a sigh of content at the bare idea.
“Teddy, you are not as nice a little boy as I thought when you talk like that,” said Jeffreys. “Come and let’s have one more turn on the machine, and then I must hurry back, or Mrs Trimble will think I’m lost.”
Jeffreys got back to Galloway House about ten o’clock, and found Jonah sitting up for him.
“So you have come back,” said that individual pompously. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your evening out.”
“Yes,” said Jeffreys, “pretty well.”
“Oh!” said Jonah to himself, as he went up to bed, bursting with excitement. “If he only knew what I know! Let me see—”
And then he went over in his mind the events of that wonderful evening, the visit to the post-office and the horrified look as he came out letter in hand; the mysterious conference with the bookseller, doubtless over this very letter. And how artfully he had been pretending to look at the books outside till he saw no one was looking! Then, the secret meeting with his accomplice in the minster yard—Mr Julius, yes, that was the name he had himself told the boys—and the altercation over the money, doubtless the booty of their crime, and Mr Julius’s denunciation of Jeffreys as a murderer! Whew! Then that lonely country walk, and that search on the bank, and that exclamation, “It was this very place!” Whew! Jonah had tied a bit of his bootlace on the hedge just under the spot, and could find it again within a foot. Then the rencontre with the two boys and the strange, enigmatical talk in the shed, pointing to the plot of a new crime of which he—Trimble—was to be the victim. Ha, ha!—and the business over that tricycle too, in the candle-light. Jonah could see through that. He could put a spoke in a wheel as well as Jeffreys.