“Then you supposed something that didn’t happen,” said Philip, in the same surly tone as before. “I’ve seen nothing of him since—since that night.” Then, a sudden thought occurring to him, he added—“I left him—down by the river.”
A shrill voice—piping, and thin, and unsteady—broke in from the other end of the table. Its owner was a little man, with a figure as thin and shrunken and unsteady as his voice—a man with no linen to speak of, who yet had whiskers, which had once been fashionable, on either side of his grimy face, and whose shaking hand affectionately clasped a glass of spirits. “A split in the camp—eh?” he squeaked out. “Ogledon and his cousin had a row—eh?”
Philip Chater was learning many things and learning them quickly. If Ogledon—the man expected at Chater Hall by the housekeeper—and the man known as the Count were one and the same person, and that person Dandy Chater’s—and his own—cousin, what had they both to do with these men, and why had both disappeared—the one murdered, and the other missing?
“Hold your tongue, Cripps,” exclaimed the man who had spoken first. “The Count knows his own business—and ours; I expect he’ll be here presently——”
(“I sincerely hope he won’t,” thought Philip.)
“In the meantime, if you’re sober enough, Doctor”—this to the man he had addressed as Cripps—“we’ll get to business.”
Philip Chater pricked up his ears; he remembered, at that moment, that Betty Siggs, in her disclosure to him of the story of his own life, had mentioned a certain drunken little doctor, of the name of Cripps, who knew the secret of his birth, and had been paid to keep it.
“You’ll be glad to know, Dandy,” went on the man, who appeared to act as a species of leader—“that the business at Sheffield has turned up trumps. We don’t mention names, even amongst ourselves; but the haul was bigger than we anticipated. The man behind the counter—you know who I mean—gets a thousand for handing over the flimsies; and gets it pretty easily, too, to my mind. The rest is divided out between us, except for your share and Ogledon’s. Here’s yours”—he handed a packet across the table to Philip—“and perhaps, as the Count hasn’t turned up, you’d better take his as well. Here it is.”
Philip took the two packets, inwardly wondering what they contained, and thrust them into his pocket, with a nod. As he did so he became aware that three of the heads had drawn together, and that whispers were passing amongst them, while three pairs of eyes were glancing in his direction. Quick to fear that some suspicion of his identity might have come upon them, he watched them covertly; while such phrases as—“The Count said nothing about him”—“I suppose we’d better tell him”—“He’ll know the country, at any rate”—and the like, fell upon his attentive ears.
“Now—what the devil are you plotting there?” he asked, angrily.