'Mr Lytherly!' I exclaimed, 'I didn't expect to see you; and you're right as to my being Robinson, although police officer no longer. Why, I thought you were in the army.'
'So I was,' he returned; 'but I'm out of it now; and I'll tell you how it was.'
It seems he had been to India, and got some promotion after three years' service; and had the good fortune to save his colonel from drowning, or what was more likely in those parts, being taken down by a crocodile, under circumstances of extraordinary bravery. He did not tell me this last bit, but I heard so afterwards. Lytherly was always a wonderful swimmer, and I remembered his taking a prize at London. The exertion or the wetting brought on a fever, and he was recommended for his discharge. The colonel behaved most liberally. But what was the best of all, the old fellow who kept the canteen at the station died about this time, and Lytherly had been courting his daughter for a good bit, more to the girl's satisfaction than that of her father; so then they got married, and came home to England, and he was tolerably well off. He naturally talked about the Combestead murder, and said frankly enough, that—except the people with whom he lodged, and they were suspected, he said, of perjury—he thought I was the only person in the town who did not believe him guilty of the murder.
'But murder will out, Mr Robinson,' he said; 'and you will see this will be found out some day.'
'Well, I am sure I hope it will, Mr Lytherly,' I answered him. 'But as for "murder will out" and all that, I don't think you will find any policeman or magistrate who will agree with you there; and there was less to help us when you had got out of the scrape in this Combestead business, than any affair I was ever concerned in.'
'I don't care,' he says; 'it will come out, Mr Robinson. I dream of it almost every night; and my wife consulted some of the best fortune-tellers in India, and they all told her it would be discovered.'
'Hum!' I said; 'we don't think much of fortune-tellers here, you know.'
'I'm perfectly aware of that,' he says; 'and I shouldn't give them in as evidence; but if you had lived three years in India with people who knew the native ways, you might alter your mind about fortune-tellers. Anyway, you will remember, when it's found out, that I told you how it would be.'
I laughed, and said I should; and after we had had another glass together, and he had given me his address and made me promise to call on him, we parted.
I told my wife all about it; and it is very curious to see how women are all alike in curiosity and superstition and all that; for although my wife had been married to me for thirty years, and so had every opportunity of learning better, yet she caught at what young Lytherly—not so very young now, by-the-by—had said about these fortune-tellers, and was quite ready to believe and swear that the murder would be found out. It's no use arguing with a party like that; so I merely smiled at her, and passed it off.