“Hawful is it?” smiled Ferret, warning her to remain seated with a hand lifted eloquently; “but it won’t be hawful, but just a pleasant little picnic if you will do just what I tell you. Come now, don’t be a fool, miss, but a dear, good, cool-headed young lady. Will you help me?”
“Yes,” replied Miss Mettleby; “of course I will do anything to help Mr. Fair—I mean, Mrs. Fair.”
“Of course you will,” said Ferret encouragingly. “I knew you was a Christian the minute I see you, miss. You stop in this room until I come back. I am going out to telephone, you see.”
“Oh, we have a telephone in the house, you know,” eagerly remarked Kate, not liking the idea of being kept a prisoner in the library while this man roamed about the house at his leisure.
“Yes,” jeered Ferret; “and it would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it, for me to yell through your telephone downstairs that I wanted the Yard to send me six constables at once to nab a foreign gentleman—with the foreign gent himself lying under the very mat on which I was standing. Innocent! No. I must go out to telephone—and if you sort of want to see me safe out of the house, why, come down to the door with me—yes, that’s it. I want you to sit in the little room by the street door, and when my friend goes out the door follow him—follow him, miss, you understand. He will go across the street, down the next street to the square, turn to the left, and call a cab at the corner. You call the next cab and direct the driver to follow the first one. Watch him, follow him, don’t lose sight of him.”
“But he wouldn’t be such a fool as to go out by the front door,” replied Kate, thoroughly puzzled by Ferret’s mysterious instructions, which she, of course, did not understand were merely attempts on his part to get her out of his way and fixed permanently in some known room.
“Never fear,” answered Ferret; “that’s just what he will do. He’ll go out of the front door as if he owned the house. In all likelihood I’ll be over the way when he and you come out, and then of course I’ll follow him myself, but if I ain’t there, you must do as I say. Follow him no matter wherever he goes—and then come to Scotland Yard and report.”
“I don’t know about all this,” stoutly returned Kate, shaking her head. “Why can’t Mr. Fair be advised at once? This is all wrong—and strange.”
“But you see, miss,” quickly protested Ferret, “Mr. Fair has private reasons for not wishing us to trouble the foreign gent, so he wouldn’t help us to nab him. Funny, isn’t it? But it often happens that we poor detectives has to catch all sorts of gents in spite of the very parties on whose accounts we wants ’em. The aristocracy has objections against appearing in court even against their own murderers. Now Mr. Fair does not know this gent’s little game and so he trusts him. We’ve got to do all this business ourselves—and, I tell you, it’s life and death. So, is it a go? Will you be a sensible young woman and not make a row, and help me?”
“I will,” answered Kate, convinced by the fellow’s irresistibly frank air—and moved by the comforting thought that her consent to his plan would at least get him out of the house—when she would of course advise Mr. Fair of the whole matter, even if it did spoil a good dinner.