The Cubs found the Mysterious Tramp on the terrace, having a very serious pow-wow with Miss Prince. He stayed to breakfast with them, but was very silent, and not a bit funny—which was disappointing.
“When are you going to make Black Bill say where Danny is?” asked David.
“If he won’t say, will you use torture?” inquired Bill the practical.
“Yes, yes!” burst in David, the imaginative; “you could make a lovely thumb-screw with my fretwork vice. But I think slow roasting would be best. If you lit the stove in the billiard-room you could make him sit on it till it got hotter and hotter and hotter, like——”
“No,” said the Tramp thoughtfully, looking reprovingly at Miss Prince, who was apparently choking over her buttered toast, “I don’t think we shall need to use torture. Black Bill will find it best to plead guilty of everything, and clear up all the mysteries.”
“D’you s’pose he’s fool enough to tell the truth?” asked Bill. “I tell you it’ll have to be torture.”
It was soon after breakfast that a long, grey car arrived, bringing the Inspector, a wiry little man in plain clothes and two constables. It was closely followed by a closed car, containing two more constables.
“What a lot of coppers they want to settle two gipsies,” remarked Hugh. “My father can deal with three poachers, single-handed.”
The first thing that took place was the cross-questioning of Black Bill. As the Tramp had said, he didn’t try to justify himself. He said Danny had been prying into his private concerns, and he owned up that he had kidnapped him. He explained exactly where he might be found—namely, in the disused water-mill. He only hoped he had not tried to escape out of the window, and fallen into the river, and got sucked under the wheel.
An expedition hurried off to the mill, to return an hour after with the sad news that Danny was not in the mill, but that there were signs of the room having been recently occupied, and the window overlooking the river being open.