It was his first decision; his next was to motor over to the school, as he had fortunately told his wife he might, and have a word with Mr. Spearman, who deserved hanging for the whole thing! The mischief was done, however, and it was now a matter in which home and school authorities must act together. A clerk was instructed to telephone to the garage for the car to come straight to the works. And the ironmaster stood waiting at his office window in a fever of anxiety.

The grimy scene on which he looked had a constant charm for him, and yet to-day it almost added to the bitterness of his heart. His was the brain that had conceived those broad effects of smoke and flame, and blackened faces lit by the light of molten metal; his the strong hand and the stout heart which had brought his conception into being. Those were his trucks bringing in his ore from his mines; that was his consequential little locomotive fussing in front of them. His men, dwellers in his cottages on the brow of that hill, which was also his, happened to be tapping one of his furnaces at the moment; that was his pig-iron running out into the moulds as magically as an electric advertis.e.m.e.nt writes itself upon the London sky at night. The sense of possession is the foible of many who have won all they have; the ironmaster almost looked upon the hot air dancing over the white-hot bars as his too. The whole sulphurous prospect, once a green pasture, had long been his to all intents and purposes, and no second soul would ever take his pride in it; to his children it would never be more than the means of livelihood; and how had it repaid even him for a life's devotion? With a house of sorrow in the next valley! With a stricken wife, and sons whose right hands kept their cunning for the cricket-field, and one of whom the very thought had become a sudden madness!

Yet he could think of nothing else, except his wife, even in the great green car that whisked him westward in a dancing cloud of dust; for he did not drive himself, and the rush through the iced fragrance of the summer's day was a mental stimulant that did its work only too well. Now it recalled the ailing infancy of the missing boy-bronchitis it had been in the early stages-and how his mother had taken him to Hastings three successive winters, and wrapped him up far too much. Old family jokes cropped up in a new light, dimming the eyes without an instant's warning.

On one of those flittings south the solicitous mother had placed the uncomplaining child on a footwarmer, and forgotten him until a cascade of perspiration apprised her of the effect: poor Mr. Upton had never thought of the incident without laughter, until to-day. Without doubt she had coddled him, and all for this, and she herself too ill to hear a word about it!

His mind harked back to his wife. In her sad case there was no uncertainty. He thought of thirty years ago when he had seen her first.

There had been drama and colour in their meeting; the most celebrated of the neighbouring packs had run a fox to earth on his works, indeed in his very slag-heap! The author of cancerous furnaces in the green heart of a gra.s.s country had never been a popular personage with the hunting folk; but he was master of the situation that memorable day. It was his terrier that went into the slag-heap like a ferret, and came out b.l.o.o.d.y with a moribund fox; his pocket-knife that sh.o.r.e through the brush, his hand that presented it across the wall to the only young lady in at the death. The men in pink looking over, the hunt servants with their work cut out on the other side, the tongue of molten slag sticking out of the furnace mouth-the momentary contact of the industrial and the sporting world-it was that strange and yet significant scene which had first endeared its dingy setting to the ironmaster's heart. But he had made the contact permanent by falling in love with the young lady of the brush and marrying her under all the guns of her countified kith and kin. And now she was a stricken invalid, and their youngest-born was G.o.d knew where!

Of course there were no tidings of him at the school, where the now distracted father spent a more explosive hour than he cared to think about as he flew on to town in the car. He was afraid he had been very rude to Mr. Spearman; but then Spearman had been rash enough to repudiate his obvious responsibility in the matter. It was not his fault that the boy went up to town so often to see his doctor and stay the night. He had his own opinion of that arrangement, but it had become his business to see it carried out. Mr. Upton got in a sharp thrust here, to which the house-master retorted that if a boy of seventeen could not be trusted to keep his word, he should like to know who could! Tony had promised him faithfully to return that same night, failing friends whom he had mentioned as certain to put him up; their names Mr. Upton was able to demand at last as though they were so much blood; and he could not have cursed them more freely if Spearman had been a layman like himself. But that was all the information forthcoming from this quarter; for, happening to ask what the head master thought of the affair, Mr. Upton was calmly informed that it had still to reach his ears; at which he stared, and then merely remarked that he was not surprised, but in such a tone that Spearman sprang up and led him straight into the presence.

Now the Benevolent Despot of this particular seat of learning was an astute pedagogue who could handle men as well as boys. He explained to Mr. Upton that the safe-keeping of the unit was the house-master's concern, but agreed it was time that he himself was made acquainted with the present case. He took it as seriously, too, as Mr. Upton could have wished, but quite as frankly from his own point of view as his two visitors did from each of theirs. He had no doubt the boy would turn up, but when he did it would be necessary for him to give a satisfactory account of his proceedings before he could be received back into the school.

"Bother the school!" cried Mr. Upton, diluting the anathema with difficulty. "Let me find my lad alive and well; then you can do what you like."

"But how do you propose to find him?" inquired the head master, with only a dry smile (which disappointed Spearman) by way of rejoinder.

"First I shall have a word with these infernal people who, on their own showing, refused the boy a bed. I'll give them a bit of my mind, I promise you! Then there's the hotel they seem to have driven him to; it may be the one we always stay at, or one they've recommended. If I can't hear anything of him there, I suppose there'll be nothing for it but to call in the police."

"My dear sir," exclaimed the head master, "you may as well call in the public at once! It will be in the papers before you know where you are; and that, I need hardly point out to you, is as undesirable from our point of view as I should have thought it would be from yours."

"It's more so from mine!" cried Mr. Upton, in fresh alarm and indignation.

"You think about your school. I think about my wife and boy; it might kill her to hear about this before he's found. But if I don't go to the police, who am I to go to?" The head master leant back in his chair, and joined his finger-tips judicially.

"There was a man we had down here to investigate an extraordinary case of dishonesty, in which I was actually threatened with legal proceedings on behalf of a certain boy. But this man Thrush came down and solved the mystery within twenty-four hours, and saved the school a public scandal."

"He may save you another," said Mr. Upton, "if he can find my boy. What did you say the name was?"

"Thrush-Eugene Thrush-quite a remarkable man, and, I think, a gentleman,"

said the head master impressively. Further particulars, including an address in Gla.s.shouse Street, were readily supplied from an advertis.e.m.e.nt in that day's _Times,_ in which Mr. Thrush was described as an "inquiry agent," capable alike of "delicate investigations" and "confidential negotiations."

That was the very man for Mr. Upton, as he himself agreed. And he departed both on speaking terms with Mr. Spearman, who said a final word for his own behaviour in the matter, and grimly at one with the head master on the importance of keeping it out of the papers.

MR. EUGENE THRUSH

The remarkable Mr. Thrush was a duly qualified solicitor, who had never been the man for that orderly and circ.u.mscribed profession. The tide of events which had turned his talents into their present channel, was known to but few of his many boon companions, and much nonsense was talked about him and his first career. It was not the case (as anybody might have ascertained) that he had been struck off the rolls in connection with the first great scandal in which he was professionally concerned. Nor was there much more truth in the report that he drank, in the ordinary interpretation of the term.

It is true, however, that Mr. Thrush had a tall tumbler on his dressing-table, to help him shave for the evening of that fateful Friday.

He was dressing for an early dinner before a first night. His dressing-room, in which he also slept in Spartan simplicity, was the original powder-closet of the panelled library out of which it led. There was a third room in which his man Mullins prepared breakfast and spent the day. But the whole was a glorified garret, at the top of such stairs as might have sent a nervous client back for an escort.

Mullins, with the expression of an undertaker's mute (a calling he had followed in his day), was laying out his master's clothes as mournfully as though his master were in them, instead of chatting genially as he shaved.

"I'm sorry to have missed your evidence, Mullins, but if we go into this case it's no use letting the police smell the compet.i.tive rat too soon.

Inquests are not in my line, and they'd have wondered what the devil I was doing there, especially as you refrained from saying you were in my service."

"I had no call, sir."

"Quite right, Mullins! An ideal witness, I can see you were. So you'd only to describe the finding of the body?"

"That was all, sir."

"And your description was really largely founded on fact?"

Mullins stood like a funereal grenadier at his gentleman's shaving elbow.

"I told the truth, sir, and nothing but the truth," said he, with sombre dignity.

"But not the whole truth, eh, Mullins! What about the little souvenirs you showed me yesterday?"

"There was no call to name them either, sir. The cheroot-end I must have picked up a hundred yards away, and even the medicine-cork wasn't on the actual scene of the murder."

"That's all right, Mullins. I don't see what they could possibly have to do with it, myself; and really, but for the fluke of your being the one to find the body, and picking the first-fruits for what they're worth, it's the last kind of case that I should dream of touching with a ten-foot pole. By the way, I suppose they won't require you at the adjourned inquest?"

"They may not require me, sir, but I should like to attend, if quite convenient," replied Mullins deferentially. "The police were very stingy with their evidence to-day; they've still to produce the fatal bullet, and I should like a sight of that, sir."

Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, possibly because he took as little real interest as he professed in the case which was being thrust upon him, but more obviously owing to the necessary care in shaving the corners of a delightfuly long and mobile mouth. Indeed, the whole face emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, would have delighted any eye but its own. It was fat and flabby as the rest of Eugene Thrush; there was quite a collection of chins to shave; and yet anybody but himself must have recognised the invincible freshness of complexion, the happy penetration of every glance, as an earnest of inexhaustible possibilities beneath the burden of the flesh. Great round spectacles, through which he stared like a wise fish in an aquarium, were caught precariously on a b.u.t.ton of a nose which in itself might have prevented the superficial observer from taking him any more seriously than he took himself.

Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was visible, was an essentially superficial and antipathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being badly impressed by the forbidding staircase, he had determined on the landing to sound his man before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth of his prejudices there was no more luxuriant weed than an innate abhorrence of London and all Londoners, which neither the cause of his visit nor the murky mien of Mullins was calculated to abate. The library of books in solid bindings, many of them legal tomes, was the first rea.s.suring feature; another was the large desk, made business-like with pigeon-holes and a telephone; but Mr. Upton was only beginning to recover confidence when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at his first entry.

It might have been by his face, or his fat, or his evening clothes seen from the motorist's dusty tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced joviality with which Thrush exclaimed: "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, sir, and the worst of it is that I can't let you keep me!"

This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as the kind of reception one had to come up to London to incur. "Then I'll clear out!" said he, and would have been as good as his word but for its instantaneous effect.

Thrush had pulled out a gold watch after a stare of kindly consternation.

"I really am rather rushed," said he; "but I can give you four minutes, if that's any good to you."

Now, at first sight, before a word was spoken, Mr. Upton would have said four hours or four days of that boiled salmon in spectacles would have been no good to him; but the precise term of minutes, together with a seemlier but not less decisive manner, had already quickened the business man's respect for another whose time was valuable. This is by no means to say that Thrush had won him over in a breath. But the following interchange took place rapidly.

"I understand you're a detective, Mr. Thrush?"

"Hardly that, Mr.--I've left your card in the other room."

"Upton is my name, sir."

"I don't aspire to the official designation, Mr. Upton, an inquiry agent is all I presume to call myself."

"But you do inquire into mysteries?"

"I've dabbled in them."

"As an amateur?"

"A paid amateur, I fear."