."

"Very well; I will be sure to let you know as soon as we get any clew to
the man's identity."

Mark remained in London a week, and at the end of that time he received
a note from Bow Street saying that the superintendent wished to see him.

"I am sorry that I have no news for you, Mr. Thorndyke," the officer
said, when he called upon him. "Every place where such a man would be
likely to be in hiding has been searched, and no clew whatever has been
obtained. We shall now circulate notices of the reward throughout the
country. If the man was at all severely hit, we may assume that he must
be somewhere in the neighborhood of London, whereas, if the wound was
a slight one, he might be able to go a long distance, and may be now
in York, for aught we know. However, now that the search in London has
terminated, I can really see no use in your staying here any longer; we
will let you know directly we have any news."

Three months later John Thorndyke received a letter from the Detective
Office asking him to call the next time he came up to town, as although
no news had been obtained that would lead to the man's immediate
arrest, news had at any rate been obtained showing that he was alive. It
happened that Mark was intending to go up on the following day, and his
father asked him to call for him at Bow Street.

"Well, Mr. Thorndyke, we have heard about your man, and that after we
had quite abandoned the search. I had come to the conclusion that the
wound you gave him had been a fatal one, and that he had been quietly
buried by some of the people with whom he was connected. The discovery
was, as half these discoveries generally are, the result of accident.
Last week a gentleman entered the Bank and asked for change in gold for
a fifty pound note. The cashier, looking at the number, found that it
was one of those that had been stolen from a passenger by one of the
south coaches several months ago. The gentleman was at once taken into
a private office, and questioned as to how he had obtained the note.
The account that he gave was that he was a surgeon in practice at
Southampton. A gentleman had arrived there on a date which we found to
be the day after that on which you were stopped; he was well dressed,
and had the air of a gentleman; he had come down by coach, and was
evidently very ill. He told the surgeon that he had been engaged in a
duel, that the pistols had been discharged simultaneously, and that he
had killed h