trouble. So far, then, we had plain sailing, and it continued
plain and easy during the short time we stayed in Peebles. And it came to
this: the man we were asking about came to the town early in the
afternoon of the day before the murder; he put himself up at the best
hotel in the place; he was in and out of it all the afternoon and
evening; he stayed there until the middle of the afternoon of the next
day, when he paid his bill and left. And there was the name he had
written in the register book--Mr. John Phillips, Glasgow.

Chisholm drew me out of the hotel where we had heard all this and pulled
the scrap of bill-head from his pocket-book.

"Now that we've got the name to go on," said he, "we'll send a wire to
this address in Dundee asking if anything's known there of Mr. John
Phillips. And we'll have the reply sent to Berwick--it'll be waiting us
when we get back this morning."

The name and address in Dundee was of one Gavin Smeaton, Agent, 131A Bank
Street. And the question which Chisholm sent him over the wire was plain
and direct enough: Could he give the Berwick police any information about
a man named John Phillips, found dead, on whose body Mr. Smeaton's name
and address had been discovered?

"We may get something out of that," said Chisholm, as we left the
post-office, "and we may get nothing. And now that we do know that this
man left here for Coldstream, let's get back there, and go on with our
tracing of his movements last night."

But when we had got back to our own district we were quickly at a dead
loss. The folk at Cornhill station remembered the man well enough. He had
arrived there about half-past eight the previous evening. He had been
seen to go down the road to the bridge which leads over the Tweed to
Coldstream. We could not find out that he had asked the way of
anybody--he appeared to have just walked that way as if he were well
acquainted with the place. But we got news of him at an inn just across
the bridge. Such a man--a gentleman, the inn folk called him--had walked
in there, asked for a glass of whisky, lingered for a few minutes while
he drank it, and had gone out again. And from that point we lost all
trace of him. We were now, of course, within a few miles of the place
where the man had been murdered, and the people on both sides of the
river were all in a high state of excitement about it; but we could learn
nothing more. From the moment of the man's leaving the inn on the
Colds