imple, some of revenge; a few recommended the
doctors to follow the poison clue and to ascertain if the child had
been drugged before she was put into the basket.

Speaking for myself, I had an idea in my head, which I didn't mention
even to Betsy Chambers, whom it was necessary for me to see pretty
often about that time, and generally of evenings. This idea, I
suppose, would have knocked the Scotland Yard braves silly with
laughing; but I had no fancy to share five hundred with them--more
especially since they took seven fifteen off me at Kingston last Petty
Sessions--so I just kept a quiet tongue in my head and mentioned the
matter to nobody. Perhaps it was unfortunate I did not; I can't tell
you more than this, that the next ten days found me walking about Soho
as though I had a fancy to buy up the neighbourhood, and that on the
eleventh day precisely I found what I wanted--found it by what I might
have called a turn of Providence if I didn't know now it was something
very different.

I should remind you hereabouts that the case was still the rage of the
town, though hope of bringing the would-be assassins to justice had
almost been abandoned.

The little girl now began to remember her past in a dim sort of way,
and had told the police that she lived in a foreign country by the
sea--which was not the same as saying Southend-on-the-Mud by a long
way, Her father she recollected distinctly, and cried out for him very
often in her sleep. She did not seem to think she had a mother, and of
what happened in the Richmond Road her mind recalled nothing. I had
seen her twice; but she was so frightened when I went near her that the
police forbade me to go at all--and I do believe, upon my solemn word,
that if it hadn't been for the witnesses they would have said I had
something to do with the job myself.

This, be sure, didn't trouble me at all. What was in my mind was the
five hundred sterling offered by the _Daily Herald_ for the solution of
the mystery; and that sum I did not lose sight of night or day. To win
it I must discover the Yankee with the voice like a saw-mill, and the
little cove with the saucer eyes, and for these, upon an instinct which
I can hardly account for even to myself (save to say it was connected
with three days I spent in Paris eight months ago) I hunted Soho for
eleven days as other men hunt big game in Africa. And, will you
believe it, when I discovered one of them at last, it was not by