e up on the telephone from
the Cups Hotel, at Colchester.

An hour ago he had returned to New Stone Buildings in the guise of a
respectable mechanic in his Sunday clothes, and, full of bustle and
excitement, urged me to run across to Guilford Street and assume a
similar disguise. Then, each with his modest bag, we had hailed a
motor-cab and given the man instructions to drive to the Great Eastern
terminus.

"You've read the affair in this evening's paper, I suppose?" my
companion asked; "the mystery at Button's Hill?"

"Yes," I replied. "Are we about to investigate it?"

"That's my intention, my dear Jacox," was his quick reply, as he handed
me his cigarette-case. Then, ten minutes later, when we were seated
together alone in a third-class carriage slowly leaving London, he
turned to me, and with a deep earnest look upon his face, said:

"There's much more behind what appears in the papers regarding this
curious affair--depend upon it, old chap. I've wired to Vera to be
prepared to come to Maldon on receipt of a telegram. The facts, as far
as are at present known, are these," he went on as he slowly lit another
cigarette: "At an early hour this morning a farm labourer, on his way to
work between Latchingdon and Southminster, discovered, lying in a ditch,
the body of James Pavely, aged forty-three, a well-known fisherman and
pilot. His head had been crushed by savage blows, his clothes were
soaked with blood, and he was nearly buried beneath the snow. The
labourer alarmed the police, and the body was conveyed to Southminster.
Pavely, who was very popular at the waterside at Maldon, was unmarried,
and until recently had been rather well-to-do, but for the past few
months bad luck is said to have persistently pursued him, and he had
been left without a boat, even without a share in a boat, and more
recently he had been out of a job altogether. Now," he added, with a
keen look, "I want to fix that point in your mind. For months, ever
since the summer, he has been known to be on the verge of starvation,
yet the police have found in his trousers' pocket a handkerchief in
which, carefully tied up, were forty-nine sovereigns!"

"His savings?" I suggested.

"No," declared my companion conclusively.

"But if he was murdered, why wasn't the money taken?" I queried.

Ray smiled, his face assuming that sphinx-like expression by which I
knew that he had formed some theory--a theory he was about to put to the
test.

"The