.

"How did you worm that out, Mullins?"

"By changing my tune a bit, sir. I started asking if they knew anybody
who could recommend the cigarettes from personal experience, as we were
only trying them on hearsay."

"Very smart of you, Mullins! And one wheezy novelist is the only
consumer?"

"That's right, sir, but the man in Knightsbridge sold a box on Thursday
to a doctor."

"Did you get the name?"

"Bone-Gardner, I think it was a Dr. Otto Bone-Gardner."

"Baumgartner, I expect you mean!" cried Thrush, straightening a wry face
to spell the name. "I've heard of an Otto Baumgartner, though I can't say
when or where. What's his address?"

"He couldn't tell me, sir; or else he wouldn't. Suppose he thought I'd be
turning the doctor out next. Old customer, I understood he was."

"For d'Auvergne Cigarettes?"

"I didn't inquire."

"My good fellow, that's the whole point! I'll go myself and ask for the
asthma cigarettes that Dr. Baumgartner always has; if they say he never
had them before, that'll be talking. His being a doctor looks well. But
I'm certain I know his name; you might look it up in _Who's Who,_ and read
out what they say."

And Mullins did so with due docility, albeit with queer gulps at barbaric
mouthfuls such as the list of battle-fields on which Dr. Baumgartner had
fought in his martial youth; the various Universities whereat he had
studied psychology and theology in an evident reaction of later life; even
the titles of his subsequent publications, which contained some long
English words, but were given in German too. A copious contribution
concluded with the information that photography and billiards were the
doctor's recreations, and that he belonged to a polysyllabically
unpronounceable Berlin club, and to one in St. James's which Mullins more
culpably miscalled the Parthenian.

"Parthenon!" said Thrush, as though he had bitten on a nerve. "But what
about his address?"

"There's no getting hold of that address," said Mullins, demoralised and
perspiring. "It's not given here either."

"Well, the chemist or the directory will supply that if we want it, but
I'm afraid he sounds a wheezy old bird. The author of 'Peripatetic
Psychology' deserves to have asthma all his nights, and 'After this Life'
smacks of the usual Schopenhauer and Lager. No, we won't build on Dr.
Baumgartner, Mullins; but we'll go through the chemists of London with a
small tooth-comb, from here to the four-m