on one was Mallalieu & Cotherstone's clerk, Herbert
Stoner.

CHAPTER XIV

THE SHEET OF FIGURES

At that time Stoner had been in the employment of Mallalieu and
Cotherstone for some five or six years. He was then twenty-seven years
of age. He was a young man of some ability--sharp, alert, quick at
figures, good at correspondence, punctual, willing: he could run the
business in the absence of its owners. The two partners appreciated
Stoner, and they had gradually increased his salary until it reached the
sum of two pounds twelve shillings and sixpence per week. In their
opinion a young single man ought to have done very well on that:
Mallalieu and Cotherstone had both done very well on less when they were
clerks in that long vanished past of which they did not care to think.
But Stoner was a young man of tastes. He liked to dress well. He liked
to play cards and billiards. He liked to take a drink or two at the
Highmarket taverns of an evening, and to be able to give his
favourite barmaids boxes of chocolate or pairs of gloves now and
then--judiciously. And he found his salary not at all too great, and he
was always on the look-out for a chance of increasing it.

Stoner emerged from Mallalieu & Cotherstone's office at his usual hour
of half-past five on the afternoon of the day on which the reward bills
were put out. It was his practice to drop in at the Grey Mare Inn every
evening on his way to his supper, there to drink a half-pint of bitter
ale and hear the news of the day from various cronies who were to be met
with in the bar-parlour. As he crossed the street on this errand on this
particular evening, Postick, the local bill-poster, came hurrying out of
the printer's shop with a bundle of handbills under his arm, and as he
sped past Stoner, thrust a couple of them into the clerk's hand.

"Here y'are, Mr. Stoner!" he said without stopping. "Something for you
to set your wits to work on. Five hundred reward--for a bit o' brain
work!"

Stoner, who thought Postick was chaffing him, was about to throw the
handbills, still damp from the press, into the gutter which he was
stepping over. But in the light of an adjacent lamp he caught sight of
the word _Murder_ in big staring capitals at the top of them. Beneath it
he caught further sight of familiar names--and at that he folded up the
bills, went into the Grey Mare, sat down in a quiet corner, and read
carefully through the announcement. It was a very simple