we walked away
from the station, "and I've booked you the most comfortable room I
could get in the hotel, which is a nice quiet house where we'll be
able to talk in privacy, for barring you and myself there's nobody
stopping in it, except a few commercial travellers, and to be sure,
they've their own quarters. You'll have had your lunch?"

"While I waited at Morpeth," I answered.

"Aye," he said, "I figured on that. So we'll just get into a corner of
the smoking-room and have a quiet glass over a cigar, and I'll tell
you what I've made out here--and a very strange and queer tale it is,
and one that's worth hearing, whether it really has to do with our
affair or no!"

"You're not sure that it has?" I asked.

"I'm as sure as may be that it probably has!" he replied. "But still,
there's a gulf between extreme probability and absolute certainty
that's a bit wider than the unthinking reckon for. However, here we
are--and we'll just get comfortable."

Scarterfield's ideas of comfort, I found, were to dispose himself in
the easiest of chairs in the quietest of corners with whisky and soda
on one hand and a box of cigars on the other--this sort of thing he
evidently regarded as a proper relaxation from his severe mental
labours. I had no objection to it myself after four hours slow
travelling--yet I confess I felt keenly impatient until he had mixed
our drinks, lighted his cigar and settled down at my elbow.

"Now," he said confidentially, "I'll set it all out in order--what
I've done and found out since I came here two days ago. There's no
need, Mr. Middlebrook, to go into detail about how I set to work to
get information: we've our own ways and methods of getting hold of
stuff when we strike a strange town. But you know what I came here
for. There's been talk, all through this case, of the name
Netherfield--from the questions that Salter Quick put to you when you
met him on the cliffs, and from what was said at the Mariner's Joy.
Very good--now I fell across that name, too, in my investigations in
London, as being the name of a man who was on the _Elizabeth
Robinson_, of uncertain memory, lost or disappeared in the year 1907,
with the two Quicks. He was set down, that Netherfield, as being of
Blyth, Northumberland. Clearly, then, Blyth was a place to get in
touch with--and here in Blyth we are!"

"A clear bit of preface, Scarterfield," said I approvingly. "Go ahead!
I'm bearing in mind that you've been here forty-eig