d be a
couple of hundred people in it. And many of them were strangers. When
the proceedings were over, men were crowding about the table on which
Quick's things had been laid out, for exhibition to the coroner and
the jury--what easier than for someone to pick up that box? The place
was so crowded that such an action would pass unnoticed."

"Very evident it did!" observed Scarterfield.

"But I've heard of such things being taken out of sheer
curiosity--morbid desire to get hold of something that had to do with
a murder. However, if this particular thing was abstracted by the
murderer, or by somebody acting on his behalf it looks as if he, or
they, were on the spot. And then--that affair of Mr. Cazalette's
pocket-book!"

"Well, Scarterfield," said I. "There's another way of regarding both
these thefts. Supposing tobacco-box and pocket-book were stolen, not
as means of revealing a secret, but so that no one else--Cazalette or
anybody--should get at it! Eh?"

"There's something in that," he admitted thoughtfully. "You mean that
the murderers had already got rid of the Quicks so that there should
be two less in the secret, and these things stolen lest outsiders
should get any inkling of it?"

"Precisely!" I answered. "Closeness and secrecy--that's been at the
back of everything so far. I tell you--you're dealing with unusually
crafty brains!"

"I wish I could get the faintest idea of whose brains they were!" he
sighed. "A direct clue, now--"

Before he could say any more one of the hotel servants came into the
coffee-room and made for our table.

"There's a man in the hall asking for Mr. Scarterfield," he announced.
"Looks like a seafaring man, sir. He says Mrs. Ormthwaite told him
he'd find you here."

"Woman with whom Baxter used to lodge," muttered Scarterfield, in an
aside to me. "Come along, Mr. Middlebrook--you never know what you
mayn't hear."

We went out into the hall. There, twisting his cap in his hands, stood
a big, brown-bearded man.

CHAPTER XIV

SOLOMON FISH

It needed but one glance at Scarterfield's visitor to assure me that
he was a person who had used the sea. There was the suggestion of salt
water and strong winds all over him, from his grizzled hair and beard
to his big, brawny hands and square set build; he looked the sort of
man who all his life had been looking out across wide stretches of
ocean and battling with the forces of Nature in her roughest moods.
Just then there