gh, Scarterfield. Get a
time-table."

CHAPTER XV

MR. JALLANBY--SHIP BROKER

There were reasons, other than the suddenly excited desire to follow
this business out to whatever end it might come at, which induced me
to consent to the detective's suggestion that I should go to Hull with
him. As I had said to Solomon Fish, I knew Hull--well enough. In my
very youthful days I had spent an annual holiday there, with
relatives, and I had vivid recollections of the place.

Already, in those days, they had begun to pull Hull to pieces, laying
out fine new streets and open spaces where there had been
old-fashioned, narrow alleys and not a little in the slum way. But
then, as happily now, there was still the old Hull of the ancient High
Street, and the Market Place, and the Land of Green Ginger, and the
older docks, wharves, and quays; it had been amongst these survivals
of antiquity, and in the great church of Holy Trinity and its scarcely
less notable sister of St. Mary in Lowgate that I had loved to wander
as a boy--there was a peculiar smell of the sea in Hull, and an
atmosphere of seafaring life that I have never met with elsewhere,
neither in Wapping nor in Bristol, in Southhampton nor in Liverpool;
one felt in Hull that one was already half-way to Bergen or Stockholm
or Riga--there was something of North Europe about you as soon as you
crossed the bridge at the top of Whitefriargate and plunged into masts
and funnels, stacks of fragrant pine, and sheds bursting with foreign
merchandise. And I had a sudden itching and half-sentimental desire to
see the old seaport again, and once more catch up its appeal and its
charm.

"Yes, I'll certainly go with you, Scarterfield!" I repeated. "In for a
penny, in for a pound, they say. I wonder, though, what we are in for!
You think, really, we're on the track of Netherfield Baxter?"

"Haven't a doubt of it!" asserted Scarterfield, as he turned over the
pages of the railway guide. "That man who's just gone was right--that
was Baxter he saw. With who knows what of mystery and crime and all
sorts of things behind him!"

"Including the murder of one of the Quicks?" I suggested.

"Including some knowledge of it, anyway," he said. "It's a clue, Mr.
Middlebrook, and I'm on it. As this man was in Hull, there'll be news
of him to be picked up there--very likely in plenty."

"Very well," said I. "I'm with you. Now let's be off."

Going southward by way of Newcastle and York,