ight be foolish, even dangerous, to do it, but
I had an intuitive feeling that it would be neither.

"I believe," I said, brusquely enough, "that I am speaking to Mr.
Netherfield Baxter?"

He returned me a sharp glance which was half-smiling. Certainly there
was no astonishment in it.

"Aye!" he answered. "I thought, somehow, that you might be thinking
that! Well, and suppose I admit it, Mr. Middlebrook? What then? And
what do you--a Londoner, I think you told me--know of Netherfield
Baxter?"

"You wish to know?" I asked. "Shall I be plain?"

"As a pike-staff, if you like," he replied. "I prefer it."

"Well," said I, "a good many things--recently discovered by accident.
That you formerly lived at Blyth, and had some association with a
certain temporary bank-manager there, about whose death--and the
disappearance of some valuable portable property--there was a good
deal of concern manifested about the time that you left Blyth. That
you were never heard of again until recently, when a Blyth man
recognized you in Hull, where you bought a yawl--this yawl, I
believe--and said you were going to Norway in her. And that--but am I
to be still more explicit?"

"Why not?" said he with a laugh. "Forewarned is forearmed. You're
giving me valuable information."

"Very well, Mr. Baxter," I continued, determined to show him my cards.
"There's a certain detective, one Scarterfield, a sharp man, who is
very anxious to make your acquaintance. For if you want the plain
truth, he believes you, or some of your accomplices, or you and they
together, to have had a hand in the murders of Noah and Salter Quick.
And he's on your track."

I was watching him still more closely as I spoke the last sentence or
two. He remained as calm and cool as ever, and I was somewhat taken
aback by the collected fashion in which he not only replied to my
glance, but answered my words.

"Scarterfield--of whose doings I've heard a bit--has got hold of the
wrong end of the stick there, Mr. Middlebrook," he said quietly. "I
had no hand in murdering either Noah Quick or his brother Salter. Nor
had my friend--the man who's just gone off with your telegram. I don't
know who murdered those men. But I know that there have always been
men who were ready to murder them if they got the chance, and I wasn't
the least surprised to hear that they had been murdered. The wonder is
that they escaped murder as long as they did! But beyond the fact that
they were murde