one of my cigarettes just as you are smoking--and he threw it
away, I have no doubt, just as you have thrown it away when it began to
taste a little bitter."

"Look here!" said the chauffeur, and scrambled to his feet. "If you try
any monkey tricks with me--"

Mr. Holland eyed him with interest.

"If you try any monkey tricks with me," said the chauffeur thickly,
"I'll--"

He pitched forward on his face and lay still.

Mr. Holland waited long enough to search his pockets, and then, stepping
cautiously into the road, donned the chauffeur's cap and goggles and set
his car running swiftly southward.

CHAPTER X

A MURDER

Constable Wiseman lived in the bosom of his admiring family in a small
cottage on the Bexhill Road. That "my father was a policeman" was the
proud boast of two small boys, a boast which entitled them to no small
amount of respect, because P. C. Wiseman was not only honored in his own
circle but throughout the village in which he dwelt.

He was, in the first place, a town policeman, as distinct from a county
policeman, though he wore the badge and uniform of the Sussex
constabulary. It was felt that a town policeman had more in common with
crime, had a vaster experience, and was in consequence a more helpful
adviser than a man whose duties began and ended in the patrolling of
country lanes and law-abiding villages where nothing more exciting than
an occasional dog fight or a charge of poaching served to fill the
hiatus of constabulary life.

Constable Wiseman was looked upon as a shrewd fellow, a man to whom
might be brought the delicate problems which occasionally perplexed and
confused the bucolic mind. He had settled the vexed question as to
whether a policeman could or could not enter a house where a man was
beating his wife, and had decided that such a trespass could only be
committed if the lady involved should utter piercing cries of "Murder!"

He added significantly that the constable who was called upon must be
the constable on duty, and not an ornament of the force who by accident
was a resident in their midst.

The problem of the straying chicken and the egg that is laid on alien
property, the point of law involved in the question as to when a servant
should give notice and the date from which her notice should count--all
these matters came within Constable Wiseman's purview, and were solved
to the satisfaction of all who brought their little obscurities for
solution.

B