e struck in ludicrously quick
succession; but the first was repeated on the boy's hang-dog admission
that he had been hiding.

"Hiding, Tony?"

Thrush himself seemed surprised at the expression. "But at all events we
found you better employed," he said to Pocket, "and the sooner we all take
up the chase again the more chance we shall have of laying this rascal by
the heels."

"Take it up, then!" snapped Mr. Upton. "Jump into the motor, and bring
the brute to me when you've got him! I want to speak to my boy."

He did not realise the damage done to his car, or listen to a word that
passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his
child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his head
outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it
very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple facts. He
stated his suspicion of Baumgartner's complicity in the Hyde Park affair
as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in Holland Walk and
Park Lane as obvious pieces of the same handiwork, and yet declared his
conviction that the actual hand was not Dr. Baumgartner's at all.

"But why should you think he had an accomplice, Tony?"

"He was unarmed the other morning. I'm quite positive of that. And his
niece, who lives with him, has never seen a firearm of any kind in the
house."

"Well, he's villain enough to hang, if ever there was one! It's time we
laid hold of him. Where's Mr. Thrush? I thought you'd taken him on in
the car?"

This to the chauffeur, now the centre of the carrion crowd that gathers
about the body of any disabled motor. The chauffeur, a countryman like
his master, was enjoying himself vastly with a surreptitious cigarette and
sardonic mutterings on the cause of his scattered spokes; the facts being
that he had nearly fallen asleep at his wheel, which Mr. Upton had
incontinently taken into his own less experienced hands.

"The car won't take anybody anywhere to-day," explained the chauffeur,
with his cigarette behind his back. "I shall have to get a lorry to take
the car." He held his head on one side suddenly. "There's a bit o' tyre
trouble for somebody!" he cried, grimly.

Indeed, a sharp crack had come from the direction of the river, not unlike
the bursting of a heavy tyre; but Pocket Upton did not think it was that.
He caught his father's arm, and whispered in his father's ear, and they
plunged together into