-a very taking, good-looking fellow he was, they
say--and he'd a decent lodging. But in spring 1904 he was living on
the proceeds of chance betting, and was sometimes very low down, and
in May of that year he disappeared, in startlingly sudden fashion,
without saying a word to anybody, and since then nobody has ever seen
a vestige or ever heard a word of him."

Scarterfield paused, looking at me as if to ask what I thought of it.
I thought a good deal of it.

"A very interesting bit of life-drama, Scarterfield," said I. "And
there have been far stranger things than it would be if this
Netherfield Baxter of Blyth turned out to be the William Netherfield
of the _Elizabeth Robinson_. You haven't hit on anything in the shape
of a bridge, a connecting link between the two?"

"Not yet, anyway," he answered. "And I don't think it's at all likely
that I shall, here, for, as I said just now, nobody in this place has
ever heard of Netherfield Baxter since he walked out of his lodging
one evening and clean vanished. To be sure, there's been nobody at all
anxious to hear of him. For one thing, he left no near and dear
relations or friends--for another, he left no debts behind him. The
last fact, of course," added Scarterfield, with a wink, "was due to
another, very pertinent fact--nobody, to be sure, in his latter
stages, would give him credit!"

"You've more to tell," I suggested.

"Oh, much more!" he acquiesced. "We're about half-way through the
surface matters. Now then--you're bearing in mind that Netherfield
Baxter disappeared, very suddenly, in May 1904. Perhaps the town
didn't make much to do over his disappearance for a good reason--it
was just then in the very midst of what we generally call a nine days'
wonder. For some months the Old Alliance Bank here had been in charge
of a temporary manager, in consequence of the regular manager's
long-continued illness. This temporary manager was a chap named
Lester--John Martindale Lester--who had come here from a branch of the
same bank at Hexham, across country. Now, this Lester was a young man
who was greatly given to going about on a motor-cycle--not so many of
those things about, then, as we see now; he was always tearing about
the country, they say, on half-holidays, and Saturdays and Sundays.
And one evening, careering round a sharp corner, somewhere just
outside the town, in the dark, he ran full tilt into a cart that
carried no tail-light, and--broke his neck! They pi