ething."

"Well, I don't see that it will do any harm to ask him. I'll only take
a ticket to Shalecray, then. I can go on farther later in the day if I
don't find anything to suit me there. We'd better take the first
train--a quarter to nine. We've still twenty minutes or so to wait."

"Yes, there's plenty of time--time for a pipe. You don't object, sir?
But, bless me"--and he felt in his pockets one after the other--"if I
haven't forgotten my 'bacca! With your leave, sir, I'll run across the
street to fetch some. I saw a shop as we came in."

"Very well," said Geoff; "I'll wait here. Don't be too late."

He had no particular fancy for going to buy cheap tobacco in the company
of the very rustic-looking stranger. Besides, he thought it safer to
remain quiet in a dark corner of the waiting-room.

It was curious that, though the countryman came back with a well-filled
tobacco-pouch, he had not left the station! He only disappeared for a
minute or two into the telegraph office, and the message he there
indited was as follows:--

"Got him all safe. Will report further this evening."

And ten minutes later the two were ensconced in a third-class carriage,
with tickets for Shalecray.

Geoff had often travelled second, but rarely third. He did not, truth to
tell, particularly like it. Yet he could not have proposed anything else
to his companion, unless he had undertaken to pay the difference. And
as it was, the breakfast and his own third-class ticket had made a
considerable hole in his thirty shillings. He must be careful, for even
with all his inexperience he knew it was _possible_ he might have to pay
his own way for some little time to come.

"Still, the chances are I shall find what I want very easily," he
reflected. "It is evidently not difficult, by what this fellow tells
me."

It did not even strike him as in any way a very remarkable coincidence
that almost on the doorstep of his own home he should have lighted upon
the very person he needed to give him the particular information he was
in want of. For in many ways, in spite of his boasted independence, poor
Geoff was as innocent and unsuspicious as a baby.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VIII.

"HALF-A-CROWN A WEEK AND HIS VICTUALS."

Shalecray was a small station, where no very considerable number of
trains stopped in the twenty-four hours. It was therefore a slow train
by which Geoffrey Tudor and his new friend travelled; so, though the
distance