"I haven't seen him either," replied Tuppence impatiently. "Go on about Waterloo. What
were you doing there?"
"He gave me a call. Over the phone. Told me to get a move on, and hustle. Said he was
trailing two crooks."
"Oh!" said Tuppence, her eyes opening. "I see. Go on."
"I hurried along right away. Beresford was there. He pointed out the crooks. The big one
was mine, the guy you bluffed. Tommy shoved a ticket into my hand and told me to get
aboard the cars. He was going to sleuth the other crook." Julius paused. "I thought for
sure you'd know all this."
"Julius," said Tuppence firmly, "stop walking up and down. It makes me giddy. Sit down
in that armchair, and tell me the whole story with as few fancy turns of speech as
possible."
"Sure," he said. "Where shall I begin?"
"Where you left off. At Waterloo."
"Well," began Julius, "I got into one of your dear old-fashioned first-class British
compartments. The train was just off. First thing I knew a guard came along and
informed me mighty politely that I wasn't in a smoking-carriage. I handed him out half a
dollar, and that settled that. I did a bit of prospecting along the corridor to the next coach.
Whittington was there right enough. When I saw the skunk, with his big sleek fat face,
and thought of poor little Jane in his clutches, I felt real mad that I hadn't got a gun with
me. I'd have tickled him up some.
"We got to Bournemouth all right. Whittington took a cab and gave the name of an hotel.
I did likewise, and we drove up within three minutes of each other. He hired a room, and
I hired one too. So far it was all plain sailing. He hadn't the remotest notion that anyone
was on to him. Well, he just sat around in the hotel lounge, reading the papers and so on,
till it was time for dinner. He didn't hurry any over that either.
"I began to think that there was nothing doing, that he'd just come on the trip for his
health, but I remembered that he hadn't changed for dinner, though it was by way of
being a slap-up hotel, so it seemed likely enough that he'd be going out on his real
business afterwards.
"Sure enough, about nine o'clock, so he did. Took a car across the town--mighty pretty
place by the way, I guess I'll take Jane there for a spell when I find her--and then paid it
off and struck out along those pine-woods on the top of the cliff. I was there too, you
understand. We walked, maybe, for half an hour. There's a lot of villas all the way along,
