"It's the fellow," I said, returning to Raffles, and I described his boots.
Raffles was delighted.
"Well done, Bunny; you're coming on," said he. "Now I wonder if he's been over here all the time, or if they sent him over expressly? You did better than you think in spotting those boots, for they can only have been made in Italy, and that looks like the special envoy. But it's no use speculating. I must find out."
"How can you?"
"He won't stay there all night."
"Well?"
"When he gets tired of it I shall return the compliment and follow HIM."
"Not alone," said I, firmly.
"Well, we'll see. We'll see at once," said Raffles, rising.
"Out with the gas, Bunny, while I take a look. Thank you. Now wait a bit . . . yes! He's chucked it; he's off already; and so am I!"
But I slipped to our outer door, and held the passage.
"I don't let you go alone, you know."
"You can't come with me in pyjamas."
"Now I see why you made me put them on!"
"Bunny, if you don't shift I shall have to shift you. This is my very own private one-man show. But I'll be back in an hour--there!"
"You swear?"
"By all my gods."
I gave in. How could I help giving in? He did not look the man that he had been, but you never knew with Raffles, and I could not have him lay a hand on me. I let him go with a shrug and my blessing, then ran into his room to see the last of him from the window.
The creature in the coat and boots had reached the end of our little street, where he appeared to have hesitated, so that Raffles was just in time to see which way he turned. And Raffles was after him at an easy pace, and had himself almost reached the corner when my attention was distracted from the alert nonchalance of his gait. I was marvelling that it alone had not long ago betrayed him, for nothing about him was so unconsciously characteristic, when suddenly I realized that Raffles was not the only person in the little lonely street.
Another pedestrian had entered from the other end, a man heavily built and clad, with an astrakhan collar to his coat on this warm night, and a black slouch hat that hid his features from my bird's-eye view. His steps were the short and shuffling ones of a man advanced in years and in fatty degeneration, but of a sudden they stopped beneath my very eyes. I could have dropped a marble into the dinted crown of the black felt hat. Then, at the same moment, Raffles turned the corner without looking round, and the big man below raised both his hands and his face.
Of the latter I saw only the huge white moustache, like a flying gull, as Raffles had described it; for at a glance I divined that this was his arch-enemy, the Count Corbucci himself.
I did not stop to consider the subtleties of the system by which the real hunter lagged behind while his subordinate pointed the quarry like a sporting dog. I left the Count shuffling onward faster than before, and I jumped into some clothes as though the flats were on fire. If the Count was going to follow Raffles in his turn, then I would follow the Count in mine, and there would be a midnight procession of us through the town. But I found no sign of him in the empty street, and no sign in the Earl's Court Road, that looked as empty for all its length, save for a natural enemy standing like a waxwork figure with a glimmer at his belt.
"Officer," I gasped, "have you seen anything of an old gentleman with a big white mustache?"
The unlicked cub of a common constable seemed to eye me the more suspiciously for the flattering form of my address.
"Took a hansom," said he at length.
A hansom! Then he was not following the others on foot; there was no guessing his game. But something must be said or done.
"He's a friend of mine," I explained, "and I want to overtake him. Did you hear where he told the fellow to drive?"
A curt negative was the policeman's reply to that; and if ever I take part in a night assault-at-arms, revolver versus baton, in the back kitchen, I know which member of the Metropolitan Police Force I should like for my opponent.
If there was no overtaking the Count, however,it should be a comparatively simple matter in the case of the couple on foot, and I wildly hailed the first hansom that crawled into my ken.
I must tell Raffles who it was that I had seen; the Earl's Court Road was long, and the time since he vanished in it but a few short minutes. I drove down the length of that useful thoroughfare, with an eye apiece on either pavement, sweeping each as with a brush, but never a Raffles came into the pan.
Then I tried the Fulham Road, first to the west, then to the east, and in the end drove home to the flat as bold as brass. I did not realize my indiscretion until I had paid the man and was on the stairs. Raffles never dreamt of driving all the way back; but I was hoping now to find him waiting up above. He had said an hour. I had remembered it suddenly. And now the hour was more than up. But the flat was as empty as I had left it; the very light that had encouraged me, pale though it was, as I turned the corner in my hansom, was but the light that I myself had left burning in the desolate passage.
I can give you no conception of the night that I spent. Most of it I hung across the sill, throwing a wide net with my ears, catching every footstep afar off, every hansom bell farther still, only to gather in some alien whom I seldom even landed in our street. Then I would listen at the door.
He might come over the roof; and eventually some one did; but now it was broad daylight, and I flung the door open in the milkman's face, which whitened at the shock as though I had ducked him in his own pail.
"You're late," I thundered as the first excuse for my excitement.
"Beg your pardon," said he, indignantly, "but I'm half an hour before my usual time."
"Then I beg yours," said I; "but the fact is, Mr. Maturin has had one of his bad nights, and I seem to have been waiting hours for milk to make him a cup of tea."
