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Updated: June 13, 2025
When Melchard had been removed, Dick gave his three listeners a rapid and, as their faces and exclamatory comment testified, a vivid sketch of his adventure from his detection of the perfume which pervaded the alcove in Randal's study and the corroboration of his suspicions given by Melchard's attempted alibi in the letter to Amaryllis, to the time when his train pulled out of Todsmoor station; and, in the course of his narrative, he laid on the table, each at its historic point, his pièces de conviction.
"Either," said Dick, "we must break through the bars of Melchard's cage, or keep hidden inside it. The bosses of this mob, you see, won't give a damn how many of their people get strafed as long as they suppress us, and get back what I've got in my pocket." They were now not fifty yards from the horse-trough in front of "The Goat in Boots."
"Sit there," he said, pointing to the corner opposite to Melchard's head; and, when she was seated, gave her back the pistol. "If anything comes, cover it with that." "But, Dick ," she faltered, "I know I'm silly, but I I don't want to kill anybody. I'm afraid." "P'r'aps they'll funk it. But I've an idea they're more afraid of him if they know we've got him than of us."
From Mut-mut's revolver Dick sent a bullet which threw up the dust at Melchard's feet. "Two inches to the right of your feet." He fired again. Again the little puff of dust. "An inch and a half to the left of your feet," he sang out cheerfully. "The next'll be half-way between and three feet higher. Put down your gun." Melchard produced his automatic and dropped it. "Kick it away from you."
"Let's hook it, then," said Dick, buttoning the package and envelope into his hip-pocket, and slipping the rest of Melchard's papers into the side pocket of his own jacket, hanging loosely on Amaryllis. As they crossed the hall he missed Ockley. "My God!" he cried. "The black bloke's gone. Did you see him go or hear him?" Amaryllis shook her head.
"Melchard's!" he thought; and knew that for him, Dick Bellamy, she must be, in what was coming, not a woman but a tiger or a bad man. The fire now glowed under its blaze. She took a shovel and strewed a thin layer of small coal over all. Next she spread a doubled sheet of newspaper on the stone floor, and laid on it small sticks and again small coal.
The first note had contained merely the information that Alban Melchard was the man of whom Dick was going in pursuit, and Melchard's address, found that evening in the letter received by Amaryllis; the second, the few particulars concerning Melchard which he had gathered from the landlord.
"Mother Brundage," said Amaryllis, "greased her hands from the frying-pan and rubbed it down hand over hand as if she were hoisting a sail. The Marquis of Ontario," she said, "would know I wasn't his daughter, with that-coloured hair." "Then why did you go all to pieces," asked Dick, "at the sound of Melchard's voice?" "It was that frightful man made me feel queer.
Melchard, with his left hand on his hip and the barrel of the automatic resting on the upturned elbow close to his chin, was on the point of firing again at the very moment when Mut-mut, having reached the top of the ridge, was running back to meet Dick, and Dick, coming down the slope at the best of his prodigious though uneven stride, was within two paces of Melchard's back.
"But it was Melchard's voice that made you take a lump of me between your teeth and bite a hole in my coat," he went on. "There's a hideous wound just under this." And he picked at two broken threads on his shoulder. "That was just hate and disgust, not fear. And it's horrid to say I bit you, when you know I didn't.
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