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Updated: June 3, 2025
I managed, indeed being on my mettle to drain my own glass, and even achieved a noise which, with Hartnoll, might pass for a smacking of the lips: but we decided to empty his out of window, for fear of the waiter's scorn. We heaved up the lower sash the effort it cost went some way to explaining the fustiness of the room and Hartnoll tossed out the beer. There was an exclamation below.
"With a cry of horror Hartnoll sprang back, and as he did so a great yellow dog dashed across the hearth in front of him, whilst from somewhere close at hand came a laugh long, low and satirical. A cold terror gripped Hartnoll, and for a moment or so he was on the verge of fainting.
And with that he stuck his hands suddenly in his pockets, turned away from me, and stared very resolutely out of the dirty bow-window. When the waiter had brought the drinks and retired again, Hartnoll confessed to me that he had never tasted beer. "You'll come to it in time," said I encouragingly: but I fancy that the tap at the Blue Posts was of a quality to discourage a first experiment.
"'Brady, by all that's holy, Hartnoll exclaimed. 'By Jupiter, the beggar's asleep. That's what comes of swotting too hard! Brady! "Approaching the chair he called again, 'Brady! and getting no reply, patted the figure gently on the back. "'Be jabbers, you sleep soundly, old fellow! he said. 'How about that! and he shook him heartily by the shoulder. The instant he let go the figure collapsed.
"Then Hartnoll, who seems to have been a regular Sherlock Holmes, got to work in grim earnest. On the floor in Maguire's room he picked up a diminutive silver-topped pencil, which had rolled under the fender and had so escaped observation. He asked several of Maguire's most intimate friends if they remembered seeing the pencil-case in Maguire's possession, but they shook their heads.
It encouraged us to exchange confidences of earlier deeds of derring-do, of bird-nesting, of rook-shooting, of angling for trout, of encounters with poachers. I remember crossing my knees, holding up my glass to the light, and remarking sagely that some poachers were not at all bad fellows. Hartnoll agreed that it depended how you took 'em.
A week later a dray rumbled up to the door of my lodgings in Jermyn Street, and two stout men delivered from it a hogshead of the sherry you are now drinking. He had inquired for Hartnoll's address, but Hartnoll, poor lad, had lain for fifteen years in the British burial-ground at Port Royal.
On the third stair under the lamp I caught a momentary vision of a dirty, half-naked boy standing with a drawn dirk in his hand, and with that, my foot catching against Meliar-Ann's body, I pitched past, head foremost, into the lighted room. As I fell I heard, or seemed to hear, a scuffle of feet, followed by a shout from Hartnoll behind us "My dirk!
"It's the press," insisted Hartnoll: and for the moment, when we emerged out of a side lane upon a square filled with flaring lights, the crashing of drums and cymbals, and the voices of showmen yelling in front of their booths, I had a suspicion that he was right.
A lamp burned foggily at the head of the steps by which we descended to the waterside, and looking up I saw the child who had called herself Meliar-Ann standing in the circle of it, and gazing down upon the embarkation with dark unemotional eyes. Hartnoll spied her too, and waved his recovered dirk triumphantly. She paid him no heed at all.
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