“Oh, Southend is very much like other places of the sort,” he answered. “It’s got a great many pleasant and a few objectionable folks. There are the local celebrities (eminent nobodies I call them), who, it is true, are very important personages indeed, their importance in Southend being only equalled by their utter insignificance and total extinction outside that locality. And there’s a good sprinkling of gentlemen with ‘sporting’ tendencies. I must tell you, by the bye, that the qualities which constitute a man a sportsman in Southend are decided proclivities towards cards, billiards, and whisky--especially whisky. But take the Southend folk all round they’re the pleasantest of people, and a chummier little place I never knew.” I made a great show of laughing at the little man’s description, which, as he evidently laid himself out to be a wit, put him in the best of humours with himself and with me, and I then went on to say that I thought he and I had travelled down together on another occasion, and reminded him of the fusee incident. He replied that he did not recollect me, which was not to be wondered at, for I had sat well back in the darkest corner, and had taken no part in the conversation. “But I remember the man who objected so to the fusee,” he went on with a smile. “He _did_ get excited over it, didn’t he?” I said that he certainly had done so, and asked with apparent unconcern whether the man in question was a friend. “No, I can’t say that he’s a friend,” was the answer; “but I’ve travelled down with him several times, and always found him very pleasant company.” I was glad to hear this, for it satisfied me that the fact of my having seen Mullen in the Southend train was not due to a chance visit which might never have been repeated. Had it been so the difficulty of my undertaking would have been enormously increased, for I should then have held a clue only to his identity, whereas I had now a clue to his whereabouts as well. “But now you mention it” (which, as I had nothing to mention, was not the case), my companion went on, “now that you mention it--though it had never struck me before--it is rather strange that, though I’ve seen our friend several times in the train, I have never once seen him anywhere in Southend. In a place like that you are bound to see any one staying there, and in fact I’ve often knocked up against the same people half a dozen times in an evening, first on the cliffs, then on the pier, and after that in the town. But I can’t recall ever once seeing our fusee friend anywhere. It seems as if when he got to Southend he vanished into space.”