"I got your telegram, Mr. Middlebrook," he remarked as we walked away from the station, "and I've booked you the most comfortable room I could get in the hotel, which is a nice quiet house where we'll be able to talk in privacy, for barring you and myself there's nobody stopping in it, except a few commercial travellers, and to be sure, they've their own quarters. You'll have had your lunch?" "While I waited at Morpeth," I answered. "Aye," he said, "I figured on that. So we'll just get into a corner of the smoking-room and have a quiet glass over a cigar, and I'll tell you what I've made out here--and a very strange and queer tale it is, and one that's worth hearing, whether it really has to do with our affair or no!" "You're not sure that it has?" I asked. "I'm as sure as may be that it probably has!" he replied. "But still, there's a gulf between extreme probability and absolute certainty that's a bit wider than the unthinking reckon for. However, here we are--and we'll just get comfortable." Scarterfield's ideas of comfort, I found, were to dispose himself in the easiest of chairs in the quietest of corners with whisky and soda on one hand and a box of cigars on the other--this sort of thing he evidently regarded as a proper relaxation from his severe mental labours. I had no objection to it myself after four hours slow travelling--yet I confess I felt keenly impatient until he had mixed our drinks, lighted his cigar and settled down at my elbow. "Now," he said confidentially, "I'll set it all out in order--what I've done and found out since I came here two days ago. There's no need, Mr. Middlebrook, to go into detail about how I set to work to get information: we've our own ways and methods of getting hold of stuff when we strike a strange town. But you know what I came here for. There's been talk, all through this case, of the name Netherfield--from the questions that Salter Quick put to you when you met him on the cliffs, and from what was said at the Mariner's Joy. Very good--now I fell across that name, too, in my investigations in London, as being the name of a man who was on the _Elizabeth Robinson_, of uncertain memory, lost or disappeared in the year 1907, with the two Quicks. He was set down, that Netherfield, as being of Blyth, Northumberland. Clearly, then, Blyth was a place to get in touch with--and here in Blyth we are!" "A clear bit of preface, Scarterfield," said I approvingly. "Go ahead! I'm bearing in mind that you've been here forty-eight hours."