Scarterfield told Fish enough to satisfy and quieten him; and presently the man went away, having first told us that he would be at home for another month. When he had gone Scarterfield turned to me. "There!" he said. "What d'you think of that, Mr. Middlebrook?" "What do you think of it?" I suggested. "I think that Netherfield Baxter is alive and active and up to something," he answered. "And I'd give a good deal to know who that Chinaman is who was with him. But there's ways of finding out a lot now that I've heard all this, Mr. Middlebrook!--I'm off to Hull. Come with me!" Until that instant such an idea had never entered my head. But I made up my mind there and then. "I will!" said I. "We'll see this through, Scarterfield. Get a time-table." CHAPTER XV MR. JALLANBY--SHIP BROKER There were reasons, other than the suddenly excited desire to follow this business out to whatever end it might come at, which induced me to consent to the detective's suggestion that I should go to Hull with him. As I had said to Solomon Fish, I knew Hull--well enough. In my very youthful days I had spent an annual holiday there, with relatives, and I had vivid recollections of the place. Already, in those days, they had begun to pull Hull to pieces, laying out fine new streets and open spaces where there had been old-fashioned, narrow alleys and not a little in the slum way. But then, as happily now, there was still the old Hull of the ancient High Street, and the Market Place, and the Land of Green Ginger, and the older docks, wharves, and quays; it had been amongst these survivals of antiquity, and in the great church of Holy Trinity and its scarcely less notable sister of St. Mary in Lowgate that I had loved to wander as a boy--there was a peculiar smell of the sea in Hull, and an atmosphere of seafaring life that I have never met with elsewhere, neither in Wapping nor in Bristol, in Southhampton nor in Liverpool; one felt in Hull that one was already half-way to Bergen or Stockholm or Riga--there was something of North Europe about you as soon as you crossed the bridge at the top of Whitefriargate and plunged into masts and funnels, stacks of fragrant pine, and sheds bursting with foreign merchandise. And I had a sudden itching and half-sentimental desire to see the old seaport again, and once more catch up its appeal and its charm. "Yes, I'll certainly go with you, Scarterfield!" I repeated. "In for a penny, in for a pound, they say. I wonder, though, what we are in for! You think, really, we're on the track of Netherfield Baxter?" "Haven't a doubt of it!" asserted Scarterfield, as he turned over the pages of the railway guide. "That man who's just gone was right--that was Baxter he saw. With who knows what of mystery and crime and all sorts of things behind him!" "Including the murder of one of the Quicks?" I suggested.