Pocket drew back to let it pass, without looking twice at the car itself, which indeed was disguised out of knowledge in the promiscuous mire of many countries; but the red eyes behind the driver’s goggles were not so slow. Down went his feet on clutch and brake without a second’s interval; round spun the car in a skid that tore studs from the tyres, and fetched her up against the kerb with a shivered wheel. Pocket started forward with a cry; but at that moment a ponderous step fell close behind him; his arm was seized, and he was dragged in custody across the road. “Your boy, I think!” cried one whom he had never seen before, and did not now, being locked already in the motorist’s arms. “When did you find him?” the father asked when he was man enough, still patting Pocket’s shoulders as if he were a dog. “Only last night when I wired.” “And where?” “In the house where you and I couldn’t make ourselves heard.” The schoolboy flared up through all his emotion. “Why, I never saw you before this minute!” “Well, I’ve had my eye on you, more or less, for a day or two.” “Then why didn’t you wire before?” demanded Mr. Upton, quite ready to mask his own emotion with a little heat. “I didn’t get it till after nine o’clock—too late for the evening train—but I wasn’t going to waste three hours with a forty-horser eating its head off! So here I am, on my way to the address you gave.” “It was plumb opposite Baumgartner’s. I mounted guard there the very night you left. He came out twenty minutes ago, and your boy after him!” “But what does it all mean, Thrush? What on earth were you doing there, my dear boy?” The notes of anger and affection were struck in ludicrously quick succession; but the first was repeated on the boy’s hang-dog admission that he had been hiding. “Hiding, Tony?” Thrush himself seemed surprised at the expression. “But at all events we found you better employed,” he said to Pocket, “and the sooner we all take up the chase again the more chance we shall have of laying this rascal by the heels.” “Take it up, then!” snapped Mr. Upton. “Jump into the motor, and bring the brute to me when you’ve got him! I want to speak to my boy.” He did not realise the damage done to his car, or listen to a word that passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his head outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple facts. He stated his suspicion of Baumgartner’s complicity in the Hyde Park affair as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious pieces of the same handiwork, and yet declared his conviction that the actual hand was not Dr. Baumgartner’s at all. “But why should you think he had an accomplice, Tony?”