“He was unarmed the other morning. I’m quite positive of that. And his niece, who lives with him, has never seen a firearm of any kind in the house.” “Well, he’s villain enough to hang, if ever there was one! It’s time we laid hold of him. Where’s Mr. Thrush? I thought you’d taken him on in the car?” This to the chauffeur, now the centre of the carrion crowd that gathers about the body of any disabled motor. The chauffeur, a countryman like his master, was enjoying himself vastly with a surreptitious cigarette and sardonic mutterings on the cause of his scattered spokes; the facts being that he had nearly fallen asleep at his wheel, which Mr. Upton had incontinently taken into his own less experienced hands. “The car won’t take anybody anywhere to-day,” explained the chauffeur, with his cigarette behind his back. “I shall have to get a lorry to take the car.” He held his head on one side suddenly. “There’s a bit o’ tyre trouble for somebody!” he cried, grimly. Indeed, a sharp crack had come from the direction of the river, not unlike the bursting of a heavy tyre; but Pocket Upton did not think it was that. He caught his father’s arm, and whispered in his father’s ear, and they plunged together into a side street broader than the asphalt thoroughfare, but with scarcely a break in either phalanx of drab mediocre dwellings, and not a creature stirring except themselves and a few who followed. The hog’s back of a still more deserted bridge arched itself at the foot of the street, its suspension cables showing against the sky in foreshortened curves. As they ran a peculiarly shrill whistle cut the morning air like a streak of sound. “P’lice!” screamed one of those bringing up the rear, and they easily spurted past father and son, each already contending with his own infirmity. Mr. Upton was dangerously scarlet in the neck, and Pocket panting as he had not done for days. In sad labour they drew near the suspension bridge, to a crescendo accompaniment on the police whistle. It was evidently being blown on the Embankment to the right of the bridge, and already with considerable effect. As the pair were about to pass an intermediate turning on the right, a constable flew across it on a parallel course, and they altered theirs with one accord. Pocket panted after the constable, and his father thundered after Pocket, into a narrow street debouching upon a fenced strip of greenery, not too dense to hide broad pavement and low parapet on its further side, with a strip of brown river beyond that, and a skyline of warehouses on the Surrey shore.