“There’s a chance of getting the chronometer, too, if we get the man,” I quietly observed. “Just leave your name and address, and all particulars, while I go and see if I can lay hands on Tommy.” I fully expected that I should get Tommy at some of his usual haunts, and return within the hour, but I was giving Tommy credit for far less ability than he possessed. I chanced to know his favourite hiding-place, and went to that direct. He was not there, and had not been near it for days. All his haunts were tried with a like result. Then, a little annoyed, I “tried back,” and discovered the entry and common stair in the Low Calton in which he had burrowed while his pursuers rushed by. Two boys had seen him there, and they testified that he had turned back towards Greenside as soon as it was safe to venture forth; and from that point all trace of him disappeared. I hunted for him high and low, for days on end, in vain; and what added to my mystification was the fact that Tommy’s relatives and acquaintances were as puzzled and distressed at his disappearance as I could possibly be. At first I thought it possible that he had left the city, but in a day or two had reason to believe that such was not the case. Tommy never went farther than Glasgow or Paisley, and as he had not been heard of or seen in either of these places, a queer thought came into my mind. Could it be possible that Tommy had wandered into bad company and got knocked on the head—in other words, murdered—for the valuable treasure he carried? I note the strange suspicion, not because it turned out to be correct in regard to the loss of Tommy’s valuable life, but because the treasure he carried was to bring him trouble quite as unexpected as his disappearance had been sudden. While I had thus been hunting in vain, and Tommy’s friends had been almost mourning him as dead, and even ungenerously hinting that I had had a hand in his slaughter, Tommy was enjoying the sweets of a well-earned repose in—of all places in the world the last I should have thought of—the Infirmary! He had got hurt, then—run over with a cab or something—in his flight? Not at all. Seized with a fever, then? Neither. He was as sound in body and limb as myself. It was simply this. Before the chronometer had come in his way, Tommy, who was lazy and hard-up, had gone once or twice to the Infirmary complaining of some imaginary trouble, which the doctors could not understand. His object was to get admitted as a patient, and have a month or two’s rest and retirement from the uncertainties of the thieving profession—to be coddled up in bed and tended night and day, and fed up with wine and other delicacies too often denied to the most ingenious malingerer in prison. Tommy was one of those clever malingerers, but he preferred to practise the art in a place where he could at any moment gain his liberty by ending the distressing symptoms of disease.