"How can you expect to when you know the brooch was used to
seal the dead man's lips?" "I forgot that,"
said Paul, faintly. "My memory--" "Is not so
good as it was." Hurd rose. "I'll go, as I see you are
exhausted. Good-bye." "Wait! You'll keep me advised
of how the case goes?" "Certainly, if the doctors will
allow me to. Good-bye," and Hurd went away very well satisfied
with the information he had obtained.
The clue, as he thought it was, led him to Wargrove, where he obtained
useful information from Mr. Beecot, who gave it with a very bad grace,
and offered remarks about his son's being mixed up in the case, which
made Hurd, who had taken a fancy to the young fellow, protest. From
Wargrove, Hurd went to Stowley, in Buckinghamshire, and interviewed the
pawnbroker whose assistant had wrongfully sold the brooch to Beecot many
years before. There he learned a fact which sent him back to Mr. Jabez
Pash in London. "I says, sir," said Hurd, when again
in the lawyer's private room, "that nautical gentleman of yours
pawned that opal serpent twenty years ago more or less."
"Never," said the monkey, screwing up his face and
chewing. "Yes, indeed. The pawnbroker is an old man, but he remembers
the customer quite well, and his description, allowing for the time that
has elapsed, answers to the man who tried to get the jewels from
you." Mr. Pash chewed meditatively, and then inflated his
cheeks. "Pooh," he said, "twenty years is a
long time. A man then, and a man now, would be quite
different." "Some people never change," said
Hurd, quietly.
"You have not changed much, I suspect."
"No," cackled the lawyer, rather amused. "I
grew old young, and have never altered my looks."
"Well, this nautical gentleman may be the same. He pawned the
article under the name of David Green--a feigned one, I
suspect." "Then you think he is guilty?"
"I have to prove that the brooch came into his possession again
before I can do that," said Hurd, grimly. "And, as
the brooch was lost in the street by Mr.
