The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [3619]
"Very well, he will give you twenty-five dollars. I forgot that ten dollars was but little in advance of your expenses."
"Twenty-five if I find him, and he is in funds. What if I don't?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Except your ticket; that I'll give you."
Sweetwater did not know what to say. Like the preceding job it might be innocent and it might not. And then, he did not like going to Boston, where he was liable to meet more than one who knew him.
"There is no harm in the business," observed the other, carelessly, pushing a glass of whiskey which had just been served him toward Sweetwater. "I would even be willing to do it myself, if I could leave New Bedford to-night, but I can't. Come! It's as easy as crooking your elbow."
"Just now you said it wasn't," growled Sweetwater, drinking from his glass. "But no matter about that, go ahead, I'll do it. Shall I have to buy other clothes?"
"I'd buy a new pair of trousers," suggested the other. "The rest you can get in Boston. You don't want to be too much in evidence, you know."
Sweetwater agreed with. him. To attract attention was what he most dreaded. "When does the train start?" he asked.
The young man told him.
"Well, that will give me time to buy what I want. Now, what are your instructions?"
The young man gave him a memorandum, containing four addresses. "You will find him at one of these places," said he. "And now to know your man when you see him. He is a large, handsome fellow, with red hair and a moustache like the devil. He has been hurt, and wears his left hand in a sling, but he can play cards, and will be found playing cards, and in very good company too. You will have to use your discretion in approaching him. When once he sees this bit of paper, all will be easy. He knows what these two words mean well enough, and the third one, the one that is worth twenty-five dollars to you, is FREDERICK."
Sweetwater, who had drunk half his glass, started so at this word, which was always humming in his brain, that he knocked over his tumbler and spilled what was left in it.
"I hope I won't forget that word," he remarked, in a careless tone, intended to carry off his momentary show of feeling.
"If you do, then don't expect the twenty-five dollars," retorted the other, finishing his own glass, but not offering to renew Sweetwater's.
Sweetwater laughed, said he thought he could trust his memory, and rose. In a half-hour he was at the depot, and in another fifteen minutes speeding out of New Bedford on his way to Boston.
He had had but one anxiety--that Mr. Stone might be going up to Boston too. But, once relieved of this apprehension, he settled back, and for the first time in twelve hours had a minute in which to ask himself who he was, and what he was about. Adventure had followed so fast upon adventure that he was in a more or less dazed condition, and felt as little capable of connecting event with event as if he had been asked to recall the changing pictures of a kaleidoscope. That affair of the packet, now, was it or was it not serious, and would he ever know what it meant or how it turned out?
Like a child who had been given a pebble, and told to throw it over the wall, he had thrown and run, giving a shout of warning, it is true, but not knowing, nor ever likely to know, where the stone had fallen, or what it was meant to do. Then this new commission on which he was bent--was it in any way connected with the other, or merely the odd result of his being in the right place at the right moment? He was inclined to think the latter. And yet how odd it was that one doubtful errand should be followed by another, in a town no larger than New Bedford, forcing him from scene to scene, till he found himself speeding toward the city he least desired to enter, and from which he had the most to fear!
But brooding over a case like this brings small comfort. He