Here Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of his triumph, breaks off to ejaculate, “Oh, dear me!  Oh, Lord!  I’m shaken all to pieces!”

“Now, when you’re ready,” says Mr. Bucket after awaiting his recovery, “to come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, here the gentleman sits, you know.”

“Haven’t I come to it, Mr. Bucket?” cries Grandfather Smallweed.  “Isn’t the gentleman concerned yet?  Not with Captain Hawdon, and his ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain?  Come, then, I want to know where those letters are.  That concerns me, if it don’t concern Sir Leicester Dedlock.  I will know where they are.  I won’t have ’em disappear so quietly.  I handed ’em over to my friend and solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, not to anybody else.”

“Why, he paid you for them, you know, and handsome too,” says Mr. Bucket.

“I don’t care for that.  I want to know who’s got ’em.  And I tell you what we want—­what we all here want, Mr. Bucket.  We want more painstaking and search-making into this murder.  We know where the interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough.  If George the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice, and was set on.  You know what I mean as well as any man.”

“Now I tell you what,” says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering his manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordinary fascination to the forefinger, “I am damned if I am a-going to have my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as half a second of time by any human being in creation.  You want more painstaking and search-making!  You do?  Do you see this hand, and do you think that I don’t know the right time to stretch it out and put it on the arm that fired that shot?”

Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to apologize.  Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him.

“The advice I give you is, don’t you trouble your head about the murder.  That’s my affair.  You keep half an eye on the newspapers, and I shouldn’t wonder if you was to read something about it before long, if you look sharp.  I know my business, and that’s all I’ve got to say to you on that subject.  Now about those letters.  You want to know who’s got ’em.  I don’t mind telling you.  I have got ’em.  Is that the packet?”

Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr. Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifies it as the same.

“What have you got to say next?” asks Mr. Bucket.  “Now, don’t open your mouth too wide, because you don’t look handsome when you do it.”

“I want five hundred pound.”

“No, you don’t; you mean fifty,” says Mr. Bucket humorously.

It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred.