“Take care,” he cried.  “You are playing a fool’s game; you are making an enemy for nothing; you will gain nothing by this, I warn you of it!” And then with one of his changes, “Seventy dollars—­only seventy—­in mercy, Mr. Dodd, in common charity.  Don’t dash the bowl from my lips!  You have a kindly heart.  Think of my position, remember my unhappy wife.”

“You should have thought of her before,” said I.  “I have made my offer, and I wish to sleep.”

“Is that your last word, sir?  Pray consider; pray weigh both sides:  my misery, your own danger.  I warn you—­I beseech you; measure it well before you answer,” so he half pleaded, half threatened me, with clasped hands.

“My first word, and my last,” said I.

The change upon the man was shocking.  In the storm of anger that now shook him, the lees of his intoxication rose again to the surface; his face was deformed, his words insane with fury; his pantomime excessive in itself, was distorted by an access of St. Vitus.

“You will perhaps allow me to inform you of my cold opinion,” he began, apparently self-possessed, truly bursting with rage:  “when I am a glorified saint, I shall see you howling for a drop of water and exult to see you.  That your last word!  Take it in your face, you spy, you false friend, you fat hypocrite!  I defy, I defy and despise and spit upon you!  I’m on the trail, his trail or yours, I smell blood, I’ll follow it on my hands and knees, I’ll starve to follow it!  I’ll hunt you down, hunt you, hunt you down!  If I were strong, I’d tear your vitals out, here in this room—­tear them out—­I’d tear them out!  Damn, damn, damn!  You think me weak!  I can bite, bite to the blood, bite you, hurt you, disgrace you ...”

He was thus incoherently raging, when the scene was interrupted by the arrival of the landlord and inn servants in various degrees of deshabille, and to them I gave my temporary lunatic in charge.

“Take him to his room,” I said, “he’s only drunk.”

These were my words; but I knew better.  After all my study of Mr. Bellairs, one discovery had been reserved for the last moment:  that of his latent and essential madness.

CHAPTER XX.  STALLBRIDGE-LE-CARTHEW.

Long before I was awake, the shyster had disappeared, leaving his bill unpaid.  I did not need to inquire where he was gone, I knew too well, I knew there was nothing left me but to follow; and about ten in the morning, set forth in a gig for Stallbridge-le-Carthew.

The road, for the first quarter of the way, deserts the valley of the river, and crosses the summit of a chalk-down, grazed over by flocks of sheep and haunted by innumerable larks.  It was a pleasant but a vacant scene, arousing but not holding the attention; and my mind returned to the violent passage of the night before.  My thought of the man I was pursuing had been greatly changed.  I conceived of him, somewhere in front of me, upon his dangerous errand, not to be turned aside, not to be stopped, by either fear or reason.  I had called him a ferret; I conceived him now as a mad dog.  Methought he would run, not walk; methought, as he ran, that he would bark and froth at the lips; methought, if the great wall of China were to rise across his path, he would attack it with his nails.