‘If she does not know it, I’ll be happy to show it you.’

With a surly nod, Mr. Lowe requited the prisoner’s urbanity, and followed Mrs. Jukes into her master’s bed-chamber; there was an old-fashioned oak chest of drawers facing the window.

‘Where’s Captain Cluffe?’ enquired Lowe.

‘He stopped at his lodgings, on the way,’ answered the man; ’and said he’d be after us in five minutes.’

‘Well, be good enough, Madam, to show me the key of these drawers.’

So he opened the drawers in succession, beginning at the top, and searching each carefully, running his fingers along the inner edges, and holding the candle very close, and grunting his disappointment as he closed and locked each in its order.

In the mean time, Doctor Toole was ushered into the little parlour, where sat the disabled master of the Brass Castle.  The fussy little mediciner showed in his pale, stern countenance, a sense of the shocking reverse and transformation which the great man of the village had sustained.

‘A rather odd situation you find me in, Doctor Toole,’ said white Mr. Dangerfield, in his usual harsh tones, but with a cold moisture shining on his face; ’under duresse, Sir, in my own parlour, charged with murdering a gentleman whom I have spent five hundred guineas to bring to speech and life, and myself half murdered by a justice of the peace and his discriminating followers, ha, ha, ha!  I’m suffering a little pain, Sir; will you be so good as to lend me your assistance?’

Toole proceeded to his task much more silently than was his wont, and stealing, from time to time, a glance at his noticeable patient with the wild gray eyes, as people peep curiously at what is terrible and repulsive.

‘’Tis broken, of course,’ said Dangerfield.

‘Why, yes, Sir,’ answered Toole; ’the upper arm—­a bullet, Sir.  H’m, ha—­yes; it lies only under the skin, Sir.’

And with a touch of the sharp steel it dropped into the doctor’s fingers, and lay on a bloody bit of lint on the table by the wine-glasses.  Toole applied his sticking-plaster, and extemporised a set of splints, and had the terrified cook at his elbow tearing up one of her master’s shirts into strips for bandages; and so went on neatly and rapidly with his shifty task.

In the mean time, Cluffe had arrived.  He was a little bit huffed and grand at being nailed as an evidence, upon a few words carelessly, or, if you will, confidentially dropped at his own mess-table, where Lowe chanced to be a guest; and certainly with no suspicion that his little story could in any way be made to elucidate the mystery of Sturk’s murder.  He would not have minded, perhaps, so much, had it not been that it brought to light and memory again the confounded ducking sustained by him and Puddock, and which, as an officer and a very fine fellow, he could not but be conscious was altogether an undignified reminiscence.