Then they chaffered about the price, and at last Grotait agreed to give him L20.

Cole went to Coventry, and told how far Grotait would allow him to go:  “But,” said he, “L20 is not enough.  I run an even chance of being hung or lagged.”

“Go a step beyond your instructions, and I’ll give you a hundred pounds.”

“I daren’t,” said Cole:  “unless there was a chance to blow up the place with the man in it.”  Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said:  “I hear he sleeps in the works.  I must find out where.”

Accordingly, he talked over one of the women in the factory, and gained the following information, which he imparted to Mr. Coventry: 

Little lived and slept in a detached building recently erected, and the young woman who had overpowered Hill slept in a room above him.  She passed in the works for his sweetheart, and the pair were often locked up together for hours at a time in a room called the “Experiment Room.”

This information took Coventry quite by surprise, and imbittered his hatred of Little.  While Cole was felicitating him on the situation of the building, he was meditating how to deal his hated rival a stab of another kind.

Cole, however, was single-minded in the matter; and the next day he took a boat and drifted slowly down the river, and scanned the place very carefully.

He came at night to Coventry, and told him he thought he might perhaps be able to do the trick without seeming to defy Grotait’s instructions.  “But,” said he, “it is a very dangerous job.  Premises are watched:  and, what do you think? they have got wires up now that run over the street to the police office, and Little can ring a bell in Ransome’s room, and bring the bobbies across with a rush in a moment.  It isn’t as it was under the old chief constable; this one’s not to be bought nor blinded.  I must risk a halter.”

“You shall have fifty pounds more.”

“You are a gentleman, sir.  I should like to have it in hard sovereigns.  I’m afraid of notes.  They get traced somehow.”

“You shall have it all in sovereigns.”

“I want a little in advance, to buy the materials.  They are costly, especially the fulminating silver.”

Coventry gave him ten sovereigns, and they parted with the understanding that Cole should endeavor to blow up the premises on some night when Little was in them, and special arrangements were made to secure this.

Henry Little and Grace Carden received each of them, an anonymous letter, on the same day.

Grace Carden’s ran thus:—­

“I can’t abide to see a young lady made a fool of by a villain.  Mr. Little have got his miss here:  they dote on each other.  She lives in the works, and so do he, ever since she came, which he usen’t afore.  They are in one room, as many as eight hours at a stretch, and that room always locked.  It is the talk of all the girls.  It is nought to me, but I thought it right you should know, for it is quite a scandal.  She is a strapping country lass, with a queerish name.  This comes from a strange, but a well-wisher.