“And then what do you think? That Stafford begins to tear his hair. Just so. Tugs at it with both hands without saying anything. Cloete gives a push to the table which nearly sends the fellow off his chair, tumbling inside the fender; so that he has got to catch hold of it to save himself. . .
“You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely. I’ve got to a point that I don’t care what happens to me. I would shoot you now for tuppence.
“At this the cur dodges under the table. Then Cloete goes out, and as he turns in the street—you know, little fishermen’s cottages, all dark; raining in torrents, too—the other opens the window of the parlour and speaks in a sort of crying voice—
“You low Yankee fiend—I’ll pay you off some day.
“Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it.”
My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.
“I don’t quite understand this,” I said. “In what way?”
He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it. Enough to keep her comfortable. George Dunbar’s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.
“I am curious,” I said, “to learn what the motive force of this tragic affair was—I mean the patent medicine. Do you know?”
He named it, and I whistled respectfully. Nothing less than Parker’s Lively Lumbago Pills. Enormous property! You know it; all the world knows it. Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried it.
“Why!” I cried, “they missed an immense fortune.”
“Yes,” he mumbled, “by the price of a revolver-shot.”
He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock. The night before he sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink. “Funny chap, Cloete. We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go on board.”