The villagers know him well. He is the young hairship inventor who has a private sitting-room at the Colney Arms. Certain of them, agog to pry his secret, followed him as he set out one day. They discovered nothing. For hours they followed; but he, glancing ever over his shoulder, pounded steadily on, mile upon mile--field, lane, high road, hill and dale. He never shook them off though he ran; they never brought him to standstill though indomitably they pursued. Towards evening the exhausted procession came thundering up the village street.
It was a very pale and haggard young man that bolted into the Colney Arms that night.
If George had the _Daily_ to curse for the miserable life of secrecy and constant agony of discovery that he was compelled to lead, he had it also to bless that his discovery by the red-headed Pinner boy had not long ago led to his being run to earth. In its anxiety to cap the satisfactory splash it was making over this Country House Outrage, the _Daily_ had overstepped itself and militated against itself. Those “Catchy Clues” were responsible. So cunningly did they inspire the taste for amateur detective work, so easy did they make such work appear, that Mr. Pinner, having thrashed silence into his red-headed son, kept that son's discovery to himself. As he argued it--laboriously pencilling down “data” in accordance with the “Catchy Clue” directions,--as he argued it--if he communicated his knowledge to the _Daily_ or to the local police, if he put them--(the word does not print nicely) on the scent, ten to one they would capture the thief and secure the reward. No, Mr. Pinner intended to have the reward himself. Therefore he hoarded his secret; brooded upon it; dashed off hither and thither as the day's news brought him a Catchy Clue that seemed to fit his data.
But of this George knew nothing. Steeped in crime this miserable young man dragged out his awful life at Temple Colney: nightmares by night, horrors by day.
Every morning with trembling fingers he opened his _Daily_; every morning was shot dead by these lines or their equivalent:
After much groaning and agony George would force himself to know the worst; after swearing furiously through the paragraphs of stuffing with which Mr. Bitt's cunning young man skilfully evaded the point, would come at last upon the “fresh clue” and read with a groan of relief that, so far as the truth were concerned, it was no clue at all.