I hadn't got a gun with me. I'd have tickled him up some.

"We got to Bournemouth all right. Whittington took a cab and
gave the name of an hotel. I did likewise, and we drove up
within three minutes of each other. He hired a room, and I hired
one too. So far it was all plain sailing. He hadn't the remotest
notion that anyone was on to him. Well, he just sat around in
the hotel lounge, reading the papers and so on, till it was time
for dinner. He didn't hurry any over that either.

"I began to think that there was nothing doing, that he'd just
come on the trip for his health, but I remembered that he hadn't
changed for dinner, though it was by way of being a slap-up
hotel, so it seemed likely enough that he'd be going out on his
real business afterwards.

"Sure enough, about nine o'clock, so he did. Took a car across
the town--mighty pretty place by the way, I guess I'll take Jane
there for a spell when I find her--and then paid it off and
struck out along those pine-woods on the top of the cliff. I was
there too, you understand. We walked, maybe, for half an hour.
There's a lot of villas all the way along, but by degrees they
seemed to get more and more thinned out, and in the end we got to
one that seemed the last of the bunch. Big house it was, with a
lot of piny grounds around it.

"It was a pretty black night, and the carriage drive up to the
house was dark as pitch. I could hear him ahead, though I
couldn't see him. I had to walk carefully in case he might get on
to it that he was being followed. I turned a curve and I was