Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 8).djvu/275

"What! You?"

"What!" he at length ejaculated. "What! You—you're Rameau?"

The negro looked round nervously, and shrank further from the door.

"Yes," he said; "but please not so loud—please not loud. Zey may be near, and I'm 'fraid."

"You will certify, will you not," asked Hewitt, with malicious glee, "not only that you were not murdered last Saturday by Victor Goujon, but that, in fact, you were not murdered at all? Also that you carried your own body away in the usual fashion, on your own legs?"

"Yes, yes," responded Rameau, looking haggardly about; "but is not zis—zis room publique? I should not be seen."

"Nonsense," replied Hewitt, rather testily, "you exaggerate your danger and your own importance, and your enemies' abilities as well. You're safe enough."

"I suppose, then," Nettings remarked, slowly, like a man on whose mind something vast was beginning to dawn—"I suppose—why, hang it, you must have just got up while that fool of a girl was screaming and fainting upstairs, and walked out—they say there's nothing so hard as a nigger's skull, and yours has certainly made a fool of me. But then somebody must have chopped you over the head—who was it?"

"My enemies—my great enemies; enemies politique. I am a great man"—this with a faint revival of vanity amid his fear—"a great man in my countree. Zey have great secret club-'sieties to kill me—me and my frien's; and one enemy coming in my rooms does zis—one, two"—he indicated wrist and head—"wiz a choppah."

Rameau made the case plain to Nettings, so far as the actual circumstances of the assault on himself were concerned. A negro whom he had noticed near the place more than once during the previous day or two had attacked him suddenly in his rooms, dealing him two savage blows with a chopper. The first he had caught on his wrist, which was seriously damaged, as well as excruciatingly painful, but the second had taken effect on his head. His assailant had evidently gone away then, leaving him for dead; but as a matter of fact he was only stunned by the shock, and had, thanks to the adamantine thickness of the negro skull and the ill-direction of the chopper, only a very bad scalp wound, the bone being no more than grazed. He had lain insensible for some time, and must have come to his senses soon after the housemaid had left the room. Terrified at the knowledge that his enemies had found him out, his only thought was to get away and hide himself. He hastily washed and tied up his head, enveloped himself in the biggest coat he could find, and let himself down into the basement by the coal-lift, for fear of observation. He waited in the basement of one of the adjoining buildings till dark and then got away in a cab, with the idea of hiding himself in the East-end. He had had very little money with him on his flight, and it was by reason of this circumstance that Hewitt, when he found him, had prevailed on him to leave his hiding-place, since it would be impossible for him to touch any of the large sums of money in the keeping of his bank so long as he was supposed to be dead. With much difficulty, and the promise of ample police protection, he was at last convinced that it would be safe