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patience like that engendered by watching another man look up Bradshaw. "That's all right," said Gordon at last. "In order to catch the Scottish train at Crewe he'd have had to take that earlier train, the one Marryatt came up by, and get out at Binver. He took the 3.47, I suppose, because he couldn't get away sooner. Perhaps, if we're right in thinking he wanted to skip, he was going to go across country by car to-morrow and confuse his tracks a bit."

"The thing doesn't look like skipping quite as much as it did. For Heaven's sake let's beware of prejudicing the case. Anyhow, he meant to make for Glasgow on the Wednesday night⁠—that's to-morrow night, isn't it? Now let's have one more look at that silly list that was on the back of the anonymous letter."

The list had been copied almost in facsimile, for it was very short. It ran

at least, that was the general impression it gave, but the writing was so spidery as to make it very doubtful which precise letter each of the strokes represented.

"I suppose it must be a shopping-list of some sort. If one could make that last word 'ties' it would read better," said Gordon.