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imself. I felt that there was something wrong with the man. Go on."
"What's the use of your stamping your foot, and wanting me to go on when you won't let me? When I was locked up in the cellar I had on the drosky driver's coat. It was made out of a shabby old ponyskin. I had nothing to do, so I put my hands in the pockets. In the right-hand pocket I felt there was something in the lining. I could not make the thing out, but when I had finished breakfast at Mr. Stewart's it came out all at once, and I held it up in my fingers to see what it was,"
"What was it? Anything particular? You seem to have been dealing in nothing else but mysteries 1"
"Mr. Stewart stooped down to look at it, and directly he saw it he snatched it out of my fingers, and made no end of a fuss."
"What did it look like can't you tell me?"
"It was a dark brown colour it looked like a pill; it was about the size of a pill and was round like a pill. Mr. Stewart said it was a pill. But it was certainly no ordinary kind of pill, or Mr. Stewart would not have made the fuss he did. He took me to his bedroom; I slipped out of the pony-skin coat and into a suit of his clothes instead this is the suit. When I got back to the room in which I had had breakfast, he presently came in and made me the offer I told you of he promised to give me five hundred pounds if I took those pills to America."
"Pills were there more than one?"
"I believe that while I was changing into his clothes he cut the pony-skin coat open and found, concealed in the lining somewhere else, other pills twenty-two of them altogether. It is those he wants me to take to America."
"But Hugh, what can they be? Of course they're not pills."
"The presumption is that they're not the kind supplied by a chemist."
"Then what are they? This old man who has just been here the thought of having lost them seemed to be very nearly driving him mad. So far as I could make out that coat is his property."
"That's no affair of min
