Page:In old madras.djvu/9

Rh "Well, he won't get it!" declared Mr. Fleming. "Let's send for him, and see what he is like? Here, Parsons!" he shouted to a pallid clerk; "just ask the gentleman to step this way."

In less than two minutes, the said gentleman, alert, well-groomed, and self-possessed, was bowing to the firm.

"Very glad to see you, Captain Mallender," lied Mr. Parr, the more prominent of the partners. "Just arrived, find it rather sultry, eh?"

"Yes," agreed the caller in a pleasant manly voice, "it's a bit of a change from an English winter—can't say much for your climate!"

"Won't you take a chair?" suavely suggested Mr. Fleming. "I suppose you have come out with the usual battery of rifles, to shoot big game?"

"Shoot big game! No," replied Mallender, as he seated himself, placed his hat carefully beside him on the dusty matting, and then in a clear decided tone, promptly announced his mission. "The fact is, I'm here to make enquiries about my Uncle and namesake, an officer in the Blue Hussars, who disappeared mysteriously about thirty years ago, when camping up in Coorg."

Mr. Parr nodded gravely, and considered the speaker with a sharp appraising eye—a veritable rat's eye. His partner merely exhibited a detached and judicial attitude, as he twisted the visitor's card between his bleached, fat fingers.

"He was supposed to have been drowned in the Cauvery, or carried off by a tiger," continued the young man, "and after the family had put on mourning, and the step had gone in the regiment, he wrote to my father, to say that although dead to the world, he was still in the land of the living—I have this letter in my possession."

Here the speaker hesitated for a moment, and looked expectantly at his audience; but the representatives of the house of Brown and Brown maintained an unsympathetic and professional silence, only broken