“Suppose you were to try”--I paused so as to make quite
sure--“Bantock, 13 Harwood Street, Oxford Street.”
“And who is Bantock?” the detective asked. “And what do you know about
him, anyhow?”
“I don’t know anything at all about him, but I saw the man who cut my
hair whisper to the other man just before he ran away, ‘Bantock, 13
Harwood Street, Oxford Street’--I saw him quite distinctly.”
“You saw him whisper? What does the girl mean by saying she saw him
whisper? Why, young lady, you must have been quite fifty feet away.
How, at that distance, and with all the noise of the traffic, could
you hear a whisper?”
“I didn’t say I heard him; I said I saw him. I don’t need to hear to
know what a person is saying. I just saw you whisper to the other man,
‘The young lady seems to be by way of being a curiosity.’”
The London detective stared at our detective. He seemed to be
bewildered.
“But I--I don’t know how you heard that; I scarcely breathed the
words.”
Mr. Colegate explained. When they heard they all seemed to be
bewildered, and they looked at me, as people do look at the present
day, as if I were some strange and amazing thing. The London detective
said: “I never heard the like to that. It seems to me very much like
what old-fashioned people called ‘black magic.’”
Although he was a detective, he could not have been a very intelligent
person after all, or he would not have talked such nonsense. Then he
added, with an accent on the “saw”:
“What was it you said you _saw_ him whisper?”