"Davis, Richard Harding - The Lost House" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Richard Harding)

that paper."

On the way to Sowell Street Ford stopped at a newspaper agency, and
paid for the insertion that afternoon of the same advertisement in
three newspapers. It read: "If hansom-cab driver who last week
carried note, found in street, to American Embassy will mail his
address to X. X. X., care of GLOBE, he will be rewarded."

From the nearest post-office he sent to his paper the following
cable: "Query our local correspondent, Dalesville, Kentucky,
concerning Dosia Pearsall Dale. Is she of sound mind, is she
heiress. Who controls her money, what her business relations with
her uncle Charles Ralph Pearsall, what her present address. If any
questions, say inquiries come from solicitors of Englishman who
wants to marry her. Rush answer.

Sowell Street is a dark, dirty little thoroughfare, running for
only one block, parallel to Harley Street. Like it, it is decorated
with the brass plates of physicians and the red lamps of surgeons,
but, just as the medical men in Harley Street, in keeping with that
thoroughfare, are broad, open, and with nothing to conceal, so
those of Sowell Street, like their hiding-place, shrink from
observation, and their lives are as sombre, secret, and dark as the
street itself.

Within two turns of it Ford dismissed the taxicab. Giving the
soiled person a half-smoked cigarette, he told him to walk through
Sowell Street, and when he reached the place where he had picked up
the paper, to drop the cigarette as near that spot as possible. He
then was to turn into Weymouth Street and wait until Ford joined
him. At a distance of fifty feet Ford followed the man, and saw
him, when in the middle of the block, without apparent hesitation,
drop the cigarette. The house in front of which it fell was marked,
like many others, by the brass plate of a doctor. As Ford passed it
he hit the cigarette with his walking-stick, and drove it into an
area. When he overtook the man, Ford handed him another cigarette.
"To make sure," he said, C4 go back and " drop this in the place
you found the paper. For a moment the man hesitated.

"I might as well tell you," Ford continued, "that I knocked that
last cigarette so far from where you dropped it that you won't be
able to use it as a guide. So, if you don't really know where you
found the paper, you'll save my time by saying so." Instead of
being confused by the test, the man was amused by it. He laughed
appreciatively admitted. "You've caught me out fair, governor," "I
Want the 'arf-crown, and I dropped the cigarette as near the place
as I could. But I can't do it again. It was this way," he
explained. "I wasn't taking notice of the houses. I was walking
along looking into the gutter for stumps. I see this paper wrapped
about something round. 'It's a copper,' I thinks, 'jucked out of a