XXXVI
THE WALKING STICK
Had there been, next morning, any curious eyes to watch the conduct of the gentleman who had come to rent a sporting estate, they would probably have surmised that he had found something to please his fancy strangely, and yet that some perplexity still persisted. They would also have put him down as a much more excitable, and even demonstrative, young man than they had imagined. On a lonely stretch of shore hard by the little town he paced for nearly an hour, his face a record of the debate within, and his cane gesticulating at intervals.
Of a sudden he stopped dead and his lips moved in a murmured ejaculation, and then after standing stock still for some minutes, he murmured again:
"Ten to one on it!"
His cane had been stationary during this pause. Now he raised it once more, but this time with careful attention. It was a light bamboo with a silver head. He looked at it thoughtfully, bent it this way and that, and then drove it into the sand and pressed it down. Though to the ordinary eye a very chaste and appropriate walking stick for such a gentleman as Mr. Carring-
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