CHAPTER II. IN WHICH THE ENEMY ARRIVES. "I say, boss," remarked the tramp, as he paused for a moment in the process of stuffing himself to repletion with cold game-pie, "this is a rum trip, and no mistake." "What's that got to do with you?" retorted Marchmont sharply, appropriating the remaining fragments of the pasty to his own use. The two men were seated in the shady angle of a ruined buttress, a portion of a stately abbey, which in pre-Norman days had flourished at a spot some half-dozen miles from the site of Blanford. "Well," said the tramp, "if this ain't a wild-goose chase I dunno what you calls it. Here you've gone an' took me away from my happy home, an' brought me across the ragin'[Pg 174] Atlantic, an' dumped me in a moth-eaten little village where there ain't nothin' fit to drink, all because I happened to chum with a Bishop." [Pg 174] "You seem to forget," said Marchmont, "that it was you who came to me, offering to sell your friends and their secrets for a sufficient remuneration." "So I did," said the tramp; "but it was revenge, that's what it was—revenge. I was deserted in a furrin land, with just my board-bill paid, and not a penny to bless myself with." "Ah," said Marchmont. "That's the reason, I suppose, why you came from Montreal to New York in a parlour car." The tramp sighed despondently, saying: "Now whoever told you that, boss?" "Nobody. I found the Pullman check in your coat-pocket when I was looking for my diamond ring, which you'd absent-mindedly placed there." "Humph!" replied the other. "There ain't no foolin' you!"[Pg 175] [Pg 175] "I should be a pretty poor journalist if there were," said his employer. "Now give me the story again, and see if you can get it straight." "Well, there ain't nothin' much to tell, 'cept I was carried off by them Spanish conspirators in mistake for a lady, which I in no-wise resembles, an' the bloke as was the head of the gang was allus called the Bishop, and a pretty rum Bishop he was." "Never mind about his qualifications,"
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