Archie wanted to talk about clothes, but not yet.
“I say, laddie,” he said, hurriedly. “Lend me, your ear for half a jiffy!” Outside the baying of the pack had become imminent. “Stow me away for a moment in the undergrowth, and I’ll buy anything you want.”
He withdrew into the jungle. The noise outside grew in volume. The pursuit had been delayed for a priceless few instants by the arrival of another dray, moving northwards, which had drawn level with the first dray and dexterously bottled up the fairway. This obstacle had now been overcome, and the original searchers, their ranks swelled by a few dozen more of the leisured classes, were hot on the trail again.
“You done a murder?” enquired the voice of the proprietor, mildly interested, filtering through a wall of cloth. “Well, boys will be boys!” he said, philosophically. “See anything there that you like? There some sweet things there!”
“I’m inspecting them narrowly,” replied Archie. “If you don’t let those chappies find me, I shouldn’t be surprised if I bought one.”
“One?” said the proprietor, with a touch of austerity.
“Two,” said Archie, quickly. “Or possibly three or six.”
The proprietor’s cordiality returned.
“You can’t have too many nice suits,” he said, approvingly, “not a young feller like you that wants to look nice. All the nice girls like a young feller that dresses nice. When you go out of here in a suit I got hanging up there at the back, the girls ‘ll be all over you like flies round a honey-pot.”
“Would you mind,” said Archie, “would you mind, as a personal favour to me, old companion, not mentioning that word ‘girls’?”
He broke off. A heavy foot had crossed the threshold of the shop.
“Say, uncle,” said a deep voice, one of those beastly voices that only the most poisonous blighters have, “you seen a young feller run past here?”
“Young feller?” The proprietor appeared to reflect. “Do you mean a young feller in blue, with a Homburg hat?”
“That’s the duck! We lost him. Where did he go?”
“Him! Why, he come running past, quick as he could go. I wondered what he was running for, a hot day like this. He went round the corner at the bottom of the block.”
There was a silence.
“Well, I guess he’s got away,” said the voice, regretfully.
“The way he was travelling,” agreed the proprietor, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in Europe by this. You want a nice suit?”
The other, curtly expressing a wish that the proprietor would go to eternal perdition and take his entire stock with him, stumped out.
“This,” said the proprietor, tranquilly, burrowing his way to where Archie stood and exhibiting a saffron-coloured outrage, which appeared to be a poor relation of the flannel family, “would put you back fifty dollars. And cheap!”
“Fifty dollars!”
“Sixty, I said. I don’t speak always distinct.”
Archie regarded the distressing garment with a shuddering horror. A young man with an educated taste in clothes, it got right in among his nerve centres.
“But, honestly, old soul, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that isn’t a suit, it’s just a regrettable incident!”
The proprietor turned to the door in a listening attitude.
“I believe I hear that feller coming back,” he said.
Archie gulped.
“How about trying it on?” he said. “I’m not sure, after all, it isn’t fairly ripe.”
“That’s the way to talk,” said the proprietor, cordially. “You try it on. You can’t judge a suit, not a real nice suit like this, by looking at it. You want to put it on. There!” He led the way to a dusty mirror at the back of the shop. “Isn’t that a bargain at seventy dollars?… Why, say, your mother would be proud if she could see her boy now!”
A quarter of an hour later, the proprietor, lovingly kneading a little sheaf of currency bills, eyed with a fond look the heap of clothes which lay on the counter.
“As nice a little lot as I’ve ever had in my shop!” Archie did not deny this. It was, he thought, probably only too true.