He had shouted 'Hi!' and The
Man had run. The Man had got into the house under the pretence of
being a friend of Claire's. At the suggestion that he should meet
Claire he had dashed away in a panic. And Claire, both then and
later, had denied absolutely any knowledge of him.
As for the apparently blameless beekeeping that was going on at
the place where he lived, that was easily discounted. Mr Pickering
had heard somewhere or read somewhere--he rather thought that it
was in those interesting but disturbing chronicles of Raffles--that
the first thing an intelligent burglar did was to assume some
open and innocent occupation to avert possible inquiry into his
real mode of life. Mr Pickering did not put it so to himself, for
he was rarely slangy even in thought, but what he felt was that he
had caught The Man and his confederate with the goods.
If Mr Pickering had had his boyhood at the proper time and
finished with it, he would no doubt have acted otherwise than he
did. He would have contented himself with conducting a war of
defence. He would have notified the police, and considered that
all that remained for him personally to do was to stay in his room
at night with his revolver. But boys will be boys. The only course
that seemed to him in any way satisfactory in this his hour of
rejuvenation was to visit the bee farm, the hotbed of crime, and
keep an eye on it.
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