And so on. They’re like children, these country folk. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this lot, all contradicting each other and starting off another rumor as soon as they’d managed to swallow the last one.

But the big question was, where was the doctor?

Because no one had seen him at all since the first yell of Fire. He’d vanished—and so had that Princess, whoever she was, who kept coming into all the different stories I heard.

We’d moved back inside now and I was snug by the fire in the Jolly Huntsman, with a mug of beer and half a dozen sausages in front of me (but I made sure they stayed on the plate this time—till I ate ’em, of course). And now there was a sensible-looking fellow saying how he saw her, the Princess, that is, trying to get away from some little oily fellow who’d got ahold of her—and how he didn’t like the look of him, I mean the sensible-looking fellow didn’t like the look of the oily-looking fellow, so he spilled a mug of beer down his neck for him and made him let go.

“Good for you,” says I. “That was a noble action, giving up your beer like that.”

“My beer?” says he. “Get away—I wouldn’t spill my beer. I got hold of my neighbor’s and used that.”

I said he was a sensible-looking fellow.

But that set me thinking, that little episode. A Princess, appeared from nowhere—and a missing little girl (well, two, but one’ll do for the moment). An uncle, eager to get her back for some dark deed he had in mind—and an oily-looking fellow grabbing hold of the Princess.

Could this oily-looking fellow be the uncle? I never had an uncle, so I couldn’t speak from personal experience, but from observing the uncles of others, I reckoned there was two kinds: fat jolly ones and thin old mean ones. I never heard of an oily uncle—it isn’t right somehow. But all the same, suppose this Princess had been one of those little girls?

Oh, I’m not a fool, you know. I’m no cuckoo.

So—if the Princess had been here a little while ago, she couldn’t be far away now.

So—look for a Princess, and I might find a missing girl.

Or—look for the doctor, and I might find the Princess.

Or—look for the missing girl, and I might find the doctor.

Simple!

I finished my sausages and beer and set out. And blow me down if within the next five minutes I didn’t come across two scoundrels who had the same idea as I did.