The Camera Fiend

Publisher Marketing: Excerpt: ...with a loaded revolver in his pocket!" pg 162 "Had he brought it from school?" asked Thrush, with a covert frown at the transfigured Mullins. Mr. Upton repeated what he had heard through the young Westminsters, with their father's opinion of pawnbrokers' shops as resorts for young schoolboys, of young schoolboys who frequented them, and of parents and guardians who gave them the chance. How the two gentlemen had parted without fisticuffs became the latest mystery to Eugene Thrush, whose only comment was that it behoved him all the more to do something to redeem the capital in the other's eyes. "Now we know why my poor wife heard a shot!" was the only rejoinder, in a voice not too broken to make Mullins prick up his ears; it was the first he had heard about the dream. "I wouldn't say that, Mr. Upton. We know no more than we knew before. Yet I will own now," exclaimed Thrush, catching Mullins's bright eye, "that the coincidence will be tremendous if there's nothing in it!" But only half the coincidence was present in the father's mind; no thought of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist-apologised-and humbly entreated him to take a more hopeful view. pg 163 "There may have been an accident, Thrush, but not necessarily a fatal one!" An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins and nods behind the poor father's back. Thrush looked at both men with the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being-looked and frowned again-frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush that it lit him... Contributor Bio:  Hornung, E W Ernest William Hornung (1866 -1921) was a prolific English poet and novelist, famed for his A. J. Raffles series of novels about a gentleman thief in late 19th century London. Hornung spent most of his life in England and France, but in 1883 he traveled to Australia where he lived for three years, his experiences there shaping many of his novels and short stories. On returning to England he worked as a journalist, and also published many of his poems and short stories in newspapers and magazines. A few years after his return, he married Constance Aimee Doyle, sister of his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he had a son. During WWI he followed the troops in French trenches and later gave a detailed account of his encounters in "Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front". Ernest Hornung died in 1921.