Kitabı oku: «No Clue», sayfa 4
VII
THE HOSTILITY OF MR. SLOANE
Delayed by a punctured tire, Hastings reached Sloanehurst when the inquest was well under way. He went into the house by a side door and found Lucille Sloane waiting for him.
"Won't you go to father at once?" she urged him.
"What's the matter?" He saw that her anxiety had grown during his absence.
"He's in one of his awfully nervous states. I hope you'll be very patient with him – make allowances. He doesn't seem to grasp the importance of your connection with the case; wants to ask questions. Won't you let me take you to him, now?"
"Why, yes, if I can be of any help. What do you want me to say to him?"
As a matter of fact, he was glad of the opportunity for the interview. He had long since discovered the futility of inquests in the uncovering of important evidence, and he had not intended to sit through this one. He wanted particularly to talk to Berne Webster, but Sloane also had to be questioned.
"I thought you might explain," she continued hurriedly, preceding him down the hall toward her father's room, "that you will do exactly what I asked you to do – see that the mysterious part of this terrible affair, if there is any mystery in it – see that it's cleared up promptly. Please tell him you'll act for us in dealing with newspaper reporters; that you'll help us, not annoy us, not annoy him."
She had stopped at Sloane's door.
"And you?" Hastings delayed her knock. "If they want you to testify, if Dr. Garnet calls for you, I think you'd better testify very frankly, tell them about the footsteps you heard."
"I've already done that." She seemed embarrassed. "Father asked me to 'phone Mr. Southard, Mr. Jeremy Southard, his lawyer, about it. I know I told you I wanted your advice about everything. I would have waited to ask you. But you were late. I had to take Mr. Southard's advice."
"That's perfectly all right," he reassured her. "Mr. Southard advised you wisely. – Now, I'm going to ask your help. The guest-rooms upstairs – have the servants straightened them up this morning?"
They had not, she told him. Excitement had quite destroyed their efficiency for the time being; they were at the parlour windows, listening, or waiting to be examined by the coroner.
"That's what I hoped," he said. "Won't you see that those rooms are left exactly as they are until I can have a look at them?" She nodded assent. "And say nothing about my speaking of it – absolutely nothing to anybody? It's vitally important."
The door was opened by Sloane's man, Jarvis, who had in queer combination, Hastings thought, the salient aspects of an undertaker and an experienced pick-pocket. He was dismal of countenance and alert in movement, an efficient ghost, admirably appropriate to the twilit gloom of the room with its heavily shaded windows.
Mr. Sloane was in bed, in the darkest corner.
"Father," Lucille addressed him from the door-sill, "I've asked Mr. Hastings to talk to you about things. He's just back from Washington."
"Shuddering saints!" said Mr. Sloane, not lifting his head from the pillows.
Lucille departed. The ghostly Jarvis closed the door without so much as a click of the latch. Hastings advanced slowly toward the bed, his eyes not yet accustomed to the darkness.
"Shuddering, shivering, shaking saints!" Mr. Sloane exclaimed again, the words coming in a slow, shrill tenor from his lips, as if with great exertion he reached up with something and pushed each one out of his mouth. "Sit down, Mr. Hastings, if I can control my nerves, and stand it. What is it?"
His hostility to the caller was obvious. The evident and grateful interest with which the night before he had heard the detective's stories of crimes and criminals had changed now to annoyance at the very sight of him. As a raconteur, Mr. Hastings was quite the thing; as protector of the Sloane family's privacy and seclusion, he was a nuisance. Such was the impression Mr. Hastings received.
At a loss to understand his host's frame of mind, he took a chair near the bed.
Mr. Sloane stirred jerkily under his thin summer coverings.
"A little light, Jarvis," he said peevishly. "Now, Mr. Hastings, what can I do for – tell you?"
Jarvis put back a curtain.
"Quivering and crucified martyrs!" the prostrate man burst forth. "I said a little, Jarvis! You drown my optic nerves in ink and, without a moment's warning, flood them with the glaring brilliancy of the noonday sun!" Jarvis half-drew the curtain. "Ah, that's better. Never more than an inch at a time, Jarvis. How many times have I told you that? Never give me a shock like that again; never more than an inch of light at a time. Frantic fiends! From cimmerian, abysmal darkness to Sahara-desert glare!"
"Yes, sir," said Jarvis, as if on the point of digging a grave – for himself. "Beg pardon, sir."
He effaced himself, in shadows, somewhere behind Hastings, who seized the opportunity to speak.
"Miss Sloane suggested that you wanted certain information. In fact, she asked me to see you."
"My daughter? Oh, yes!" The prone body became semi-upright, leaned on an elbow. "Yes! What I want to know is, why – why, in the name of all the jumping angels, everybody seems to think there's a lot of mystery connected with this brutal, vulgar, dastardly crime! It passes my comprehension, utterly! – Jarvis, stop clicking your finger-nails together!" This with a note of exaggerated pleading. "You know I'm a nervous wreck, a total loss physically, and yet you stand there in the corner and indulge yourself wickedly, wickedly, in that infernal habit of yours of clicking your finger-nails! Mute and mutilated Christian martyrs!"
He fell back among the pillows, breathing heavily, the perfect picture of exhaustion. Jarvis came near on soundless feet and applied a wet cloth to his master's temples.
The old man regarded them both with unconcealed amazement.
"You'll have to excuse me, Mr. Hastings, really, I can't be annoyed!" the wreck, somewhat revived, announced feebly. "All I said to my daughter, Miss Sloane, is what I say to you now: I see no reason why we should employ you, or indeed why you should be connected with this affair. You were my guest, here, at Sloanehurst. Unfortunately, some ruffian of whom we never heard, whose existence we never suspected – Jarvis, take off this counterpane; you're boiling me, parboiling me; my nerves are seething, simmering, stewing! Athletic devils! Have you no discrimination, Jarvis? – as I was saying, Mr. Hastings, somebody stabbed somebody else to death on my lawn, unfortunately marring your visit. But that's all. I can't see that we need you – thank you, nevertheless."
The dismissal was unequivocal. Hastings got to his feet, his indignation all the greater through realization that he had been sent for merely to be flouted. And yet, this man's daughter had come to him literally with tears in her eyes, had begged him to help her, had said that money was the smallest of considerations. Moreover, he had accepted her employment, had made the definite agreement and promise. Apparently, Sloane was in no condition to act independently, and his daughter had known it, had hoped that he, Hastings, might soothe his silly mind, do away with his objections to assistance which she knew he needed.
There was, also, the fact that Lucille believed her father unaccountably interested, if not implicated, in the crime. He could not get away from that impression. He was sure he had interpreted correctly the girl's anxiety the night before. She was working to save her father – from something. And she believed Berne Webster innocent.
These were some of the considerations which, flashing through his mind, prevented his giving way to righteous wrath. He most certainly would not allow Arthur Sloane to eliminate him from the situation. He sat down again.
The nervous wreck made himself more understandable.
"Perhaps, Jarvis," he said, shrinking to one side like a man in sudden pain, "the gentleman can't see how to reach that large door. A little more light, half an inch-not a fraction more!"
"Don't bother," Hastings told Jarvis. "I'm not going quite yet."
"Leaping crime!" moaned Mr. Sloane, digging deeper into the pillows, "Frantic imps!"
"I hope I won't distress you too much," the detective apologized grimly, "if I ask you a few questions. Fact is, I must. I'm investigating the circumstances surrounding what may turn out to be a baffling crime, and, irrespective of your personal wishes, Mr. Sloane, I can't let go of it. This is a serious business – "
The sick man sat up in bed with surprising abruptness.
"Serious business! Serious saints! – Jarvis, the eau de cologne! – You think I don't know it? They make a slaughter-house of my lawn. They make a morgue of my house. They hold a coroner's inquest in my parlour. They're in there now – live people like ravens, and one dead one. They cheat the undertaker to plague me. They wreck me all over again. They give me a new exhaustion of the nerves. They frighten my daughter to death. – Jarvis, the smelling salts. Shattered saints, Jarvis! Hurry! Thanks. – They rig up lies which, Tom Wilton, my old and trusted friend, tells me, will incriminate Berne Webster. They sit around a corpse in my house and chatter by the hour. You come in here and make Jarvis nearly blind me.
"And, then, then, by the holy, agile angels! you think you have to persuade me it's a serious business! Never fear! I know it! – Jarvis, the bromide, quick! Before I know it, they'll drive me to opiates. – Serious business! Shrivelled and shrinking saints!"
Arms clasped around his legs, knees pressed against his chin, Mr. Sloane trembled and shook until Jarvis, more agile than the angels of whom his employer had spoken, gave him the dose of bromides.
Still, Mr. Hastings did not retire.
"I was going to say," he resumed, in a tone devoid of compassion, "I couldn't drop this thing now. I may be able to find the murderer; and you may be able to help me."
"I?"
"Yes."
"Isn't it Russell? He's among the ravens now, in my parlour. Wilton told me the sheriff was certain Russell was the man. Murdered martyrs! Sacrificed saints! Can't you let a guilty man hang when he comes forward and puts the rope around his own worthless neck?"
"If Russell's guilty," Hastings said, glad of the information that the accused man was then at Sloanehurst, "I hope we can develop the necessary evidence against him. But – "
"The necessary – "
"Let me finish, Mr. Sloane, if you please!" The old man was determined to disregard the other's signs of suffering. He did not believe that they were anything but assumed, the exaggerated camouflage which he usually employed as an excuse for idleness. "But, if Russell isn't guilty, there are facts which may help me to find the murderer. And you may have valuable information concerning them."
"Sobbing, sorrowing saints!" lamented Mr. Sloane, but his trembling ceased; he was closely attentive. "A cigarette, Jarvis, a cigarette! Nerves will be served. – I suppose the easiest way is to submit. Go on."
"I shall ask you only two or three questions," Hastings said.
The jackknife-like figure in the bed shuddered its repugnance.
"I've been told, Mr. Sloane, that Mr. Webster has been in great need of money, as much as sixty-five thousand dollars. In fact, according to my information, he needs it now."
"Well, did he kill the woman, expecting to find it in her stocking?"
"The significance of his being hard-pressed, for so large an amount," the old man went on, ignoring the sarcasm, "is in the further charge that Miss Brace was trying to make him marry her, that he should have married her, that he killed her in order to be free to marry your daughter – for money."
"My daughter! For money!" shrilled Sloane, neck elongated, head thrust forward, eyes bulging. "Leaping and whistling cherubim!" For all his outward agitation, he seemed to Hastings in thorough command of his logical faculties; it was more than possible, the detective thought, that the expletives were time-killers, until he could decide what to say. "It's ridiculous, absurd! Why, sir, you reason as loosely as you dress! Are you trying to prostrate me further with impossible theories? Webster marry my daughter for money, for sixty-five thousand dollars? He knows I'd let him have any amount he wanted. I'd give him the money if it meant his peace of mind and Lucille's happiness. – Dumb and dancing devils! Jarvis, a little whiskey! I'm worn out, worn out!"
"Did you ever tell Mr. Webster of the extent of your generous feeling toward him, Mr. Sloane – in dollars and cents?"
"No; it wasn't necessary. He knows how fond of him I am."
"And you would let him have sixty-five thousand dollars – if he had to have it?"
"I would, sir! – today, this morning."
"Now, one other thing, Mr. Sloane, and I'm through. It's barely possible that there was some connection between this murder and a letter which came to Sloanehurst yesterday afternoon, a letter in an oblong grey envelope. Did – "
The nervous man went to pieces again, beat with his open palms on the bed covering.
"Starved and stoned evangels, Jarvis! Quit balling your feet! You stand there and see me harassed to the point of extinction by a lot of crazy queries, and you indulge yourself in that infernal weakness of yours of balling your feet! Leaping angels! You know how acute my hearing is; you know the noise of your sock against the sole of your shoe when you ball your feet is the most exquisite torture to me! A little whiskey, Jarvis! Quick!" He spoke now in a weak, almost inaudible voice to Hastings: "No; I got no such letter. I saw no such letter." He sank slowly back to a prone posture.
"I was going to remind you," the detective continued, "that I brought the five o'clock mail in. Getting off the car, I met the rural carrier; he asked me to bring in the mail, saving him the few steps to your box. All there was consisted of a newspaper and one letter. I recall the shape and colour of the envelope – oblong, grey. I did not, of course, look at the address. I handed the mail to you when you met me on the porch."
Mr. Sloane, raising himself on one elbow to take the restoring drink from Jarvis, looked across the glass at his cross-examiner.
"I put the mail in the basket on the hall table," he said in high-keyed endeavour to express withering contempt. "If it had been for me, Jarvis would have brought it to me later. I seldom carry my reading glasses about the house with me."
Hastings, subjecting the pallid Jarvis to severe scrutiny, asked him:
"Was that grey letter addressed to – whom?"
"I didn't see it," replied Jarvis, scarcely polite.
"And yet, it's your business to inspect and deliver the household's mail?"
"Yes, sir."
"What became of it, then – the grey envelope?"
"I'm sure I can't say, sir, unless some one got it before I reached the mail basket."
Hastings stood up. Interrogation of both master and man had given him nothing save the inescapable conviction that both of them resented his questioning and would do nothing to help him. The reason for this opposition he could not grasp, but it was a fact, challenging his analysis. Arthur Sloane rejected his proffered help in the pursuit of the man who had brought murder to the doors of Sloanehurst. Why? Was this his method of hiding facts in his possession?
Hastings questioned him again:
"Your waking up at that unusual hour last night – was it because of a noise outside?"
The neurasthenic, once more recumbent, succeeded in voicing faint denial of having heard any noises, outside or inside. Nor had he been aware of the murder until called by Judge Wilton. He had turned on his light to find the smelling-salts which, for the first time in six years, Jarvis had failed to leave on his bed-table, – terrible and ill-trained apes! Couldn't he be left in peace?
The hall door opened, admitting Judge Wilton. The newcomer, with a word of greeting to Hastings, sat down on the bedside and put a hand on Sloane's shoulder.
Hastings turned to leave the room.
"Any news?" the judge asked him.
"I've just been asking Mr. Sloane that," Hastings said, in a tone that made Wilton look swiftly at his friend's face.
"I told Arthur this morning," he said, "how lucky he was that you'd promised Lucille to go into this thing."
"Apparently," Hastings retorted drily, "he's unconvinced of the extent of his good fortune."
Mr. Sloane, quivering from head to foot, mourned softly: "Unfathomable fate!"
Wilton, his rugged features softening to frank amusement, stared a moment in silence at Sloane's thin face, at the deeply lined forehead topped by stringy grey hair.
"See here, Arthur," he protested, nodding Hastings an invitation to remain; "you know as much about crime as Hastings and I. If you've thought about this murder at all, you must see what it is. If Russell isn't guilty – if he's not the man, that crime was committed shrewdly, with forethought. And it was a devilish thing – devilish!"
"Well, what of it?" Sloane protested shrilly, not opening his eyes.
"Take my advice. Quit antagonizing Mr. Hastings. Be thankful that he's here, that he's promised to run down the guilty man."
Mr. Sloane turned his face to the wall.
"A little whiskey, Jarvis," he said softly. "I'm exhausted, Tom. Leave me alone."
Wilton waved his hand, indicative of the futility of further argument.
"Judge," announced Hastings, at the door, "I'll ask you a question I put to Mr. Sloane. Did you receive, or see, a letter in an oblong, grey envelope in yesterday afternoon's mail?"
"No. I never get any mail while I'm here for a week-end."
Wilton followed the detective into the hall.
"I hope you're not going to give up the case, Hastings. You won't pay any attention to Arthur's unreasonable attitude, will you?"
"I don't know," Hastings said, still indignant. "I made my bargain with his daughter. I'll see her."
"If you can't manage any other way, I – or she – will get any information you want from Arthur."
"I hope to keep on. It's a big thing, I think." The old man was again intent on solving the problem. "Tell me, judge; do you think Berne Webster's guilty?" Seeing the judge's hesitance, he supplemented: "I mean, did you notice anything last night, in his conduct, that would indicate guilt – or fear?"
Later, when other developments gave this scene immense importance, Hastings, in reviewing it, remembered the curious little flicker of the judge's eyelids preceding his reply.
"Absolutely not," he declared, with emphasis. "Are you working on that" – he hesitated hardly perceptibly – "idea?"
VIII
THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY
Ancestors of the old family from whom Arthur Sloane had purchased this colonial mansion eight years ago still looked out of their gilded frames on the parlour walls, their high-bred calm undisturbed, their aristocratic eyes unwidened, by the chatter and clatter of the strangers within their gates. Hastings noticed that even the mob and mouthing of a coroner's inquest failed to destroy the ancient atmosphere and charm of the great room. He smiled. The pictured grandeur of a bygone age, the brocaded mahogany chairs, the tall French mirrors – all these made an incongruous setting for the harsh machinery of crime-inquiry.
The detective had completed his second and more detailed search of the guest-rooms in time to hear the words and study the face of the last witness on Dr. Garnet's list. That was Eugene Russell.
"One of life's persimmons – long before frost!" Hastings thought, making swift appraisal. "A boneless spine – chin like a sheep – brave as a lamb."
Russell could not conceal his agitation. In fact, he referred to it. Fear, he explained in a low, husky voice to the coroner and the jury, was not a part of his emotions. His only feeling was sorrow, varied now and then by the embarrassment he felt as a result of the purely personal and very intimate facts which he had to reveal.
His one desire was to be frank, he declared, his pale blue eyes roving from place to place, his nervous fingers incessantly playing with his thin, uncertain lips. This mania for truthfulness, he asserted, was natural, in that it offered him the one sure path to freedom and the establishment of his innocence of all connection with the murder of the woman he had loved.
He was, he testified, thirty-one years old, a clerk in a real-estate dealer's office and a native of Washington. Mildred Brace had been employed for a few weeks by the same firm for which he worked, and it was there that he had met her. Although she had refused to marry him on the ground that his salary was inadequate for the needs of two people, she had encouraged his attentions. Sometimes, they had quarrelled.
"Speak up, Mr. Russell!" Dr. Garnet directed. "And take your time. Let the jury hear every word you utter."
After that, the witness abandoned his attempt to exclude the family portraits from his confidence, but his voice shook.
"Conductor Barton is right," he said, responding to the coroner's interrogation. "I did come out on his car, the car that gets to the Sloanehurst stop at ten-thirty, and I did leave the car at the Ridgecrest stop, a quarter of a mile from here. I was following Mil – Miss Brace. I saw her leave her apartment house, the Walman. I followed her to the transfer station at the bridge, and I saw her take the car there. I followed on the next car. I knew where she was going, knew she was going to Sloanehurst."
"How did you know that, Mr. Russell?"
"I mean I was certain of it. She'd told me Mr. Berne Webster, the lawyer she'd been working for, was out here spending the week-end; and I knew she was coming out to meet him."
"Why did she do that?"
Mr. Russell displayed pathetic embarrassment and confusion before he answered that. He plucked at his lower lip with spasmodic fingers. His eyes were downcast. He attempted a self-deprecatory smile which ended in an unpleasant grimace.
"She wouldn't say. But it was because she was in love with him."
"And you were jealous of Mr. Webster?"
"We-ell – yes, sir; that's about it, I guess."
"Did Miss Brace tell you she was coming to Sloanehurst?"
"No, sir. I suspected it."
"And watched her movements?"
"Yes, sir."
"And followed her?"
"Yes."
"Why did you think she was in love with Mr. Webster, Mr. Russell? And please give us a direct answer. You can understand the importance of what you're about to say."
"I do. I thought so because she had told me that he was in love with her, and because of her grief and anger when he dismissed her from his office. And she did everything to make me think so, except declaring it outright. She did that because she knew I hated to think she was in love with him."
"All right, Mr. Russell. Now, tell us what happened during your – ah – shadowing Miss Brace the night she was killed."
"I got off the car at Ridgecrest and walked toward Sloanehurst. It was raining then, pretty hard. I thought she had made an appointment to meet Mr. Webster somewhere in the grounds here. It was a quarter to eleven when I got to the little side-gate that opens on the lawn out there on the north side of the house."
"How did you know that?"
"I looked at my watch then. It's got a luminous dial."
"You were then at the gate near where she was found, dead?"
"Yes. And she was at the gate."
"Oh! So you saw her?"
"I saw her. When I lifted the latch of the gate, she came toward me. There was a heavy drizzle then. I thought she had been leaning on the fence a few feet away. She whispered, sharp and quick, 'Who's that?' I knew who she was, right off. I said, 'Gene.'
"She caught hold of my arm and shook it. She told me, still whispering, if I didn't get away from there, if I didn't go back to town, she'd raise an alarm, accuse me of trying to kill her – or she'd kill me. She pressed something against my cheek. It felt like a knife, although I couldn't see, for the darkness."
The witness paused and licked his dry lips. He was breathing fast, and his restless eyes had a hunted look. The people in the room leaned farther toward him, some believing, some doubting him.
Hastings thought: "He's scared stiff, but telling the truth – so far."
"All right; what next?" asked Dr. Garnet, involuntarily lowering his voice to Russell's tone.
"I accused her of having an appointment to meet Webster there. I got mad. I hate to have to tell all this, gentlemen; but I want to tell the truth. I told her she was a fool to run after a man who'd thrown her over.
"'It's none of your look-out what I do!' she told me. 'You get away from here, now – this minute! You'll be sorry if you don't!' There was something about her that frightened me, mad as I was. I'd never seen her like that before."
"What do you mean?" Garnet urged him.
"I thought she would kill me, or somebody else would, and she knew it. I got the idea that she was like a crazy woman, out of her head about Webster, ready to do anything desperate, anything wild. I can't explain it any better than that."
"And did you leave her?"
"Yes, sir."
"At once?"
"Practically. A sort of panic got hold of me. I can't explain it, really."
Russell, seeking an illuminative phrase, gave vent to a long-drawn, anxious sigh. He appeared to feel no shame for his flight. His fear was that he would not be believed.
"Just as she told me a second time to leave her, I thought I heard somebody coming toward us, a slushy, dull sound, like heavy footsteps on the wet grass. Mildred's manner, her voice, had already scared me.
"When I heard those footsteps, I turned and ran. My heart was in my mouth. I ran out to the road and back toward Washington. I ran as fast as I could. Twice I fell on my hands and knees. I can't tell you exactly how it was, why it was. I just knew something terrible would happen if I stayed there. I never had a feeling like that before. I was more afraid of her than I was of the man coming toward us."
Members of the jury pushed back their chairs, were audible with subdued exclamations and long breaths, relieved of the nervous tension to which Russell's story of the encounter at the gate had lifted them. They were, however, prejudiced against him, a fact which he grasped.
One of them asked him:
"Can you tell us why you followed her out here?"
"Why?" Russell echoed, like a man seeking time for deliberation.
"Yes. What did you think you'd do after you'd overtaken her?"
"Persuade her to go back home with me. I wanted to save her from doing anything foolish – anything like that, you know."
"But, from what you've told us here this morning, it seems you never had much influence on her behaviour. Isn't that true?"
"I suppose it is. – But," Russell added eagerly, "I can prove I had no idea of hurting her, if that's what you're hinting at. I can prove I never struck her. At twenty minutes past eleven last night I was four miles from here. Mr. Otis, a Washington commission merchant, picked me up in his automobile, six miles outside of Washington and took me into town. I couldn't have made that four miles on foot, no matter how I ran, in approximately fifteen or twenty minutes.
"It's been proved that she was struck down after eleven anyway. – You said the condition of the body showed that, doctor. – You see, I would have had to make the four miles in less than twenty minutes – an impossibility. You see?"
His eagerness to win their confidence put a disagreeable note, almost a whimper, into his voice. It grated on Dr. Garnet.
It affected Hastings more definitely.
"Now," he decided, "he's lying – about something. But what?" He noted a change in Russell's face, a suggestion of craftiness, the merest shadow of slyness over his general attitude of anxiety. And yet, this part of his story seemed straight enough.
Dr. Garnet's next question brought out the fact that it would be corroborated.
"This Mr. Otis, Mr. Russell; where is he?"
"Right there, by the window," the witness answered, with a smug smile which gave him a still more unprepossessing look.
Jury and spectators turned toward the man at the window. They saw a clean-shaven, alert-looking person of middle age, who nodded slightly in Russell's direction as if endorsing his testimony. There seemed no possible grounds for doubting whatever Otis might say. Hastings at once accepted him as genuine, an opinion which, it was obvious, was shared by the rest of the assemblage.
Russell sensed the change of sentiment toward himself. Until now, it had been a certainty that he would be held for the murder. But his producing an outsider, incontestably a trustworthy man, to establish the truth of his statement that he had been four miles away from the scene of the crime a quarter of an hour after it had been committed – that was something in his favour which could not be gainsaid.
Granting even that he had had an automobile at his disposal – a supposition for which there was no foundation – his alibi would still have been good, in view of the rain and the fact that one of the four miles in question was "dirt road."
With the realization of this, the jury swung back to the animus it had felt against Webster, the incredulity with which it had received his statement that there had been between him and the dead woman no closer relationship than that of employer and employe.
Webster, seated near the wall furthest from the jury, felt the inquiry of many eyes upon him, but he was unmoved, kept his gaze on Russell.
Dr. Garnet, announcing that he would ask Mr. Otis to testify a little later, handed Russell the weapon with which Mildred Brace had been murdered.
"Have you ever seen that dagger before?" he asked.
Russell said he had not. Reminded that Sheriff Crown had testified to searching the witness's room and had discovered that a nail file was missing from his dressing case, a file which, judging by other articles in the case, must have been the same size as the one used in making the amateur dagger, Russell declared that his file had been lost for three years. He had left it in a hotel room on the only trip he had ever taken to New York.
He gave way to Mr. Otis, who described himself as a commission merchant of Washington. Returning from a tour to Lynchburg, Virginia, he said, he had been hailed last night by a man in the road and had agreed to take him into town, a ride of six miles. Reaching Washington shortly before midnight, he had dropped his passenger at Eleventh and F streets.
