Chapter XXVII.In the LibraryGeorge returned to the library, and sorting the smaller keys from the others on the ring he tried them one after the other in the lock of the trunk. He was beginning to despair when at length one fitted, and snapping down the hasps he threw back the lid.They could not have packed very well, he and Norman, or else the expressmen had been unusually rough in handling the trunk. Its contents had been flung about in wild disorder, and George thought ruefully of the delicate clock and the glass ink-well of the desk set.He picked out the caps and a mackinaw which might come in handy, and was on the point of closing the trunk when he hesitated. It might be as well to see if that clock were damaged or not; it had been Leila’s gift and George knew how much Norman thought of it.He lifted the other garments out and then the books, revealing the remaining articles wrapped loosely in newspaper. He felt about among them until he found the clock, and as he took it up the paper fell from it and partially opened as it dropped to the floor.The clock looked all right; its works might be damaged, but at least it was not smashed!With a sigh of thankfulness George stooped to pick up the paper, when the printed line upon the top margin caught his eye.“Daily Bulletin, June 1st.”That was an odd coincidence! His thoughts strayed back to the notes he had taken from Millard’s disclosures in the Horton case. How many thousands of those newspapers were scattered throughout the city and its environs! Somewhere, someone had put a copy identical with this to its sinister use. Poor Horton!These were only the outside sheets, too! That was funny! The inside ones must be about another package in the trunk, of course. On a sudden impulse George picked up the desk blotter and unwrapped it. Its covering proved to be the outer double page of the ‘Daily Bulletin’ for May 28th! Another of the corresponding dates to those on the papers in Horton’s bag!By jingo, there was something queer about this! Without consciously following his bewildered train of thought any farther, George took each package one by one from the trunk and unwrapped it carefully, laying the papers in a neat pile. When he had finished and the trunk was empty he took the newspapers to the table, and spreading them out with trembling hands he sorted them.Four were complete copies of the ‘Bulletin’ for June sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth; the remainder were the outside pages of that paper for——he caught his breath sharply as he examined them——forMay twenty-eighth,thirtieth, andthirty-first,June first,third, andfourth! And on each of them was scrawled a rough circle with Storm’s apartment number, “One-A”, within it!No other scrap of newspaper was visible anywhere, and George knew they had left none about in that living-room in town when they finished packing. Where could the inside pages be?—He must be mistaken in the dates of those papers found in Horton’s bag! His memory had failed him!With shaking fingers he tore the notebook from his pocket and read the entry, his eyes fairly starting from his head. No, there had been no mistake! The dates were identical!This was the most extraordinary, unheard-of coincidence in all the world! But even as his slow-moving mind strove to grasp it, the conviction came that itcouldnot be a coincidence! One newspaper, maybe, or two, but not six and only six with the inner sheets gone;the same sixwhose outer pages were missing from those in Horton’s bag!As the monstrous, almost unbelievable fact was borne in upon him, George started back from the table, both hands clutching at the meager hair on his temples. He must be going mad! His mind, usually slow and groping, raced back over the events of the past few days, seizing upon events scarcely considered then but now standing out in awful confirmation.On Wednesday afternoon at the club Colonel Walker had told of meeting Storm near the Grand Central Station on Wednesday of the previous week around dinner time; the day and hour at which the train Horton took from Poughkeepsie arrived! Storm had tried to deny it, but when Walker added that it was raining as additional proof of the day, Storm hurriedly admitted an errand to his tobacconist’s.Why had he denied it at first?Then, too, when George arrived at the club he heard Griffiths commiserating with Storm over having been swindled by Du Chainat, and Storm indignantly denying that, too. He remembered the conversation later at dinner in the grill-room, when he had taxed Storm with concealing his acquaintance with the swindler from him. Storm said that he had not told him of it because he was ashamed to admit that Du Chainat had almost duped him.Almost?Had Storm not been fleeced, he would not have concealed his acquaintance with the swindler! His egotism would have made him boast of his escape at the moment of the furore over the Du Chainat exposure!Griffiths had said that Storm was down in the swindler’s list for sixty thousand; that would have meant every cent and more than George knew Storm possessed in the world! From whence, if he had indeed lost that, had come the money for this long foreign trip so suddenly decided upon without apparent reason?George recalled his own theory of Horton’s death: that he had met someone he knew well and trusted absolutely, and placing himself utterly in the supposed friend’s hands, had been done to death without warning.It could not have been Norman Storm! Not that old friend of twenty years, sleeping so peacefully upstairs! George tried to thrust the thought from him in an agony of unspeakable horror, but it remained and would not be exorcised.Suppose by sheer accident or stroke of fate Horton and Storm had met near the station and the latter had taken Horton to his rooms? His rooms, which were so near the place on the Drive where the body was afterward found! Suppose Horton had told of the huge amount in cash that he carried, exhibited it, perhaps, and the sight proved too great a temptation for Storm, already half-crazed with the loss of the last of his fortune?George could not conceive of the man he had loved as a brother deliberately planning a cold-blooded murder, but every known fact fitted in with this hideous supposition. Storm could not have killed Horton in his own rooms and conveyed the body to the place where it was found, but if he could have induced Horton to accompany him there on some pretext——Then the testimony of the policeman whom he himself had met and questioned on Wednesday evening recurred to George’s mind, and he commenced to pace the floor in short, nervous steps as though to get away from the fearful thought that hounded him.The policeman’s description of the heavier set of the two pedestrians whom he had passed on the night of the murder might have fitted Horton—according to the newspaper report on the body—or any of a million other men, perhaps. But his account of the taller man——! George picked up his notebook from the floor where it had fallen from his paralyzed fingers in the shock of the verification of his discovery and read the description again:—“Tall, thin, with a smooth-shaved face and small hands——I saw that much when he put a match to his cigarette. He was dressed all in dark clothes; black, maybe.”George closed the notebook and put it back slowly into his pocket. Tall, thin, smooth-shaven, in mourning, with the inevitable cigarette! It was Storm to the life! His heart, all the accumulating affection of years cried out against the justice of that verdict. A tall, thin man dressed in dark clothes; were there not thousands in the city? But that methodical, inexorable brain of George’s had gone back swiftly to the night after that on which the murder must have taken place, when he and Storm had motored out in Abbott’s car up the road for dinner.They passed twice by the very spot where Horton’s body must still have been lying, and on the first occasion——God! how it had all come back!—Storm had leaned forward, staring, then uttered a sharp exclamation and sank back in his seat; George had had to speak to him twice before he answered.He knew then what lay beyond that wall!The visit to the Police Headquarters, the wager with Millard: all that had been sheer bravado. But what horrible manner of man was this whom he had thought he knew so well! With what outward calm he had received Millard’s revelations at that dinner on Tuesday night! The fact that the newspapers stuffed in Horton’s bag—from which he had thought to remove all clues by taking off these outer sheets with the apartment number on them—had been made special note of must have been a shock to him, and also the news that the bills were marked and a warning had been sent out for them. But perhaps he had already discounted that, perhaps he was depending on the ten thousand in gold to get him out of the country.But why should he go? His salary at the trust company each year was that amount and half again as much. Unless he were quite mad he would not have dreamed of throwing up such a position and committing murder for a comparatively paltry sum in order to gratify a sudden whim for a few months of travel in the East.George’s heart rebounded in a sudden leap of loyalty, and he sought eagerly for evidence in rebuttal. That desperately tired, harassed man who was his friend; that man whose presence was so near, who even now was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion upstairs was not guilty of this fearful thing! Storm would certainly have been mad to commit a crime; but Storm was certainly not mad! He was nervous and worn out and grief-stricken, but he was unquestionably sane. By what ruse could he have gotten Horton’s pistol from him? How separated him from the bag in his charge and how and why become possessed of his hat?These were but trivial details and immaterial to the mass of circumstantial evidence, George realized, and his heart sank once more. Storm could easily have persuaded Horton to leave the bag and pistol there in his own rooms while they went for a short midnight stroll. But what of the hat——?The policeman’s testimony again! He had said that the stocky, heavy-built man wore a cap of some sort! George’s eyes traveled shrinkingly to those he had taken from the trunk. No cap had been found near the body. Perhaps—perhaps it was one of these, here in this room!If events had really occurred as he was mentally evolving them, the bag, together with the hat and pistol, would be all the evidence of the crime except the money itself which remained in Storm’s hands; and he could very readily have been the one to check the bag with the other articles inside at the terminal the next morning as the easiest method of disposing of them. But what had he done with the money? Where was it now?George dropped limply into a chair, his mind struggling with the problem. It did not matter so much at the moment what had become of the money as why Storm had done this fearful thing.For he must have done it! Here was the evidence of the outer sheets of the newspapers, with the apartment number scrawled upon them to corroborate the police theory as to why they had been removed; and every fact, known and surmised, bore out the hideous truth!Why had he killed Horton? The obvious reason, of course, was the possession of the money, but although his capital must have been swept away if he had really been duped by the swindler, he had still his comfortable income in a life-long sinecure. Only desperate men kill, but why was Storm desperate? To get away?Surely that mere impulse would not have been strong enough to force him to murder! What had he to get away from? Only grief-stricken memories of his dead wife; and other men lived down such sorrow. Grief alone could not drive a man from his assured place in the world to become a wanderer in strange lands, a self-exiled pariah! Nothing but the consciousness of guilt could do that, and the fear of retributive justice; but Storm had been guiltless of anything then. George could well imagine his desire to flee the country after Horton was found with his head crushed in—So, too, had Leila died!George sprang from his chair with both clenched fists raised above his head. She, too, had been found with her head crushed, as though by the blow of some heavy, blunt instrument!But, no! No! He was going crazy! Poor Leila had suffered an attack ofpetit mal, she had fallen and struck her head on that rounded brass knob of the fender!But had she?Storm had told him that Dr. Carr had advanced that theory, but George recalled in a sickening wave of horror that the doctor himself had unconsciously contradicted that statement when he was called hurriedly to attend Storm on the night after the funeral; after the visit of the Brewsters with their confession, when Storm had broken down for the first time.Carr had said then that it was Storm who suggested the accidental cause of Leila’s death, but George had been too worried and upset to note the discrepancy at the time.It could not be! It was too vile, too impossible! He was letting his mind run away with him! What cause could Storm have had to kill the thing he loved best in all the world? Leila had been a perfect wife, their happiness was unalloyed. Men only did such a fearful thing in a fit of jealous rage or madness, and Leila had been the last woman in the world——Then the Brewster’s visit recurred to him once more, and Leila’s little white lie which he himself had called forth. And then, without warning, that almost forgotten scene of the morning on the down-town street, before the entrance to the Leicester Building to which he had been a wholly inadvertent witness flashed before his mental vision as though thrown upon a screen, and the whole truth was revealed.George cowered back aghast as from the mouth of a yawning abyss, but he could not deny what his inmost soul confirmed.Storm could not have learned of her birthday surprise for him. His face as George had seen it from across the street had revealed utter stupefaction at seeing his wife issue from the Leicester Building. Then that same evening on the veranda when Leila denied having been in town for weeks and told that palpable falsehood about lunch at the Ferndale Inn: what murderous demon must have entered his breast with the jealous conviction that his wife was deceiving him! George knew his pride, his swift, uncontrollable passion; the thought must have been like a white-hot iron searing his brain!But who could he have imagined had supplanted him? The answer came even as the question formed itself in his mind. Brewster! Richard Brewster had called on Leila the following night to ask about his own wife’s affair. Could Storm have returned early and in secret and found him there? Brewster’s office was in the Leicester Building, too; George had called there on him more than once. Why, the thing was as clear as day!Storm and Leila must have had a fearful scene in the den after Brewster’s departure, and the culmination must have come with that swift, awful blow which laid her dead at her husband’s feet! But with what weapon had that blow been struck?George closed his eyes, shuddering, and visualized the room which was as familiar to him as his own. It contained nothing which could have been put effectively to such a foul use. Even the poker had been removed from the fireplace when it had been banked with ferns for the spring.Horton might have been killed—and probably was—by the blow from a heavy cane, but there was none in the den——The golf sticks! They had been lying there across the den table where he had found them to-night. Storm’s oath when George had brought them here to the library a few hours ago, his gesture of horror and repulsion, his cry to take them out of his sight, that he should never play again—how comprehensible it all was now!All but overcome with the horror of the thought, George went silently out into the hall, gathered up the sticks and returned to the library. As he did so a bestial, raucous snore drifted down from above, and for a minute the very soul of him shook with the longing to rush up the stairs and destroy with his bare hands the vile thing which lay there. The years of friendship were gone wholly now, blotted by his hideous knowledge of the truth. The Norman Storm whom he had known had vanished; indeed, had never existed. In his stead this dissembling creature with a murderer’s black heart had walked among men, free until this hour!Trembling, George laid the sticks one by one across the couch and examined them. No mid-iron could have struck that blow; it would have crashed through the temple and left a frightful, gaping, ragged wound. It must have been something round and smooth, not unlike the brass knob on the fender, since the doctor and coroner had both been easily deceived. Not the putter nor the brassie nor the cleek,—the driver! George picked it up and carried it close to one of the candles. Could it be that he really saw a faint tinge of brown upon its hardwood knob?He laid it aside with a sigh and started once more his restless pacing up and down, as his thoughts returned to the events immediately following Leila’s death, from the moment when he himself had been summoned to the house.No wonder Storm had collapsed in the presence of Richard and Julie Brewster. They had all unconsciously revealed to him his wife’s innocence of the sin for which he had taken her life. It had been not grief alone, but remorse which struck him down! What credulous fools they had all been not to have seen the truth!A confirming memory came to him of Storm’s manner when he awakened from his drugged sleep on the following morning. How anxious he had been to know what he had said during his unconsciousness! That was an effort to learn if he had betrayed himself. How they had all played into his hands!No wonder, too, that later, after George had returned to town, when he telephoned to Storm that Potter’s rooms were to be vacant, he had required little urging to escape from the scene of his unspeakable crime! No wonder that he had said it was “hell” at Greenlea!The consciousness of the undeserved fate which he had visited upon the woman who at the altar had placed her life in his keeping must have driven him all but mad!And yet how quickly his conscience, if he had ever possessed one, had died in the quick fire of his egotism at the ease with which he had evaded justice! George recalled his wild talk about crime; how a man could do anything and get away with it if he only had brains enough. His remorse had been swallowed up by his malevolent, distorted pride of achievement.How easy it was now to trace the subsequent steps! The constantly reiterated condolences of his acquaintances on every hand must have driven him to frenzy; and then had come the chance of miraculous wealth through Du Chainat, for Griffiths must have been right. A lawyer of his brains and reputation would not have referred to it unless he had seen the virtual proof, and George remembered the skepticism with which he had received Storm’s hasty denial.Storm had staked his all on the chance, and lost! Then, hounded by guilty memories and desperate, he had encountered Horton, and the rest was explained.But the money! Where could it be? Having risked so much for it, he would scarcely be likely to leave it out of his immediate possession, and a bag full of money——The valise upstairs!The obviously heavy valise which he would not permit George to touch, which no one else must carry but himself!——Leila’s letters? George’s lip curled in bitter self-scorn. How credulous he had been!Storm must have intended to secrete the money here about the house somewhere until their return from the fishing trip and then make his getaway. But why had he so suddenly changed his mind and evinced willingness to go on the trip at all? Was it to get out of sight and still keep in touch with the progress of the investigation until it had ceased through lack of further evidence to engage the activities of the police?Or was it to get George himself away? Storm knew his theory; George cursed himself for his stupidity, his blindness! He had descanted at length upon his idea of the murder, and Storm, realizing how dangerously near the truth it was, may have planned to keep him out of mischief until the case was dropped.But was that all he had planned?George stood still, stunned with the thought which came to him. Storm had killed two people and gotten away with it; why not a third? Why not George himself, if he suspected that George was likely to come upon the truth? The red trilogy!That selection of a deserted lodge hidden miles away in the heart of the wilderness far from the beaten paths for their headquarters during the fishing trip; the determination to be absolutely alone with George, without even the services of a guide; the insistence upon taking the pistol along——!George eyed the thing with horror and loathing as it lay in the top of the open bag. Then he walked grimly over to it, and picking it up together with the box of cartridges he took it to the table and loaded it with awkward, unaccustomed hands.There was no doubt in his mind as to the course he must pursue; there had been no question of it, from the first moment when conviction came to him that Storm had killed Horton. Now, at the thought of Leila, a passionate regret that his part was not to be a more active one filled his soul, but it brought no hesitation.Laying the pistol down he crossed to the door, and as he closed it softly that harsh, stertorous snore came down the stairs once more, and again that primitive instinct to destroy laid hold upon George; but he shook it off resolutely and returned to the desk. Yet with his hand upon the receiver of the telephone he paused.Dare he speak? That man lying there upstairs in brutish unconsciousness was surely the vilest thing that lived! Yet dare he speak and throw out into the world the knowledge of this fearful thing?Slowly, determinedly, George lifted the receiver.
George returned to the library, and sorting the smaller keys from the others on the ring he tried them one after the other in the lock of the trunk. He was beginning to despair when at length one fitted, and snapping down the hasps he threw back the lid.
They could not have packed very well, he and Norman, or else the expressmen had been unusually rough in handling the trunk. Its contents had been flung about in wild disorder, and George thought ruefully of the delicate clock and the glass ink-well of the desk set.
He picked out the caps and a mackinaw which might come in handy, and was on the point of closing the trunk when he hesitated. It might be as well to see if that clock were damaged or not; it had been Leila’s gift and George knew how much Norman thought of it.
He lifted the other garments out and then the books, revealing the remaining articles wrapped loosely in newspaper. He felt about among them until he found the clock, and as he took it up the paper fell from it and partially opened as it dropped to the floor.
The clock looked all right; its works might be damaged, but at least it was not smashed!
With a sigh of thankfulness George stooped to pick up the paper, when the printed line upon the top margin caught his eye.
“Daily Bulletin, June 1st.”
That was an odd coincidence! His thoughts strayed back to the notes he had taken from Millard’s disclosures in the Horton case. How many thousands of those newspapers were scattered throughout the city and its environs! Somewhere, someone had put a copy identical with this to its sinister use. Poor Horton!
These were only the outside sheets, too! That was funny! The inside ones must be about another package in the trunk, of course. On a sudden impulse George picked up the desk blotter and unwrapped it. Its covering proved to be the outer double page of the ‘Daily Bulletin’ for May 28th! Another of the corresponding dates to those on the papers in Horton’s bag!
By jingo, there was something queer about this! Without consciously following his bewildered train of thought any farther, George took each package one by one from the trunk and unwrapped it carefully, laying the papers in a neat pile. When he had finished and the trunk was empty he took the newspapers to the table, and spreading them out with trembling hands he sorted them.
Four were complete copies of the ‘Bulletin’ for June sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth; the remainder were the outside pages of that paper for——he caught his breath sharply as he examined them——forMay twenty-eighth,thirtieth, andthirty-first,June first,third, andfourth! And on each of them was scrawled a rough circle with Storm’s apartment number, “One-A”, within it!
No other scrap of newspaper was visible anywhere, and George knew they had left none about in that living-room in town when they finished packing. Where could the inside pages be?—He must be mistaken in the dates of those papers found in Horton’s bag! His memory had failed him!
With shaking fingers he tore the notebook from his pocket and read the entry, his eyes fairly starting from his head. No, there had been no mistake! The dates were identical!
This was the most extraordinary, unheard-of coincidence in all the world! But even as his slow-moving mind strove to grasp it, the conviction came that itcouldnot be a coincidence! One newspaper, maybe, or two, but not six and only six with the inner sheets gone;the same sixwhose outer pages were missing from those in Horton’s bag!
As the monstrous, almost unbelievable fact was borne in upon him, George started back from the table, both hands clutching at the meager hair on his temples. He must be going mad! His mind, usually slow and groping, raced back over the events of the past few days, seizing upon events scarcely considered then but now standing out in awful confirmation.
On Wednesday afternoon at the club Colonel Walker had told of meeting Storm near the Grand Central Station on Wednesday of the previous week around dinner time; the day and hour at which the train Horton took from Poughkeepsie arrived! Storm had tried to deny it, but when Walker added that it was raining as additional proof of the day, Storm hurriedly admitted an errand to his tobacconist’s.Why had he denied it at first?
Then, too, when George arrived at the club he heard Griffiths commiserating with Storm over having been swindled by Du Chainat, and Storm indignantly denying that, too. He remembered the conversation later at dinner in the grill-room, when he had taxed Storm with concealing his acquaintance with the swindler from him. Storm said that he had not told him of it because he was ashamed to admit that Du Chainat had almost duped him.Almost?Had Storm not been fleeced, he would not have concealed his acquaintance with the swindler! His egotism would have made him boast of his escape at the moment of the furore over the Du Chainat exposure!
Griffiths had said that Storm was down in the swindler’s list for sixty thousand; that would have meant every cent and more than George knew Storm possessed in the world! From whence, if he had indeed lost that, had come the money for this long foreign trip so suddenly decided upon without apparent reason?
George recalled his own theory of Horton’s death: that he had met someone he knew well and trusted absolutely, and placing himself utterly in the supposed friend’s hands, had been done to death without warning.
It could not have been Norman Storm! Not that old friend of twenty years, sleeping so peacefully upstairs! George tried to thrust the thought from him in an agony of unspeakable horror, but it remained and would not be exorcised.
Suppose by sheer accident or stroke of fate Horton and Storm had met near the station and the latter had taken Horton to his rooms? His rooms, which were so near the place on the Drive where the body was afterward found! Suppose Horton had told of the huge amount in cash that he carried, exhibited it, perhaps, and the sight proved too great a temptation for Storm, already half-crazed with the loss of the last of his fortune?
George could not conceive of the man he had loved as a brother deliberately planning a cold-blooded murder, but every known fact fitted in with this hideous supposition. Storm could not have killed Horton in his own rooms and conveyed the body to the place where it was found, but if he could have induced Horton to accompany him there on some pretext——
Then the testimony of the policeman whom he himself had met and questioned on Wednesday evening recurred to George’s mind, and he commenced to pace the floor in short, nervous steps as though to get away from the fearful thought that hounded him.
The policeman’s description of the heavier set of the two pedestrians whom he had passed on the night of the murder might have fitted Horton—according to the newspaper report on the body—or any of a million other men, perhaps. But his account of the taller man——! George picked up his notebook from the floor where it had fallen from his paralyzed fingers in the shock of the verification of his discovery and read the description again:—“Tall, thin, with a smooth-shaved face and small hands——I saw that much when he put a match to his cigarette. He was dressed all in dark clothes; black, maybe.”
George closed the notebook and put it back slowly into his pocket. Tall, thin, smooth-shaven, in mourning, with the inevitable cigarette! It was Storm to the life! His heart, all the accumulating affection of years cried out against the justice of that verdict. A tall, thin man dressed in dark clothes; were there not thousands in the city? But that methodical, inexorable brain of George’s had gone back swiftly to the night after that on which the murder must have taken place, when he and Storm had motored out in Abbott’s car up the road for dinner.
They passed twice by the very spot where Horton’s body must still have been lying, and on the first occasion——God! how it had all come back!—Storm had leaned forward, staring, then uttered a sharp exclamation and sank back in his seat; George had had to speak to him twice before he answered.He knew then what lay beyond that wall!
The visit to the Police Headquarters, the wager with Millard: all that had been sheer bravado. But what horrible manner of man was this whom he had thought he knew so well! With what outward calm he had received Millard’s revelations at that dinner on Tuesday night! The fact that the newspapers stuffed in Horton’s bag—from which he had thought to remove all clues by taking off these outer sheets with the apartment number on them—had been made special note of must have been a shock to him, and also the news that the bills were marked and a warning had been sent out for them. But perhaps he had already discounted that, perhaps he was depending on the ten thousand in gold to get him out of the country.
But why should he go? His salary at the trust company each year was that amount and half again as much. Unless he were quite mad he would not have dreamed of throwing up such a position and committing murder for a comparatively paltry sum in order to gratify a sudden whim for a few months of travel in the East.
George’s heart rebounded in a sudden leap of loyalty, and he sought eagerly for evidence in rebuttal. That desperately tired, harassed man who was his friend; that man whose presence was so near, who even now was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion upstairs was not guilty of this fearful thing! Storm would certainly have been mad to commit a crime; but Storm was certainly not mad! He was nervous and worn out and grief-stricken, but he was unquestionably sane. By what ruse could he have gotten Horton’s pistol from him? How separated him from the bag in his charge and how and why become possessed of his hat?
These were but trivial details and immaterial to the mass of circumstantial evidence, George realized, and his heart sank once more. Storm could easily have persuaded Horton to leave the bag and pistol there in his own rooms while they went for a short midnight stroll. But what of the hat——?
The policeman’s testimony again! He had said that the stocky, heavy-built man wore a cap of some sort! George’s eyes traveled shrinkingly to those he had taken from the trunk. No cap had been found near the body. Perhaps—perhaps it was one of these, here in this room!
If events had really occurred as he was mentally evolving them, the bag, together with the hat and pistol, would be all the evidence of the crime except the money itself which remained in Storm’s hands; and he could very readily have been the one to check the bag with the other articles inside at the terminal the next morning as the easiest method of disposing of them. But what had he done with the money? Where was it now?
George dropped limply into a chair, his mind struggling with the problem. It did not matter so much at the moment what had become of the money as why Storm had done this fearful thing.
For he must have done it! Here was the evidence of the outer sheets of the newspapers, with the apartment number scrawled upon them to corroborate the police theory as to why they had been removed; and every fact, known and surmised, bore out the hideous truth!
Why had he killed Horton? The obvious reason, of course, was the possession of the money, but although his capital must have been swept away if he had really been duped by the swindler, he had still his comfortable income in a life-long sinecure. Only desperate men kill, but why was Storm desperate? To get away?
Surely that mere impulse would not have been strong enough to force him to murder! What had he to get away from? Only grief-stricken memories of his dead wife; and other men lived down such sorrow. Grief alone could not drive a man from his assured place in the world to become a wanderer in strange lands, a self-exiled pariah! Nothing but the consciousness of guilt could do that, and the fear of retributive justice; but Storm had been guiltless of anything then. George could well imagine his desire to flee the country after Horton was found with his head crushed in—
So, too, had Leila died!George sprang from his chair with both clenched fists raised above his head. She, too, had been found with her head crushed, as though by the blow of some heavy, blunt instrument!
But, no! No! He was going crazy! Poor Leila had suffered an attack ofpetit mal, she had fallen and struck her head on that rounded brass knob of the fender!But had she?Storm had told him that Dr. Carr had advanced that theory, but George recalled in a sickening wave of horror that the doctor himself had unconsciously contradicted that statement when he was called hurriedly to attend Storm on the night after the funeral; after the visit of the Brewsters with their confession, when Storm had broken down for the first time.
Carr had said then that it was Storm who suggested the accidental cause of Leila’s death, but George had been too worried and upset to note the discrepancy at the time.
It could not be! It was too vile, too impossible! He was letting his mind run away with him! What cause could Storm have had to kill the thing he loved best in all the world? Leila had been a perfect wife, their happiness was unalloyed. Men only did such a fearful thing in a fit of jealous rage or madness, and Leila had been the last woman in the world——
Then the Brewster’s visit recurred to him once more, and Leila’s little white lie which he himself had called forth. And then, without warning, that almost forgotten scene of the morning on the down-town street, before the entrance to the Leicester Building to which he had been a wholly inadvertent witness flashed before his mental vision as though thrown upon a screen, and the whole truth was revealed.
George cowered back aghast as from the mouth of a yawning abyss, but he could not deny what his inmost soul confirmed.
Storm could not have learned of her birthday surprise for him. His face as George had seen it from across the street had revealed utter stupefaction at seeing his wife issue from the Leicester Building. Then that same evening on the veranda when Leila denied having been in town for weeks and told that palpable falsehood about lunch at the Ferndale Inn: what murderous demon must have entered his breast with the jealous conviction that his wife was deceiving him! George knew his pride, his swift, uncontrollable passion; the thought must have been like a white-hot iron searing his brain!
But who could he have imagined had supplanted him? The answer came even as the question formed itself in his mind. Brewster! Richard Brewster had called on Leila the following night to ask about his own wife’s affair. Could Storm have returned early and in secret and found him there? Brewster’s office was in the Leicester Building, too; George had called there on him more than once. Why, the thing was as clear as day!
Storm and Leila must have had a fearful scene in the den after Brewster’s departure, and the culmination must have come with that swift, awful blow which laid her dead at her husband’s feet! But with what weapon had that blow been struck?
George closed his eyes, shuddering, and visualized the room which was as familiar to him as his own. It contained nothing which could have been put effectively to such a foul use. Even the poker had been removed from the fireplace when it had been banked with ferns for the spring.
Horton might have been killed—and probably was—by the blow from a heavy cane, but there was none in the den——
The golf sticks! They had been lying there across the den table where he had found them to-night. Storm’s oath when George had brought them here to the library a few hours ago, his gesture of horror and repulsion, his cry to take them out of his sight, that he should never play again—how comprehensible it all was now!
All but overcome with the horror of the thought, George went silently out into the hall, gathered up the sticks and returned to the library. As he did so a bestial, raucous snore drifted down from above, and for a minute the very soul of him shook with the longing to rush up the stairs and destroy with his bare hands the vile thing which lay there. The years of friendship were gone wholly now, blotted by his hideous knowledge of the truth. The Norman Storm whom he had known had vanished; indeed, had never existed. In his stead this dissembling creature with a murderer’s black heart had walked among men, free until this hour!
Trembling, George laid the sticks one by one across the couch and examined them. No mid-iron could have struck that blow; it would have crashed through the temple and left a frightful, gaping, ragged wound. It must have been something round and smooth, not unlike the brass knob on the fender, since the doctor and coroner had both been easily deceived. Not the putter nor the brassie nor the cleek,—the driver! George picked it up and carried it close to one of the candles. Could it be that he really saw a faint tinge of brown upon its hardwood knob?
He laid it aside with a sigh and started once more his restless pacing up and down, as his thoughts returned to the events immediately following Leila’s death, from the moment when he himself had been summoned to the house.
No wonder Storm had collapsed in the presence of Richard and Julie Brewster. They had all unconsciously revealed to him his wife’s innocence of the sin for which he had taken her life. It had been not grief alone, but remorse which struck him down! What credulous fools they had all been not to have seen the truth!
A confirming memory came to him of Storm’s manner when he awakened from his drugged sleep on the following morning. How anxious he had been to know what he had said during his unconsciousness! That was an effort to learn if he had betrayed himself. How they had all played into his hands!
No wonder, too, that later, after George had returned to town, when he telephoned to Storm that Potter’s rooms were to be vacant, he had required little urging to escape from the scene of his unspeakable crime! No wonder that he had said it was “hell” at Greenlea!
The consciousness of the undeserved fate which he had visited upon the woman who at the altar had placed her life in his keeping must have driven him all but mad!
And yet how quickly his conscience, if he had ever possessed one, had died in the quick fire of his egotism at the ease with which he had evaded justice! George recalled his wild talk about crime; how a man could do anything and get away with it if he only had brains enough. His remorse had been swallowed up by his malevolent, distorted pride of achievement.
How easy it was now to trace the subsequent steps! The constantly reiterated condolences of his acquaintances on every hand must have driven him to frenzy; and then had come the chance of miraculous wealth through Du Chainat, for Griffiths must have been right. A lawyer of his brains and reputation would not have referred to it unless he had seen the virtual proof, and George remembered the skepticism with which he had received Storm’s hasty denial.
Storm had staked his all on the chance, and lost! Then, hounded by guilty memories and desperate, he had encountered Horton, and the rest was explained.
But the money! Where could it be? Having risked so much for it, he would scarcely be likely to leave it out of his immediate possession, and a bag full of money——
The valise upstairs!The obviously heavy valise which he would not permit George to touch, which no one else must carry but himself!——Leila’s letters? George’s lip curled in bitter self-scorn. How credulous he had been!
Storm must have intended to secrete the money here about the house somewhere until their return from the fishing trip and then make his getaway. But why had he so suddenly changed his mind and evinced willingness to go on the trip at all? Was it to get out of sight and still keep in touch with the progress of the investigation until it had ceased through lack of further evidence to engage the activities of the police?
Or was it to get George himself away? Storm knew his theory; George cursed himself for his stupidity, his blindness! He had descanted at length upon his idea of the murder, and Storm, realizing how dangerously near the truth it was, may have planned to keep him out of mischief until the case was dropped.
But was that all he had planned?George stood still, stunned with the thought which came to him. Storm had killed two people and gotten away with it; why not a third? Why not George himself, if he suspected that George was likely to come upon the truth? The red trilogy!
That selection of a deserted lodge hidden miles away in the heart of the wilderness far from the beaten paths for their headquarters during the fishing trip; the determination to be absolutely alone with George, without even the services of a guide; the insistence upon taking the pistol along——!
George eyed the thing with horror and loathing as it lay in the top of the open bag. Then he walked grimly over to it, and picking it up together with the box of cartridges he took it to the table and loaded it with awkward, unaccustomed hands.
There was no doubt in his mind as to the course he must pursue; there had been no question of it, from the first moment when conviction came to him that Storm had killed Horton. Now, at the thought of Leila, a passionate regret that his part was not to be a more active one filled his soul, but it brought no hesitation.
Laying the pistol down he crossed to the door, and as he closed it softly that harsh, stertorous snore came down the stairs once more, and again that primitive instinct to destroy laid hold upon George; but he shook it off resolutely and returned to the desk. Yet with his hand upon the receiver of the telephone he paused.
Dare he speak? That man lying there upstairs in brutish unconsciousness was surely the vilest thing that lived! Yet dare he speak and throw out into the world the knowledge of this fearful thing?
Slowly, determinedly, George lifted the receiver.