My experience as a detective has convinced me that the evident is usually true; that in a great majority of cases crime leaves a straight trail, and ambiguities are more often due to the inability of the trailer than to the cunning of the trailed. Such reputation as I have established is due to acceptance of and earnest adherence to the obvious.
In this affair of Thomas Gilbert's death, everything so far pointed one way. The body had been found in a bolted room, revolver in hand; on the wall over the mantel hung the empty holster; Worth assured me the gun was kept always loaded; and there might be motive enough for suicide in the quarrel last night between father and son.
Because of that flitting shadow I had seen, I knew this place was not impervious. Some one person, at least, could enter and leave the room easily, quickly, while its doors were locked. But that might be Hughes—or even Worth—with some reason for doing so not willingly explained, and some means not readily seen. It probably had nothing to do with Thomas Gilbert's sudden death, could not offset in my mind the conviction of Thomas Gilbert's stiffened fingers about the pistol's butt. That I made a second thorough investigation of the study interior was not because I questioned the manner of the death.
I began taking down books from the shelves at regular intervals, sounding the thick dead-wall, in search of a secreted entrance. I came on a row of volumes whose red morocco backs carried nothing but dates.
"Account books?" I asked.
Worth turned his head to look, and the bleakest thing that could be called a smile twisted his lips a little, as he said,
"My father's diaries."
"Quite a lot of them."
"Yes. He'd kept diaries for thirty years."
"But he seems to have dropped the habit. There is no 1920 book."
"Oh, yes there is," very definitely. "He never gave up setting down the sins of his family and neighbors while his eyes had sight to see them, and his hand the cunning to write." He spoke with extraordinary bitterness, finishing, "He would have had it on the desk there. The current book was always kept convenient to his hand."
An idea occurred to me.
"Worth," I asked, "did you see that 1920 volume when you were here last night?"
He looked a little startled, and I prompted,
"Were you too excited to have noticed a detail like that?"
"I wasn't excited; not in the sense of being confused," he spoke slowly. "The book was there; he'd been writing in it. I remember looking at it and thinking that as soon as I was gone, he'd sit down in his chair and put every damn' word of our row into it. That was his way. The seamy side of Santa Ysobellife's recorded in those books. I always understood they amounted to a pack of neighborhood dynamite."
"Got to find that last book," I said.
He nodded listlessly. I went to it, giving that room such a searching as would have turned out a bent pin, had one been mislaid in it. I even took down from the shelves books of similar size to see if the lost volume had been slipped into a camouflaging cover—all to no good. It wasn't there. And when I had finished I was positive of two things; the study had no other entrance than the apparent ones, and the diary of 1920 had been removed from the room since Worth saw it there the night before. I reached for one of the other volumes. Worth spoke again in a sort of dragging voice,
"What do you want to look at them for, Jerry?"
"It's not idle curiosity," I told him, a bit pricked.
"I know it's not that." The old, affectionate tone went right to my heart. "But if you're thinking you'll find in them any explanation of my father's taking his own life, I'm here to tell you you're mistaken. Plenty there, no doubt, to have driven a tender hearted man off the earth.... He was different." Eyeing the book in my hand, the boy blurted with sudden heat, "Those damn' diaries have been wife and child and meat and drink to him. They were his reason for living—not dying!"
"Start me right in regard to your father, Worth," I urged anxiously. "It's important."
The boy gave me his shoulder and continued to stare down into the fire, as he said at last, slowly,
"I would rather leave him alone, Jerry."
I knew it would be useless to insist. Never then orthereafter did I hear him say more of his father's character. At that, he could hardly have told more in an hour's talk.
At random, I took the volume that covered the year in which, as I remembered, Thomas Gilbert's wife had secured her divorce from him. Neatly and carefully written in a script as readable as type, the books, if I am a judge, had literary style. They were much more than mere diaries. True, each entry began with a note of the day's weather, and certain small records of the writer's personal affairs; but these went oddly enough with what followed; a biting analysis of the inner life, the estimated intentions and emotions, of the beings nearest to him. It was inhuman stuff. But Worth was right; there was no soil for suicide in this matter written by a hand guided by a harsh, censorious mind; too much egotism here to willingly give over the rôle of conscience for his friends. Friends?—could a man have friends who regarded humanity through such unkindly, wide open, all-seeing eyes?
Worth, seated across from me on the other side of the fire, stared straight into the leaping blaze; but I doubted if that was what he saw. On his face was the look which I had come to know, of the dignified householder who had gone in and shut the door on whatever of dismay and confusion might be in his private affairs. I began to read his father's version of the separation from his mother, with its ironic references to her most intimate friend.
"Marion would like to see Laura Bowman ship Tony and marry Jim Edwards. I swear the modern woman has played bridge so long that her idea of the most serious obligation in life—the marriage vow—is,'Never mind. If you don't like the hand you have got, shuffle, cut, and deal again!'"
I dropped the book to my knee and looked over at Worth, asking,
"This Mrs. Dr. Bowman that we met last night at Tait's—she was a special friend of your mother's?"
"They were like sisters—in more than one way." I knew without his telling it that he alluded to their common misfortune of being both unhappily married. His mother, a woman of more force than the other, had gained her freedom.
"Femina Priores." I came on an entry standing oddly alone. "Marion is to secure the divorce—at my suggestion. I have demanded that our son share his time between us."
Again I let the book down on my knee and looked across at the silent fellow there. And I had heard him compassionate Barbara Wallace for having painful memories of her childhood! I believe he was at that moment more at peace with his father than he had ever been in his life—and that he grieved that this was so. I knew, too, that the forgiveness and forgetting would not extend to these pitiless records. Without disturbing him, I laid the book I held down and scouted forward for things more recent.
"Laura Bowman"—through one entry after another Gilbert kicked that poor woman's name like a football. Very fine and righteous and high-minded in what he said, but writing it out in full and calling her painful difficulties—the writhing of a sensitive, high-strung woman, mismated with a tyrant—an example notably stupid and unoriginal, of the eternal matrimonial triangle. Bowman evidently kept his sympathy, so faras such a nature can be said to entertain that gentle emotion.
I ran through other volumes, merciless recitals, now and again, of the shortcomings of his associates or servants; a cold blooded misrepresentation of his son; a sneer for the affair with Ina Thornhill, with the dictum, sound enough no doubt, that the girl herself did the courting, and that she had no conscience—"The extreme society type of parasite," he put it. And then the account of his break with Edwards.
Dr. Bowman, it seems, had come to Gilbert in confidence for help, saying that his wife had left his house in the small hours the previous night, nothing but an evening wrap pulled over her night wear, and that he guessed where she could be found, since she hadn't gone to her mother's. He asked Gilbert to be his ambassador with messages of pardon. Didn't want to go himself, because that would mean a row, and he was determined, if possible, to keep the thing private, giving a generous reason: that he wasn't willing to disgrace the woman. All of which, after he'd written it down, the diarist discredited with his brief comment to the effect that Tony Bowman shunned publicity because scandal of the sort would hurt his practice, and his pride as well, and that he didn't go out to Jim Edwards's ranch because, under these circumstances, he would be afraid of Jim.
Thomas Gilbert did the doctor's errand for him. The entry concerning it occupied the next day. I read between the lines how much he enjoyed his position of god from the machine, swooping down on the two he found out there, estimating their situation and behavior in his usual hair-splitting fashion, sitting asa court of last appeal. It was of no use for Edwards to explain to him that Laura Bowman was practically crazy when she walked out of her husband's house as the culmination of a miserable scene—the sort that had been more and more frequent there of late—carrying black-and-blue marks where he had grabbed and shaken her. The statement that it was by mere chance she encountered Jim seemed to have made Gilbert smile, and Jim's taking of her out to the ranch, the assertion that it was the only thing to do, that she was sick and delirious, had inspired Gilbert to say to him, quite neatly, "You weren't delirious, I take it—not more than usual."
Then he demanded that Laura go with him, at once, back to her husband, or out to her mother's. She considered the matter and chose to go back to Bowman, saying bitterly that her mother made the match in the first place, and stood always against her daughter and with her son-in-law whatever he did. Plainly it took all of Laura's persuasions to prevent actual blows between Gilbert and Edwards. Also, she would only promise to go back and live under Bowman's roof, but not as his wife—and the whole situation was much aggravated.
I followed Mr. Thomas Gilbert's observation of this affair: his amused understanding of how much Jim Edwards and Laura hated him; his private contempt for Bowman, to whom he continued to give countenance and moral support; his setting down of the quarrels, intimate, disastrous, between Bowman and his wife, as the doctor retailed them to him, the woman dragging herself on her knees to beg for her freedom, and his callous refusals; backed by threat of the widepublicity of a scandalous divorce suit, with Thomas Gilbert as main witness. I turned to Worth and asked,
"When will Edwards be here?"
"Any minute now." Worth looked at me queerly, but I went on,
"You said he phoned from the ranch. Did he answer you in person—from out there?"
"That's what I told you, Jerry."
My searching gaze made nothing of the boy's impassive face; I plunged again into the diaries, running down a page, getting the heading of a sentence, not delaying to go further unless I struck something which seemed to me important, and each minute thinking of the strangeness of a man like this killing himself. It was in the 1916 volume, that I made a discovery which surprised an exclamation from me.
"What would you call this, Worth? Your father's way of making corrections?"
"Corrections?" Worth spoke without looking around. "My father never made corrections—in anything." It was said without animus—a simple statement of fact.
"But look here." I held toward him the book. There were three leaves gone; that meant six pages, and the entries covered May 31 and June 1. I had verified that before I spoke to him, noticing that the statement of the weather for May 31 remained at the foot of the last page left, while a run-over on the page beyond the missing ones had been marked out. It had nothing to do with the weather. As nearly as I could make out with the reading glass I held over it, the words were, "take the woman for no other than she appears."
"Worth," I urged, "give me your attention for a minute here. You say your father did not make corrections, but one of the diaries is cut. The records of two days are gone. Were those pages stolen?"
"How should I know?" said Worth, and added, helpfully, "Pity they didn't steal the whole lot. That would have been a relief."
There were voices and the sound of steps outside. I shoved the diary back into its place on the shelf, and turned to see Barbara at the broken door with Jim Edwards. She came in, her clear eyes a little wide, but the whole young personality of her quite composed. Edwards halted at the door, a haggard eye roving over the room, until it encountered the blood-stain on the rug, when it sheered abruptly, and fixed itself on Worth, who crossed to shake hands, with a quiet,
"Come in, won't you, Jim? Or would you rather go up to the house?"
Keenly I watched the man as he stood there struggling for words. There was color on his thin cheeks, high under the dark eyes; it made him look wild. The chill of the drive, or pure nervousness, had him shaking.
"Thank you—the house, I think," he said rather incoherently. Yet he lingered. "Barbara's been telling me," he said in that deep voice of his with the air of one who utters at random. "Worth,—had you thought that it might have been happening down here, right at the time we all sat at Tait's together?"
He was in a condition to spill anything. A moment more and we should have heard what it was that had him in such a grip of horror. But as I glanced at Worth, I saw him reply to the older man's questionwith a very slight but very perceptible shake of the head. It had nothing to do with what had been asked him; to any eye it said more plainly than words, "Don't talk; pull yourself together." I whirled to see how Edwards responded to this, and found our group had a new member. In the door stood a decent looking, round faced Chinaman. Edwards had drawn a little inside the threshold for him, but very little, and waited, still shaken, perturbed, hat in hand, apparently ready to leave as soon as the Oriental got out of his way.
"Hello," the yellow man saluted us.
"Hello, Chung," Worth rejoined, and added, "Looks good to see you again."
I was relieved to hear that. It showed me that the cook, anyhow, had not seen Worth last night in Santa Ysobel.
"Just now I hea' 'bout Boss." Chung's eye went straight to the stain on the rug, exactly as Edwards' had done, but it stopped there, and his Oriental impassiveness was unmoved. "Too bad," he concluded, thrust the fingers of one hand up the sleeve of the other and waited.
"Where you been all day?" I said quickly.
"My cousin' ranch."
"His cousin's got a truck farm over by Medlow—or used to have," Worth supplied, and Chung looked to him, instantly.
"You sabbee," he said hopefully. "I go iss mo'ning—all same any day—not find out 'bout Boss. Too bad. Too velly much bad." A pause, then, looking around at the four of us, "I get dinner?"
"We've all had something to eat, Chung," Worth said. "You go now fix room. Make bed. To-night,I stay; Mr. Boyne here stay; Mr. Edwards stay. Fix three rooms. Good fire."
"All 'ite," the chink would have ducked out then, Jim Edwards after him, but I stopped the proceedings with,
"Hold on a minute—while we're all together—tell us about that visitor Mr. Gilbert had last night." I was throwing a rock in the brush-pile in the chance of scaring out a rabbit. I was shooting the question at Chung, but my eye was on Edwards. He glared back at me for a moment, then couldn't stand the strain and looked away. At last the Chinaman spoke.
"Not see um. I go fix bed now."
"Hold on," again I stopped him. "Worth, tell him those beds can wait. Tell him it's all right to answer my questions."
"'S all 'ite?" Chung studied us in turn. I was keeping an inconspicuous eye on Edwards as I reassured him. "'S all 'ite," he repeated with a falling inflection this time, and finished placidly, "You want know 'bout lady?"
"What's all this?" Edwards spoke low.
"About a lady who came to see Mr. Gilbert last night," I explained shortly; then, "Who was she, Chung?"
"Not see um good." The Chinaman shook his head gravely.
"Did she come here—to the study?" I asked. He nodded. Worth moved impatiently, and the Chinaman caught it. He fixed his eyes on Worth. I stepped between them. "Chung," I said sharply. "You knew the lady. Who was she?"
"Not see um good," he repeated, plainly reluctant. "She hold hand by face—cly, I think."
"Good God!" Edwards broke out startlingly. "If we're going to hear an account of all the women that Tom lectured and made cry—leave me out of it."
"One woman will do, for this time," I said to him drily, "if it's the right one," and he subsided, turning away. But he did not go. With burning eyes, he stood and listened while I cross-examined the unwilling Chung and got apparently a straight story showing that some woman had come to the side door of his master's house shortly after dinner Saturday night, walked to the study with that master, weeping, and that her voice when he heard it, sounded like that of some one he knew. I tried every way in the world to get him to be specific about this voice; did it sound like that of a young lady? an old lady? did he think it was some one he knew well, or only a little? had he been hearing it much lately? All the usual tactics; but Chung's placid obstinacy was proof against them. He kept shaking his head and saying over and over,
"No hear um good," until Barbara, standing watchfully by, said,
"Chung, you think that lady talk like this?"
As she spoke, after the first word, a change had come into her voice; it was lighter, higher, with a something in its character faintly reminiscent to my ear. And Chung bobbed his head quickly, nodding assent. In her mimicry he had recognized the tones of the visitor. I glanced at Edwards: he looked positively relieved.
"I'll go to the house, Worth," he said with morecomposure in his tone than I would have thought a few moments ago he could in any way summon. "You'll find me there." And he followed the Chinaman up the moonlit path.
I stood at the door and watched until I saw first Chung's head come into the light on the kitchen porch, then Jim Edwards's black poll follow it. I waited until both had gone into the house and the door was shut, before I went back to Barbara and Worth. They were speaking together in low tones over at the hearth. The three of us were alone; and the blood-stain on the rug, out of sight there in the shadow beyond the table, would seem to cry out as a fourth.
"Barbara," I broke in across their talk, "who was the woman who came here to this place last night?"
She didn't answer me. Instead, it was Worth who spoke.
"Better come here and listen to what Bobs has been saying to me, Jerry, before you ask any questions."
I crossed and stood between the two young people.
"Well," I grunted; and though Barbara's face was white, her eyes big and black, she answered me bravely,
"Mr. Gilbert did not kill himself. Worth doesn't think so, either."
"What!" It was jolted out of me. After a moment's thought, I finished, "Then I've got to know who the woman was that visited this room last night."
For a long while she made no reply, studying Worth's profile as he stared steadily into the fire.No signal passed between them, but finally she came to her decision and said,
"Mr. Boyne, ask Worth what he thinks I ought to say to that."
Instead, "Who was it, Worth?" I snapped, speaking to the back of the young man's head. The red came up into the girl's face, and her eyes flashed; but Worth merely shrugged averted shoulders.
"You can search me," he said, and left it there.
I looked from one to the other of these young people: Worth, whom I loved as I might have my own son had I been so fortunate as to possess one; this girl who had made a place of warmth for herself in my heart in less than a day, whose loyalty to my boy I was certain I might count on. How different this affair must look to them from the face it wore to me, an old police detective, who had bulled through many inquiries like this, the corpse itself, perhaps, lying in the back of the room, instead of the blood-stain we had there on the rug; what was practically the Third Degree being applied to relatives and friends; with the squalid prospect of a court trial ahead of us all. If they'd seen as much of this sort of thing as I had, they wouldn't be holding me up now, tying my hands that were so willing to help, by this fine-spun, overstrained notion of shielding a woman's name.
"Barbara," I began—I knew an appeal to the unaccountable Worth would get me nowhere—"the facts we've got to deal with here are a possible murder, with this lad the last person known—by us, of course—to have seen his father alive. We know, too, that they quarreled bitterly. We know all this. Outside people, men who are interested, and more or lesshostile, were aware that Worth needed money—needs it yet, for that matter—a large sum. I suppose it is a question of time when it will be known that Worth came here last night; and when it is known, do you realize what it will mean?"
Worth had sat through this speech without the quiver of a muscle, and no word came from him as I paused for a reply. Little Barbara, big eyes boring into me as though to read all that was in the back of my mind, nodded gravely but did not speak. I crossed to the shelves and took down the diary whose leather back bore the date of 1916. As I opened it, finding the place where its pages had been removed, I continued,
"You and I know—we three here know—" I included Worth in my statement—"that the crime was neither suicide nor patricide; but it is likely we must have proof of that fact. Unless we find the murderer—"
"But the motive—there would have to be motive."
Barbara struck right at the core of the thing. She didn't check at the mere material facts of how a murder could have been done, who might have had opportunity. The fundamental question of why it should have been was her immediate interest.
"I believe I've the motive here," I said and thrust the mutilated volume into her hand. "Some one stole these leaves out of Mr. Gilbert's diary. The books are filled with intimate details of the affairs of people—things which people prefer should not be known—names, details and dates written out completely. It's likely murder was done last night to get possession of those pages."
She went to the desk and glanced over the book; not the minute examination with the reading glass which I had given it; that mere flirt of a glance which, when I had first noticed it the night before at Tait's, skimming across that description of Clayte, had seemed so inadequate. Then she turned to me.
"Mr. Gilbert cut these out himself," she pronounced.
That brought Worth's head up and his face around to stare at her.
"You say my father removed something he had written?" he asked. Barbara nodded. "He never changed a decision—and those books were his decisions."
"Then this wasn't a correction, but he cut it out. Can't you see, Mr. Boyne? Those leaves were removed by a man who respected the book and was as careful in his mutilation of it as he was in its making. It is precisely written—I'm referring to workmanship, not its literary quality—carefully margined, evenly indented on the paragraph beginnings. And so, in this removal of three leaves, the cutting was done with a sharp knife drawn along the edge of a ruler—" I picked up from where they lay on the blotting pad, a small pearl-handled knife, its sharp blade open, and the ruler I had seen when looking down from the skylight, and placed them before her. She nodded and continued,
"There is a bit of margin left so no other leaves can be loosened by this removal. The marking out of the run-over has been neatly ruled, done so recently that the ink is not yet black—done with that ink in the stand. It was blotted with this." She lifted a hand-blotter to show me the print of a line of ink. Therewere other markings on the face of the soft paper, and I took it eagerly. Barbara smiled.
"You will get little from that," she said. I had not even seen her give it attention. "Scattered words—and parts of words, blotted frequently as they were written. Perhaps, with care, we might learn something, but we can turn more easily to the last pages of his diary and—"
"There are no last pages," I interrupted. "The 1920 book is missing."
"Gone—stolen?" she exclaimed. It brought a smile to my face. For the first time in my experience of this pretty, little bunch of brains, she had hazarded a guess.
"Gone," I admitted coolly—a bit sarcastically. "I've no reason to say stolen."
"But—yes, you have—you have, Mr. Boyne! If it is gone, it was stolen. Is it gone—are you sure it is gone?" Eagerly her eyes were searching desk, cabinet, the shelf where the other diaries made their long row. I satisfied her on that score.
"I have searched the study thoroughly; it is not in this room."
"Was here last night," Worth cut in. "I saw it on the desk."
"And was stolen last night," Barbara reaffirmed, quickly. "These books are too big to be slipped into a pocket, so we can't believe it was left upon Mr. Gilbert's person; and he wouldn't lend it—wouldn't willingly let it go from his possession. So it was stolen; and the man who stole it—killed him." She shuddered.
That was going too swift for me to follow, but Isaw on Worth Gilbert's face his acceptance of it. Either conviction of Barbara's infallibility, or some knowledge locked up inside his own chest, made him certain the diary had been stolen, and the thief was his father's murderer. In a flash, I remembered his words, "putting every damn' word of our row into it," and I shot straight at him,
"Did you take that book, Worth?"
He only shook his head and answered,
"You heard what Bobs said, Jerry."
If he took the book he killed his father; that was Barbara's inference, Worth's acceptance. I threw back my shoulders to cast off the suspicion, then reached across to place my fingers under the girl's hand and pull from it the only record of that last written page, the blotter.
"Will you read me that?" I asked her. "Every word and part of a word—every letter?"
Her eyes smiled into mine with a reassurance that was like balm. Worth rose and found her a hand-glass on the mantel, passing it to her, and with this to reverse the scrawlings, she read and I wrote down in my memorandum book two complete words, two broken words and five single letters picked from overlying marks that were too confused to be decipherable. Though the three of us struggled with them, they held no meaning.
Worth's interest quickly ceased.
"I'll join Jim Edwards in the house," he said, but I stopped him.
"One minute, Worth. There was a woman visitor here last night. It would seem she carried away with her the diary of 1920 and three leaves from the bookof 1916. I want you—you and Barbara—to tell me what you know that happened here in Santa Ysobel on the dates of the missing pages, May 31 and June 1, 1916."
Barbara accepted the task, turning that wonderful cinematograph memory back, and murmured,
"I never tried recollecting on just a bare date this way, but—" then glanced around at me and finished—"nothing happened to me in Santa Ysobel then, because I wasn't in Santa Ysobel. I was in San Francisco and—"
"And I was in Flanders, so that lets me out," Worth broke in brusquely. "I'll go into the house."
"Wait, Worth." I placed a hand on his shoulder. "Go on, Barbara; you had thought of something."
"Yes. Father died in January of that year, and in March I had to vacate the house. It had been sold, and they wanted to fix it over. I left Santa Ysobel on the eighteenth of March, but they didn't get into the house until June first."
Again Worth interrupted.
"Which jogs my memory for an unexciting detail." He smiled enigmatically. "I was jilted June first."
"In Flanders?" How many times had this lad been jilted?
"No. Right here. I wasn't here of course, but the letter which did the trick was written here, and bore that date—June one, 1916."
"How do you get the date so pat?"
"It was handed me by the mail orderly—I was on the Verdun sector then—on the morning of the Fourth of July. Remember the date the letter was written because of the quick time it made. Most of our mailtook from six weeks to eternity. What are you smiling at, Bobs?"
"Just a little—you don't mind, do you?—at your saying you remember Ina's letter by the quick time it made in reaching you."
"Who bought your house, Barbara?" I asked her.
"Dr. Bowman—or rather Mrs. Bowman's uncle bought it and gave it to her."
"And they went in on the first of June, 1916?" I was all excitement, turning the pages of the diary to get to certain points I remembered. "What can either one of you tell me about the state of affairs at that time between Dr. Bowman and his wife—and that man who was just in here—Jim Edwards?"
Worth turned a hostile back; Barbara seemed to shrink in her chair. I hated like a whipping to pull this sort of stuff on them, but I knew that Barbara's knowledge of Worth's danger would reconcile her to whatever painful thing must be done, and I had to know who was that visitor of last night.
"Is that—that stuff in those damnable books?" I saw the hunch of Worth's broad shoulders.
"Some of it is—some of it has been cut out," I replied.
"And you connect Jim Edwards with this crime?"
"I don't connect him—he connects himself—by them, and by his manner."
"Burn them!" He faced me, came over and reached for the book. "Dump the whole rotten mess into the fire, Jerry, and be done with it."
"Easy said, but that would sure be a short cut to trouble. Tell me, I've got to know, if you think thisman Edwards—under great provocation—capable of—well, of killing a fellow creature."
"Jerry," Worth took the book out of my hand and laid it on the table, "what you want to do is to forget this—dirt—that you've been reading, and go at this thing without prejudice. If you open any trails and they lead in my direction, don't be afraid to follow them. This thing of trying to find a criminal in some one that my father has already deeply injured—some one that he's made life a hell for—so that suspicion needn't be directed to me, makes me sick. If I'd allow you to do it, I'd be yellow clear through."
That was about the longest speech I'd heard Worth Gilbert make since his return from France. And he meant every word of it, too; but it didn't suit me. This "Hew to the line" stuff is all right until the chips begin whacking the head of your friend. In this case there wasn't a doubt in my mind that when a breath of suspicion got out that Thomas Gilbert had not killed himself, that minute would see the first finger point at Thomas Gilbert's son as the murderer. So I grumbled,
"Just the same, Edwards has something on his mind about last night."
"He has—and it's pretty nearly tearing him to pieces," Worth admitted, but would go no further.
"He was here last night, I'm sure—and Mrs. Bowman was with him," I ventured.
Barbara, who had been sitting through this her eyes on Worth, turned from him to me and pronounced, gently,
"Yes, he was here, and Laura was with him."
"Bobs!" Worth spoke so sternly that she glanced up startled. "I'll not stand for you throwing suspicion on Jim."
"Did I—do that?" her lip trembled. Worth's eyes were on the fire.
"Don't quarrel with the girl," I remonstrated. Barbara had told me the visitor; I covered my elation with, "She's only looking out for your safety."
"I can look out for myself," curtly. He turned hard eyes on us. It made me feel put away from him, chucked out from his friendship. "And I never quarreled with anybody in my life. Sometimes—" he turned from one to the other of us, speaking slowly, "Sometimes I seem to antagonize people, for no reason that I can see; and sometimes I fight; but I never quarrel."
"No offense intended—or taken," I assured him hastily. My heart was full of his danger, and I told myself that it was his misery spoke, and not the true Worth Gilbert. But a very pale and subdued Barbara said tremulously,
"I guess I'd better go home now," suggesting, after the very slightest pause, "Mr. Boyne can take me."
"Don't, Bobsie." Worth's voice was gentle again, but absent. It sounded as though he had already forgotten both of us, and our possible cause of offense. "Go to the house with Jerry. I'll bar the door and follow."
"Can't I help with that?" I offered.
"No. Eddie will give me a hand if I need it. Go on. I'll be with you in a minute."
But it was considerably more than a minute before Worth followed us to the house. We walked slowly, talking; when I looked back from the kitchen porch, Worth had already come outside, and I thought Eddie Hughes was with him, though I heard no voices and couldn't be sure on account of the shrubbery between.
Getting into the house we found that Chung had the downstairs all opened up through, lights going, heat turned on from the basement furnace; everywhere that tended, homelike appearance a competent servant gives a place. On the hall table as we passed, I noticed a doctorish top coat, with a primly folded muffler laid across it.
"Dr. Bowman is here," Barbara said hardly above her breath.
We listened; no sound of voices from the living room; then I got the tramp of feet that moved back and forth in there. We opened the door, and there were the two men; a queer proposition!
Bowman had taken a chair pretty well in the middle of the room. It was Jim Edwards whose feet I had heard as he roamed about. No word was going between them; apparently they hadn't spoken to each other at all; the looks that met or avoided were thosestrange looks of persons who live in lengthened and what might be termed intimate hostility.
"Ah—Boyne—isn't it?" Bowman greeted me; I thought our coming relieved the situation. He shook hands, then turned to Barbara with, "Mrs. Thornhill said you were here; I told her I would bring you back with me."
I rather wondered not to hear him insist on being taken at once to the study, but his next words gave the reason. He'd reached Santa Ysobel too late for the inquest itself, but not too late to make what he informed us was a thorough investigation of everything it treated of.
Barbara and I found places on the davenport; Edwards prowled up and down the other end of the room, openly in torment. Those stormy black eyes of his were seldom off Bowman, while the doctor's gray, heavy-lidded gaze never got beyond the toes of the restless man's moving boots. He had begun a grumbling tale of the coroner's incompetence and neglect to reopen the inquest when he, the family physician, arrived, as though that were important, when Worth came in.
Instantly the doctor was on his feet, had paced up to the new master of the house, and began pumping his arm in a long handshake, while he passed out those platitudes of condolence a man of his sort deals in at such a time. The stuff I'd been reading in those diaries had told me what was the root and branch of his friendship with the dead man; it made the hair at the back of my neck lift to hear him boasting of it in Jim Edwards' presence, and know what I knew. "And, my dear boy," he finished, "they tell me you'venot been to view the body—yet. I thought perhaps you'd like to go—with me. I can have my machine here in a minute. No?" as Worth declined with a wordless shake of the head.
I hoped he'd leave then; but he didn't. Instead, he turned back to his chair, explaining,
"If Mrs. Thornhill's cook hadn't phoned me, when Mrs. Thornhill had a second collapse last night, I suppose I should be in San Francisco still. The coroner seemed to think there was no necessity for having competent medical testimony as to the time of death, and the physical condition of the deceased. I should have been wired for. The inquest should have been delayed until I arrived. The way the thing was managed was disgraceful."
"It was merciful." Jim Edwards spoke as though unwillingly, in a muttered undertone. Evidently it was the first word he'd addressed to Bowman—if he could be said to address him now, as he finished, "I hadn't thought of an inquest. Yet of course there'd be one in a case of suicide."
Bowman only heard and wholly misconstrued him, snatching at the concluding words,
"Of course it was suicide. Done with his own weapon, taken from the holster where we know it always hung, fully loaded. The muzzle had been pressed so close against the breast when the cartridge exploded that the woolen vest had taken fire. I should say it had smouldered for some time; there was a considerable hole burned in the cloth. The flesh around the wound was powder-scarred."
Worth took it like a red Indian. I could see by the glint of his eye as it flickered over the doctor's face,the smooth white hands, the whole smooth personality, that the boy disliked, and had always disliked him. Yet he listened silently.
I rather hoped by leading questions to get Bowman to express the opinion that Thomas Gilbert had been killed in the small hours of the morning. Circumstances then would have fitted in with Eddie Hughes. Eddie Hughes was to me the most acceptable murderer in sight. But no—nothing would do him but to stick to the hour the coroner had accepted.
"Medical science cannot determine closer than that," he was very final. "The death took place within an hour preceding midnight."
"You are positive it couldn't be this morning?" I asked.
"Positive."
Well, Dr. Bowman's testimony, if accepted at the value the doctor himself placed upon it, would clear Worth of suspicion, for the lad was with me at Tait's from a few minutes past ten until after one; and Jim Edwards, now pacing the floor so restlessly, had also been there the greater part of that time. I had had too much experience with doctor's guesses based onrigor mortisto let it affect my views.
In the minute of silence, we could hear Chung moving about at the back of the house. The doctor spoke querulously.
"Never expect anything of a Chinaman, but I should think when the chauffeur found the body he might have had sense enough to summon friends of the family. He could have phoned me—I was only in San Francisco."
"He could have phoned me at the ranch," Jim Edwards' deep voice came in.
"You? Why should he phone for you?" Bowman wheeled on him at last. "I was the man's physician, as well as his close friend. Everybody knows you weren't on good terms with him. Gad! You wouldn't be here in this house to-night, if he were alive."
In the sort of silence that comes when some one's been suddenly struck in the face, Worth crossed to Edwards and laid an arm along his shoulders.
"I've asked Jim to stay in my place, here, in my house, while I'm away over Monday—and he can do as he likes about whom he chooses to have around."
Bowman gradually got to his feet, his face a study.
"I see," he said. "Then I'll not trespass on your time any longer. I felt obliged to offer my services ... patients of mine ... for years ... in affliction ..." a gleam of anger came into his fishy eyes. "I've been met with damned insolence.... Claiming of the house before your father's decently in his grave." He jerked fully erect. "Leave your affairs in the hands of that degenerate. If he doesn't do you dirt, you'll be the first he's let off! Come, Miss Barbara," to the girl who sat beside me, looking on mutely observant.
"Thank you, doctor." She answered him as tranquilly as though no voice had been raised in anger in that room. "I think I'll stay a little longer. Jim will take me home."
The doctor glared and stalked out. To the last I think he was expecting some one to stop him andapologize. I suppose this was what Worth described naïvely as "antagonizing people without intending to." Well, it might not be judicious; I certainly was glad the doctor was so sure of the time at which his friend Gilbert had met death; yet I couldn't but enjoy seeing him get his. As soon as the man's back was turned, Edwards beckoned Barbara to the window. Worth and I left them talking together there in low tones, he to get something he wanted from a case in the hall, where he called me to the phone, saying long distance wanted me. While I was waiting for my connection (Central, as usual, having gotten me, now couldn't get the other party) the two came from the living room and Barbara said "Good night" to us in passing.
"Those two seem to have something on hand," I commented as they went out. "The little girl gave Bowman one for himself—in the nicest possible way. Don't wonder Edwards likes her for it."
"Poor Laura Bowman! Her friends take turns giving that bloodless lizard she's tied to, one for himself any time they can," Worth said. "My mother used to handle the doctor something like that; and now it's Barbara—little Bobsie Wallace—God bless her!"
He went on into the dining room. I looked after his unconscious, departing figure and thought he deserved a good licking. Why couldn't he have spoken that way to the girl herself? Why hadn't he taken her home, instead of leaving it to Edwards? Then I got my call and answered,
"This is Boyne. Put them through."
In a minute came Roberts' voice.
"Hello, Mr. Boyne?"
"Yes. What you got?"
"Telegram—Hicks—Los Angeles. He's located Steve Skeels—"
"Read me the wire," I broke in.
"All right." A pause, then, "'Skeels arrived here from 'Frisco this morning shall I arrest?'"
"Good!" I exclaimed. "Wire him to keep Steve under surveillance and await instructions. Tell him not to lose him. Get it, Roberts? Hustle it. I'll be in by nine. Good-by," and I hung up.
I looked around; Worth had gone into the dining room; I stepped to the door and saw him kneeling before an open lower door of the built-in sideboard, and noted that the compartment had been steel lined and Yale-locked, making a sort of safe. A lamp at the end of an extension wire stood on the floor beside him; he looked around at me over his shoulder as I put my head in to say,
"Stock in your old suitcase has gone up a notch, Worth. We've caught Skeels."
"So soon?" was all he said. But my news seemed to decide something for him; with a sharp gesture of finality, he put into his breast pocket the package of papers he had been looking at.
When a little later, Edwards came in, Worth was waiting for him in the hall.
"Do we go now?" the older man asked, wincing. Worth nodded.
"Take your machine, Jim," he said. "We can park it at Fuller's and walk back from there. Boyne's roadster is in our garage."
"Anything wrong with Eddie Hughes?" Edwards asked as he stepped in to get his driving gloves. "Ipassed him out there headed for town lugging a lot of freight, and the fellow growled like a dog when I spoke to him."
"I fired him. Come on, Jim—let's get out of this."
"Hold on, Worth," I took a hand. "Fired Hughes? When?"
"While I was fixing up that door—after you and Bobs came to the house."
"What in God's name for?" I asked in exasperation.
"For giving me back talk," said the youth who never quarreled with any one.
He and Edwards tramped out together. I realized that the hostile son and an alienated friend had gone for a last look at the clay that had yesterday been Thomas Gilbert. Of course Worth would do that before he left Santa Ysobel. But would Edwards go in with him—or was he only along to drive the machine? It might be worth my while to know. But I could ask to-morrow; it wasn't worth a tired man's waiting up for. We must make an early start in the morning. I went upstairs to bed.
Instead of driving up to San Francisco with Worth and Barbara, the next morning, I was headed south at a high rate of speed. Sitting in the Pullman smoker, going over what had happened and what I had made of it, vainly studying a small, blue blotter with some senseless hieroglyphics reversed upon it, I wasn't at all sure that this move of mine was anywhere near the right one. But the thing hit me so quick, had to be decided in a flash, and my snap judgment never was good.
We were all at breakfast there at the Gilbert house when I got the phone that those boobs down in Los Angeles had let Skeels slip through their fingers. I could see no way but to go myself. When I went out to retrieve my hand bag from the roadster, there was Barbara already in the seat. I delayed a minute to explain to her. She was full of eager interest; it seemed to her that Skeels ducking the detectives that way was more than clever—almost worthy of a wonder man.
"Slickest thing I ever knew," I grumbled. "You can gamble I wouldn't be going south after him if Skeels hadn't shown himself too many for the Hicks agency—and they're one of the best in the business."
Worth came out and settled himself at the wheel; he and Edwards exchanged a last, low-toned word; andthey were ready to be off. Barbara leaned towards me with shining eyes.
"Perhaps," she said, "Skeels might even be Clayte!" then the roadster whisked her away.
The bulk of Worth Gilbert's fortune was practically tied up in this affair. Even as the Pullman carried me Los Angeles-ward, that boy was getting in to San Francisco, going to the bank, and turning over to them capital that represented not only his wealth but his honor. If we failed to trace this money, he was a discredited fool. Yes, I had done right to come.
So far on that side. Then apprehension began to mutter within me about the situation at Santa Ysobel. How long would that coroner's verdict of suicide satisfy the public? How soon would some seepage of fact indicate that the death was murder and set the whole town to looking for a murderer? The minute this happened, the real criminal would take alarm and destroy evidence I might have gathered if I had stayed by the case. I promised myself that it should be simply "there and back" with me in the Skeels matter.
This is the way it looked to me in the Pullman; then—once in Los Angeles—I allowed myself to get hot telling the Hicks people what I thought of them, explaining how I'd have run the chase, and wound up by giving seven days to it—seven precious, irreclaimable days—while everything lay wide open there in the north, and I couldn't get any satisfactory word from the office, and none of any sort from Worth.
That Skeels trail kept me to it, with my tongue hanging out; again and again I seemed to have him; every time I missed him by an hour or so; and that convinced me that he was straining every nerve, andthat he probably had the whole of the loot still with him. At last, I seemed to have him in a perfect trap—Ensenada, on the Peninsula. You get into and out of Ensenada by steamboat only, except back to the mines on foot or donkey. The two days I had to wait over in San Diego for the boat which would follow the one Skeels had taken were a mighty uneasy time. If I'd imagined for a moment that he wasn't on the dodge—that he was there openly—I'd have wired the Mexican authorities, and had him waiting for me in jail. But the Mexican officials are a rotten lot; it seemed to me best to go it alone.
What I found in Ensenada was that Skeels had been there, quite publicly, under his own name; he had come alone and departed with a companion, Hinch Dial, a drill operator from the mines, a transient, a pick-up laborer, seemingly as close-mouthed as Silent Steve himself. Steve had come on one steamer and the two had left on the next. That north-bound boat we passed two hours off Point Loma was carrying Skeels and his pal back to San Diego!
Again two days lost, waiting for the steamer back. And when I got to San Diego, the trail was stone cold. I had sent Worth almost daily reports in care of my office, not wanting them to lie around at Santa Ysobel during the confusion of the funeral and all; but even before I went to Ensenada, telegrams from Roberts had informed me that these reports could not be delivered as Worth had not been at the office, and telephone messages to Santa Ysobel and the Palace Hotel had failed to locate him. When I believed I had Skeels firmly clasped in the jaws of the Ensenada trap, I had sent a complete report of my doings up to thattime, and the optimistic outlook then, to Barbara with instructions for her to get it to Worth. She would know where he was.
But she hadn't. Her reply, waiting at San Diego for me, a delicious little note that somehow lightened the bitterness of my disappointment over Skeels, told me that she had seen Worth at the funeral, almost a week ago now, but only for a minute; that she had supposed he had joined me on the Skeels chase; and she would now try to hunt him up and deliver my report. Roberts, too, had a line in one of his reports that Worth had called for the suitcase on the Monday I left and had neither returned it nor been in the office since.
I worried not at all over Worth; if he wanted to play hide and seek with Dykeman's spotters, he was thoroughly capable of looking after himself; but in the Skeels matter, I did then what I should have done in the first place, of course; turned the work over to subordinates and headed straight home.
I reached San Francisco pretty well used up. It was nearly the middle of the forenoon next day when I got to my desk and found it piled high with mail that had accumulated in my absence. Roberts had looked after what he could, and sorted the rest, ready for me. Everything concerning the Clayte case was in one basket. As Roberts handed it to me, he explained.
"The Van Ness bank attorney—Cummings—has been keeping tabs on you tight, Mr. Boyne. Here every day—sometimes twice. Wants to know the minute you're back."
I grunted and dived into the letters. Nothing interesting. Responses acknowledging receipts of my early inquiries. Roberts lingered.
"Well?" I shot at him. He moved uneasily as he asked.
"Did you wire him when you were coming back?"
"Cummings? No. Why?"
"He telephoned in just before you came saying that he'd be right up to see you. I told him you hadn't returned. He laughed and hung up."
"All right, Roberts. Send him in when he comes." I dismissed the secretary. Cummings was keeping tabs on me with a vengeance. What was on his chest?
I didn't need to wait long to find out. In another minute he was at my door greeting me in an off-hand, "Hello, Boyne. Ready to jump into your car and go around with me to see Dykeman?"
"Just got down to the office, Cummings," I watched him, trying to figure out where I stood and where he stood after this week's absence. "Haven't seen Worth Gilbert yet. What's the rush with Dykeman?"
"You'll find out when you get there."
Not very friendly, seeing that Cummings had been Worth's lawyer in the matter, and aside from that queer scene in my office, there'd been no actual break. He stood now, not really grinning at me, but with an amused look under that bristly mustache, and suggested,
"So you haven't seen young Gilbert?"
The tone was so significant that I gave him a quick glance of inquiry as I said,
"No. What about him?"
"Put on your coat and come along. We can talkon the way," he replied, and I went with him to the street, dug little Pete out of the bootblack stand and herded him into the roadster to drive us. Cummings gave the order for North Beach, and as we squirmed through and around congested down-town traffic, headed for the Stockton Street tunnel, I waited for the lawyer to begin. When it came, it was another startling question,
"Didn't find Skeels in the south, eh?"
I hadn't thought they'd carry their watching and trailing of us so far. I answered that question with another,
"When did you see or hear from Worth Gilbert last?"
"Not since the funeral," he said promptly, "the day before the funeral—a week ago to-day, to be exact. I ran down to make my inventory then; as administrator, you know."
He looked at me so significantly that I echoed,
"Yes, I know."
"Do you? How much?" His voice was hard and dry; it didn't sound good to me.
"See here," I put it to him, as my clever little driver dodged in and out through the narrow lanes between Pagoda-like shops of Chinatown, avoiding the steep hill streets by a diagonal through the Italian quarter on Columbus Avenue. "If there's anything you think I ought to be told, put me wise. I suppose you raised that money for Worth—the seventy-two thousand that was lacking, I mean?"
"I did not."
I turned the situation over and over in my mind, and at last asked cautiously,
"Worth did get the money to make up the full amount, didn't he?"
We had swerved again to the north, where the Powell car-line curves into Bay Street, and were headed direct for the wharves. Cummings watched me out of the corners of his eyes, a look that bored in most unpleasantly, while he cross-examined,
"So you don't know where he raised that money—or how—or when? You don't even know that he did raise it? Is that the idea?"
I gave him look for look, but no answer. An indecisive slackening of the machine, and Little Pete asked,
"Where now, sir?"
"You can see it," Cummings pointed. "The tall building. Hit the Embarcadero, then turn to your right; a block to Mason Street."
So close to the dock that ships lay broadside before its doors, moored to the piles by steel cables, the Western Cereal Company plant scattered its mills and warehouses over two city blocks. Freight trains ran through arcades into the buildings to fetch and carry its products; great trucks, some gas driven, some with four- and six-horse teams, loaded sacks or containers that shot in endless streams through well worn chutes, or emptied raw materials that would shortly be breakfast foods into iron conveyors that sucked it up and whined for more. It was a place of aggressive activity among placid surroundings, this plant of Dykeman's, for its setting was the Italian fisherman's home district; little frame shacks, before which they mended their long, brown nets, or stretched them on the sidewalks to dry; Fisherman's Wharf and its lateen rigged,gayly painted hulls, was under the factory windows.
We pulled up before the door of a building separate from any of the mills or warehouses, and I followed Cummings through a corridor, past many doors of private offices, to the large general office. Here a young man at a desk against the rail lent Cummings respectful attention; the lawyer asked something in a low tone, and was answered,
"Yes, sir. Waiting for you. Go right through."
Down the long room with its rattling typewriters, its buzz of clerks and salesmen we went. Cummings was a little ahead of me, when he checked a moment to bow to some one over at a desk. I followed his glance. The girl he had spoken to turned her back almost instantly after she had returned his greeting; but I couldn't be mistaken. There might be more than one figure with that slim, half girlish grace about it, and other hair as lustrously blue-black, but none could be wound around a small head quite so shapely, carried with so blossomlike a toss. It was Barbara Wallace.
So this was where her job was. Strange I had not known this fact of grave importance. I went on past her unconscious back, left her working at her loose-leaf ledgers, beside her adding machine, my mind a whirl of ugly conjecture. Dykeman's employee; that would instantly and very painfully clear up a score of perplexing questions. Dykeman would need no detectives on my trail to tell him of my lack of success in the Skeels chase. Lord! I had sent her as concise a report as I could make—to her, for Worth. I walked on stupidly. In front of the last door in the big room, Cummings halted and spoke low.
"Boyne, you and I are both in the employ of theVan Ness Avenue Bank. We're somewhat similarly situated in another quarter; I'm representing the Gilbert estate, and you've been retained by Worth Gilbert."
I grunted some sort of assent.
"I brought you here to listen to what the bank crowd has to say, but when they get done, I've something to tell you about that young employer of yours. You listen to them—then you listen to me—and you'll know where you stand."
"I'll talk with you as soon as I get through here, Cummings."
"Be sure you do that little thing," significantly, and we went in.