We found Whipple with Dykeman. I had always liked the president of the Van Ness Avenue Bank well enough; one of the large, smooth, amiable sort, not built to withstand stress of weather, apt to be rather helpless before it. He seemed now mighty upset and worried. Dykeman looked at me with hard eyes that searched me, but on the whole he was friendly in his greeting and inquiries as to my health.
While I was getting out of my coat and stowing it, making a great deal of the process so as to gain time, I saw Cummings was exchanging low spoken words with the two of them. I tried to keep my mind on these men before me and why I was with them, but all the while it would be running back to the knock-out blow of seeing that girl in Dykeman's place. She was double-crossing Worth! I might have grinned at the idea that I'd let myself be fooled by a pair of big, expressive, wistful, merry black eyes; but I had seen the look in those same eyes when they were turned on my boy; to think she'd look at him like that, and sell him out, was against nature. It was hurting me beyond all reason.
Whipple asked me about my trip south as though it was the most public thing in the world and he knewits every detail, and accepted my reply that I couldn't take one man's pay and report to another, with,
"Just so, Mr. Boyne. But your agency is retained—regularly, year by year—by our bank. And our bank has given over none of its rights—I should say duties—in regard to the Clayte case. We stand ready to assist any one whose behavior seems to us that of a law-abiding citizen. We don't want to advance any criminality. We can't strike hands with outlaws—"
"Tell him about the suitcase, Whipple," Dykeman broke in impatiently, rather spoiling the president's oratorical effect. "Tell him about the suitcase."
The suitcase! Was this one of the things Barbara Wallace had let out to her employer? She could have done so. She knew all about it.
"One moment, please," I snapped. "I've been away for a week, Mr. Whipple. I don't know a thing of what you're talking about. Did Captain Gilbert fail to meet his engagement with you Monday morning?"
Whipple shook his head.
"Mr. Dykeman wants you told about the suitcase," he said. "I'd like to have Knapp here when we go into that."
Dykeman picked up the end of a speaking-tube and barked into it,
"Send those men in." In the moment's delay, we all sat uneasily mute. Knapp came in with Anson. As they nodded to us and settled into chairs, two or three others joined us. Nothing was said about this filling out of the numbers, but to me it meant serious business, with Worth Gilbert its motive.
"Get it over, can't you?" I said, looking about from one to the other of the men, all directors in the bank."I understand that Captain Gilbert met his engagement with you; was he short of the sum agreed?" Again Whipple shook his head.
"Captain Gilbert walked into the bank at exactly ten o'clock Monday morning. The uh—uh—unusual arrangement—contract, to call it so—that we'd made with him concerning the defalcation would have expired in a few seconds, and I think I may say," he looked around at the others, "that we should not have been sorry to have it do so. But he brought the sum agreed on."
I drew a great sigh of relief. Worth's bargain was complete; he was done with these men, anyhow. I was half out of my chair when Whipple said, sharply for him,
"Sit down, Mr. Boyne." And Dykeman almost drowned it in his,
"Wait, there, Boyne! We're not through with you."
"There's more to tell," Whipple continued. "Captain Gilbert brought that eight hundred thousand cash and securities in a—er—in a very strange way."
"What d'you mean, strange way? airplane or submarine?" I growled.
"He brought it," Whipple's words marched out of him like a solemn procession, "in a brown, sole-leather suitcase."
"Withbrass trimmings," Dykeman supplemented, and leaned back in his chair with an audible "Ah-h-h!" of satisfaction.
If ever a poor devil was flabbergasted, it was the head of the Boyne agency at that moment. I had a fellow feeling for that Mazeppa party who was tiedin his birthday suit to the back of a wild horse. Locoed broncos were more amenable to rein than Worth Gilbert. So that was why he wanted that suitcase—"had a use for it," he'd put it; insisted on an order to be able to get it if I wasn't at my office; wanted it to shove back at these scary bank officials, with his own money for the payment inside. No wonder Whipple called him an "outlaw"!
"Get the idea, do you, Boyne?" Anson lunged at me in his ponderous way. "The rest of us thought 'twas a poor joke, but Knapp and Whipple had both seen that suitcase before—and recognized it."
"Yes," said Knapp quietly. "It chanced I saw it go through the door that last day, when it had nearly a million of our money in it. And here it was—" his voice broke off.
"Certainly startling," Cummings spoke directly at me, "for them to see it come back in Worth Gilbert's hands, with the same kind of filling, less one hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. Of course, I didn't know the identity of the suitcase until they'd given Gilbert his receipt and he was gone."
"Oh, they accepted his money?" I said, and every man in the room looked sheepish, except Cummings who didn't need to, and Dykeman who was too mad to. He shouted at me,
"Yes, we took it; and you're going to tell us where he got that suitcase."
"What have your own detectives—those you hired on the side—to say about it?" I countered on him, and saw instantly that the Whipple end of the crowd hadn't known of Dykeman's spotters and trailers.
"Well, why not?" Dykeman shrilled. "Why not?Who wouldn't shadow that crook? One hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars! Worked us like suckers—come-ons—!" he choked up and began to cough. Cummings came in where he left off.
"See here, Boyne; we don't want to antagonize you. You've said from the first that this crime was a conspiracy—a big thing—directed by brains on the outside. Clayte was the tool. Whose tool was he? That's what we want to know." And Anson trundled along,
"These men who have been in the war get a contempt for law, there's no doubt about it. Captain Gilbert might—"
"No names!" Whipple's hand went up in protest. "No accusations, gentlemen, please; Mr. Boyne—this is a dreadful thing. But, really, Captain Gilbert's manner was very strange. I might say he—"
"Swaggered," supplied Cummings coolly as the president's voice lapsed.
"Well," Whipple accepted it, "he swaggered in and put it all over us. There he was, a man fresh from the deathbed of a suicide father; that father's funeral yet to occur. I, personally, hadn't the heart to question him or raise objections. I was dazed."
"Dazed," Dykeman snapped up the word and worried it, as a dog worries a bone. "Of course, we were all dazed. It was so open, so shameless—that's why he got by with it. Making use of his position as heir, less than forty eight hours after his father was shot."
"After his father shot himself," Whipple's lowered tone was a plea. "After his father shot himself."
"Huh!" snorted Dykeman. "If a man shoots himself, he's been shot, hasn't he? Hell! What's the use of whipping the devil round the stump that way? Boyne, you can stand with us, or you can fight us."
"Boyne's with us—of course he's with us," Whipple broke in, his words a good deal more confident than his tone or the look of his face.
"Well, then," Dykeman ground out, "when our thief of a teller splits that one hundred and eighty seven thousand with his man Gilbert—shut up, Whipple—shut up! You can't stop me—we're going to know about it. We'll get them both then, and send them across. And we'll recover one hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars that belongs to the Van Ness Avenue bank."
"Goodnight!" I got to my feet. "This lets me out. I can't deal with men who make a scrap of paper of their contracts as quick as you gentlemen do."
"Stop, Boyne—you haven't got it all," Dykeman ordered me.
"Yes, wait, Mr. Boyne," Whipple came in. "You haven't a full understanding of the enormity of this young man's action. Mr. Cummings has something to tell you which, I think, will—"
"Nothing Mr. Cummings can say," I shut them off, "will alter the fact that I am employed by Captain Worth Gilbert at your recommendation—at your own recommendation—that I have been away more than a week on his business, and have not yet had an opportunity to report to him personally. When I've seen him, I'll be ready to talk to you."
"You'll talk now or never—" Dykeman's shrill threat was interrupted by the shriller bell of the telephone. He yanked the instrument to him, and the "Hello!" he cried into it had the snap of an oath. He looked up and shoved the thing in my direction. "Calling for you, Boyne," he snarled.
There was deathly stillness in the room, so that the whir of the great stones in the mill came to us insistently. I stood there, they all watching me, and spoke into the transmitter.
"This is Boyne."
"Hold the receiver close to your ear so it won't leak words." The warning wasn't needed; I thought I knew the voice. "Press the transmitter close to your chest. Listen—don't talk; don't say a word in reply to me. I'm in the telephone booth outside. I must see you just as soon as I can. I'll be at the Little Italy restaurant—you know, don't you? on Fisherman's Wharf—in ten minutes. If you can come, and alone, find me there. I'll wait an hour. If you can't come now, youmustsee me this evening after working hours."
"I'll come now," I raised the transmitter to say, and quickly over the wire came the answer,
"I told you not to speak—in there! This is Barbara Wallace."
I went away from there.
Looking about me, I had guessed that pretty much every man in the room believed that it was Worth Gilbert with whom I had been talking over the phone. Dykeman's trailers would be right behind me. Yet to the last, Whipple and his crowd were offering me the return trip end of my ticket with them; if I would come back and be good, even now, all would be forgiven. I sized up the situation briefly and took my plunge, shutting the door after me, glancing across the long room to see that Barbara Wallace's desk was deserted. Nobody followed me from the room I had just left. I walked quickly to the outer door.
Little Pete switched on his engine as I leaped into the car. My "Let her go!" wasn't needed to make him throw in his clutch, and give me a flying start straight ahead down the broad plank way of the Embarcadero. Looking back as we hit the belt-line tracks, I saw a small car with two men in it, shoot out from one of the wide doorways of the plant; but as we rounded the cliff-like side of Telegraph Hill, my view of them was cut off. Things had come for me thick and fast. I felt pretty well balled up. But the girl had used secrecy in appointing this interview; till I could see further into the thing, it was anyhow a safe bet to drop them.
"Pete," I said, "lose that car behind us. Only ten minutes to slip them and land me at Fisherman's Wharf. Show me what-for."
He grinned. Between Montgomery and the bay, north of California Street, there are many narrow byways, crowded with the heavy traffic of hucksters and vegetable men, a section devoted to the commission business. Into its congestion Pete dove with a weasel instinct for finding the right holes to slip through, the alleys that might be navigated in safety; in less than the ten minutes I'd specified, we were free again on Columbus Avenue, pursuit lost, and headed back for the restaurant on the wharf.
"Boss," Little Pete was hoarse with the excitement he loved, as he laid the roadster alongside the Little Italy, "was it on the level, what you fed the lawyer guy? Ain't you wise to where Captain Gilbert is? I've saw him frequent since you've been gone."
"How many times is 'frequent,' Pete?" I asked. "And when did the last 'frequent' happen?"
"Twice," sulkily. I'd wounded his pride by not taking him seriously; but he added as I jumped down from the machine. "I druv him up on the hill, 'round the place where you an' him—an' her—went that day."
Pete didn't need to use Barbara Wallace's name. The way he salaamed to the pronoun was enough; the swath that girl cut evidently reached from the cradle to the grave, with this monkey grinning at one end, and me doddering along at the other.
I gave a moment to questioning Pete, found out all he knew, and went into the restaurant, wondering whatunder heaven Barbara Wallace would say to me or ask me.
The Little Italy restaurant is not so bad a place for luncheon. If one likes any eatables the western seas produce, I heartily recommend it. Where fish are unloaded from the smacks by the ton, fish are sure to be in evidence, but they are nice, fresh fish, and look good enough to eat. And the Little Italy is clean, with white oil-clothed tables and a view from its broad windows that down-town restaurants would double their rent to get.
Just now it was full of noisy patrons, foreigners, mostly; people too busy eating to notice whether I carried my head on my shoulders or under my arm.
In a far corner, Barbara Wallace's eyes were on me from the minute I came within her sight. She had ordered clams for two, mostly, I thought, to defend the privacy of our talk from the interruptions of a waiter, and I was hardly in my chair before she burst out,
"Where's Worth? Why wasn't he in that office to defend himself against what they're hinting?"
"I suppose," I said dryly, "because he wasn't given an invitation to attend. You ought to know why. You work for Dykeman."
"I work for Dykeman?" she repeated after me in a bewildered tone. "I'm bookkeeper in the Western Cereal Company's employ, if that's what you mean. You understood so from the first."
"You know I didn't," I reproached her hotly. "Do you think I'd have let you on the inside of this case if I'd known it was a pipe line direct to Dykeman?"
And on the instant I spoke there came to me aremembrance of her saying that Sunday morning as we pulled up before the St. Dunstan that she went past the place on the street car every day getting to her work at the Western Cereal Company. Sloppy of me not to have paid better attention; I knew vaguely that Dykeman was in one of the North Beach mills.
"Fifty-fifty, Barbara," I conceded. "I should have known—made it my business to learn. And Dykeman has questioned you—"
"He has not!" indignantly. "I don't suppose he knows Worth and I are acquainted." I could have smiled at that. There were detectives' reports in Dykeman's desk that recorded date, hour and duration of every meeting this girl had had with Worth and with myself. Besides, Cummings knew. It must have been through Cummings that she learned what was about to take place in Dykeman's private office. What had she told Cummings?
I was ready to blurt out the question, when she fumbled in her bag with little, shaking hands, drew out and passed to me unopened the envelope addressed to Worth, with my detailed report of the Skeels chase.
"I did my best to deliver it," she steadied her voice as she spoke. "He wasn't at the Palace. He wasn't at Santa Ysobel. He didn't communicate with me here."
My edifice of suspicion of Barbara Wallace crumbled. Cummings had not learned through her that I was unsuccessful in the south; nor had she spilled a word to him that she shouldn't, or they'd have had the dope on where Worth had found that suitcase, and thrown it at me quick.
"Barbara," I said, "will you accept my apologies?"
"Oh, yes," she smiled vaguely. "I don't know what you're apologizing for, but it doesn't matter. I hoped you would bring me news of Worth—of where he is."
"When did you see him last?"
"On the day of the funeral. I hardly got to speak to him."
Little Pete's news was slightly later. He'd taken Worth up to the Gold Nugget and dropped him there. Thursday, Worth was at the Nugget for more than an hour. On both occasions, Pete was told to slip the trailers, and did. That meant that Worth was working on the Clayte case—or thought he was. I told her of this.
"Yes—Oh, yes," she repeated listlessly. "But where is he now? And awful things—things like this meeting—coming up."
"What besides this meeting?"
"At Santa Ysobel."
"What? Things that have happened since the boy's gone? You couldn't get much idea of the lay of the land when you were down there Wednesday, could you?"
"Oh, but I could—I did," earnestly. "Of course it was a large funeral; it seemed to me I saw everybody I'd ever known. At a time like that, nothing would be said openly, but the drift was all in one direction. They couldn't understand Worth, and so nearly every one who spoke of him, picked at him, trying to understand him. Mrs. Thornhill's cook was already telling that Worth had quarreled with his father and demanded money. I shouldn't wonder if by now Santa Ysobel's set the exact hour of the quarrel."
"Me for down there as quick as I can," I muttered, and Barbara, facing me sympathetically, offered,
"I've a letter from Skeet Thornhill," she groped in her bag again, mumbling as women do when they're hunting for a thing, "It came this morning.... Mrs. Thornhill's no better—worse, I judge.... Oh, here it is," and she pulled out a couple of closely scribbled sheets. "The child writes a wild hand," she apologized, as she passed these over.
The flapper dashed into her letter with a sort of incoherent squeal. The carnival ball was only four days off. Everybody was already dead on his, her or its feet. The decorations they'd planned were enough to kill a horse—let alone getting up costumes. "As usual, everything seems to be going to the devil here," she went on; "Got a cannery girl elected festival queen this time. Ina's furious, of course. Moms had a letter from her that singed the envelope; but I sort of enjoy seeing the cannery district break in. They've got the money these days."
Nothing here to my purpose. Barbara reached forward and turned the sheet for me, and I saw Worth Gilbert's name half way down it.
"Doctor Bowman is an old hell-cat, and I hate him." Skeet made her points with a fine simplicity. "Since mother's sick, he comes here every day, though what he does but sit and shoot off his mouth and get her all worked up is more than I can see. Yesterday I was in the room when he was there, and he got to talking about Worth—the meanest, lowest-down, hinting talk you ever heard! Said Worth got a lot of money when his father died, and I flared up and said what of it? Did he think Mr. Gilbert ought to have left it tohim? That hit him, because he and Mr. Gilbert used to be good friends, and he and Worth aren't. I sassed him, and he got so mad that just as he was leaving, he hollered at me that I better ask Worth Gilbert where he was at the hour his father was shot. Now, what do you know about that? That man is spreading stories. A doctor can set them going. He's making his messy old calls on people all day, and they, poor fish-hounds, believe everything he says. Though mother didn't. After he was gone, she just lay there in her bed and said over and over that it was a lie, a foolish, dangerous lie! Poor mumsie, she's so nervous that when the grocer's truck had a blow-out down in the drive, she nearly went into hysterics—cried and carried on, something about it's being 'the shot.' I suppose she meant the one when Mr. Gilbert killed himself. Wasn't that queer? Any loud noise of the sort sets her off that way. She lies and listens, and listens and mutters to herself. It scares me." She closed with, "Please don't break your promise to be here through this infernal Bloss. Fes."
"Good advice, that last," I said slowly, as I laid the letter on the table, keeping a hand on it. "You'll do that, won't you, Barbara?"
"I had intended to. I was given leave from this afternoon. But—well—I'd thought it over, and almost made up my mind to go back to my desk."
Barbara Wallace uncertain, halting between two courses of action! What did it mean?
"See here, Barbara; this isn't a time for Worth Gilbert's friends to slacken on him."
"I hadn't slackened," she said very low. And left it for me to remember that Worth apparently had.
"Then you're needed at Santa Ysobel," I urged.
"But you're going, aren't you, Mr. Boyne?"
"Yes. As soon as I can get off. That doesn't keep you from being needed. Worth's one of the most efficiently impossible young men I ever tried to handle. Maybe he's not any fuller of shocks than any other live wire, but he sure does manage to plant them where they'll do the most harm. Cummings, Dykeman—and this Dr. Bowman down there; active enemies."
"They can't hurt Worth Gilbert—all of them together!"
"Wait a minute. I'm going to Santa Ysobel to find the murderer of Thomas Gilbert. That means a stirring to the depths of that little town. This underneath-the-surface combustion will get poked into a flame—she's going to burst out, and somebody's going to get burned. We don't want that to be Worth, Barbara."
"No. But what can I do—what influence have I with him—" she was beginning, but I broke in on her.
"Barbara, you and I are going to find the real murderer, before the Cummings-Dykeman bunch discover a way into and out of that bolted study. Those people want to see Worth in jail."
There was a long pause while she faced me, the rich color failing a little in her cheeks.
"I see," speaking slowly, studying each word. "And as long as we didn't find out how to enter and leave the study, we have no way of knowing how hard or how easy it's going to be for them to find it out. We—" her voice still lower—"we can't tell if they already know it or not."
"Yes we can," I leaned forward to say. "The minutethey know that—Worth Gilbert will be charged with murder."
I hit hard enough that time to bring blood, but she bled inwardly, sitting there staring at me, quite pale, finally faltering,
"Well—I can't stop to think of his having followed Ina Vandeman south—on her wedding trip—if he needs me—and I can help—I must—" she broke down completely, and I sat there feeling big-footed and blundering at this revelation of what it was that had put that clear, logical mind of hers off the track, left her confused, groping, just a girl, timid, distrustful of her own judgment where her heart was concerned.
"Was that it all the time?" I asked. "Well, take it from me, Worth's done nothing of the sort. He's been playing detective, not chasing off after some other man's bride."
Up came the color to her cheeks, she reached that mite of a hand across to shake on the bargain with,
"I'll go straight down this evening. You'll find me in Santa Ysobel when you come, Mr. Boyne."
"At the Thornhills'?" It might be handy to have her there; but she shook her head, looking a little self-conscious.
"I'm taking that spare room at Sarah Capehart's. Skeet wanted me, and I have an invitation from Laura Bowman; but if—well, seeing that this investigation is going to cover all that neighborhood, I thought I'd rather be with Sarah."
The level-headed little thing! Pete and I had the pleasure of taking her out to her home where she had her packing to attend to. On the way she spoke of anengagement with Cummings for the theater Saturday night.
"And instead, I suppose I shall be at the carnival ball. Shall I tell him that in my note, Mr. Boyne? Is it all right to let him know?"
"It's all right," I assented. "You can bet Cummings is due down there as soon as Worth shows up; and that must be soon, now."
"Yes," Barbara agreed. Her face clouded a little. "You noticed in Skeet's letter that they're expecting Ina to-morrow."
Poor child—she couldn't get away from it. I patted the hand I had taken to say good-by and assured her again,
"Worth Gilbert hasn't been in the south. I wonder at you, Barbara. You're so clear headed about everything else—don't you see that that would be impossible?"
Then I drove back to my office, to find lying on my desk a telegram from the young man, dated at Los Angeles, requesting me to meet him at Santa Ysobel the following evening!
Wednesday evening I pulled into a different Santa Ysobel: lanterns strung across between the buildings, bunting and branches of bloom everywhere, streets alive with people milling around, and cars piled high with decorative material, crowded with the decorators. The carnival of blossoms was only three days ahead.
At Bill Capehart's garage they told me Barbara was out somewhere with the crowd; and a few minutes later on Main Street, I met her in a Ford truck. Skeet Thornhill was at the wheel, adding to the general risk of life and limb on Santa Ysobel streets, carrying a half a dozen or more other young things tucked away behind. Both girls shouted at me; they were going somewhere for something and would see me later.
Getting down toward the Gilbert place, just beyond the corner, I flushed from the shadows of the pepper trees a bird I knew to be one of Dykeman's operatives. Watching his carefully careless progress on past the Gilbert lawn, then the Vandeman grounds, my eye was led to a pair who approached across the green from the direction of the bungalow. No mistaking the woman; even at this distance, height and the clean sweep of her walk, told me that this was the bride, Ina Vandeman. And the man strolling beside her—hadhe come with her from the house, or joined her on the cross-cut path?—could that be Worth Gilbert?
I sat in the roadster and gaped. The evening light—behind them, and dim enough at best—made their countenances fairly indistinguishable. At the gap in the hedge, they paused, and Mrs. Vandeman reached out, broke off a flower to fasten in his buttonhole, looking up into his face, talking quickly. Old stuff—but always good reliable old stuff. Then Worth saw me and hailed, "Hello, Jerry!" But he did not come to me, and I swung out of the machine to the sidewalk.
I heard the sobbing of the Ford truck; it went by, missing my runningboard by an inch, stopped at Vandeman's gate and Skeet discharged her cargo of clamor to stream across the sidewalk and up toward the bungalow. I saw Barbara, in the midst of the moving figures, suddenly stop, knew she had seen the two over there, and crossed to her, with a cheerful,
"He's here all right."
"Oh, yes," not looking toward the gap in the hedge, or at me. "He came on the same train with—with them."
Then some one from the porch yowled reproachfully for her to fetch those bannerspronto, and with a little catching of breath, she ran on up the walk.
I turned back. Worth and Ina had moved on. Bronson Vandeman, well groomed, dressed as though he had just come in off the golf links, his English shoes and loud patterned stockings differentiating him from the crude outdoor man of the Coast, had joined them on the Gilbert lawn; his genial greeting to me let his bride get by with a mere bow, turning at onceback to her house by the front walk. But rather to my annoyance, Vandeman came bounding up the steps after us. I judged Worth must have invited him.
Chung carried my suitcase upstairs, and lingered a minute in my room. I'll swear it wasn't merely to get the tip for which he thanked me, but with the idea of showing me in some recondite, Oriental fashion that he was glad I'd come. This interested me. The people who were glad to have me in Santa Ysobel at this time belonged on the clean side of my ledger. Then I went downstairs to find Vandeman still in the living room, sprawled at ease beside the window, looking round with a display of his fine teeth, reaching a hand to pull in the chair Worth set for me.
"Well, Jerry," that young man prompted, indicating by a careless gesture the smokers' tray on the table beside me, "there is time before dinner for the tale of your exploits. How's my friend Steve?"
I began to select a cigar, and said shortly,
"It's all in reports waiting for you at my office."
"Yes." Worth ignored my irritation. "Tell it. What'd you do down south?"
"Just back from the south yourself, aren't you?" I countered.
"Sure," airily. "But I wasn't there to butt in on your game. Did you find that Skeels was Clayte?"
I merely looked over the flame of my match at that small-town society man, smiling back at me with a show of polite interest.
"Go on," Worth interpreted. "Vandeman knows all about it. I tried to sell him a few shares of stock in the suitcase, so he'll take an interest in the game; but he's too much the tight-wad to buy."
"Oh, no," deprecated Vandeman. "Just no gambler; hate to take a chance." He ran his fingers through his hair, tossing it up with a gesture I had noticed when he came back from the dance at Tait's.
"All right—apology accepted," Worth nodded. "Anyway, you didn't. Well, Jerry?"
Vandeman waited a moment with natural curiosity, then, as I still said nothing, giving my attention to my smoke, moved reluctantly to rise, saying,
"That means I'd better chase along and let you two talk business."
"No. Sit tight," from Worth.
I was mad clear through, and disturbed and apprehensive, too. I managed a brief, dry statement of the outcome in the south. Worth hailed it with,
"Skeels lurks in the jungle! Life still holds a grain of interest."
"Why the devil couldn't you keep me advised of your movements?" I demanded.
"Dykeman's hounds," he grinned. "Had them guessing. They'd have picked me up if I'd gone to your office."
"You could have written or wired. They've picked you up anyway," I grunted. "One's on the job now. Saw him as I came in."
"Eh? What's that?" cried Vandeman, a man snooping in the shrubbery outside getting more attention from him than one dodging pursuit three hundred miles away. "What do you mean, hounds?" and when he had heard the explanation of Dykeman's trailers, "I call that intolerable!"
"Oh, I don't know." Worth reached over my shoulder for a cigarette. "Lose 'em whenever I like."
I wasn't so certain. There were men in my employ he couldn't shake. Perhaps those reports in Dykeman's desk might have offered some surprises to this cock-sure lad. My exasperation at Worth mounted as I listened to Vandeman talking.
"Those bank people should do one thing or another," he gave his opinion. "Just because you got gay with them and handed them their payment in the suitcase it left in, they've no right to have you watched like a criminal. In a small town like this, such a thing will ruin a man's standing."
"If he has any standing," Worth laughed.
"See here," Vandeman's smile was persuasive. "Don't let what I said out in front embitter you."
"I'll try not to."
"Mr. Boyne"—Vandeman missed the sarcasm—"when I got back to this town to-day, what do you suppose I found? The story going around that a quarrel with Worth, over money, drove his father to take his own life."
"That's my business here," I nodded. And when he looked his surprise, "To stop such stories."
He stared at me, frankly puzzled for a moment, then said,
"Well, of course you know, and I know, that they're scurrilous lies; but just how will you stop them?"
I had intended my remark to stand as it was; but Worth filled in the pause after Vandeman's question with,
"Jerry's here to get the truth of my father's murder, Bronse."
"Murder?" The mere naked word seemed to shock Vandeman. His sort clothe and pad everything—eventheir speech. "I didn't know any one entertained the idea your father was murdered. He couldn't have been—not the way it happened."
"Nevertheless we think he was."
"Oh, but Boyne—start a thing like that, and think of the talk it'll make! They'll commence at once saying that there was nobody but Worth to profit by his father's death."
"Don't worry, Mr. Vandeman." He made me hot. "We know where to dig up the motive for the crime."
"You mean the diaries?" Worth's voice sounded unbelievably from beside me. "Nothing doing there, Jerry. I've burned them."
I sat and choked down the swears. Yet, looking back on it, I saw plainly that Jerry Boyne was the man who deserved kicking. I ought never to have left them with him.
"You read them and burned them?" said Vandeman.
"Burned them without reading," Worth's impatient tones corrected.
"Without reading!" the other echoed, startled. Then, after a long pause, "Oh—I say—pardon me, but—but ought that to have been done? Surely not. Worth—if you'd read your father's diaries for the past few years—I don't believe you'd have a doubt that he committed suicide—not a doubt."
Worth sat there mute. Myself, I was rather curious as to what Vandeman would say; I had read much in those diaries. But when it came, it was the same old line of talk one hears when there's a suicide: Gilbert was a lonely man; his life hadn't been happy; he cut himself off from people too much. Vandeman said that of late he believed he was pretty nearly the onlyintimate the dead man had. This last gave him an interest in my eyes. I broke in on his generalities to ask him bluntly why he was so certain the death was suicide.
"Mr. Gilbert was breaking up; had been for two years or more. Worth's been away; he's not seen it; but I can tell you, Boyne, his father's mind was affected."
Worth let that pass, though I could see he wasn't convinced by Vandeman's sentimentalities, any more than I was. After the man had gone, I turned on Worth sharply, with,
"Why the devil did you tell that pink-tea proposition about your dealings with the Van Ness Avenue bank?"
"Safety valve, I guess. I get up too heavy a load of steam, and it's easy to blow it off to Vandeman. Told him most of it in the smoker, coming up. You'll talk about anything in a smoker."
"Oh, will you?" I said in exasperation. "And you'll burn anything, I suppose, that a match'll set fire to?"
"Go easy, Jerry Boyne." His chin dropped to his chest, he sat glowering out through the window. "Cleansing fires for that sort of garbage," he said finally. "I burned them on the day of his funeral."
My coming had thrown dinner late; we were barely through with the meal and back once more in the living room when the latch of the French window rattled, the window itself was pushed open, and a high imperious voice proclaimed,
"The Princess of China, calling on Mr. Worth Gilbert."
There stood Ina Vandeman in the gorgeously embroidered robes of a high caste Chinese lady, her fair hair covered by a sleek black wig that struck out something odd, almost ominous, in the coloring of her skin, the very planes of her features. Outside, along the porch, sounded the patter of many feet; Skeet wriggled through the narrow frame under her tall sister's arm, came scooting into the room to turn and gaze back at her.
"Doesn't she look the vamp?"
"Skeet!" Ina had sailed in by this time, and Ernestine followed more soberly. "You've been told not to say that."
"I think," the other twin backed her up virtuously, "with poor mother sick and all, you might respect her wishes. You know what she said about calling Ina a vamp." And Skeet drawled innocently,
"That it hit too near the truth to be funny—wasn't that it?"
Through the open window had followed a half dozen more of the Blossom Festival crowd, Barbara and Bronson Vandeman among them. Ina paid no attention to any one, standing there, her height increased by the long, straight lines of the costume, her bisque doll features given a strange, pallid dignity by the raw magnificence of its crusted purple and crimson and green and gold embroidery and the dead black wig.
"Isn't it an exquisite thing, Worth?" displaying herself before him. "Bronse has a complete Mandarin costume; we lead the grand march as the emperor and empress of Mongolia. Don't you think it's a good idea?"
"First rate." Worth spoke in his usual unexcited fashion, and it was difficult to say whether he meant the oriental idea or the appearance of the girl who stood before him. She came close and offered the cuff of one of her sleeves to show him the embroidery, lifting a delicate chin to display the jade buttons at the neck.
Barbara over on the other side of the room refused to meet my eye. Mrs. Bowman, a big fur piece pulled up around her throat, shivered. I met half a dozen Santa Ysobel people whose names I've forgotten. I could see that Bronson Vandeman socially took the lead here, that everybody looked to him. The room was a babel of talk, when a few minutes later the doorbell rang in orthodox fashion, and Chung ushered Cummings in upon the general confusion. Some of the bunch knew and spoke to him; others didn't and had to be presented; it took the first of his time and attention. He only got a chance for one swipe at me, a low-toned, sarcastic,
"Made a mistake to duck me, Boyne."
I didn't think it worth while to answer that. Presently I saw him standing with Barbara. He was evidently effecting a switch of his theater engagement to the ball, for I heard Skeet's,
"Mr. Cummings wants a ticket! He'll need two! Ten dollars, Mr. Cummings—five apiece."
"No, no—Skeet," Barbara laughed embarrassedly. "Mr. Cummings was just joking. He'll not be here Saturday night."
"I'll come back for it," hand in pocket.
"It's a masquerade—" Barbara hesitated.
"Bring my costume with me from San Francisco."
"I'm not sure—" again Barbara hesitated; Skeet cut in on her,
"Why, Barbie Wallace! It's what you came to Santa Ysobel for—the Bloss. Fes. ball. And to think of your getting a perfectly good man, right at the last minute this way, and not having to tag on to Bronse and Ina or something like that! I think you're the lucky girl," and she clutched Cummings' offered payment to stow it with other funds she had collected.
At last they got themselves out of the room and left us alone with Cummings. He had carried through his little deal with Barbara as though it meant considerable to him, but I knew that his errand with Worth was serious, and put in quickly,
"I intended to write or phone you to-morrow, Cummings."
"Well," the lawyer worked his mouth a bit under that bristly mustache and looked at Worth, "it might have saved you some embarrassment if you'd been warned of my errand here to-night—earlier, that is.I suppose Captain Gilbert has told you that I phoned him, when I failed to connect with you, that I was coming here—and what I was coming for?"
"I didn't tell Jerry," Worth picked up a cigarette. "Couldn't very well tell him what you were coming for. Don't know myself."
The words were blunt; really I think there was no intention to offend, only the simple statement of a fact; but I could see Cummings beginning to simmer, as he inquired,
"Does that mean you didn't understand my words on the phone, or that you understood them and couldn't make out what I meant by them?"
"Little of both," allowed Worth. Cummings stepped close to him and let him have it direct:
"I'm here to-night, Captain Gilbert, as executor of your father's estate. I have filed the will to-day. I might have done so earlier, but when I inventoried this place (you remember, the day before the funeral—you were here at the time) I failed to locate a considerable portion of your father's estate."
"You failed to locate? All the estate's here; this house, the down-town properties. What do you mean, failed to locate?"
"I was not alluding to realty," said Cummings. "It's my duty to locate and report to the court the present whereabouts of seventy-five thousand dollars worth of stock in the Van Ness Avenue Savings Bank. Can you declare to me as executor, where it is? And, if any other person than your father placed it in its present whereabouts, are you ready to declare to me how and when it came into that person's possession?"
"Quite a lot of words, Cummings; but it doesn'tmean anything," Worth said casually. "You know where that bank stock is and who put it there."
"Officially, I do not know. Officially, I demand to be told."
"Unofficially, answer it for yourself." Worth turned his back on the lawyer to get a match from the mantel.
"Very well. My answer is that I intend to find out how and when that bank stock which formed a part of your payment to the Van Ness Avenue bank disappeared from this house."
I admit I was scared. Here was the first gun of the coming battle; and I was sure this enemy, who stood now looking through half closed eyes at the lad's back, would have poisoned gas among his weapons. He had emphasized the "when." He believed that the stories of Worth's night visit to his father were true; that the implied denial by Barbara and myself in my office, was false; that Worth had either received the stock from his father that Saturday night or taken it unlawfully. I was sure that it was the stock certificates which I had seen Worth take from the safe-compartment of the sideboard in the small hours of Monday morning; a breach of legal form which it would be possible for a friendly executor to pass over.
"Cummings, Worth inherits everything under his father's will; what's the difference about a small irregularity in taking possession? He—"
"Never explain, Jerry," Worth shut me up. "Your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't believe it."
Cummings had stood where he was since the firstof the interview. His face went strangely livid. There was more in this than a legal fight.
"Yes, Boyne's a fool to try to help your case with explanations, Gilbert," he choked out. "I'll see that both of you get a chance to answer questions elsewhere—under oath. Good evening." He turned and left.
He had the best of it all around. I endeavored for some time to get before Worth the dangers of his high-handed defiance of law, order, probate judges, and the court's officers, in the person of Allen G. Cummings, attorney and his father's executor. He listened, yawned—and suggested that it must be nearly bedtime. I gave it up, and we went—I, at least, with a sense of danger ahead upon me—to our rooms.
Along in the middle of the night I waked to the knowledge that a casement window was pounding somewhere in the house. For a while I lay and listened in that helpless, exaggerated resentment one feels at such a time. I'd drop off, get nearly to sleep, only to be jerked broad awake again by the thudding. Listening carefully I decided that the bothersome window was in Worth's room, and finally I got up sense and spunk enough to roll out of bed, stick my feet into slippers, and sneak over with the intention of locking it.
The room was dimly lighted from the street lamps, far away as they were; I made my way across it. Worth's deep, regular breathing was quite undisturbed. I had trouble with the catch, went and felt over the bureau and found his flashlight, fixed the window by its help, and returning it, remembering how near I came to knocking it off the bureau top, thought to put it in a drawer which stood half open.
As I aimed it downward, its circle of illumination showed something projecting a corner from beneath the swirl of ties and sheaf of collars—a book—a red morocco-bound book. Mechanically I nudged the stuff away with the torch itself. What lay there turned me cold. It was the 1920 diary!
My fingers relaxed; the flashlight fell with a thump, as I let out an exclamation of dismay. A sleepy voice inquired from the bed,
"Hi, you Jerry! What you up to in here?"
For answer, I dragged out the book, went over to the bed, and switched on the reading lamp there. Worth scowled in the glare, and flung his arms up back of his head for a pillow to raise it a bit.
"Yeah," blinking amiably at the volume. "Meant to tell you. Found it to-day when I was down in the repair pit at the garage. It had been stuck in the drainpipe there."
"And I suppose," I said savagely, "that if I hadn't come onto it now, you'd have burned this, too."
"Don't get sore, Jerry," he said. "I saved it," and he yawned.
I had an uncontrollable impulse to have a look at that last entry, which would record the bitter final quarrel between this boy and his father. No difficulty about finding the spot; as I raised the book in my hands it fell open of itself at the place. I looked and what I saw choked me—got cross-wise in my throat for a moment so no words could come out. I stuck the book under his nose, and held it there till I could whisper.
"Worth, did you do this?"
The last written page was numbered 49; on it wasrecorded the date, March sixth; the weather, cloudy, clearing late in the afternoon; the fact that the sun had set red in a cloudless sky; and it ended abruptly in the middle of a phrase. The leaf that carried page 50 had been torn out; not cut away carefully as were those leaves in the earlier book, but ripped loose, grabbed with clutching fingers that scarred and twisted the leaf below!
He shoved my hand away and stared at me. For a moment I thought everything was over. Certainly I could not be a very appealing sight, standing there sweating with fear, my hair all stuck up on my head where I'd clawed it, shivering in my nightclothes more from miserable nervousness than from cold; but somehow those eyes of his softened; he gave me one of the looks that people who care for Worth will go far to get, and said quietly,
"You see what you're doing? I told you I didn't steal the book, so that clears me in your mind of being the murderer. Now you're after me about this torn-out page. If I'd torn it out and stolen it—you and I would know what it would mean."
"But, boy—," I began, when he suffered a change of heart.
"Get out of here! Take that damn book and leave."
He heaved himself over in the bed, hunching the covers about his ears, turning his back on me. As I crept away, I heard him finish in a sort of mutter—as though to himself—
"I'm sorry for you, Jerry Boyne."
Morning dawned on the good ship Jerry Boyne not so dismasted and rudderless as you might have thought. I'd carried that 1920 diary to my room and, before I slept, read the whole of it. This was the last word we had from the dead man; here if anywhere would be found support for the suggestions of a weakening mind and suicide.
Nothing of that sort here; on the contrary, Thomas Gilbert was very much his clear-headed, unpleasant, tyrannical self to the last stroke of the pen. But I came on something to build up a case against Eddie Hughes, the chauffeur.
I didn't get much sleep. As soon as I heard Chung moving around, I went down, had him give me a cup of coffee, then stationed him on the back porch, and walked to the study, shut myself in, and discharged my heavy police revolver into a corner of the fireplace; then with the front door open, fired again.
"How many shots?" I called to Chung.
"One time shoot."
Worth's head poked from his upstairs window as he shouted,
"What's the excitement down there?"
"Trying my gun. How many times did I fire?"
"Once, you crazy Indian!" and the question of sound-proof walls was settled. Nobody heard theshot that killed Gilbert twenty feet away from the study if the door was closed. Mrs. Thornhill's ravings, as described in Skeet's letter to Barbara, were merely delirium.
I walked out around the driveway to the early morning streets of Santa Ysobel. The little town looked as peaceful and innocent as a pan of milk. In an hour or so, its ways would be full of people rushing about getting ready for the carnival, a curious contrast to my own business, sinister, tragic. It seemed to me that two currents moved almost as one, the hidden, dark part under—for there must be those in the town who knew the crime was murder; the murderer himself must still be here—and the foam of noisy gayety and blossoms riding atop. A Blossom Festival; the boyhood of the year; and I was in the midst of it, hunting a murderer!
An hour later I talked to Barbara in the stuffy little front room at Capehart's, brow-beaten by the noise of Sarah getting breakfast on the other side of the thin board partition; more disconcerted by the girl's manner of receiving the information of how I had found the 1920 diary hidden in Worth's bureau drawer. There was a swift, very personal anger at me. I had to clear myself instantly and thoroughly of any suspicion of believing for a moment that Worth himself had stolen or mutilated the book, protesting,
"I don't—I don't! Listen, Barbara—be reasonable!"
"That means 'Barbara, be scared!' And I won't. When they're scared, people make mistakes."
"You might see differently if you'd been there last night when Cummings made his charge against Worth.That seventy two thousand dollars Worth carried up to the city Monday morning, he had taken from his father's safe the night before."
For a minute she just looked at me, and not even Worth Gilbert's dare-devil eyes ever held a more inclusively defiant light than those big, soft, dark ones of hers.
"Well—wasn't it his?"
"All right," I said shortly. "I'm not here to talk of Worth's financial methods; they're scheduled to get him into trouble; but let that pass. Look through this book and you'll see who it is I'm after."
She had already opened the volume, and began to glance along the pages. She made a motion for me to wait. I leaned back in my chair, and it was only a few moments later that she looked up to say,
"Don't make the arrest, Mr. Boyne. You have nothing here against Eddie—for murder."
Because I doubted myself, I began to scold, winding up,
"All the same, if that gink hasn't jumped town, I'll arrest him."
"It would be a good deal more logical to arrest him if he had jumped the town," Barbara reminded me. "If you really want to see him, Mr. Boyne, you'll find him at the garage around on the highway. He's working for Bill."
That was a set-back. A fleeing Eddie Hughes might have been hopeful; an Eddie Hughes who gave his employer back-talk, got himself fired, and then settled down within hand-reach, was not so good a bet. Barbara saw how it hit me, and offered a suggestion.
"Mr. Boyne, Worth and I are taking a hike out to San Leandro canyon this afternoon to get ferns for the decorating committee. Suppose you come along—anyhow, a part of the way—and have a quiet talk, all alone with us. Don't do anything until you have consulted Worth."
"All right—I'll go you," I assented, and half past two saw the three of us, Worth in corduroys and puttees, Barbara with high boots and short, dust-brown skirt, tramping out past the homes of people toward the open country. At the Vandeman place Skeet's truck was out in front, piled with folding chairs, frames, light lumber, and a lot of decorative stuff. The tall Chinaman came from the house with another load.
"You Barbie Wallace!" the flapper howled. "Aren't you ashamed to be walking off with Worth and Mr. Boyne both, and good men scarce as hen's teeth in Santa Ysobel to-day!"
"I'm not walking off with them—they're walking off with me," Barbara laughed at her.
"Shameless one!" Skeet drawled. "I see you let Mr. Cummings have a day off—aren't you the kind little boss to 'em!"
I just raised my brows at Barbara, and she explained a bit hastily,
"Skeet thinks she has to be silly over the fact that Mr. Cummings has gone up to town, I suppose." She added with fine indifference, "He'll be back in the morning."
"You bet he'll be back in the morning," Worth assured the world.
"Now what does he mean by that, Mr. Boyne?"
"He means Cummings is out after him."
"I don't," Worth contradicted me personally. "I mean he's after Bobs. She knows it. Look at her."
She glanced up at me from under her hat-brim, all the stars out in those shadowy pools that were her eyes. The walk had brought sumptuous color to her cheeks, where the two extra deep dimples began to show.
"You both may think," she began with a sobriety that belied the dimples and shining eyes, "looking on from the outside, that Mr. Cummings has an idea of, as Skeet would say, 'rushing' me; but when we're alone together, about all he talks of is Worth."
"Bad sign," Worth flung over a shoulder that he pushed a little in advance of us. "Takes the old fellows that way. Their notion of falling for a girl is to fight all the other Johnnies in sight. Guess you've got him going, Bobs."
I walked along, chewing over the matter. She'd estimated Cummings fairly, as she did most things that she turned that clear mind of hers on; but her lack of vanity kept her from realizing, as I did, that he was in the way to become a dangerous personal enemy to Worth. His self-interest, she thought, would eventually swing him to Worth's side. She didn't as yet perceive that a motive more powerful than self-interest had hold of him now.
"Why, Mr. Boyne," she answered as though I'd been speaking my thoughts aloud, "I've known Mr. Cummings for years and years. He never—"
"You said a mouthful there, Bobs." Worth halted, grinning, to interrupt her. "He never—none whatever. But he has now."
"He hasn't."
"Leave it to Jerry. Jerry saw him that first night in at Tait's; then afterward, in the office."
"Oh, come on!" Barbara started ahead impatiently. "What difference would it make."
They went on ahead of me, scrapping briskly, as a boy and girl do who have grown up together. I stumped along after and reflected on the folly of mankind in general, and that of Allen G. Cummings in particular. That careful, mature bachelor had seen this lustrous young creature blossom to her present perfection; he'd no doubt offered her safe and sane attention, when she came to live in San Francisco where they had friends in common. But it had needed Worth Gilbert's appearance on the scene to wake him up to his own real feeling. Forty-five on the chase of nimble sweet and twenty; Cummings was in for sore feet and humiliating tumbles—and we were in for the worst he could do to us. I sighed. Worth had more than one way of making enemies, it seemed.
At last we came in sight of the country club upon its rise of ground overlooking the golf links. The low, brown clubhouse, built bungalow fashion, with a long front gallery and gravel sweep, was swarming with people—the decorators. Motors came and went. The grounds were being strung with paper lanterns. We skirted these, and the links itself where there were two or three players, obstinate, defiant old men who would have their game in spite of forty blossom festivals—climbed a fence, and crossed the grass up to the crest of a little round hill, halting there for the view. It wasn't high, but standing free as it did, it commanded pretty nearly the entire Santa Ysobeldistrict. Massed acres of pink and white, the great orchards ran one into the other without break for miles. The lanes between the trunks, diamonded like a harlequin's robe in mathematical primness, were newly turned furrows of rich, black soil, against which the gray or, sometimes, whitewashed trunks of apricot, peach and plum trees gave contrast. Then the cap of glorious blossoms, meeting overhead in the older orchards, with a warm blue sky above and puffs of clouds that matched the pure white of the plum trees' bloom.
The spot suited me well; we had left the town behind us; here neither Dykeman's spotter nor any one he hired to help him could get within listening distance, I dropped down on a bank; Worth and Barbara disposed themselves, he sprawling his length, she sitting cross-legged, just below him.
It wasn't easy to make a beginning. I knew it wouldn't do me any particular good with Worth to dwell on his danger. But I finally managed to lay fairly before them my case against Eddie Hughes, and I must say that, as I told it, it sounded pretty strong.
I didn't want to put too much stress on having found my evidence in the diaries; I knew Worth was as obstinate as a mule, and having said that he would not stand for any one being prosecuted on their evidence, he'd stick to it till the skies fell. I called on my memory of those pages, now unfortunately ashes and not get-atable, and explained that Worth's father hired Hughes directly after a jail-break at San Jose had roused the whole country. Three of the four escapes were rounded up in the course of a few days, but the fourth—known to us as Eddie Hughes—wassafe in Thomas Gilbert's garage, working there as chauffeur, having been employed without recommendation on the strength of what he could do.
"And the low wages he was willing to take," Worth put in drily. "Old stuff, Jerry. I wasn't sure till you spilled it just now that my father was wise to it. But I knew. What you getting at?"
"Just this. When I talked to Hughes that first night I came down here with you, while we all supposed the death a suicide, he couldn't keep his resentment against your father, his hatred of him, from boiling over every time he was mentioned."
"Get on," said Worth wearily. "Father hired a jail-bird that came cheap. Probably put it to himself that he was giving the man a chance to go straight."
I glanced up. This was just about what I remembered Thomas Gilbert to have said in the entry that told of the hiring of Eddie. Worth nodded grimly at my startled face.
"Eddie's gone straight since then," he filled in. "That is, he's kept out of jail, which is going straight for Eddie. He'd certainly hate the man who held him as he's been held for five years. Not motive enough for murder though."
"There's more. The 1920 diary you gave me last night tells when and why the extra bolts were put on the study doors. Your father had been missing liquor and cigars and believed Hughes was taking them."
"Pilfering!" with an expression of distaste. "That doesn't—"
"Hold on!" I stopped him. "On February twelfthyour father left money, marked coin and paper money, as if by accident, on the top of the liquor cabinet; not exposed, but dropped in under the edge of the big ash tray so it might look as though it were forgotten—in a sense, lost there."
"How much?" came the quick question.
"Fifty one dollars." He looked around at me.
"Just one dollar above the limit of petty larceny; a hundred cents added to put it in the felony class that meant state's prison. So he could have sent Eddie to the pen,—eh? I guess you've got a motive there, Boyne."
"Well—er—" I squirmed over my statement, blurting out finally. "Hughes didn't take the money."
"Knew it was a trap," Worth's laugh was bitter. "And hated the man who cold-bloodedly set it to catch him. If he didn't take it, don't you think he counted it?"
"Worth," I said sharply. "Your father put those bolts on—and continued to find that he was being robbed. He was mad about it. Any man would be. Say what you will, no one likes to find that persons in his employ are stealing from him. The aggravating thing was that he couldn't bring it home to Hughes, though he was sure of the fact."
"So he went back to what he had known of Eddie when he hired him? After profiting by it for five years, he was going to rake that up?"
"He was,"—a bit nettled—"and well within his rights to do so. Three weeks before he was shot, he wrote that he'd started the inquiry. There was no further mention of the matter in the book as it stands, but don't you see that the result of the inquiry musthave been on that torn-out last page? Eddie's Saturday night alibi won't hold water. His cannery girl, of course, will swear he was with her; but there's no corroborating testimony. No one saw them together from nine till twelve."
Dead silence dropped on us, with the white clouds standing like witnesses in the blue above, the wind bringing now and again on its scented wings little faint echoes of the noise down at the clubhouse.
"What more do you want?" Both young faces were set against me, cold and hostile. "Here was motive, opportunity, a suspect capable of the deed. My theory is that Mr. Gilbert came in on Hughes, caught him in the act of stealing from the cabinet. Hughes jumped for the pistol over the fireplace, got it, fired the fatal shot, and placed the dead man's fingers about the butt of the gun. Then he picked up the diary lying on the table, tore out the leaf about himself, and poked the rest of the book down the drain pipe."
"And the shot?" Worth resisted me. "Why didn't the shot bring Chung on the run?"
"Because he couldn't hear it. Nobody'd hear it ten paces away. That's what I was trying out this morning. You told me I'd fired once. Well, I fired twice; once with the door shut, and neither you nor Chung heard it; afterward, with the door open—the report you registered."
"The blotter—and it had been used on that last page—showed no words to strengthen this theory of yours," said Barbara as confidently as though the little blue square had been clear print, instead of broken blurring. Perhaps it was clear to her. I wasglad I'd given it a thorough reëxamination the night before.
"I think it does," I struggled against the tide, manfully, buoying myself up with the tracing of the blotter. "Here's the word 'demanded,' reasonably connected with the affair. The letters 'ller' may be the last end of 'caller,' or possibly 'fuller'; I noticed Gilbert spoke in a former entry of the bottle in the cabinet and Hughes snitching from it, and used the word 'fuller.' Here's the word 'Avenue,' complete, and Lizzie Watkins, Hughes' girl, lives on Myrtle Avenue."
The silence after that was fairly derisive. Worth broke it with an impatient,
"And the fact of the bolted doors throws all that stuff out."
"Well," I grunted, "Barbara deduced the slipping of some bolts to please you once—why can't she again?"
"Mr. Boyne," the girl spoke quickly, "it wouldn't help you a bit to be assured that Eddie Hughes could enter the study and leave it bolted behind him when he went out—help you to the truth, I mean. These facts you've gathered are all wabbly; they'll never in the world fit in trim and true. They're hardly facts at all. They're partial facts."
"Wouldn't help me?" I ejaculated. "It would cinch a case against him. We've got to have some one in jail, and that shortly. We're forced to."
"Forced?" Worth had sat up a little and reached far forward for a stone that lay among the weeds down there. He spoke to me sidewise with a challenging flicker of the eye. Barbara kept her lips tight shut.
"I need a prisoner," trying to correct my error; then burst out, "My Lord, children! An arrest isn't going to hurt a man like Hughes,—even if he proves to be innocent. It's an old story to him. Barbara, you said yourself that the man who stole the 1920 diary was the murderer."