Hastings, opening his mouth for angry retort, checked himself. He stood a moment silent, shaken by the effort it cost him to maintain his self-control.
"Humph!" Sloane's nasal, twangyexclamation was clearly intended to provoke him further.
But, without a word, he turned and left the room. Passing the screen near the door, he heard Jarvis snicker, a discreet echo of Sloane's goading ridicule.
On his way back to the parlour, the old man made up his mind to discount Sloane's behaviour.
"I've got to take a chance," he counselled himself, "but I know I'm right in doing it. A big responsibility—but I'm right!"
Then he submitted this report:
"He says nothing new, Crown. Far as I can make out, nothing unusual waked him up that night—except chronic nervousness; he turned on that light to find some medicine; he knew nothing of the murder until Judge Wilton called him."
"Humph!" growled Crown. "And you fall for that!"
Hastings eyed him sternly. "It's the statement I'm going to give to the reporters."
The sheriff was silent, irresolute. Hastings congratulated himself on his earlier deduction: that Crown, unable to frighten Sloane into communicativeness, was thankful for an excuse to withdraw.
Hendricks had reported the two-hourconference between Crown and Mrs. Brace late that afternoon. Hastings decided now: "The man's in cahoots with her. His ally! And he won't act until he's had another session with her.—And she won't advise an arrest for a day or two anyway. Her game is to make him play on Sloane's nerves for a while. She advises threats, not arrests—which suits me, to a T!"
He fought down a chuckle, thinking of that alliance.
Crown corroborated his reasoning.
"All right, Hastings," he said doggedly. "I'm not going back to his room. I gave him his chance. He can take the consequences."
"What consequences?"
"I'd hardly describe 'em to his personal representative, would I? But you can take this from me: they'll come soon enough—and rough enough!"
Hastings made no reference to having been dismissed by Sloane. He was glad when Crown changed the subject.
"Hastings, you saw the reporters this afternoon—I've been wondering—they asked me—did they ask you whether you suspected the valet—Jarvis?"
"Of what?"
"Killing her."
"No; they didn't ask me."
"Funny," said Crown, ill at ease. "They asked me."
"So you said," Hastings reminded, looking hard at him.
"Well!" Crown blurted it out. "Do you suspect him? Are you working on that line—at all?"
Hastings paused. He had no desire to mislead him. And yet, there was no reason for confiding in him—and delay was at present the Hastings plan.
"I'll tell you, Crown," he said, finally; "I'll work on any line that can lead to the guilty man.—What do you know?"
"Who? Me?" Crown's tone indicated the absurdity of suspecting Jarvis. "Not a thing."
But it gave Hastings food for thought. Was Mrs. Brace in communication with Jarvis? And did Crown know that? Was it possible that Crown wanted to find out whether Hastings was having Jarvis shadowed? How much of a fool was the woman making of the sheriff, anyway?
Another thing puzzled him: why did Mrs. Brace suspect Arthur Sloane of withholding the true story of what he had seen the night of the murder? Hastings' suspicion, amounting to certainty, came from his knowledge that theman's own daughter thought him deeply involved in the crime. But Mrs. Brace—was she clever enough to make that deduction from the known facts? Or did she have more direct information from Sloanehurst than he had thought possible?
He decided not to leave the sheriff entirely subject to her schemes and suggestions. He would give Mr. Crown something along another line—a brake, as it were, on impulsive action.
"You talk about arresting Webster right away—or Sloane," he began, suddenly confiding. "You wouldn't want to make a mistake—would you?"
Crown rose to that. "Why? What do you know—specially?"
"Well, not so much, maybe. But it's worth thinking about. I'll give you the facts—confidentially, of course.—Hub Hill's about a hundred yards from this house, on the road to Washington. When automobiles sink into it hub-deep, they come out with a lot of mud on their wheels—black, loamy mud. Ain't any other mud like that Hub Hill mud anywhere near here. It's just special and peculiar to Hub Hill. That so?"
"Yes," agreed Crown, absorbed.
"All right. How, then, did Eugene Russellkeep black, Hub Hill mud on his shoes that night if he went the four miles on foot to where Otis picked him up?"
"Eh?" said Crown, chin fallen.
"By the time he'd run four miles, his shoes would have been covered with the red mud of that mile of 'dirt road' or the thin, grey mud of the three miles of pike—wouldn't they? They'd have thrown off that Hub Hill mud pretty quick, wouldn't they?"
"Thunder!" marvelled Crown. "That's right! And those shoes were in his room; I saw 'em." He gurgled, far back in his throat. "Say! How did he get from Hub Hill to where Otis picked him up?"
"That's what I say," declared Hastings, very bland. "How?"
To Lucille, after Crown's departure, the detective declared his intention to "stand by" her, to stay on the case. He repeated his statement of yesterday: he suspected too much, and knew too little, to give it up.
He told her of the responsibility he had assumed in giving the sheriff the fictitious Sloane statement. "That is, it's not fictitious, in itself; it's what your father has been saying. But I told Crown, and I'm going to tell the newspaper men, that he says it's all he knows, really. And I hate to do it—because, honestly, Miss Sloane,I don't think it is all. I'm afraid he's deceiving us."
She did not contradict that; it was her own opinion.
"However," the old man made excuse, "I had to do it—in view of things as they are. And he's got to stick to it, now that I've made it 'official,' so to speak. Do you think he will?"
She did not see why not. She would explain to him the importance, the necessity, of that course.
"He's so mistaken in what he's doing!" she said. "I don't understand him—really. You know how devoted to me he is. He called me into his room again an hour or two ago and tried to comfort me. He said he had reason to know everything would come out as it should. But he looked so—so uncertain!—Oh, Mr. Hastings, who did kill that woman?"
"I think I'll be able to prove who did it—let's see," he spoke with a light cheerfulness, and at the same time with sincerity; "I'll be able to prove it in less than a week after Mrs. Brace takes that money from you."
She said nothing to that, and he leaned forward sharply, peering at her face, illegible to him in the darkness of the verandah.
"So much depends on that, on you," he added. "You won't fail me—tomorrow?"
"I'll do my best," she said, earnestly, struggling against depression.
"She must take that money," he declared with great emphasis. "She must!"
"And you think she will?"
"Miss Sloane, I know she will," he said, a fatherly encouragement in his voice. "I'm seldom mistaken in people; and I know I've judged this woman correctly. Money's her weakness. Love of it has destroyed her already. Offering this bribe to anybody else situated as she is would be ridiculous—but she—she'll take it."
Lucille sat a long time on the verandah after Hastings had gone. She was far more depressed than he had suspected; she had to endure so much, she thought—the suspense, which grew heavier as time went by; the notoriety; Berne Webster still in danger of his life; her father's inexplicable pose of indifference toward everything; the suspicions of the newspapers and the public of both her father and Berne; and the waiting, waiting, waiting—for what?
A little moan escaped her.
What if Mrs. Brace did take the marked money? What would that show? That she was acting with criminal intent, Hastings had said. But he had another and more definite objectin urging her to this undertaking; he expected from it a vital development which he had not explained—she was sure. She worried with that idea.
Her confidence in Hastings had been without qualification. But what was he doing? Anything? Judge Wilton was forever saying, "Trust Hastings; he's the man for this case." And that was his reputation; people declared that, if anybody could get to the bottom of all this mystery, he could. Yet, two whole days had passed since the murder, and he had just said another week might be required to work out his plan of detection—whatever that plan was.
Another week of this! She put her hot palms to her hotter temples, striving for clarity of thought. But she was dazed by her terror—her isolated terror, for some of her thoughts were such that she could share them with nobody—not even Hastings.
"If the sheriff makes no arrest within the next few days, I'll be out of the woods," he had told her. "Delay is what I want."
There, again, was discouragement, for here was the sheriff threatening to serve a warrant on Berne within the next twenty-four hours! She had heard Crown make the threat, and to her it had seemed absolutely final: unless herfather revealed something which Crown wanted, whether her father knew it or not, Berne was to be subjected to this humiliation, this added blow to his chance for recovery!
She sprang up, throwing her hands wide and staring blindly at the stars.
The woman whom she was to bribe cast a deep shadow on her imagination. Sharing the feeling of many others, she had reached the reluctant conclusion that Mrs. Brace in some way knew more than anybody else about the murder and its motives. It was, she told herself, a horrid feeling, and without reason. But she could not shake it off. To her, Mrs. Brace was a figure of sinister power, an agent of ugliness, waiting to do evil—waiting for what?
By a great effort, she steadied her jangled nerves. Hastings was counting on her. And work—even work in the dark—was preferable to this idleness, this everlasting summing-up of frightful possibilities without a ray of hope. She would do her best to make that woman take the money!
Tomorrow she would be of real service to Berne Webster—she would atone, in some small measure, for the sorrow she had brought upon him, discarding him because of empty gossip!—Would he continue to love her?—Perhaps, ifshe had not discarded him, Mildred Brace would not have been murdered.
A groan escaped her. She fled into the house, away from her thoughts.
It was nine o'clock the following evening when Lucille Sloane, sure that she had entered the Walman unobserved, rang the bell of Mrs. Brace's apartment. Her body felt remarkably light and facile, as if she moved in a tenuous, half-real atmosphere. There were moments when she had the sensation of floating. Her brain worked with extraordinary rapidity. She was conscious of an unusually resourceful intelligence, and performed a series of mental gymnastics, framing in advance the sentences she would use in the interview confronting her.
The constant thought at the back of her brain was that she would succeed; she would speak and act in such a way that Mrs. Brace would take the money. She was buoyed by a fierce determination to be repaid for all the suspense, all the agony of heart, that had weighed her down throughout this long, leaden-footed day—the past twenty-four hours unproductive of a single enlightening incident.
Mrs. Brace opened the door and, with a scarcely perceptible nod of the head, motioned her into the living room. Neither of them spoke until they had seated themselves on the chairs by the window. Even then, the silence was prolonged, until Lucille realized that her tongue was dry and uncomfortably large for her mouth. An access of trembling shook her. She tried to smile and knew that her lips were twisting in a ghastly grin.
Mrs. Brace moved slowly to and fro on the armless rocker, her swift, appraising eyes taking in her visitor's distress. The smooth face wore its customary, inexpressive calm. Lucille, striving desperately to arrive at some opinion of what the woman thought, saw that she might as well try to find emotion in a statue.
"I—I," the girl finally attained a quick, flurried utterance, "want to thank you for—for having this—this talk with me."
"What do you want to talk about, Miss Sloane?"
The low, metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency.
It both angered and encouraged Lucille. She perceived the futility of polite, introductory phrases here; she could go straight to her purpose, be brutally frank. She gave Mrs. Bracea brilliant, disarming smile, a proclamation of fellowship. Her confidence was restored.
"I'm sure we can talk sensibly together, Mrs. Brace," she explained, dissembling her indignation. "We can get down to business, at once."
"What business?" inquired the older woman, with some of the manner Hastings had seen, an air of lying in wait.
"I said, on the 'phone, it was something of advantage to you—didn't I?"
"Yes; you said that."
"And, of course, I want something from you."
"Naturally."
"I'll tell you what it is." Lucille spoke now with cool precision, as yet untouched by the horror she had expected to feel. "It's a matter of money."
Mrs. Brace's tongue came out to the edge of the thin line of her lips. Her nostrils quivered, once, to the sharply indrawn breath. Her eyes were more furtive.
"Money?" she echoed. "For what?"
"There's no good of my making long explanations, Mrs. Brace," Lucille said. "I've read the newspapers, every line of them, about—our trouble. And I saw the references to your finances, your lack of money."
"Yes?" Mrs. Brace's right hand lay on her lap; the thumb of it began to move against theforefinger rapidly, the motion a woman makes in feeling the texture of cloth—or the trick of a bank clerk separating paper money.
"Yes. I read, also, what you said about the tragedy. Today I noticed that the only note of newness in the articles in the papers came from you—from your saying that 'in a few days, three or four at the outside'—that was your language, I'm quite sure—you'd produce evidence on which an arrest would be made. I've intelligence enough to see that the public's interest in you is so great, the sympathy for you is so great, that your threats—I mean, predictions, or opinions—colour everything that's written by the reporters. You see?"
"Do I see what?"
Despite her excellent pose of waiting with nothing more than a polite interest, Lucille saw in her a pronounced alteration. That was not so much in her face as in her body. Her limbs had a look of rigidity.
"Don't you see what I mean?" Lucille insisted. "I see that you can make endless trouble for us—for all of us at Sloanehurst. You can make people believe Mr. Webster guilty, and that father and I are shielding him. People listen to what you say. They seem to be on your side."
"Well?"
"I wondered if you wouldn't stop your interviews—your accusations?"
The younger woman's eagerness, evident now in the variety of her gestures and the rapid procession of pallour and flush across her cheeks, persuaded Mrs. Brace that Lucille was acting on an impulse of her own, not as an agent to carry out another's well designed scheme. The older woman, at that idea, felt safe. She asked:
"And you want—what?"
"I've come here to ask you to tell me all you know, or to be quiet altogether."
"I'm afraid I don't understand—fully," returned Mrs. Brace, with an exaggerated bewilderment. "Tell all I know?"
"That is, if you do know anything you haven't told!" Lucille urged her. "Oh, don't you see? I'm saying to you that I want to put an end to this dreadful suspense!"
Mrs. Brace laughed disagreeably; her face was harder, less human. "You mean I'm amusing myself, exerting myself needlessly, as a matter of spite? Do you mean to tell me that?"
"No! No!" Lucille denied, impatient with herself for lack of clearness. "I mean I'm sure you're attacking an innocent man. And I'm willing, I'm anxious—oh, I hope so much, Mrs. Brace—to make an agreement with you—a financial arrangement——" She paused thefractional part of a second on that; and, seeing that the other did not resent the term, she added: "to pay you to stop it. Isn't that clear?"
"Yes; that's clear."
"Understand me, please. What I ask is that you say nothing more to the reporters, the sheriff or the Washington police, that will have the effect of hounding them on against Mr. Webster. I want to eliminate from the situation all the influence you've exerted to make Mr. Crown believe Mr. Webster's guilty and my father's protecting him."
"Let me think," Mrs. Brace said, coolly.
Lucille exulted inwardly, "She'll do it! She'll do it!" The hard eyes dissected her eager face. The girl drew back in her chair, thinking now: "She suspects who sent me!"
At last, the older woman spoke:
"The detective, Hastings, would never have allowed you to come here, Miss Sloane.—Excuse my frankness," she interjected, with a smile she meant to be friendly; "but you're frank with me; we're not mincing matters; and I have to be careful.—He'd have warned you that your errand's practical confession of your knowledge of something incriminating Berne Webster. If you didn't suspect the man even more strongly than I do, you'd never have been driven to—this."
She leaned the rocker back and crossed her knees, the movement throwing into high relief the hard lankness of her figure. She gazed at the wall, over Lucille's head, as she dealt with the possibilities that presented themselves to her analysis. Her manner was that of a certain gloating enjoyment, a thinly covered, semi-orderly greediness.
"She's not even thinking of her daughter," Lucille thought, and went pale a moment. "She's as bad as Mr. Hastings said—worse!"
"Then, too," Mrs. Brace continued, "your father discharged him last night."
Lucille remembered the detective's misgivings about Jarvis; how else had this woman found that out?
"And you've taken matters into your own hands.—Did your father send you here—to me?"
"Why, no!"
The other smiled slyly, the tip of her tongue again visible, her eyebrows high in interrogation. "Of course," she said; "you wouldn't tell me if he had. He would have warned you against that admission."
"It's Mr. Webster about whom I am most concerned," Lucille reminded, sharpness in her vibrant young voice. "My father's being annoyed is merely incidental."
"Oh, of course! Of course," Mrs. Brace grinned, with broad sarcasm.
Lucille started. The meaning of that could not be misunderstood; she charged that the money was offered at Arthur Sloane's instigation and that the concern for Berne Webster was merely pretence.
Mrs. Brace saw her anger, and placated it:
"Don't mind me, Miss Sloane. A woman who's had to endure what I have—well, she doesn't always think clearly."
"Perhaps not," Lucille assented; but she was aware of a sudden longing to be done with the degrading work. "Now that we understand each other, Mrs. Brace, what do you say?"
Mrs. Brace thought again.
"How much?" she asked at last, her lips thickening. "How much, Miss Sloane, do you think my silence is worth?"
Lucille took a roll of bills from her handbag. The woman's chair slid forward, answering to the forward—leaning weight of her new posture. She was lightly rubbing her palms together, as, with head a little bowed, she stared at the money in the younger woman's hand.
"I have here five hundred dollars," Lucille began.
"What!"
Mrs. Brace said that roughly; and, in violentanger, drew back, the legs of her chair grating on the floor.
For a moment Lucille gazed at her, uncomprehending.
"Oh!" she said, uncertainly. "You mean—it isn't enough?"
"Enough!" Mrs. Brace's rage and disappointment grew, her lowered brows a straight line close down to her eyes.
"But I could get more!" Lucille exclaimed, struggling with disgust. "This," she added, with ready invention, "can serve as a part payment, a promise of——"
"Ah-h!" the older woman exclaimed. "That's different. I misunderstood."
She put down the signals of her wrath, succeeding in that readjustment so promptly that Lucille stared at her in undisguised amazement.
"You must pardon me, Miss Sloane. I thought you were making me the victim of your ridicule, some heartless joke."
"Then, we can come to an agreement? That is, if this money is the first——"
She broke the sentence. Mrs. Brace had put up her hand, and now held her head to one side, listening.
There was a step clearly audible outside, in the main hall. The next moment the doorbell rang. They sat motionless. When the bellrang again, Mrs. Brace informed her with a look that she would not answer it.
But the ringing continued, became a prolonged jangle. It got on Lucille's already strained nerves.
"Suppose you slip into the bedroom," Mrs. Brace whispered.
"Oh, no!" Lucille whispered back.
She was weighed down by black premonition; she hoped Mrs. Brace would not open the door.
The bell rang again.
"You'll have to!" Mrs. Brace said at last. "I won't let anybody in. I have to answer it!"
"You'll send them away—whoever it is—at once?"
"At once. I don't want you seen here, any more than you want to be seen!"
Lucille started toward the bedroom. At the first step she took, Mrs. Brace put a hand on her arm.
"That money!" she demanded, in a low whisper. "I'll take it."
"And do what I asked—stop attacking us?"
"Yes. Yes!"
Lucille gave her the money.
There were no lights in the bedroom. Lucille, for fear of stumbling or making a noise, stood to one side of the door-frame, close to the wall.
Mrs. Brace's footsteps stopped. There wasthe click of the opening door. Then, there came to Lucille the high-pitched, querulous voice which she had been afraid she would hear.
It was her father's.
"Mrs. Brace, good evening.—May I come in?"
Then followed the sound of footsteps, and the closing of the door.
"I shan't detain you long, Mrs. Brace." They were still in the hall. "May I come in?"
"Certainly." The tardy assent was the perfection of indifference.
They entered the living room. Lucille, without using her eyes, knew that her father was standing just within the doorway, glancing around with his slight squint, working his lips nervously, his head thrust forward.
"Ah-h!" his shrill drawl, although he kept it low, carried back to Lucille. "All alone—may I ask?" He went toward the chairs by the window. "That is, I hope to have—well—rather a confidential little talk with you."
Mrs. Brace resumed her place on the armless rocker after she had moved a chair forward for him. Lucille heard it grate on the floor. Certain that he had taken it, she looked into theroom. Her intuition was correct; Mrs. Brace had placed it so that his back was turned to both the bedroom door and the door into the entry. This made her escape possible.
The relief she got from the thought was of a violent nature. It came to her like a blow, almost forcing a gasp from her constricted throat. If she could tiptoe without sound a distance of eighteen feet, a matter of six or seven steps, she could leave the apartment without his knowledge.
To that she was doubly urged. In the first place, Hastings' warning drummed upon her brain; he had specified the importance of keeping even her father in ignorance of her errand.
Upon that came another reason for flight, her fear of hearing what her father would say. A wave of nausea weakened her. She bowed down, there in the dark, under the burden of her suspicion: he had come to do, for quite a different reason, what she had done! She kept away from definite analysis of his motive. Fear for Berne, or fear for himself, it was equally horrible to her consideration.
"I admire your spirit, Mrs. Brace," he was saying, in ingratiating tone; "and your shrewdness. I've followed all you said, in the papers. And I'm in hopes that we may——"
He stopped, and Lucille, judging from the thinedges of sounds that she caught, had a mental picture of his peering over his shoulder. He resumed:
"I must apologize, I'm sure. But you'll realize my concern for secrecy—after I've explained. May I—ah-h-h—do you mind if I look about, for possible hearers?"
"It's unnecessary," came the calm, metallic assurance. "I've no objection to your searching my apartment, if you insist." She laughed, a mirthless deprecation of his timidity, and coolly put herself at his disposal in another sentence: "I've sense enough to form an idea of what you'll propose; and I'd scarcely want others to hear it—would I?"
"Ah-h-h!" he drawled, expressing a grudging disposition to accept her assurance. "Certainly not.—Well, that's very reasonable—and obliging, I'm sure."
Again by the thin fringes of sound, Lucille got information of his settling into his chair.
"Why," he began; "why, in the name of all the unfathomable, inscrutable angels——"
"First, Mr. Sloane," Mrs. Brace interrupted him—and Lucille heard the rattle of a newspaper; "as a preface to our—shall we say conference?—our conference, then, let me read you this summary of my position.—That is, if you care to understand my position thoroughly."
She was far from her habitual quietness, rattling the newspaper incessantly. The noise, Lucille realized, would hang as a curtain between her father's ears and the possible sounds of her progress from the bedroom door to the entry.
Stealing a glance into the living room, she saw his back and, over his stooped shoulders, Mrs. Brace's calm face. In that instant, the newspaper shook more violently—enough, she thought, to signal cooperation.
She sickened again at sight of that woman about to dispense bought favours to her father. The impulse to step forth and proclaim her presence rose strongly within her; but she was turned from it by fear that her interruption might produce disastrous results. After all, she was not certain of his intention.
She knew, however, that at any moment he might insist on satisfying himself, by a tour of inspection, that he was safe from being overheard. She hesitated no longer. She would try to get away.
"Look at this, Mr. Sloane, if you please," Mrs. Brace was saying; "notice how the items are made to stand out, each in a paragraph of large type."
She held the paper so that Sloane bent forward, and, against his will, was held to jointperusal while she read aloud. The curtain of protecting noise thus was thickened.
"'That Mrs. Brace has knowledge of the following facts,'" the harsh, colourless voice was reading.
Lucille began her escape. She moved with an agony of precaution, taking steps only a few inches long, her arms held out from her sides to avoid unnecessary rustling of her clothing. She went on the balls of her feet, keeping the heels of her shoes always free of the floor, each step a slow torture.
Her breathing stopped—a hysterical contraction of her chest prevented breathing. Her face burned like fire. Her head felt crowded, as if the blood tried to ooze through the confining scalp. There was a great roaring in her ears. The pulse in her temples was like the blows of sledges.
Once, midway of the distance, as she stood lightly balanced, with arms outstretched, something went wrong with her equilibrium. She started forward as she had often done when a child, with the sensation of falling on her face. Her skirt billowed out in front of her. If she had had any breath in her, she would have cried out.
But the automatisms of her body worked better than her overtaxed brain. Her right footwent out easily and softly—she marvelled at that independent motion of her leg—and, taking up the falling weight of her body, restored her balance.
Mrs. Brace's voice had not faltered, although she must have seen the misstep. Arthur Sloane's bowed shoulders had not stirred. Mrs. Brace continued the printed enumeration of her stores of knowledge.
Lucille took another step. She was safe!—almost. There remained but a yard of her painful progress. One more step, she comforted herself, would put her on the threshold of the entry door, and from there to the corridor door, shielded by the entry wall from possible observation by her father, would be an easy business.
She completed that last step. On the threshold, she had to turn her body through an arc of ninety degrees, unless she backed out of the door. This she was afraid to do; her heel might meet an obstruction; a raised plank of the flooring, even, would mean an alarming noise.
She began to turn. The reading continued. The whole journey from door to door, in spite of the anguished care of every step, had consumed scarcely a minute. She was turning, the balancing arms outstretched. Deep down in herchest there was the beginning of a sensation, muscles relaxing, the promise of a long breath of relief.
Her left hand—or, perhaps, her elbow; in the blinding, benumbing flash of consternation, she did not know which—touched the pile of magazines on the table that was set against the door-frame. The magazines did not fall to the floor, but the fluttering of the loose cover of the one on top made a noise.
She fled, taking with her the flashing memory of the first stirring of her father's figure and the crackle of the paper in Mrs. Brace's hand. In two light steps she was at the corridor door. Her hands found the latch and turned it. She ran down the stairs with rapid, skimming steps, the door clicking softly shut as she made the turn on the next landing.
Her exit had been wonderfully quiet. She knew this, in spite of the fact that her straining senses had exaggerated the flutter of the magazine cover and the click of the door into a terrifying volume of sound. It was entirely possible that Mrs. Brace had been able to persuade her father that he had heard nothing more than some outside noise. She was certain that he had not seen her.
She crossed the dim, narrow lobby of the Walman so quickly, and so quietly, that the girlat the telephone board did not look in her direction.
Once in the street, she was seized by desire to confide to Hastings the story of her experience. She decided to act on the impulse.
He was at first more concerned with her physical condition than with what she had to tell. He saw how near she was to the breaking point.
"My dear child!" he said, in the tone of fatherly solicitude which she had learned to like. "Comfort before conference! Here, this chair by the window—so—and this wreck of a fan, can you use it? Fine! Now, cool your flushed face in this thin, very thin stream of a breeze—feel it? A glass of water?—just for the tinkling of ice? That's better, isn't it?"
The only light in the room was the reading lamp, under a dark-green shade, and from this little island of illumination there ran out a chaotic sea of shadows, huge waves of them, mounting the height of the book-shelves and breaking irregularly on the ceiling.
In the dimness, as he walked back and forth hunting for the fan or bringing her the water, he looked weirdly large—like, she thought dully, a fairy giant curiously draped. But the serenity of his expression touched her. She was glad she had come.
While she told her story, he stood in front of her, encouraging her with a smile or a nod now and then, or ambled with soft step among the shadows, always keeping his eyes upon her. For the moment, her tired spirit was freshened by his lavish praise of the manner in which she had accomplished her undertaking. Following that, his ready sympathy made it easier for her to discuss her fear that her father had planned to bribe Mrs. Brace.
Nevertheless, the effort taxed her severely. At the end of it, she leaned back and closed her eyes, only to open them with a start of fright at the resultant dizziness. The sensation of bodily lightness had left her. Her limbs felt sheathed in metal. An acute, throbbing pain racked her head. She was too weary to combat the depression which was like a cold, freezing hand at her heart.
"You don't say anything!" she complained weakly.
He stood near her chair, gazing thoughtfully before him.
"I'm trying to understand it," he said; "why your father did that. You're right, of course. He went there to pay her to keep quiet. But why?"
He looked at her closely.
"Could it be possible," he put the inquiryat last, "that he knew her before the murder?"
"I've asked him," she said. "No; he never had heard of her—neither he nor Judge Wilton. I even persuaded him to question Jarvis about that. It was the same; Jarvis never had—until last Sunday morning."
"You think of everything!" he congratulated her.
"No! Oh, no!"
Some quick and overmastering emotion broke down the last of her endurance. Whether it was a new and finer appreciation of his persistent, untiring search for the guilty man, or the realization of how sincerely he liked her, giving her credit for a frankness she had not exercised—whatever the pivotal consideration was, she felt that she could no longer deceive him.
She closed her lips tightly, to keep back the rising sobs, and regarded him with questioning, fearful eyes.
"What is it?" he asked gently, reading her appealing look.
"I've a confession to make," she said miserably.
He refused to treat it as a tragedy.
"But it can't be very bad!" he exclaimed pleasantly. "When we're overwrought, imagination's like a lantern swinging in the wind, changing the size of everything every second."
"But it is bad!" she insisted. "I haven't been fair. I couldn't bring myself to tell you this. I tried to think you'd get along without it!"
"And now?"
She answered him with an outward calmness which was, in reality, emotional dullness. She had suffered so much that to feel vividly was beyond her strength.
"You have the right to know it," she said, looking at him out of brilliant, unwinking eyes. "It's about father. He was out there—on the lawn—before he turned on the light in his room. I heard him come in, a minute before Berne went down the back stairs and out to the lawn. And I heard him go to his window and stand there, looking out, at least five long minutes before he flashed on his light."
He waited, thinking she might have more to tell. Construing his silence as reproof, she said, without changing either her expression or her voice:
"I know—it's awful. I should have told you. Perhaps, I've done great harm."
"You've been very brave," he consoled her, with infinite tenderness. "But it happens that I'd already satisfied myself on that point. I knew he'd been out there."
She was dumb, incapable of reacting to hiswords. Even the fact that he was smiling, with genuine amusement, did not affect her.
"Here comes the grotesque element, the comical, that's involved in so many tragedies," he explained. "Your father's weakness for 'cure' of nervousness, and his shrinking from the ridicule he's suffered because of it—there's the explanation of why he was out there that night."
She could not see significance in that, but neither could she summon energy to say so. She wondered vaguely why he thought it funny.
"That night—rather, the early morning hours following—while the rest of you were in the library, I looked through his room, and I found a pair of straw sandals in the closet—such as a man could slip on and off without having to bend down to adjust them. And they were wet, inside and out.
"Sunday morning, when Judge Wilton and I were at his bedside, I saw on the table a 'quack' pamphlet on the 'dew' treatment for nervousness, the benefit of the 'wet, cooling grass' upon the feet at night. You know the kind of thing. So——"
"Oh-h-h!" she breathed, tremulous and weak. "So that's why he was out there! Why didn't I think? Oh, how I've suspected him of——"
"But remember," he warned; "that's why he went out. We still don't know what he—what happened after he got out there—or why he's refused to say that he ever was out there. When we think of this, and other things, and, too, his call tonight on Mrs. Brace, for bribery—leaving what we thought was a sickbed—"
"But he's been up all day!" she corrected.
"And yet," he said, and stopped, reflecting.
"Tell me," she implored; "tell me, Mr. Hastings, do you suspect my father—or not—of the——?"
He answered her unfinished question with a solemn, painstaking care:
"Miss Sloane, you're not one who would want to be misled. You can bear the truth. I'd be foolish to say that he's not under suspicion. He is. Any one of the men there that night may have committed the murder. Webster, your father, Wilton—only there, suspicion seems totally gratuitous—Eugene Russell, Jarvis—I've heard things about him—any one of them may have struck that blow—may have."
"And father," she said, in a grieved bewilderment, "has paid Mrs. Brace to stop saying she suspects Berne," she shuddered, facing the alternative, "or himself!"
"You see," he framed the conclusion for her, "how hard he makes it for us to keep him out of trouble—if that gets out. He's put his hand on the live wire of circumstantial evidence, awire that too often thrashes about, striking the wrong man."
"And Berne?" she cried out. "I think I could stand anything if only I knew——"
But this time the mutinous sobs came crowding past her lips. She could not finish the inquiry she had begun.
It was early in the afternoon of Wednesday when Mr. Hastings, responding to the prolonged ringing of his telephone, took the receiver off the hook and found himself in communication with the sheriff of Alexandria county. This was not the vacillating, veering sheriff who had spent nearly four days accepting the hints of a detective or sitting, chameleon-minded, at the feet of a designing woman. Here was an impressive and self-appreciative gentleman, one who delighted in his own deductive powers and relished their results.
He said so. His confidence fairly rattled the wire. His words annihilated space grandly and leaped into the old man's receptive ear with sizzling and electric effect. Mr. Crown, triumphant, was glad to inform others that he was making a hit with himself.
"Hello! That you, Hastings? Well, old fellow, I don't like to annoy you with an up-to-date rendition of 'I told you so!'—but it's comeout, to the last syllable, exactly as I said it would—from the very first!"
Ensued a pause, for dramatic effect. The detective did not break it.
"Waiting, are you? Well, here she goes; Russell's alibi's been knocked into a thousand pieces! It's blown up! It's gone glimmering!—What do you think of that?"
Hastings refrained from replying that he had regarded such an event as highly probable. Instead, he inquired:
"And that simplifies things?"
"Does it!" exploded Mr. Crown. "I'm getting to you a few minutes ahead of the afternoon papers. You'll see it all there." An apologetic laugh came over the wire. "You'll excuse me, I know; I had to do this thing up right, put on the finishing touches before you even guessed what was going on. I've wound up the whole business. The Washington police nabbed Russell an hour ago, on my orders.
"'Simplifies things?' I should say so! I guess you can call 'em 'simplified' when a murder's been committed and the murderer's waiting to step into my little ring-tum-fi-diddle-dee of a country jail! 'No clue to this mystery,' the papers have been saying! What's the use of a clue when youknowa guy's guilty? That's what I've been whistling all along!"
"But the alibi?" Hastings prompted. "You say it's blown up?"
"Blown! Gone! Result of my sending out those circulars asking if any automobile parties passed along the Sloanehurst road the murder night. Remember?"
"Yes." The old man recalled having made that suggestion, but did not say so.
"This morning the chief of police of York—York, Pennsylvania—wired me. I got him by long-distance right away. He gave me the story, details absolutely right and straight, all verified—and everything. A York man, named Stevens, saw a newspaper account, for the first time this morning, of the murder. He and four other fellows were in a car that went up Hub Hill that night a little after eleven—a few minutes after.—Hear that?"
"Yes. Go on."
"Stevens was on the back seat. They went up the hill on low—terrible piece of road, he calls it—they were no more than crawling. He says he was the only sober man in the crowd—been out on a jollification tour of ten days. He saw a man slide on to the running board on his side of the car as they were creeping up the hill. The rest of the party was singing, having a high old time.
"Stevens said he never said a word, justwatched the guy on the running board, and planned to crack him on the head with an empty beer bottle when they got on the straight road and were hitting up a good clip—just playing, you understand.
"After he'd watched the guy a while and was trying to fish up a beer bottle from the bottom of the car, the chauffeur slowed down and hollered back to him on the back seat that he wanted to stop and look at his radiator—it was about to blow up, too hot. He'd been burning the dust on that stretch of good road.
"When he slowed down, the guy on the running board slipped off. Stevens says he rolled down a bank."
The jubilant Mr. Crown stopped, for breath.
"That's all right, far as it goes," Hastings said; "but does he identify that man as Russell?"
"To the last hair on his head!" replied the sheriff. "Stevens' description of the fellow is Russell all over—all over! Just to show you how good it is, take this: Stevens describe the clothes Russell wore, and says what Otis said: he'd lost his hat."
"Stevens got a good look at him?"
"Says the headlights were full on him ashe stood on one side of the road, there on Hub Hill, waiting to slide on the running board.—And this Stevens is a shrewd guy, the York chief says. I guess his story plugs Russell's lies, shoots that alibi so full of holes it makes a sifter look like a piece of sheet-iron!
"That car went up Hub Hill at seven minutes past eleven—that means Russell had plenty of time to kill the girl after the rain stopped and to get out on the road and slip on to that running board. And the car slowed up, where he rolled off the running board, at eighteen minutes past eleven.
"Time's right, location's right, identification's right!—Pretty sweet, ain't it, old fellow? Congratulate me, don't you? Congratulate me, even if it does step on all those mysterious theories of yours—that right?"
Hastings bestowed the desired felicitations upon the exuberant conqueror of crime.
Turning from the telephone, he gazed a long time at the piece of grey envelope on the table before him. He had clung to his belief that, in those fragments of words, was to be found a clue to the solution of the mystery. He picked up his knife and fell to whittling.
Outside in the street a newsboy set up an abrupt, blaring din, shouting sensational headlines:
"SLOANEHURST MYSTERY SOLVED!—RUSSELL THE MURDERER!—ALIBI A FAKE!"
The old man considered grimly, the various effects of this development in the case—Lucille Sloane's unbounded relief mingled with censure of him for having added to her fears, and especially for having subjected her to the ordeal of last night's experience with Mrs. Brace—the adverse criticism from both press and public because of his refusal to join in the first attacks upon Russell, Arthur Sloane's complacency at never having treated him with common courtesy.
His thoughts went to Mrs. Brace and her blackmail schemes, as he had interpreted or suspected them.
"If I'd had a little more time," he reflected, "I might have put my hand on——"
His eyes rested on the envelope flap. His mind flashed to another and new idea. His muscles stiffened; he put his hands on the arms of his chair and slowly lifted himself up, the knife dropping from his fingers and clattering on the floor. He stood erect and held both hands aloft, a gesture of wide and growing wonder.
"Cripes!" he said aloud.
He picked up the grey paper with a hand that trembled. His pendent cheeks puffed out like those of a man blowing a horn. He stared atthe paper again, before restoring it to its envelope, which he put back into one of his pockets.
"Cripes!" he said again. "It's a place! Pursuit! That's where the——"
He became a whirlwind of action, covered the floor with springy step. Taking a book of colossal size from a shelf, he whirled the pages, running his finger down a column while he murmured, "Pursuit—P-u-r—P-u—P-u——"
But there was no such name in the postal directory. He went back to older directories. He began to worry. Was there no such postoffice as Pursuit? He went to other books, whirling the pages, running down column after column. And at last he got the information he sought.
Consulting a railroad folder, he found a train schedule that caused him to look at his watch.
"Twenty-five minutes," he figured. "I'm going!"
He telephoned for a cab.
Then, seating himself at the table, he tore a sheet from a scratch-pad and wrote:
"Don't lose sight of Mrs. Brace. Disregard Russell's arrest.
"Hendricks: the Sloanehurst people are members of the Arlington Golf Club. Get a look at golf bags there. Did one, or two, contain piece or pieces of a bed-slat?
"Gore: check up on Mrs. B.'s use of money.
"I'll be back Sunday."
He sealed the envelope into which he put that, and, addressing it to Hendricks, left it lying on the table.
At the station he bought the afternoon newspapers and turned to Eugene Russell's statement, made to the reporters immediately after his arrest. It ran:
"I repeat that I'm innocent of the murder. Of course, I made a mistake in omitting all mention of my having ridden the first four miles from Sloanehurst. But, being innocent and knowing the weight of the circumstantial evidence against me, I could not resist the temptation to make my alibi good. I neither committed that murder nor witnessed it. The story I told at the inquest of what happened to me and what I did at Sloanehurst stands. It is the truth."
Returning from his trip Sunday morning, the detective, after a brief conference with Hendricks, had gone immediately to Mrs. Brace's apartment. She sat now, still and watchful, on the armless rocker by the window, waiting for him to disclose the object of his visit. Except the lifted, faintly interrogating eyebrows, there was nothing in her face indicative of what she thought.
He caught himself comparing her to a statue, forever seated on the low-backed, uncomfortable chair, awaiting without emotion or alteration of feature the outcome of her evil scheming. Her hardness gave him the impression of something hammered on, beaten into an ugly pattern.
Having that imperturbability to overcome, he struck his first blow with surprising directness.
"I'm just back from Pursuit," he said.
That was the first speech by either of them since the monosyllabic greeting at the door. He saw that she had prepared herself for such an announcement; but the way she took itreminded him of a door shaken by the impact of a terrific blow. A little shiver, for all her force of repression, moved her from head to foot.
"You are?" she responded, her voice controlled, the hard face untouched by the shock to which her body had responded.
"Yes; I got back half an hour ago, and, except for one of my assistants, you're the first person I've seen." When that drew no comment from her, he added: "I want you to remember that—later on."
He began to whittle.
"Why?" she asked with genuine curiosity, after a pause.
"Because it may be well for you to know that I'm dealing with you alone, and fairly.—I got all the facts concerning you."
"Concerning me?" Her tone intimated doubt.
"Now, Mrs. Brace!" he exclaimed, disapproving her apparent intention. "You're surely not going to pretend ignorance—or innocence!"
She crossed her knees, and, putting her left forearm across her body, rested her right elbow in that hand. She began to rock very gently, her posture causing her to lean forward and giving her a look of continual but polite questioning.
"If you want to talk to me," she said, hervoice free of all feeling, "you'll have to tell me what it's about."
"All right; I will," he returned. "You'll remember, I take it, my asking you to tell me the meaning of the marks on the flap of the grey envelope. I'll admit I was slow, criminally slow, in coming to the conclusion that 'Pursuit!' referred to a place rather than an act. But I got it finally—and I found Pursuit—not much left of it now; it's not even a postoffice.
"But it's discoverable," he continued on a sterner note, and began to shave long, slender chips from his block of wood. "I'll give you the high lights: young Dalton was killed—his murderer made a run for it—but you, a young widow then, in whose presence the thing was done, smoothed matters out. You swore it was a matter of self-defence. The result was that, after a few half-hearted attempts to locate the fugitive, the pursuit was given up."
"Very well. But why bring that story here—now? What's its significance?"
He stared at her in amazement. Her thin, sensitive lips were drawn back at the corners, enough to make her mouth look a trifle wider—and enough to suggest dimly that their motion was the start of a vindictive grimace. Otherwise, she was unmoved, unresponsive to the open threat of what he had said.
"Let me finish," he retorted. "An unfortunate feature, for you, was that you seemed to have made money out of the tragedy. In straitened circumstances previously, you began to spend freely—comparatively speaking—a few days after the murderer's disappearance. In fact, bribery was hinted; you had to leave the village. See any significance in that?" he concluded, with irony.
"Suppose you explain it," she said, still cool.
"The significance is in the strengthening of the theory I've had throughout the whole week that's passed since your daughter was killed at Sloanehurst."
"What's that?"
She stopped rocking; her eyes played a fiery tattoo on every feature of his face.
"Your daughter's death was the unexpected result of your attempts to blackmail young Dalton's murderer. You, being afraid of him, and not confessing that timidity to Mildred, persuaded her to approach him—in person."
"I! Afraid of him!" she objected, aroused at last.
Her brows were lowered, a heavy line above her furtive, swift eyes; her nostrils fluttered nervously.
"Granting your absurd theory," she continued, "why should I have feared him? Whathad he done—except strike to save his own life?"
"You forget, Mrs. Brace," he corrected. "That body showed twenty-nine wounds, twenty-eight of them unnecessary—if the first was inflicted in mere self-defence. It was horrible mutilation."
"So!" she ridiculed, with obvious effort. "You picture him as a butcher."
"Precisely. And you, having seen to what lengths his murderous fury could take him, were afraid to face him—even after your long, long search had located him again. Let's be sensible, Mrs. Brace. Let's give the facts of this business a hearing.
"You had come to Washington and located him at last. But, after receiving several demands from you, he'd stopped reading your letters—sent them back unopened. Consequently, in order for you to make an appointment with him, he had to be communicated with in a handwriting he didn't know. Hence, your daughter had to write the letter making that appointment a week ago last night. Then, however——"
"What makes you think——"
"Then, however," he concluded, overbearing her with his voice, "you hadn't the courage to face him—out there, in the dark, alone. Youpersuaded Mildred to go—in your place. And he killed her."
"Ha!" The mocking exclamation sounded as though it had been pounded out of her by a blow upon her back. "What makes you say that? Where do you get that? Who put that into your head?"
She volleyed those questions at him with indescribable rapidity, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her brows straining far up toward the line of her hair. The profound disgust with which he viewed her did not affect her. She darted to and fro in her mind, running about in the waste and tumult of her momentary confusion, seeking the best thing to say, the best policy to adopt, for her own ends.
He had had time to determine that much when her gift of self-possession reasserted itself. She forced her lips back to their thin line, and steadied herself. He could see the vibrant tautness of her whole body, exemplified in the rigidity with which she held her crossed knees, one crushed upon the other.
"I know, I think, what misled you," she answered her own question. "You've talked to Gene Russell, of course. He may have heard—I think he did hear—Mildred and me discussing the mailing of a letter that Friday night."
"He did," Hastings said, firmly.
"But he couldn't have heard anything to warrant your theory, Mr. Hastings. I merely made fun of her wavering after she'd once said she'd confront Berne Webster again with her appeal for fair play."
He inspected her with an emotion that was a mingling of incredulity and repugnant wonder.
"It's no use, Mrs. Brace," he told her. "Russell didn't see the name of the man to whom the letter was addressed. I saw him last Sunday afternoon. He told me he took the name for granted, because Mildred had taunted him, saying it went to Webster. As a matter of fact, he wanted to see if Webster was at Sloanehurst and fastened his eyes for a fleeting glimpse on that word—and on that alone. Besides, there are facts to prove that the letter did not go to Webster.—Do you see how your fancied security falls away?"
"Let me think," she said, her tone flat and impersonal.
She was silent, her restless eyes gazing at the wall over his head. He watched her, and glanced only at intervals at the wood he was aimlessly shaving.
"Of course," she said, after a while, looking at him with a speculative, deliberating air, "you've deduced and pieced this together.You've a woman's intuition—comprehension of motives, feelings."
She was silent again.
"Pieced what together?" he asked.
"It's plain enough, isn't it? You began with your suspicion that my need of money was heavier in my mind than grief at Mildred's death. On that, you built up—well, all you've just said."
"It was more than a suspicion," he corrected. "It was knowledge—that everything you did, after her death, was intended to help along your scheme to—we'll say, to get money."
"Still," she persisted shrewdly, "you felt the necessity of proving I'd blackmail—if that's the word you want to use."
"How?" he put in quickly. "Prove it, how?"
"That's why you sent that girl here with the five hundred. I see it now; although, at the time, I didn't." She laughed, a short, bitter note. "Perhaps, the money, or my need of it, kept me from thinking straight."
"Well?"
"Of course," she made the admission calmly, "as soon as I took the hush money, your theory seemed sound—the whole of it: my motives and identity of the murderer."
She was thinking with a concentration sointense that the signs of it resembled physical exertion. Moisture beaded the upper part of her forehead. He could see the muscles of her face respond to the locking of her jaws.
"But there's nothing against me," she began again, and, moved by his expression, qualified: "nothing that I can be held for, in the courts."
"You've decided that, have you?"
"You'll admit it," she said. "There's nothing—there can be nothing—to disprove my statement that Dalton's death was provoked. I hold the key to that—I alone. That being true, I couldn't be prosecuted in Pursuit as 'accessory after the fact.'"
"Yes," he agreed. "That's true."
"And here," she concluded, without a hint of triumph, even without a special show of interest, "I can't be proceeded against for blackmail. That money, from both of them, was a gift. I hadn't asked for it, much less demanded it. I," she said with an assured arrogance, "hadn't got that far.—So, you see, Mr. Hastings, I'm far from frightened."
He found nothing to say to that shameless but unassailable declaration. Also, he was aware that she entertained, and sought solution of, a problem, the question of how best to satisfy her implacable determination to make the manpay. That purpose occupied all her mind, now that her money greed was frustrated.
It was on this that he had calculated. It explained his going to her before confronting the murderer. He had felt certain that her perverted desire to "get even" would force her into the strange position of helping him.
He broke the silence with a careful attempt to guide her thoughts:
"But don't fool yourself, Mrs. Brace. You've got out of this all you'll ever get, financially—every cent. And you're in an unpleasant situation—an outcast, perhaps. People don't stand for your line of stuff, your behaviour."
She did not resent that. Making a desperate mental search for the best way to serve her hard self-interest, he thought, she was impervious to insult.
"I know," she said, to his immense relief. "I've been considering the only remaining point."
"What's that?"
"The sure way to make him suffer as horribly as possible."
He pretended absorption in his carving.
"Why shouldn't he have provided me with money when I asked it?" she demanded, at last.
The new quality of her speech brought his head up with a jerk. Instead of colourless harshness, it had a warm fury. It was not that she spoke loudly or on a high key; but it had an unbridled, self-indulgent sound. He got the impression that she put off all censorship from either her feeling or her expression.
"That wasn't much to ask—as long as he continued his life of ease, of luxury, of safety—as long as I left out of consideration the debt he couldn't pay, the debt that was impossible of payment."
Alien as the thing seemed in connection with her, he grasped it. She thought that she had once loved the man.
"The matter of personal feeling?" he asked.
"Yes. When he left Pursuit, he destroyed the better part of me—what you would call the good part."
She said that without sentimentalism, without making it a plea for sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could arouse sympathy on that ground.
"And," she continued, with intense malignity, "what was so monstrous in my asking him for money? I asked him for no payment of what he really owes me. That's a debt he can't pay! My beauty, destroyed, withered and covered overwith the hard mask of the features you see now; my capacity for happiness, dead, swallowed up in my long, long devotion to my purpose to find him again—those things, man as you are, you realize are beyond the scope of payment or repayment!"