The next minute he was hovering over the still more pathetic figure of
John, sitting in the chair.
“Sad! Sad!” he murmured.
Suddenly he laid his finger on a small rent in the old man’s faded vest. “You saw this, of course,” said he, with a quick glance over his shoulder at the silent detective.
No answer, as before.
“It’s a new slit,” declared the officious youth, looking closer, “and—yes—there’s blood on its edges. Here, take the lantern, Mr. Fenton, I must see how the skin looks underneath. Oh, gentlemen, no shirt! The poorest dockhand has a shirt! Brocaded vest and no shirt; but he’s past our pity now. Ah, only a bruise over the heart. Sirs, what did you make out of this?”
As none of them had even seen it, Knapp was not the only one to remain silent.
“Shall I tell you what I make out of it?” said the lad, rising hurriedly from the floor, which he had as hurriedly examined. “This old man has tried to take his life with the dagger already wet with the blood of Agatha Webb. But his arm was too feeble. The point only pierced the vest, wiping off a little blood in its passage, then the weapon fell from his hand and struck the floor, as you will see by the fresh dent in the old board I am standing on. Have you anything to say against these simple deductions?”
Again the detective opened his lips and might have spoken, but
Sweetwater gave him no chance.
“Where is the letter he was writing?” he demanded. “Have any of you seen any paper lying about here?”
“He was not writing,” objected Knapp; “he was reading; reading in that old Bible you see there.”
Sweetwater caught up the book, looked it over, and laid it down, with that same curious twinkle of his eye they had noted in him before.
“He was writing,” he insisted. “See, here is his pencil.” And he showed them the battered end of a small lead-pencil lying on the edge of his chair.
“Writing at some time,” admitted Knapp.
“Writing just before the deed,” insisted Sweetwater. “Look at the fingers of his right hand. They have not moved since the pencil fell out of them.”
“The letter, or whatever it was, shall be looked for,” declared the constable.
Sweetwater bowed, his eyes roving restlessly into every nook and corner of the room.
“James was the stronger of the two,” he remarked; “yet there is no evidence that he made any attempt at suicide.”
“How do you know that it was suicide John attempted?” asked someone. “Why might not the dagger have fallen from James’s hand in an effort to kill his brother?”
“Because the dent in the floor would have been to the right of the chair instead of to the left,” he returned. “Besides, James’s hand would not have failed so utterly, since he had strength to pick up the weapon afterward and lay it where you found it.”
“True, we found it lying on the table,” observed Abel, scratching his head in forced admiration of his old schoolmate.
“All easy, very easy,” Sweetwater remarked, seeing the wonder in every eye. “Matters like those are for a child’s reading, but what is difficult, and what I find hard to come by, is how the twenty-dollar bill got into the old man’s hand. He found it here, but how—”
“Found it here? How do you know that?”
“Gentlemen, that is a point I will make clear to you later, when I have laid my hand on a certain clew I am anxiously seeking. You know this is new work for me and I have to advance warily. Did any of you gentlemen, when you came into this room, detect the faintest odour of any kind of perfume?”
“Perfume?” echoed Abel, with a glance about the musty apartment. “Rats, rather.”
Sweetwater shook his head with a discouraged air, but suddenly brightened, and stepping quickly across the floor, paused at one of the windows. It was that one in which the shade had been drawn.
Peering at this shade he gave a grunt.
“You must excuse me for a minute,” said he; “I have not found what I wanted in this room and now must look outside for it. Will someone bring the lantern?”
“I will,” volunteered Knapp, with grim good humour. Indeed, the situation was almost ludicrous to him.
“Bring it round the house, then, to the ground under this window,” ordered Sweetwater, without giving any sign that he noticed or even recognised the other’s air of condescension. “And, gentlemen, please don’t follow. It’s footsteps I am after, and the fewer we make ourselves, the easier will it be for me to establish the clew I am after.”
Mr. Fenton stared. What had got into the fellow?
The lantern gone, the room resumed its former appearance.
Abel, who had been much struck by Sweetwater’s mysterious manoeuvres, drew near Dr. Talbot and whispered in his ear: “We might have done without that fellow from Boston.”
To which the coroner replied:
“Perhaps so, and perhaps not. Sweetwater has not yet proved his case; let us wait till he explains himself.” Then, turning to the constable, he showed him an old-fashioned miniature, which he had found lying on James’s breast, when he made his first examination. It was set with pearls and backed with gold and was worth many meals, for the lack of which its devoted owner had perished.
“Agatha Webb’s portrait,” explained Talbot, “or rather Agatha Gilchrist’s; for I presume this was painted when she and James were lovers.”
“She was certainly a beauty,” commented Fenton, as he bent over the miniature in the moonlight. “I do not wonder she queened it over the whole country.”
“He must have worn it where I found it for the last forty years,” mused the doctor. “And yet men say that love is a fleeting passion. Well, after coming upon this proof of devotion, I find it impossible to believe James Zabel accountable for the death of one so fondly remembered. Sweetwater’s instinct was truer than Knapp’s.”
“Or ours,” muttered Fenton.
“Gentlemen,” interposed Abel, pointing to a bright spot that just then made its appearance in the dark outline of the shade before alluded to, “do you see that hole? It was the sight of that prick in the shade which sent Sweetwater outside looking for footprints. See! Now his eye is to it” (as the bright spot became suddenly eclipsed). “We are under examination, sirs, and the next thing we will hear is that he’s not the only person who’s been peering into this room through that hole.”
He was so far right that the first words of Sweetwater on his re-entrance were: “It’s all O. K., sirs. I have found my missing clew. James Zabel was not the only person who came up here from the Webb cottage last night.” And turning to Knapp, who was losing some of his supercilious manner, he asked, with significant emphasis: “If, of the full amount stolen from Agatha Webb, you found twenty dollars in the possession of one man and nine hundred and eighty dollars in the possession of another, upon which of the two would you fix as the probable murderer of the good woman?”
“Upon him who held the lion’s share, of course.”
“Very good; then it is not in this cottage you will find the person most wanted. You must look—But there! first let me give you a glimpse of the money. Is there anyone here ready to accompany me in search of it? I shall have to take him a quarter of a mile farther up-hill.”
“You have seen the money? You know where it is?” asked Dr. Talbot and
Mr. Fenton in one breath.
“Gentlemen,