“Well,” he said. “If Jim Blake did that by himself, he’s a better man than I am, Rudyard Kipling.”
On this particular night they came in filled with suppressed excitement.
Amos had emerged from hiding long enough to see Dick that day, and he had told him certain details which he had withheld before the Grand Jury.
Dick did the talking, while Judy watched him.
“In the first place,” he said, “do you believe Jim Blake is guilty?”
“I do not.”
“Well, neither do we.
But I’ve got something to tell you that will make you think. Amos went into his room the next morning, and he found some blood on Jim Blake’s clothes, and a handkerchief pretty well soaked with it.
He showed it to Blake, and Blake said he’d cut his hand the night before.
The hand was tied up, all right, and there was a cut.
Amos saw it later.
Of course he might have done that himself to explain the blood, but we don’t believe it.
Amos is hiding because he doesn’t want to tell that at the trial.
He cleaned the clothes as best he could, but when he sent the laundry out some time later he found that Jim had washed the handkerchief.
“But there’s something else.
The next day, after Sarah was missing, at noon and after you had telephoned to him, Jim Blake got out of bed, dressed in some old clothes and went out.
It was raining, and when he came back he was wet and his shoes were muddy.
“Now, I’ll admit that all that looks queer.
I believe he was on that hillside the next day, looking for something. What?
Either he’d killed Sarah and was afraid he’d dropped something incriminating, or he knew something had happened there the night before.
“He was there.
He saw somebody, or something, but he isn’t saying what or who.
Now why?
“Why has he done the things he has done?
Why leave that sword-stick around until the body is found, and then only put it in a closet?
That’s foolish.
“And why go to bed?
Guilt?
The normal thing would have been to go around as though nothing had happened.
But he goes to bed, like a baby.
Now what puts him to bed; if he wasn’t guilty he wasn’t scared. So what’s the answer?
He’s shocked. He’s had an awful jolt of some sort.
He’s either happened on the body or on the murderer with the body. If he saw only the body he’d have notified the police. But if he saw the murderer—” “I daresay I’m stupid, Dick. If he’d seen either of them, why not call the police?”
Judy turned to me.
“Dick believes,” she said patiently, “that Uncle Jim recognized somebody on the hillside that night, and that he is either afraid to tell who it was, or that he has—other reasons.”
“For not telling?”
“For not telling.”
“Reasons so strong that he is willing to go to the chair rather than tell them?
That’s ridiculous.”
“Not if he recognized the person he saw on that hillside, or wherever it was.”
And I saw between them once more that practically wordless exchange which I found so irritating; Judy staring at Dick, and Dick making a gesture, at once protesting and protective.
“But who could that be?
Not Wallie.
We know that.”
Judy looked at me, and I have never seen so tragic a look in a child’s eyes.
“Dick thinks it might have been father.”
I do not blame them, poor young things.
Indeed, thinking that over later, I was not so sure that they were not right.
Here was Jim, asking the day after Sarah’s death about Howard, and if I was certain he had not been down recently; and burning his papers later on, as though some such inquiry might have been made by letter and answered.
And there was the whole situation; a secret will, to be kept from Howard’s family, and even embodying a further secret clause.