And with that he hung up the receiver.
Chapter Thirty
WE KNOW NOW OF that frantic rush he made, within ten minutes of my calling, to the Halkett Street house, and of that frenzied search he made later on that day, along the highways and particularly the by-ways of the Warrenville road.
Some time after midnight he found what he was after, and not too late.
That had been in his mind all that day; the fear that he would be too late.
And in the meantime he had set his guards.
There was to be no escape this time, not even by death.
Even then he did not know the story, of course.
But he knew the criminal and his incredible cunning.
Let all go on as usual.
Confide in no one.
Disarm him, throw him off the track, and then into that fancied security of his thrust the long arm of the law.
That was his method, he has said since, and that it answered is shown by the fact that for ten days apparently nothing happened.
Ten hot July days, with Godfrey working on the appeal; with Jim growing weak from heat and strain; with Joseph in the hospital, receiving our visits with great dignity, but refusing to alter his original story that he had been asleep and had not seen his assailant; with no word whatever of Wallie, or of Mary Martin; with the flowers on Mrs. Bassett’s grave shriveled in the sun, and the policemen still on duty in my house and grounds, and with Katherine still in the house on Pine Street, stubbornly refusing to accept the repudiation of her which she considered Howard’s second will to be.
Some time in that ten days I made a list of possible and impossible suspects, with a notation following, and as it is before me now I reproduce it. It shows better than I can tell it the utter confusion of my mind.
This is my list:
Godfrey Lowell (Unlikely)
Inspector Harrison (Why?)
Doctor Simonds (Possible)
Mr. Waite (Possible but unlikely)
Wallie (Improbable, and why?)
Dick Carter (Possible but incredible)
Jim (Possible but unlikely)
Abner (No)
Amos (Dead)
Joseph (Himself shot)
Robert (Unlikely.
No reason)
In such fashion did I fill in those ten interminable days.
There were apparently no new developments, and the Inspector obstinately absented himself.
Judy had grown thin to the point of emaciation, and still by night our guard ranged the lower floor and by day patrolled the grounds.
Joseph had come home from the hospital that day, I remember.
He took hold of the household much as usual, tottering from the silver drawer to the kitchen closets; but he was much shattered, and with that bandaged arm of his he could do very little.
I arranged to send him to the country for a few weeks, and he agreed gratefully.
Then out of a clear sky, on the seventeenth of July, Katherine made her resolution and precipitated the crisis.
She was an intelligent woman, Katherine.
Perhaps I have done her less than justice in this narrative.
She was strange during that time, more frightened than she wanted us to know, and the result was that she withdrew herself.
I think from the time Jim took the stand at the trial, maybe even before it, she knew that he was protecting somebody.
“You say that you saw his white shirt front?
What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I say.
A white shirt front.”
“He wore no vest?”
“I can’t say.
I had only an impression of evening clothes. He might have worn a dinner jacket.”
“But you are sure of the cap?”
“No.
I think it was a cap.”
“Yet he came, according to your story, so close to you that he knocked this stick out of your hand.