Sit down.
That’s a good chair.”
He was nervous.
I saw for the first time, that night, the slight twitching about the mouth which was never afterwards to leave him, and as I told him my story it grew more and more marked.
Yet save for that twitching he heard me through quietly enough.
“What do you want me to say?” he said.
“Or to do?
If the police want a scapegoat—innocent men have been arrested before this for the sake of the sensational press—what am I to do about it?
Run away?”
“You can tell them the truth.”
“What truth?” he said irritably.
“Tell them where you were the night Sarah was killed.
Surely you can do that, Jim.”
“I have already told them.
I live the usual life of a bachelor. I’m neither better nor worse than others.
I decline to drag a woman into this; any woman.
They can all go to hell first.”
I felt my heart sink.
His indignation was not real.
He spoke like a man who has rehearsed a speech.
And from under his eyebrows he was watching me, intently, furtively.
For the first time I realized how badly frightened he was.
“I see,” I said, quietly.
“And I daresay that’s where you left the cane.
Naturally you would not care to speak about it.”
“The cane?
What cane?”
“The one I gave you, Jim.
It’s missing, apparently.”
He said nothing for a full minute.
It must have been a terrible shock to him.
Perhaps he was going back, in his mind; who knew about the cane?
Amos, of course.
And Amos had been talking.
His distrust and anger at Amos must have been a devastating thing just then. But he rallied himself.
“What’s that got to do with it?
Anybody can lose a stick.
I’ve lost dozens, hundreds.”
“You carried it out with you that night, you know.”
“And I suppose that proves that I killed Sarah Gittings!
And that I got up out of a sick bed the other night, put a can of kerosene in my car and shot this Florence Gunther!
There’s no case there.
I carry a stick out one night and forget it somewhere. Well, they can’t hang me for that.
And I wasn’t out of this house last Sunday night.”
What could I say?
Tell him Wallie’s story, that the sword-cane had not disappeared until Sarah’s body was found?
That he had brought it back, and that the police knew he had brought it back?
He hated Wallie, and I was in no condition to face an outburst of anger from him, especially since I felt that that too might have been prepared in advance; the careful defense of a frightened man.
One thing I was certain of when I left.
He was a frightened man, but not a sick man.