No Clue by James Hay (e book reader free TXT) π
Mr. Sloane found compliance impossible. He could not steady his hand sufficiently.
"Hold that torch, judge," Hastings prompted.
"It's knocked me out--completely," Sloane said, surrendering the torch to Wilton.
Webster, the pallor still on his face, a look of horror in his eyes, stood on the side of the body opposite the detective. At brief intervals he raised first one foot, then the other, clear of the ground and set it down again. He was unconscious of making any movement at all.
Hastings, thoroughly absorbed in the work before him, went about it swiftly, with now and then brief, murmured comment on what he did and saw. Although his ample night-shirt, stuffed into his equally baggy trousers, contributed nothing but comicality to his appearance, the others submitted without question to his domination. There was about him suddenly an atmosphere of power that impressed even the little group of awe-struck servants who stood a few feet away.
"Stabbed," he said,
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"The handle of the dagger matches the wood of the slat I've just mentioned. You won't find that particular slat upstairs now. It was taken out of the house the next day, broken into sections and packed in his bag of golf-sticks. But there is proof in this room of the fact that he and he only made the dagger.
"You'll find in the edge of the large blade of his penknife a nick, triangular in shape, which left an unmistakable groove in the wood every time he cut into it. That little groove shows, to the naked eye, on the end of the shortened slat and on the handle of the dagger. If you doubt itββ"
"Thunder!" Crown interrupted, in an awed tone. "You're right!"
He had taken the dagger from his pocket and given it minute scrutiny. He handed it now to Sloane.
Wilton, watching the scene with flaming eyes, sat motionless, his chin thrust down hard upon his collar, his face shining as if it had been polished with a cloth.
Sloane gave the dagger back to Crown before he spoke, in a wheezy, shrill key: "They're there, the marks, the grooves!"
He did not look at Wilton.
Hastings straightened to his full stature, and looked toward Wilton.
"Now, Judge Wilton," he challenged, "you said you preferred to answer the accusation here and now. Do you, still?"
Wilton, slowly raising the heavy lids of his eyes, like a man coming out of a trance, presented to him and to the others a face which, in spite of its flushed and swollen aspect, looked singularly bleak.
"It's not an accusation," he said in his roughened, grating voice. "It's a network of suppositions, of theories, of impossibilitiesβa crazy structure, all built on the rotten foundation of a previous misfortune."
"Arrest him, Crown!" Hastings commanded sharply.
Wilton tried to laugh, but his heavy lips merely worked in a crazy barrenness of sound. With a vague, clumsy idea of covering up his confusion, he started to light a cigar.
He stopped, hands in mid-air, when Crown, shambling to his feet, said:
"Judge, I've got to act. He's proved his case."
"Proved it!" Wilton made weak protest.
"If he hasn't, let's see your penknife."
Wilton put his hand into his trousers pocket, began the motion that would have drawn out the knife, checked it, and withdrew his hand empty. He managed a mirthless, dreary laugh, a rattling sound that fell, dead of any feeling, from his grimacing lips.
"No, by God!" he refused. "I'll give it to neither of you. I don't have to!"
In that moment, he fell to pieces. With his thick shoulders dropping forward, he became an inert mass bundled against the table edge. The blood went out of his face, so that his cheeks hollowed, and shadows formed under his eyes. He was like the victim of a quick consumption.
Crown's eyes were on Hastings.
"That's enough," the old man said shortly.
"Too much," agreed Crown. "Judge, there's no bailβon a murder charge."
"I'm very glad," Mrs. Brace commented, a terrible satisfaction in her voice. "He pays meβat last."
In the music room Dr. Garnet had just given Lucille and Hastings a favourable report on Berne Webster's condition.
"I should so like to tell him," she said, her glance entreating; "if you'll let me! Wouldn't he get well much faster if he knew itβknew the suspense was all overβthat neither he nor father's suspected any more?"
"I think," the doctor gave his opinion with exaggerated deliberation, "it mightβin fact, it really will be his best medicine."
She thanked him, stars swimming in her eyes.
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