yours?" asked the coroner, not yielding a jot of his determination.
The detective was silent.
"Read the letter," persisted Dr. Tredwell, shrewdly conscious that if once the young man's professional instinct was aroused, all the puerile objections which influenced him would immediately vanish.
There was no resisting that air of command. Taking the letter in his hand, the young man read:
"Dear Emily: – I don't know why I sit down to write to you to-day. I have plenty to do, and morning is no time for indulging in sentimentalities; but I feel strangely lonely and strangely anxious. Nothing goes just to my mind, and somehow the many causes for secret fear which I have always had, assume an undue prominence in my mind. It is always so when I am not quite well. In vain I reason with myself, saying that respectable people do not lightly enter into crime. But there are so many to whom my death would be more than welcome, that I constantly see myself in the act of being – "
"Struck, shot, murdered," suggested Dr. Tredwell, perceiving the young man's eye lingering over the broken sentence.
"The words are not there," remonstrated Mr. Byrd; but the tone of his voice showed that his professional complacency had been disturbed at last.
The other did not answer, but waited with the wisdom of the trapper who sees the quarry nosing round the toils.
"There is evidently some family mystery," the young man continued, glancing again at the letter. "But," he remarked, "Mr. Orcutt is a good friend of hers, and can probably tell us what it all means."
"Very likely," the other admitted, "if we choose to ask him."
Quick as lightning the young man's glance flashed to the coroner's face.
"You would rather not put the question to him?" he inquired.
"No. As he is the lawyer who, in all probability, will be employed by the criminal in this case, I am sure he would rather not be mixed up in any preliminary investigation of the affair."
The young man's eye did not waver. He appeared to take a secret resolve.
"Has it not struck you," he insinuated, "that Mr. Orcutt might have other reasons for not wishing to give any expression of opinion in regard to it?"
The surprise in the coroner's eye was his best answer.
"No," he rejoined.
Mr. Byrd at once resumed all his old nonchalance.
"The young lady who was here appeared to show such agitated interest in this horrible crime, I thought that, in kindness to her, he might wish to keep out of the affair as much as possible."
"Miss Dare? Bless your heart, she would not restrict him in any way. Her interest in the matter is purely one of curiosity. It has been carried, perhaps, to a somewhat unusual length for a woman of her position and breeding. But that is all, I assure you. Miss Dare's eccentricities are well known in this town."
"Then the diamond ring was really hers?" Mr. Byrd was about to inquire, but stopped; something in his memory of this beautiful woman made it impossible for him to disturb the confidence of the coroner in her behalf, at least while his own doubts were so vague and shadowy.
The coroner, however, observed the young detective's hesitation, and smiled.
"Are you thinking of Miss Dare as having any thing to do with this shocking affair?" he asked.
Mr. Byrd shook his head, but could not hide the flush that stole up over his forehead.
The coroner actually laughed, a low, soft, decorous laugh, but none the less one of decided amusement. "Your line is not in the direction of spotting criminals, I must allow," said he. "Why, Miss Dare is not only as irreproachable a young lady as we have in this town, but she is a perfect stranger to this woman and all her concerns. I doubt if she even knew her name till to-day."
A laugh is often more potent than argument. The face of the detective lighted up, and he looked very manly and very handsome as he returned the letter to the coroner, saying, with a sweep of his hand as if he tossed an unworthy doubt away forever:
"Well, I do not wish to appear obstinate. If this woman dies, and the inquest fails to reveal who her assailant is, I will apply to New York for leave to work up the case; that is, if you continue to desire my assistance. Meanwhile – "
"You will keep your eyes open," intimated the coroner, taking back the letter and putting it carefully away in his breast-pocket. "And now, mum!"
Mr. Byrd bowed, and they went together down the stairs.
It was by this time made certain that the dying woman was destined to linger on for some hours. She was completely unconscious, and her breath barely lifted the clothes that lay over the slowly laboring breast; but such vitality as there was held its own with scarcely perceptible change, and the doctor thought it might be midnight before the solemn struggle would end. "In the meantime, expect nothing," he exclaimed; "she has said her last word. What remains will be a mere sinking into the eternal sleep."
This being so, Mr. Orcutt and Mr. Ferris decided to leave. Mr. Byrd saw them safely out, and proceeded to take one or two private observations of his own. They consisted mostly in noting the precise position of the various doors in reference to the hearth where the stick was picked up, and the clock where the victim was attacked. Or, so the coroner gathered from the direction which Mr. Byrd's eye took in its travels over the scene of action, and the diagram which he hastily drew on the back of an envelope. The table was noticed, too, and an inventory of its articles taken, after which he opened the side-door and looked carefully out into the lane.
To observe him now with his quick eye flashing from spot to spot, his head lifted, and a visible air of determination infused through his whole bearing, you would scarcely recognize the easy, gracefully indolent youth who, but a little while before, lounged against the tables and chairs, and met the most penetrating eye with the sleepy gaze of a totally uninterested man. Dr. Tredwell, alert to the change, tapped the letter in his pocket complacently. "I have roused up a weasel," he mentally decided, and congratulated himself accordingly.
It was two o'clock when Mr. Byrd went forth to join Mr. Ferris in the court-room. As he stepped from the door, he encountered, to all appearance, just the same crowd that had encumbered its entrance a half hour before. Even the old crone had not moved from her former position, and seeing him, fairly pounced upon him with question after question, all of which he parried with a nonchalant dexterity that drew shout after shout from those who stood by, and, finally, as he thought, won him the victory, for, with an angry shake of the head, she ceased her importunities, and presently let him pass. He hastened to improve the chance to gain for himself the refuge of the streets; and, having done this, stood for an instant parleying with a trembling young girl, whose real distress and anxiety seemed to merit some attention. Fatal delay. In that instant the old woman had got in front of him, and when he arrived at the head of the street he found her there.
"Now," said she, with full-blown triumph in her venomous eyes, "perhaps you will tell me something! You think I am a mumbling old woman who don't know what she is bothering herself about. But I tell you I've not kept my eyes and ears open for seventy-five years in this wicked world without knowing a bit of the devil's own work when I see it." Here her face grew quite hideous, and her eyes gleamed with an aspect of gloating over the evil she alluded to, that quite sickened the young man, accustomed though he was to the worst phases of moral depravity. Leaning forward, she peered inquiringly in his face. "What has she to do with it?" she suddenly asked, emphasizing the pronoun with an expressive
