uv likker. Ef he ain' done tuk dat key fum me an' den later flung it back on de flo' uv my house, who did do it?"
She sobbed afresh.
"He is one mean nigger when he gits too much likker in him. Ain' nobody knows dat better'n I does. An' he sayed somethin' las' night 'bout gittin' a whole lot uv money. He—"
She moaned and flung herself backward on the cot.
"Gawd have mussy! Gawd have mussy! I done remembuhed. I done remembuhed. He done say somethin' 'bout dat white woman's gol' an' jewelery. Gawd! Dat's whut he done. He done it! Dat's why he wuz fightin' me. He wuz tryin' to git dat kitchen key. An' he got it! He got it! Ef he done kilt dat woman, de white folks goin' to git him sho'ly—sho'ly. An' him an' me ain' nevuh gwine git married—nevuh. Dey'll kill him or dey'll sen' him to dat pen. Aw, my Gawd! My Gawd!"
She sat up again and began to think about Mrs. Withers, how well the slain woman had treated her, how kindly. From that, her thoughts went to ghosts. She fell to trembling and moaning in an audible key. It was not long before a warden, awakened by her cries of terror, had to visit her and threaten bodily punishment if she did not keep quiet.
After a while, she relapsed into her quiet sobbing.
"I think maybe he done tuk dat key. I knows he done lef' me durin' de night, an' I b'lieve he done come back. But I ain't gwine say nothin'. Maybe I don' know. Maybe I is mistuk. De whole thing done got too mix' up fuh me. Maybe he kilt her an' maybe he ain' been nigh de place. But I wish I coul' know. My holy Lawd! I wish I done know all dat done happen.
"Dat key fallin' on de flo'. Who done drap it dar ef Perry ain' drapped it? Dat's whut I'd like to know. Ef he ain' had dat key, ain' nobody had it."
She lay down, weeping and sobbing from unhappiness and terror. Bristow and Greenleaf would have given much to have known her suspicions, suspicions which amounted to a moral certainty.
On the sleeping porch of No. 5, Manniston Road, Maria Fulton lay awake a long time and tortured herself by reviewing again and again the thoughts that had crushed her during the day. Miss Kelly, on a cot at the foot of the girl's bed, heard her stirring restlessly but could not know in the darkness how her long, slender fingers tore at the bed-covering, nor how her face was drawn with pain.
"The overturning of that chair,"—her mind whirled the events before her—"the sound of that whisper, that man's whisper, and the sight of that foot! He wore rubbers. I know he did. He always wears them when it's even cloudy. It was he! It was he!"
Her nails dug into her palms as she fought for something like self-control.
"If it was not he? I would never have fainted—never. That's what made me faint, the sickening, undeniable knowledge that that was who it was. And I loved him! But—but the rubber-shod foot, the size of it! Am I sure? Could it have been——"
She groaned so that Miss Kelly lifted her head from her own pillow and listened intently, trying to determine whether the sufferer was asleep or awake.
"He's not stupid," she swept on, closing mutinous lips against the repetition of sound. "He knew Enid could do nothing—nothing more. I don't understand. Oh, I don't understand! I wonder now why I said I heard nothing.
"I wonder why I lay unconscious on the floor near the dining room door all those hours—until ten o'clock this morning. It was because the knowledge was too much for me to stand—just as it is too much now. And I can't share it with anybody. I'll never be able to get it off my conscience. If I did, they'd hang him—or the other one who——"
At that thought, she screamed aloud, a wild, eerie sound that chilled the blood of even Miss Kelly, accustomed as she was to the cries of suffering and despair. The nurse was at the hysterical girl's side in a moment, holding her quivering body in strong, capable arms.
"What was it? What was it, Miss Fulton?" she asked soothingly.
Maria brushed the back of her hand across her forehead, which was beaded with big, cold drops of perspiration.
"Nothing, Miss Kelly; nothing," she half-moaned. "A bad dream, a nightmare, I guess. Give me something to make me sleep."
She drank eagerly from a glass the nurse put to her lips.
"If I begin to talk in my sleep, Miss Kelly, call me, wake me up, will you?" she begged, the fright still in her voice.
"Yes, I will." This reassuringly while Miss Kelly smoothed the pillows and readjusted the tumbled coverings.
Maria grasped her arm in a grip that hurt.
"But will you?" she demanded sharply. "Promise me!"
"Yes; indeed, I will. I promise."
Miss Kelly meant what she said. She was not anxious to be the recipient of the sick girl's confidences.
Chapter X.
Eyes of Accusation
Bristow, at his early breakfast, devoted himself, between mouthfuls, to the front page of The Furmville Sentinel. It was given up entirely to the Withers murder.
"Murder—murder horrible and mysterious—was committed early yesterday morning," announced the paper in large black-face type, "when the beautiful and charming Mrs. Enid Fulton Withers, wife of George S. Withers, the well-known attorney of Atlanta, was choked to death in the parlour of her home at No. 5 Manniston Road. The most heinous crime that has ever stained the annals of Furmville," etc.
The article went on to recite that Chief Greenleaf of the Furmville police force had been fortunate in securing the assistance of a genius in running down the various clues that seemed to point to the guilty party. Mr. Lawrence Bristow, of Cincinnati, now in town for his health, had worked with him all day in unearthing many circumstances "which, although each of them seemed trivial, led when summed up to the almost irrefutable conviction that the murder was done by a drunken negro, Perry Carpenter," etc.
In spite of this, the paper continued, the dead woman's husband, arriving unexpectedly on the scene, had employed by wire Samuel S. Braceway, the professional detective of Atlanta, who would reach Furmville early this morning and, probably, work with Chief Greenleaf, Mr. Bristow, and the plain-clothes squad in the effort to remove all doubts of the guilt of the accused negro.
There followed a sketch of Braceway which was enough to convince the readers that in him Mr. Withers had called into the case the shrewdest man in the South, "very probably the shrewdest man in the entire country."
"Evidently," Bristow was thinking when Greenleaf rang the door-bell, "while I'm a 'genius,' Braceway's the man everybody relies on when it comes to catching the murderer."
The chief was in a hurry, and the two men, going out of Bristow's back door, walked down to the corner of the sleeping porch of No. 7, the nurses' home. The frail wire fences that had served to partition the back lots of Nos. 5, 7, and 9 had either fallen down or been carried away, but there was a tall five-board fence at the rear of the three lots. From this board fence, the hill sloped down toward the southeast, the direction in which the negro settlement containing the home of Lucy Thomas was located.
Bristow,
