"Certainly. That's why I've em—why I want your help: to avoid all the unpleasantness possible."
When she left him to go to her father's room, Hastings joined the group on the front verandah. Sheriff Crown and Dr. Garnet had already viewed the body.
"I'll hold the inquest at ten tomorrow morning, rather this morning," the coroner said. "That's hurrying things a little, but I'll have a jury here by then. They have to see the body before it's taken to Washington."
"Besides," observed the sheriff, "nearly all the necessary witnesses are here in this house party."
Aware of the Hastings fame, he drew the old man to one side.
"I'm going into Washington," he announced, "to see this Mrs. Brace, the girl's mother. Webster says she has a flat, up on Fourteenth street there. Good idea, ain't it?"
"Excellent," assured Hastings, and put in a suggestion: "You've heard of the fleeting footsteps Miss Sloane reported?"
"Yes. I thought Mrs. Brace might tell me who that could have been—some fellow jealous of the girl, I'll bet."
The sheriff, who was a tall, lanky man with a high, hooked nose and a pointed chin that looked like a large knuckle, had a habit of thrusting forward his upper lip to emphasize his words. He thrust it forward now, making his bristly, close-cropped red moustache stand out from his face like the quills of a porcupine.
"I'd thought of that—all that," he continued. "Looks like a simple case to me—very."
"It may be," said Hastings, sure now that Crown would not suggest their working together.
"Also," the sheriff told him, "I'll take this."
He held out the crude weapon with which, apparently, the murder had been committed. It was a dagger consisting of a sharpened nail file, about three inches long, driven into a roughly rounded piece of wood. This wooden handle was a little more than four inches in length and two inches thick. Hastings, giving it careful examination, commented:
"He shaped that handle with a pocket-knife. Then, he drove the butt-end of the nail file into it. Next, he sharpened the end of the file—put a razor edge on it.—Where did you get this, Mr. Crown?"
"A servant, one of the coloured women, picked it up as I came in. You were still in the library."
"Where was it?"
"About fifteen or twenty feet from the body. She stumbled on it, in the grass. Ugly thing, sure!"
"Yes," Hastings said, preoccupied, and added: "Let me have it again."
He took off his spectacles and, screwing into his right eye a jeweller's glass, studied it for several minutes. If he made an important discovery, he did not communicate it to Crown.
"It made an ugly hole," was all he said.
"You see the blood on it?" Crown prompted.
"Oh, yes; lucky the rain stopped when it did."
"When did it stop—out here?" Crown inquired.
"About eleven; a few minutes after I'd gone up to bed."
"So she was killed between eleven and midnight?"
"No doubt about that. Her hat had fallen from her head and was bottom up beside her. The inside of the crown and all the lower brim was dry as a bone, while the outside, even where it did not touch the wet grass, was wet. That showed there wasn't any rain after she was struck down."
The sheriff was impressed by the other's keenness of observation.
"That's so," he said. "I hadn't noticed it."
He sought the detective's opinion.
"Mr. Hastings, you've just heard the stories of everybody here. Do me a favour, will you? Is it worth while for me to go into Washington? Tell me: do you think anybody here at Sloanehurst is responsible for this murder?"
"Mr. Crown," the old man answered, "there's no proof that anybody here killed that woman."
"Just what I thought," Mr. Crown applauded himself. "Glad you agree with me. It'll turn out a simple case. Wish it wouldn't. Nominating primary's coming on in less than a month. I'd get a lot more votes if I ran down a mysterious fellow, solved a tough problem."
He strode down the porch steps and out to his car—for the ten-mile run into Washington. Hastings was strongly tempted to accompany him, even without being invited; it would mean much to be present when the mother first heard of her daughter's death.
But he had other and, he thought, more important work to do. Moving so quietly that his footsteps made no sound, he gained the staircase in the hall and made his way to the second floor. If anybody had seen him and inquired what he intended to do, he would have explained that he was on his way to get his own coat in place of the one which young Webster had, with striking thoughtfulness, thrown over him.
As a matter of fact, his real purpose was to search Webster's room.
But experience had long since imbued him with contempt for the obvious. Secure from interruption, since his fellow-guests were still in the library, he did not content himself with his hawk-like scrutiny of the one room; he explored the back stairway which had been Webster's exit to the lawn, Judge Wilton's room, and his own.
In the last stage of the search he encountered his greatest surprise. Looking under his own bed by the light of a pocket torch, he found that one of the six slats had been removed from its place and laid cross-ways upon the other five. The reason for this was apparent; it had been shortened by between four and five inches.
"Cut off with a pocket-knife," the old man mused; "crude work, like the shaping of the handle of that dagger—downstairs; same wood, too. And in my room, from my bed——
"I wonder——"
With a low whistle, expressive of incredulity, he put that new theory from him and went down to the library.
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