“You mean - Mr. Sullivan committed the crime himself?”
“I think he did.”
“What was it?”
“It was murder,” I said deliberately.
Her hands clenched involuntarily, and she shrank back. “A woman?” She could scarcely form her words.
“No, a man; a Mr. Simon Harrington, of Pittsburg.”
Her effort to retain her self-control was pitiful. Then she broke down and cried, her head on the back of a tall chair.
“It was my fault,” she said wretchedly, “my fault, I should not have sent them the word.”
After a few minutes she grew quiet. She seemed to hesitate over something, and finally determined to say it.
“You will understand better, sir, when I say that I was raised in the Harrington family. Mr. Harrington was Mr. Sullivan’s wife’s father!”
CHAPTER XXV
AT THE STATION
So it had been the tiger, not the lady! Well, I had held to that theory all through. Jennie suddenly became a valuable person; if necessary she could prove the connection between Sullivan and the murdered man, and show a motive for the crime. I was triumphant when Hotchkiss came in. When the girl had produced a photograph of Mrs. Sullivan, and I had recognized the bronze-haired girl of the train, we were both well satisfied - which goes to prove the ephemeral nature of most human contentments.
Jennie either had nothing more to say, or feared she had said too much. She was evidently uneasy before Hotchkiss. I told her that Mrs. Sullivan was recovering in a Baltimore hospital, but she already knew it, from some source, and merely nodded. She made a few preparations for leaving, while Hotchkiss and I compared notes, and then, with the cat in her arms, she climbed into the trap from the town. I sat with her, and on the way down she told me a little, not much.
“If you see Mrs. Sullivan,” she advised, “and she is conscious, she probably thinks that both her husband and her father were killed in the wreck. She will be in a bad way, sir.”
“You mean that she - still cares about her husband?”
The cat crawled over on to my knee, and rubbed its bead against my hand invitingly. Jennie stared at the undulating line of the mountain crests, a colossal sun against a blue ocean of sky. “Yes, she cares,” she said softly. “Women are made like that. They say they are cats, but Peter there in your lap wouldn’t come back and lick your hand if you kicked him. If - if you have to tell her the truth, be as gentle as you can, sir. She has been good to me - that’s why I have played the spy here all summer. It’s a thankless thing, spying on people.”
“It is that,” I agreed soberly.
Hotchkiss and I arrived in Washington late that evening, and, rather than arouse the household, I went to the club. I was at the office early the next morning and admitted myself. McKnight rarely appeared before half after ten, and our modest office force some time after nine. I looked over my previous day’s mail and waited, with such patience as I possessed, for McKnight. In the interval I called up Mrs. Klopton and announced that I would dine at home that night. What my household subsists on during my numerous absences I have never discovered. Tea, probably, and crackers. Diligent search when I have made a midnight arrival, never reveals anything more substantial. Possibly I imagine it, but the announcement that I am about to make a journey always seems to create a general atmosphere of depression throughout the house, as though Euphemia and Eliza, and Thomas, the stableman, were already subsisting, in imagination, on Mrs. Klopton’s meager fare.
So I called her up and announced my arrival. There was something unusual in her tone, as though her throat was tense with indignation. Always shrill, her elderly voice rasped my ear painfully through the receiver.
“I have changed the butcher, Mr. Lawrence,” she announced portentously. “The last roast was a pound short, and his mutton-chops - any self-respecting sheep would refuse to acknowledge them.”
As I said before, I can always tell from the voice in which Mrs. Klopton conveys the most indifferent matters, if something of real significance has occurred. Also, through long habit, I have learned how quickest to bring her to the point.
“You are pessimistic this morning,” I returned. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Klopton? You haven’t used that tone since Euphemia baked a pie for the iceman. What is it now? Somebody poison the dog?”
She cleared her throat.
“The house has been broken into, Mr. Lawrence,” she said. “I have lived in the best families, and never have I stood by and seen what I saw yesterday - every bureau drawer opened, and my - my most sacred belongings - ” she choked.
“Did you notify the police?” I asked sharply.
“Police!” she sniffed. “Police! It was the police that did it - two detectives with a search warrant. I - I wouldn’t dare tell you over the telephone what one of them said when he found the whisky and rock candy for my cough.”
“Did they take anything?” I demanded, every nerve on edge.
“They took the cough medicine,” she returned indignantly, “and they said - ”
“Confound the cough medicine!” I was frantic. “Did they take anything else? Were they in my dressing- room?”
“Yes. I threatened to sue them, and I told them what you would do when you came back. But they wouldn’t listen. They took away that black sealskin bag you brought home from Pittsburg with you!”
I knew then that my hours of freedom were numbered. To have found Sullivan and then, in support of my case against him, to have produced the bag, minus the bit of chain, had been my intention. But the police had the bag,
