“Oh, my God,” said Alboin, so that it seemed as much a prayer as an oath. “What was it that man said about him?—‘If he knew, he would be ready to hang himself.’ Wasn’t that what he said, Father Brown?”
“Yes,” said Father Brown.
“Well,” said Vandam in a hollow voice, “I never thought to see or say such a thing. But what can one say except that the curse has worked?”
Fenner was standing with hands covering his face; and the priest laid a hand on his arm and said, gently, “Were you very fond of him?”
The secretary dropped his hands and his white face was ghastly under the moon.
“I hated him like hell,” he said; “and if he died by a curse it might have been mine.”
The pressure of the priest’s hand on his arm tightened; and the priest said, with an earnestness he had hardly yet shown:
“It wasn’t your curse; pray be comforted.”
The police of the district had considerable difficulty in dealing with the four witnesses who were involved in the case. All of them were reputable, and even reliable people in the ordinary sense; and one of them was a person of considerable power and importance: Silas Vandam of the Oil Trust. The first police-officer who tried to express scepticism about his story struck sparks from the steel of that magnate’s mind very rapidly indeed.
“Don’t you talk to me about sticking to the facts,” said the millionaire with asperity. “I’ve stuck to a good many facts before you were born, and a few of the facts have stuck to me. I’ll give you the facts all right if you’ve got the sense to take ’em down correctly.”
The policeman in question was youthful and subordinate, and had a hazy idea that the millionaire was too political to be treated as an ordinary citizen; so he passed him and his companions on to a more stolid superior, one Inspector Collins, a grizzled man with a grimly comfortable way of talking; as one who was genial but would stand no nonsense.
“Well, well,” he said, looking at the three figures before him with twinkling eyes, “this seems to be a funny sort of a tale.”
Father Brown had already gone about his daily business; but Silas Vandam had suspended even the gigantic business of the markets for an hour or so to testify to his remarkable experience. Fenner’s business as secretary had ceased in a sense with his employer’s life; and the great Art Alboin, having no business in New York or anywhere else, except the spreading of the Breath of Life or religion of the Great Spirit, had nothing to draw him away at the moment from the immediate affair. So they stood in a row in the inspector’s office, prepared to corroborate each other.
“Now I’d better tell you to start with,” said the inspector cheerfully, “that it’s no good for anybody to come to me with any miraculous stuff. I’m a practical man and a policeman, and that sort of thing is all very well for priests and parsons. This priest of yours seems to have got you all worked up about some story of a dreadful death and judgment; but I’m going to leave him and his religion out of it altogether. If Wynd came out of that room, somebody let him out. And if Wynd was found hanging on that tree, somebody hung him there.”
“Quite so,” said Fenner; “but as our evidence is that nobody let him out, the question is how could anybody have hung him there?”
“How could anybody have a nose on his face?” asked the inspector. “He had a nose on his face, and he had a noose round his neck. Those are facts; and, as I say, I’m a practical man and go by the facts. It can’t have been done by a miracle, so it must have been done by a man.”
Alboin had been standing rather in the background; and indeed his broad figure seemed to form a natural background to the leaner and more vivacious men in front of him. His white head was bowed with a certain abstraction; but as the inspector said the last sentence, he lifted it, shaking his hoary mane in a leonine fashion, and looking dazed but awakened. He moved forward into the centre of the group; and they had a vague feeling that he was even vaster than before. They had been only too prone to take him for a fool or a mountebank; but he was not altogether wrong when he said that there was in him a certain depth of lungs and life, like a west wind stored up in its strength, which might some day puff lighter things away.
“So you’re a practical man, Mr. Collins,” he said, in a voice at once soft and heavy. “It must be the second or third time you’ve mentioned in this little conversation that you are a practical man; so I can’t be mistaken about that. And a very interesting little fact it is for anybody engaged in writing your life, letters, and table-talk, with portrait
