“Let me see them irons,” grunted O’Bryant, snatching them.
He turned them over and over in his hands, snapped them shut, tugged and pressed, then held out a hand for my keys. Unlocking the cuffs, he peered into the clamping mechanism.
“These are regulation bracelets,” he pronounced. “You were all chained up, then?”
“We were,” replied Zoberg, and both Susan and I nodded.
Into the constable’s blue eyes came a sudden shrewd light. “I guess you must have been, at that. But did you stay that way?” He whipped suddenly around, bending above my chair to fix his gaze upon me. “How about you, Mr. Wills?”
“Of course we stayed that way,” I replied.
“Yeh? Look here, ain’t you a professional magician?”
“How did you know that?” I asked.
He grinned widely and without warmth. “The whole town’s been talking about you, Mr. Wills. A stranger can’t be here all day without his whole record coming out.” The grin vanished. “You’re a magician, all right, and you can get out of handcuffs. Ain’t that so?”
“Of course it’s so,” Zoberg answered for me. “But why should that mean that my friend has killed Mr. Gird?”
O’Bryant wagged his head in triumph. “That’s what we’ll find out later. Right now it adds up very simple. Gird was killed, in a room that was all sealed up. Three other folks was in with him, all handcuffed to their chairs. Which of them got loose without the others catching on?” He nodded brightly at me, as if in answer to his own question.
Zoberg gave me a brief, penetrating glance, then seemed to shrivel up in his own chair. He looked almost as exhausted as Susan. I, too, was feeling near to collapse.
“You want to own up, Mr. Wills?” invited O’Bryant.
“I certainly do not,” I snapped at him. “You’ve got the wrong man.”
“I thought,” he made answer, as though catching me in a damaging admission, “that it was a devil, not a man, who killed Gird.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what killed him.”
“Maybe you’ll remember after a while.” He turned toward the door, “You come along with me. I’m going to lock you up.”
I rose with a sigh of resignation, but paused for a moment to address Zoberg. “Get hold of yourself,” I urged him. “Get somebody in here to look after Miss Susan, and then clarify in your mind what happened. You can help me prove that it wasn’t I.”
Zoberg nodded very wearily, but did not look up.
“Don’t neither of you go into that room where the body is,” O’Bryant warned them. “Mr. Wills, get your coat and hat.”
I did so, and we left the house. The snow was inches deep and still falling. O’Bryant led me across the street and knocked on the door of a peak-roofed house. A swarthy little man opened to us.
“There’s been a murder, Jim,” said O’Bryant importantly. “Over at Gird’s. You’re deputized—go and keep watch. Better take the missus along, to look after Susan. She’s bad cut up about it.”
We left the new deputy in charge and walked down the street, then turned into the square. Two or three men standing in front of the “Pharmacy” stared curiously, then whispered as we passed. Another figure paused to give me a searching glance. I was not too stunned to be irritated.
“Who are those?” I asked the constable.
“Town fellows,” he informed me. “They’re mighty interested to see what a killer looks like.”
“How do they know about the case?” I almost groaned.
He achieved his short, hard laugh.
“Didn’t I say that news travels fast in a town like this? Half the folks are talking about the killing this minute.”
“You’ll find you made a mistake,” I assured him.
“If I have, I’ll beg your pardon handsome. Meanwhile, I’ll do my duty.”
We were at the red brick town hall by now. At O’Bryant’s side I mounted the granite steps and waited while he unlocked the big double door with a key the size of a can-opener.
“We’re a kind of small town,” he observed, half apologetically, “but there’s a cell upstairs for you. Take off your hat and overcoat—you’re staying inside till further notice.”
V
“They Want to Take the Law Into Their Own Hands.”
The cell was an upper room of the town hall, with a heavy wooden door and a single tiny window. The walls were of bare, unplastered brick, the floor of concrete and the ceiling of whitewashed planks. An oil lamp burned in a bracket. The only furniture was an iron bunk hinged to the wall just below the window, a wire-bound straight chair and an unpainted table. On top of this last stood a bowl and pitcher, with playing-cards scattered around them.
Constable O’Bryant locked me in and peered through a small grating in the door. He was all nose and eyes and wide lips, like a sardonic Punchinello.
“Look here,” I addressed him suddenly, for the first time controlling my frayed nerves; “I want a lawyer.”
“There ain’t no lawyer in town,” he boomed sourly.
“Isn’t there a Judge Pursuivant in the neighborhood?” I asked, remembering something that Susan had told me.
“He don’t practise law,” O’Bryant grumbled, and his beaked face slid out of sight.
I turned to the table, idly gathered up the cards into a pack and shuffled them. To steady my still shaky fingers, I produced a few simple sleight-of-hand effects, palming of aces, making a king rise to the top, and springing the pack accordion-wise from one hand to the other.
“I’d sure hate to play poker with you,” volunteered O’Bryant, who had come again to gaze at me.
I crossed to the grating and looked through at him. “You’ve got the wrong man,” I said once more. “Even if I were guilty, you couldn’t keep me from talking to a lawyer.”
“Well, I’m doing it, ain’t I?” he taunted
