“The latter, I think, though she did use a harsh word or two when she showed me the door.”
“And raised her voice?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Mr. Hildreth,” intimated the coroner, rising, “will you be kind enough to step with me into the adjoining room?”
With a look of wonder not unmixed with alarm, the young man prepared to comply.
“I should like the attention of the jury,” Dr. Tredwell signified as he passed through the door.
There was no need to give them this hint. Not a man of them but was already on his feet in eager curiosity as to what their presiding officer was about to do.
“I wish you to tell me now,” the coroner demanded of Mr. Hildreth, as they paused in the centre of the sitting-room, “where it was you stood during your interview with Mrs. Clemmens, and, if possible, take the very position now which you held at that time.”
“There are too many persons here,” the witness objected, visibly rebelling at a request of which he could not guess the full significance.
“The people present will step back,” declared the coroner; “you will have no trouble in taking your stand on the spot you occupied the other day.”
“Here, then!” exclaimed the young man, taking a position near the centre of the room.
“And the widow?”
“Stood there.”
“Facing you?”
“Yes.”
“I see,” intimated the coroner, pointing toward the windows. “Her back was to the yard while you stood with your face toward it.” Then with a quick motion, summoning the witness back into the other room, asked, amid the breathless attention of the crowd, whom this bit of byplay had wrought up to expectation: “Did you observe anyone go around to the back door while you stood there, and go away again without attempting to knock?”
Mr. Hildreth knitted his brow and seemed to think.
“Answer,” persisted the coroner; “it is not a question that requires thought.”
“Well, then, I did not,” cried the witness, looking the other directly in the eye, with the first gleam of real manly feeling which he had yet displayed.
“You did not see a tramp come into the yard, walk around to the kitchen door, wait a moment as if hesitating whether he would rap, and then turn and come back again without doing so?”
“No, sir.”
The coroner drew a piece of paper before him and began figuring on it. Earnestly, almost wildly, the young man watched him, drawing a deep breath and turning quite pale as the other paused and looked up.
“Yet,” affirmed the coroner, as if no delay had occurred since he received his last answer, “such a person did approach the house while you were in it, and if you had stood where you say, you must have seen him.”
It was a vital thrust, a relentless presentation of fact, and as such shook the witness out of his lately acquired composure. Glancing hastily about, he sought the assistance of someone both capable and willing to advise him in this crisis, but seeing no one, he made a vigorous effort and called together his own faculties.
“Sir,” he protested, a tremor of undisguised anxiety finding way into his voice, “I do not see how you make that all out. What proof have you that this tramp of which you speak came to the house while I was in it? Could he not have come before? Or, what was better, could he not have come after?”
The ringing tone with which the last question was put startled everybody. No such sounds had issued from his lips before. Had he caught a glimpse of hope, or was he driven to an extremity in his defence that forced him to assert himself? The eyes of Miss Firman and of a few other women began to soften, and even the face of Mr. Byrd betrayed that a change was on the verge of taking place in his feelings.
But the coroner’s look and tone dashed cold water on this young and tender growth of sympathy. Passing over to the witness the paper on which he had been scribbling, he explained with dry significance:
“It is only a matter of subtraction and addition, Mr. Hildreth. You have said that upon quitting this house you went directly to the depot, where you arrived barely in time to jump on the train as it was leaving the station. Now, to walk from this place to the depot at any pace you would be likely to use, would occupy—well, let us say seven minutes. At two minutes before twelve, then, you were still in this house. Well!” he ejaculated, interrupting himself as the other opened his lips, “have you anything to say?”
“No,” was the dejected and hesitating reply.
The coroner at once resumed:
“But at five minutes before twelve, Mr. Hildreth, the tramp walked into the widow’s yard. Now, allowing only two minutes for your interview with that lady, the conclusion remains that you were in the house when he came up to it. Yet you declare that, although you stood in full view of the yard, you did not see him.”
“You figure closer than an astronomer calculating an eclipse,” burst from the young man’s lips in a flash of that resolution which had for the last few minutes animated him. “How do you know your witnesses have been so exact to a second when they say this and that of the goings and comings you are pleased to put into an arithmetical problem. A minute or two one way or the other would make a sad discrepancy in your calculations, Mr. Coroner.”
“I know it,” assented Dr. Tredwell, quietly ignoring the other’s heat; “but if the jury will remember, there were four witnesses, at least, who testified to the striking of the town clock just as the tramp finally issued from the lane, and one witness, of well-known accuracy in matters of detail, who declared on oath that she had just dropped her eyes from that same
