“Here are several of them,” remarked Mr. Hickory, “and what is more, it is easy to tell just the color of the pencil from which they were cut. It was blue.”
“That is so,” assented Mr. Byrd.
“Quarrymen, charcoal-burners, and the like are not much in the habit of sharpening pencils,” suggested Hickory.
“Is the pencil now to be found in the pocket of Mr. Mansell a blue one?”
“It is.”
“Have you anything more to show me?” asked Mr. Byrd.
“Only this,” responded the other, taking out of his pocket the torn-off corner of a newspaper. “I found this blowing about under the bushes out there,” said he. “Look at it and tell me from what paper it was torn.”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Byrd; “none that I am acquainted with.”
“You don’t read the Buffalo Courier?”
“Oh, is this—”
“A corner from the Buffalo Courier? I don’t know, but I mean to find out. If it is, and the date proves to be correct, we won’t have much trouble about the little link, will we?”
Mr. Byrd shook his head and they again crouched down over the fire.
“And, now, what did you learn in Buffalo?” inquired the persistent Hickory.
“Not much,” acknowledged Mr. Byrd. “The man Brown was entirely too ubiquitous to give me my full chance. Neither at the house nor at the mill was I able to glean anything beyond an admission from the landlady that Mr. Mansell was not at home at the time of his aunt’s murder. I couldn’t even learn where he was on that day, or where he had ostensibly gone? If it had not been for the little girl of Mr. Goodman—”
“Ah, I had not time to go to that house,” interjected the other, suggestively.
“I should have come home as wise as I went,” continued Mr. Byrd. “She told me that on the day before Mr. Mansell returned, he wrote to her father from Monteith, and that settled my mind in regard to him. It was pure luck, however.”
The other laughed long and loud.
“I didn’t know I did it up so well,” he cried. “I told the landlady you were a detective, or acted like one, and she was very ready to take the alarm, having, as I judge, a motherly liking for her young boarder. Then I took Messrs. Chamberlin and Harrison into my confidence, and having got from them all the information they could give me, told them there was evidently another man on the track of this Mansell, and warned them to keep silence till they heard from the prosecuting attorney in Sibley. But I didn’t know who you were, or, at least, I wasn’t sure; or, as I said before, I shouldn’t have presumed.”
The short, dry laugh with which he ended this explanation had not ceased, when Mr. Byrd observed:
“You have not told me what you gathered in Buffalo.”
“Much,” quoth Hickory, reverting to his favorite laconic mode of speech. “First, that Mansell went from home on Monday, the day before the murder, for the purpose, as he said, of seeing a man in New York about his wonderful invention. Secondly, that he never went to New York, but came back the next evening, bringing his model with him, and looking terribly used up and worried. Thirdly, that to get this invention before the public had been his pet aim and effort for a whole year. That he believed in it as you do in your Bible, and would have given his heart’s blood, if it would have done any good, to start the thing, and prove himself right in his estimate of its value. That the money to do this was all that was lacking, no one believing in him sufficiently to advance him the five thousand dollars considered necessary to build the machine and get it in working order. That, in short, he was a fanatic on the subject, and often said he would be willing to die within the year if he could first prove to the unbelieving capitalists whom he had vainly importuned for assistance, the worth of the discovery he believed himself to have made. Fourthly—but what is it you wish to say, sir?”
“Five thousand dollars is just the amount Widow Clemmens is supposed to leave him,” remarked Mr. Byrd.
“Precisely,” was the short reply.
“And fourthly?” suggested the former.
“Fourthly, he was in the mill on Wednesday morning, where he went about his work as usual, until someone who knew his relation to Mrs. Clemmens looked up from the paper he was reading, and, in pure thoughtlessness, cried, ‘So they have killed your aunt for you, have they?’ A barbarous jest, that caused everybody near him to start in indignation, but which made him recoil as if one of these thunderbolts we have been listening to this afternoon had fallen at his feet. And he didn’t get over it,” Hickory went on. “He had to beg permission to go home. He said the terrible news had made him ill, and indeed he looked sick enough, and continued to look sick enough for days. He had letters from Sibley, and an invitation to attend the inquest and be present at the funeral services, but he refused to go. He was threatened with diphtheria, he declared, and remained away from the mill until the day before yesterday. Someone, I don’t remember who, says he went out of town the very Wednesday he first heard the news; but if so, he could not have been gone long, for he was at home Wednesday night, sick in bed, and threatened, as I have said, with the diphtheria. Fifthly—”
“Well, fifthly?”
“I am afraid of your criticisms,” laughed the rough detective. “Fifthly is the result of my poking about among Mr. Mansell’s traps.”
“Ah!” frowned the other, with a vivid remembrance of that picture of Miss Dare, with its beauty blotted out by the
