CHAPTER X
The sheriff and the coroner arrived from Ochakee in a roadster soon after dawn. All of us felt relieved at their coming: they represented the best and most intelligent type of southern citizenry. Sheriff Slatterly was scarcely older than I was, and had been given his office for meritorious services in the late war. He was a broad-shouldered large-headed man, with keen, good-natured eyes, a firm mouth, and rather prominent chin. We scraped up an acquaintance at once on the strength of our Legion buttons.
“I’m glad theya’s a suvice man heah,” he confessed to me. “It’s sho’ a mess of a case—and my deputy is busy. I’ve neveh wo’ked among these millionaih Yankee spo’ts befo’, but I suppose they ah all right. Now tell me what you think of it all.”
“I don’t think,” I confessed. “It doesn’t make good sense.”
He asked me questions in the vernacular of the South, and I answered them the best I could. Then he introduced me to the coroner.
Mr. Weldon was a man of about forty years, intelligent, forceful, not in the least the mournful type so often seen among undertakers. He was rather careless in speech, but I did not ascribe it to lack of education. He had rather a Semitic countenance, and a very deep, manly voice.
“Of course the first thing is to drag the lagoon,” he said. “We’ve got to have a body before we can hold anything but a semblance of an inquest—and of course thet’s where the body is. It couldn’t be nowhere’s else.”
All of us agreed with him. There was simply nothing else to do. The body had lain but thirty feet from the water’s edge: it was conceivable that for some mysterious reason the murderer had seen fit to return and drag his dead into the water. The idea of him carrying it in any other direction was incredible.
While we waited for drag hooks to be sent out from town the sheriff made a minute examination of the scene of the crime. He searched the ground for clews; and it seemed to me the little puzzled line between his brows deepened with every moment of the search. He stood up at last, breathing hard.
“The murderer made a clean get away, that’s certain,” he observed. “It isn’t often a man can commit a crime like this and not leave a few trails. I can’t find a trace or a button. And if he left any tracks they are mixed up with those you gentlemen made last night.”