He had counted on making Doris turn in horror from Thaxton as a sneak thief. But he found to his dismay that his ruse had precisely the opposite effect on her. Desperate, wild with baffled wrath, he resolved on sweeping Vail forcibly and permanently from his path.
The idea came to him when he saw, lying on the living-room table, the big knife which, as Clive, he had given to Vail. As always, Creede carried in his hip pocket a heavy-caliber revolver. But pistols are noisy. Knives are not.
Pouching the knife, as Thaxton carried his limp-armed body past the table on the way to his room, he had made ready to use it in a manner that could not attract suspicion to himself.
It had been easy for him as his fingers brushed the table, when he was carried past it, to pick up the knife—even easier than it had been for him to palm the Argyle watch, a little earlier, and then to pretend to pull it from Vail’s pocket in the presence of the chief.
As a child Creede had whiled away a long scarlet-fever convalescence by practicing sleight-of-hand tricks wherewith his nurse had sought to entertain him. A bit of the hard learned cunning had always lurked in his sensitive fingers.
As he was the first to go to bed he had no means whatever of knowing that the man moving noisily about in Vail’s adjoining room as he undressed was not Thaxton.
Creede waited until the house was still. Then silently he crept out into the hallway and tried Vail’s door. It was unlocked. Barefoot, he crept to the bed, guided only by the dim reflection of the setting moon on the gray wall opposite.
By this faint light he made out the form of a man lying asleep on his side. Osmun struck with force and scientific skill.
The sleeper started up with a gurgling cry. Creede, in panic, stilled the cry with a blow from the carafe at his hand.
But, as he smote, an elusive flicker of moonlight showed him the victim’s full face. And he knew his crime had been wasted.