“Well,” said Barton slowly, “I don’t much care to go into details which you may say I can hardly prove, and I don’t want to distress you in your present state of health.”
“Why don’t you speak out! Was he poisoned? Did you detect arsenic or anything? He had been drinking with some one!”
“No; if, in a sense, he had been poisoned, there was literally nothing that could be detected by the most skilled analysis. But, my dear fellow, there are venoms that leave no internal trace. If I am right—and I think I am—he was destroyed by one of these. He had been a great traveller, had he not?”
“Yes,” answered Maitland.
“Well, it is strange; the murderer must have been a great traveller also. He must have been among the Macoushi Indians of Guiana, and well acquainted with their arts. I know them too. I went there botanizing.”
“You won’t be more explicit?”
“No,” he said; “you must take it on my word, after all.”
Maitland, if not convinced, was silent He had knowledge enough of Barton, and of his healthy and joyous nature, to be certain that his theory was no morbid delusion; that he had good grounds for an opinion which, as he said, he could no longer, prove—which was, indeed, now incapable of any proof. No one had seen the commission of the crime, and the crime was of such a nature, and so cunningly planned, that it could not possibly be otherwise brought home to the murderer.
Now Maitland, knowing the Hit or Miss, and the private room up-stairs with the dormer windows, where the deed must have been done, if done at all, was certain that there could not possibly have been any eye-witness of the crime.
“What shall you do?” he asked, “or have you done anything in consequence of your discovery? Have you been to the police?”