I confess with all humility that at times the line of demarcation between truth and fiction is rendered so indefinite and indistinct, that I cannot always determine, with unerring certainty, whether an event really happened to me, or whether I only dreamed it.—Longfellow.
MR. BYRD, upon waking next morning, found himself disturbed by a great perplexity. Were the words then ringing in his ears, real words, which he had overheard spoken outside of his door some time during the past night, or were they merely the empty utterances of a more than usually vivid dream?
He could not tell. He could remember the very tone of voice in which he fancied them to have been spoken—a tone which he had no difficulty in recognizing as that of the landlord of the hotel; could even recall the faint sounds of bustle which accompanied them, as though the person using them had been showing another person through the hall; but beyond that, all was indistinct and dream-like.
The words were these:
"Glad to see you back, sir. This murder following so close upon your visit must have been a great surprise. A sad occurrence, that, sir, and a very mysterious one. Hope you have some information to give."
"If it is a remembrance and such words were uttered outside of my door last night," argued the young detective to himself, "the guest who called them forth can be no other than the tall and florid gentleman whom I encountered in the bar-room. But is it a remembrance, or only a chimera of my own overwrought brain struggling with a subject it will not let drop? As Shakespeare says, 'That is the question!'"
Fortunately, it was not one which it behooved him to decide. So, for the twentieth time, he put the subject by and resolved to think of it no more.
But perplexities of this kind are not so easily dismissed, and more than once during his hurried and solitary breakfast, did he ask himself whether, in case the words were real, he had not found in the landlord of this very hotel the one witness for which the coroner was so diligently seeking.
A surprise awaited him after breakfast, in the sudden appearance at his room door of the very gentleman last alluded to.
"Ha, Byrd," said he, with cheerful vivacity: "here is a line from the superintendent which may prove interesting to you."