“Are not these the ones?” queried the district attorney, making a sign to Sweetwater, who immediately stepped forward, with a shabby old ulster over his arm, and a battered derby in his hand.
The young man started, rose, then sat again, shouting out with angry emphasis:
“No!”
“Yet you recognise these?”
“Why shouldn’t I? They’re mine. Only I don’t wear them any more. They’re done for. You must have rooted them out from some closet.”
“We did; perhaps you can tell us what closet.”
“I? No. What do I know about my old clothes? I leave that to the women.”
The slight faltering observable in the latter word conveyed nothing to these men.
“Mr. Cumberland,”—the district attorney was very serious,—“this hat and this coat, old as they are, were worn into town from your house that night. This we know, absolutely. We can even trace them to the club-house.”
Mechanically, not spontaneously this time, the young man rose to his feet, staring first at the man who had uttered these words, then at the garments which Sweetwater still held in view. No anger now; he was too deeply shaken for that, too shaken to answer at once—too shaken to be quite the master of his own faculties. But he rallied after an interval during which these three men devoured his face, each under his own special anxiety, and read there possibly what each least wanted to see.