"Running a mark about his shoes to fix their exact location," was the grim response.
VII
"YOU THINK THAT OF ME!"
"We're certainly up against it this time," were the words with which Dr. Price led the detective down the gallery. "What sort of an opinion can a man form of a fellow like that? Is he fool or knave?"
Mr. Gryce showed no great alacrity in answering. When he did speak it was to say:
"We shall have to go into the matter a little more deeply before we can trust our judgment as to his complete sincerity. But if you want to know whether I believe him to have loosed the arrow which killed that innocent child, I am ready from present appearances to say yes. Who else was there to do it? He and he only was on the spot. But it was a chance action, without intention or wish to murder. No man, even if he were a fool, would choose such a place or such a means for murder."
"That's true; but how does it help to call it accident? Accident calls for a bow in hand, an arrow within reach, an impulse to try one's skill at a fancied target. Now the arrow—whatever may be said of the bow—was not within the reach of anyone standing in this gallery. The arrow came from the wall at the base of which this young woman died. It had to be brought from there here. That does not look like accident, but crime."
Yet as the Coroner uttered this acknowledgment, he realized as plainly as Mr. Gryce how many incongruous elements lay in the way of any such solution of the mystery. If they accepted the foreigner's account of himself,—which for some reason neither seemed ready to dispute,—into what a maze of improbabilities it at once led them! A stranger just off ship! The victim a mere schoolgirl! The weapon such an unusual one as to be outré beyond belief. Only a madman—But there! Travis had less the appearance of a lunatic than Mrs. Taylor. It must have been an accident as Gryce said; and yet—
If there is much virtue in an if, there is certainly a modicum of the same in a yet, and the Coroner, in full recognition of this stumbling-block, remarked with unusual dryness: