My heart sank a little as I heard him. I knew I had overtaxed his strength. He was wandering off again into irrelevancies. He had missed the high jump.
"That's all right, old man," I tried to console him. "There's no use overdoing this. You sit there for a while and calm down."
As I sank into a chair on the other side of the desk, defeated, staring wearily about that book-lined room that was housing so indeterminate a tragedy, the door on my left was thrown open. Through it stepped a woman in an ivory-tinted dinner gown over which was thrown a cloth-of-gold cloak.
I sat there blinking up at her, for it was Mary Lockwood herself. It was not so much her sudden appearance as the words she spoke to the huddled figure on the other side of the desk that startled me.
"You were right," she said, with a self-obliterating intensity of purpose. "Father taps his thumbs. I saw him do it an hour ago!"
I sat staring at her as she stood in the center of the room, a tower of ivory and gold against the dull and mottled colors of the book-lined wall. I waited for her to speak. Then out of the mottled colors that confronted my eye, out of the faded yellows and rusty browns, the dull greens and brighter reds, and the gilt of countless titles, my gaze rested on a near-by oblong of blue.
I looked at it without quite seeing it. Then it came capriciously home to me that blue had been the color that Criswell had mentioned.
But after all blue is only blue, I vacuously told myself as I got up and crossed the room. Then I saw the white streak at the top of the book, and for no adequate reason my heart suddenly leaped up into my throat.
I snatched at that thing of blue and white, like a man overboard snatching at a life-line. I jerked it from its resting-place and crossed to the desk-top with it.
On its blue title page I read: "Report of the Commissioner of the North West Mounted Police, 1898."