The month is March. Nearly a year has elapsed since Ashley’s first visit to the Vermont town which, for a brief space, came into the world’s eye as the scene of the mysterious death of Cashier Roger Hathaway in the Raymond National Bank. During this time no further light has been shed on the mystery, which has gradually dropped from the thoughts of all save a few persons, two of whom are Ashley and John Barker, the detective.
Jack hears from Barker occasionally. The latter is busy on other work, but he still keeps a live interest in what he regards as the case of his life, and both he and his newspaper colaborer hope some day to astonish Vermont, and incidentally the country, by solving the Hathaway mystery, one of the most remarkable in the criminal annals of New England.
But as the months slipped by Ashley’s stock of confidence decreased slightly and to-night finds him wondering whether he will ever have the privilege of handing the news editor a bundle of “copy,” with the remark “There is an exclusive that is worth while.”
“I have helped run down a number of crimes and fasten them upon the guilty persons,” he soliloquizes, “and have flattered myself that I was something of a detective. But in each of those cases the trembling villain was on or about the scene of his crime and when you had your case made out all there was to do was to clap a heavy hand upon his shoulder. But in this Hathaway drama about all of the leading characters have disappeared, and the man whom we regard as the key to the mystery, Ernest Stanley, is the very man we are least likely to find.
“But is Stanley the key?” continues Jack, stretching himself in his chair. “I don’t think Barker and I have attached sufficient importance to that blotter found on Hathaway’s desk. These fragments of sentences keep haunting me, even amid my daily duties. Something tells me that if we had the imprint of an entire page of that letter to Felton we could solve the mystery without finding our men. ‘These things I charge you, Cyrus Felton, fail not at the peril of your good name.’ ‘These things—’”
Ashley is slowly scratching a match to relight his pipe, when he suddenly stops and his thought-wrinkled forehead smooths.
“Hello! Here’s an idea, perhaps a valuable one. It is possible that Barker and I have been all wrong in regarding that letter as an accusation. The English language is elastic. ‘I charge you, Cyrus Felton,’—‘I charge you, I charge you, I charge you.’ Now, instead of ‘I accuse you,’ read ‘I adjure you.’ But ‘I adjure you,’ what? To ‘fail not.’ To ‘fail not’ in what? Ay, there’s the rub. I am as much in the dark as before. Still the idea is worth considering, and I’ll spring it on Barker.”
Ashley finishes his smoke in silence and when the last flake of tobacco has yielded its solace he draws on his coat and boards an uptown car.
In that brilliantly lighted section of Broadway where stands the Hoffman House, Jack stops a moment to chat with an acquaintance.
“Say,” remarks the latter, “there’s a chap yonder staring hard at you. Know him?”