I watched him as he went through the familiar motion of lighting a second cigarette from the first one. In the half-light of the cabin, I had not at first perceived how ill he looked; now, I saw the dark patches under the eyes, the livid and flabby face, the shaking hand. And for the first time, with a little shock, I realized how near he had been to death.
"But you, Mistair Lester," he was saying, "how does it occur that you also are going to France? I did not know you contemplated——"
"No," I answered calmly, for I had seen that the question was inevitable and I even welcomed it, since it gave me opportunity to get my guns to going. "No; the last time I saw you, I didn't contemplate it, but a good deal has happened since then. Would you care to hear? Are you strong enough to talk?"
Oh, how I relished tantalizing him!
"I should like very exceedingly to hear," he assured me, and shifted his position a little, so that his face was in the shadow. "The beams of light through the shutter make my eyes to hurt," he added.
So he mistrusted himself; so he was not finding the part an easy one, either! The thought gave me new courage, new audacity.
"You may remember," I began, "that I told you once that if I ever went to work on the Holladay case, I'd try first to find the murderess. I succeeded in doing it the very first day."
"Ah!" he breathed. "And after the police had failed! That was, indeed, remarkable. How did you accomplish it?"
"By the merest chance—by great good fortune. I was making a search of the French quarter, house by house, when, on Houston Street, I came to a restaurant, the Café Jourdain. A bottle of supérieur set Jourdain's tongue to wagging; I pretended I wanted a room; he dropped a word, the merest hint; and, in the end, I got the whole story. It seems there was not only one woman, there were two."
"Yes?"