“Well, say he slid down a high bank to reach the river——”
“There’s no high bank near the morgue, and he was fished out in that locality.”
“But he needn’t have fallen in there! In fact, he couldn’t have,—he must have floated or drifted a considerable distance to have had his clothing torn from him—and to have reached the state of exhaustion and freezing that so nearly culminated in death.”
“Yes, but even yet, you haven’t suggested anything like falling through the earth.”
“All right, Miss Smarty, what’s your idea? I see you’re dying to spring something.”
“Only what I’ve thought from the beginning. I believe he was in some cold country, Canada, or somewhere, and fell down through a mine shaft, or into a deep old well, or perhaps merely an excavation for a new, large building. But, anyway, whatever it was, his last impression was of falling down into the ground. Then when he struck he was knocked unconscious. Then, he was taken to a hospital, or somewhere, and as the fall had utterly blotted out his memory, he was kept in confinement. Then, somehow he broke loose and came to New York,—or, maybe, he was brought to New York for treatment by the doctors and he got away and either threw himself into the river or fell in accidentally, and when he was rescued he still remembered the fall but nothing else concerning his disaster.”
“Good enough, Norah, as a theory. But seems to me, in that case, he would have been sought and found by the people who had him in charge.”
“Ah, that’s the point of it all! They don’t want to find him! They know just where he is, and all about him, but they won’t tell, for it suits their base purposes to have him lost!”
“Well, you have cooked up a scheme! And he killed Amos Gately?”
“Maybe, but if so, he did it unknowingly. Perhaps these people who are looking after him, secretly hypnotized him to do it——”