“As Mr. Landon says,” spoke up Judge Hoyt, “it may be merely a coincidence that his name is Kane, when his uncle had so recently stigmatized his assailant as Cain. Surely such questionable evidence must be backed up by some incontrovertible facts.”
Landon looked at this man curiously. He knew him but slightly. He remembered him as a friend of his uncle’s, but he knew nothing of his attachment for Avice Trowbridge. Kane noted the fine face, the grave and scholarly brow, and he breathed a sigh of relief to think that the lawyer had said a kindly word for him. Landon’s was a peculiar nature. Reproof or rebuke always antagonized him, but a sympathetic word softened him at once.
Had Landon but known it, he had another friend present. Harry Pinckney, his college mate, recognized him the moment he entered the room. Then, obeying a sudden impulse, Pinckney drew back behind a pillar that divided the two drawing-rooms, as is the fashion of old houses, and had remained unseen by Landon all the morning. Pinckney himself could scarcely have told why he did this, but it was due to a feeling that he could not write his story for his paper with the same freedom of speech if Landon knew of his presence. For though he refused to himself to call it by so strong a term as suspicion, Pinckney felt that the coincidence of Cain and Kane was too unlikely to be true. Regretting his friend’s downfall, Pinckney thought, so far as he had yet discovered, that Landon was the most likely suspect. And so he did not want to meet him just yet. Later, perhaps, he could help him in some way or other, but the “story” came first.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MILK BOTTLE
“Nothing but an old milk bottle!” exclaimed Berg, disgustedly, as the exhibit was placed before him on the table.
That’s all it was, and yet somehow the commonplace thing looked uncanny when considered as evidence in a murder case. But was it evidence? Or was it merely the remnant of a last week’s picnic in the woods?
A search of the Swede’s house had brought the thing to light, and now the big fellow told again of his finding it.
Buried, he declared it was, not fifty feet from where he had seen the dying man. He had not thought at first, that it had any connection with the murder, and had taken it merely on an impulse of thrifty acquisition of anything portable. He told his wife to wash out the ill-smelling contents, and she had done so.
“If you’d only let it alone!” wailed Groot. “What did the stuff smell like? Sour milk?”
“No, no,” and Sandstrom shook his head vigorously. “It bane like a droog.”