CHAPTER IX
A LOVE LETTER
“Look here, Esther,” said old Salt to his wife, “that’s a mighty curious case over at Waring’s.”
“How you do talk! I should think that to you and me, knowing and loving John Waring as we did, you’d have no doings with the curious part of it! As for me, I don’t care who killed him. He’s dead, isn’t he? It can’t bring him back to life to hang his murderer. And to my mind it’s heathenish—all this detectiving and evidencing—or whatever they call it. Whom do they suspect now? You?”
Adams looked at his wife with a mild reproach. “Woman all over! No sense of justice, no righteous indignation. Don’t you know the murderer must be found and punished? That is if it was a murder.”
“Of course it was! That blessed man never killed himself! And he about to marry Emily Bates—a lady, if ever there was one!”
“Well, now you listen to me, Esther, and whatever you do, don’t go babbling about this. They say the Jap, who vamoosed from the Waring house, made a line of foot tracks in the snow. The snow’s crusted over, you know, and those footprints are about as clear now as when they were made.”
“Huh! footprints! Corinth is full of footprints.”
“Yes, but these—listen, Esther—these lead straight from the Waring house, over to this house. And back again.”
“How can they?” Mrs. Adams looked mystified. “That Japanese didn’t come over here.”
“You can’t say that he didn’t. And, look here, Esther, where’s Miss Austin? What’s she doing?”