Claire Blackwood greeted the caller courteously and asked him to go inside the house with her.
“Let us all go,” said Rodney Granniss. “I want to learn all about this case, and we’re entitled to know.”
“Come on, everybody,” Dunn invited, “I want to ask a lot of questions and who knows where I may get the best and most unexpected answers.”
Granniss and Lawrence North, with Ted Landon and John Clark, who had been up on the Headland in the afternoon, were the men, and Mrs Blackwood and her young guest, Eleanor Varian were the only women present.
Yet Dunn seemed well satisfied as he looked over the group.
“Fine,” he said, “all the witnesses I wanted, and all here together.”
“We didn’t witness anything,” offered John Clark, who was apparently by no means desirous of taking part in the colloquy. “And, as I’ve an engagement, can’t you question me first, and let me go?”
“Sure I can,” returned Dunn, whose easy manners were not at all curbed by the more formal attitude of those about him. “Just tell the story in your own way, son.”
Clark resented the familiar speech, but said nothing to that effect.
“There’s little to tell,” he began; “I’d never been up to Headland House before, and of course I’d never before met the Varians,—any of them. I went on Mrs Blackwood’s invitation, and after meeting the family and their guests on the veranda, we all started for a picnic. We had reached a point half way down the steep path from the house, when Miss Betty Varian said she had forgotten her camera. She returned to the house for it, and we waited. She was gone so long, that we wondered,—and then, her father went to hurry her up. He, too, was gone a long time, and then, Doctor Varian and Ted Landon went after him. That’s my story. Landon can tell you the rest.”