"Tell me what you have learned," returned I. Things usually acquire a more comprehensible aspect when you have a few facts by which to measure and weigh them, and I wanted to hear Stodger's story.
"Yip!" he cried cheerily. "Might as well sit here as anywhere else; nobody to disturb us."
Weighted as he was with surplus flesh, his agility was amazing. He wheeled round and plumped down on an oak bench, not unlike a church pew, which stood against the panelled stairway beyond the newel. As I followed I drew my overcoat closer about me, for the hall was cold and dismal.
"This fellow Burke—Alexander Stilwell; queer chap. Close-mouthed? Say!"—he squared around and tapped my chest with an impressive forefinger—"a clam 's real noisy compared with him. Fact. Watched me steady all the time I—you know—looked at the body."
Stodger stopped abruptly, with the manner of one to whom has occurred a sudden brilliant idea. He thumped one fat knee with a pudgy hand, and whispered with suppressed eagerness:
"By jinks, Swift! I have it! I 'll get Burke—Alexander Stilwell. Let him talk—in there"—with a violent gesture toward the opposite side of the hall—"library. What say? There's a—you know—alcove—curtains. I 'll hide behind 'em and listen; if he don't tell the story just like he did to me, why, we 'll call the turn on him. See?"
For various reasons I thought the idea not a bad one, and said so. Stodger was off up the stairs like a shot. He went nimbly round the prostrate figure on the landing without so much as a look toward it, and disappeared.
He and another man appeared, after a while, at the back of the hall, having evidently availed themselves of a rear stairway.
I surveyed the private secretary with much interest, and must even now confess, after no inconsiderable study of the human face, that I have never since beheld one that was so utterly baffling.
He was a slender man of medium height, and of an age that might have been anything between twenty and fifty; his eyes, hair, brows, and lashes were all of a uniform shade of pale yellow—excepting that the eyes had a greenish tint—while his face and thin, nervous hands wore a dead, unwholesome pallor.