“And yet, if it was despondency, he disguised it marvelously well. And if it was an accident it was a most skillful and fateful one. How he could swallow poison and not know it is beyond me. And now to consider who might have given it to him, arguing that it was not an accident.”
The colonel had walked up and down the stream at the turn of the Maraposa golf course, Shag following at a discreet distance, and, after trying out several places had settled down under a shady tree at an eddy where the waters, after rushing down the bed of the small river, met with an obstruction and turned upon themselves. Here they had worn out a place under an overhanging bank, making a deep pool where, if ever, fish might he expected to lurk.
And there the colonel threw in his bait and waited.
“And now, that I am waiting,” he mused, “let me consider, as my friend Walton would, matters in their sequence. Horace Carwell is dead. Let us argue that some one gave him the poison. Who was it?”
And then, like some file index, the colonel began to pass over in his mind the various persons who had come under his observation, as possible perpetrators of the crime.
“Let us begin with one the law already suspects,” mused the fisherman. “Not that that is any criterion, but that it disposes of him in a certain order—disposes of him or—involves him more deeply,” and the colonel looked to where a ground spider had woven a web in which a small but helpless grass hopper was then struggling.
“Could Harry Bartlett have given the poison?” the colonel asked himself. And the answer, naturally, was that such could have been the case.
Then came the question: “Why?”
“Had he an object? What was the quarrel about, concerning which he refuses to speak? Why is Viola so sure Harry could not have done it? I think I can see a reason for the last. She loves him as much as he does her. That's natural. She's a sweet girl!”
And, being unable to decide definitely as to the status of Harry Bartlett, Colonel Ashley mentally passed that card in his file and took up another, bearing the name Captain Gerry Poland.