“Oh, no, sir, he liked to go different places, you know yourself how he was always a bit queer and concentric and he never talked much about where he went, but always so nice and considerate. Oh, he was a fine gentleman.”
Mrs. Barlow, plainly much grieved, wept anew. “Please try to tell us everything you can think of,” said Dulcet, gently. “What time did he come in, and did you notice anything unusual?”
“Nothing out of the way that I can think of, but then I was down in the basement most of the evening, for I let my maid go to the movies and I had a deal to do. I suppose he went along Amsterdam Avenue, he was always strolling up and down Amsterdam or Columbus, poor man, getting ideas for his literature I guess. He came back about nine o'clock I should say, because I heard the door about then. Just a few minutes before he came in there was a man came to the door with a tin of tobacco for him, which he said Mr. Digby had ordered sent around, and I took it up and put it on his table, there it is now, poor man, Carter's Mixture.”
Mrs. Barlow pointed to the tin of Cartesian Mixture that stood on the table. Evidently it had only just been opened, for it was practically full.
“Yes,” said Dulcet. “Here's his pipe lying on the floor under his chair.” He picked up the briar and glanced at it. “Only just begun to smoke it, for the tobacco is hardly burned. He must have been smoking when he.... There wasn't anything else you can think of?”
The woman dried her eyes with her apron. “There was just one other thing I noticed, but I suppose it's silly. But I took note of it special, because I thought I had heard it before, lately. While he was out, and a little before the man brought the tin of tobacco, I heard a sharp tapping out on the street in front of the house. I noticed it special, because I thought at first it was someone rapping on the door, and I wondered if the bell was out of order again, but when I went I couldn't see any one. But I wondered about it because I heard it two or three times, a sharp kind of tapping, it sounded some way like hitting on stone with a stick of some sort.”
Dulcet and I looked at each other rather blankly.
“And after that,” she went on, “I didn't think about anything one way or another till you came in and I told you to go right up.”
There was a clear peal from the front door bell. “That's the doctor,” said Dulcet, and Mrs. Barlow hurried downstairs.
I have never seen any one so brisk and matter of fact as that physician, and after his arrival the affair seemed to pass out of Dulcet's hands into the painful official machinery that takes charge in such events. Dulcet, acting as the dead writer's literary representative, went into the adjoining room, which was Digby's study, to look over the papers in the desk for any manuscripts that he ought to take care of. He wrote out a list of friends and relatives for me to send telegrams to and I went out to attend to this. I don't know how they get wind of these affairs, but the reporters were already beginning to arrive when I left.