“And may I see you home after?”
“If you’ve a mind to, though there’s no need—a married woman like me.”
“You’m so brave. Good-night—good-night. See how the moon is shining on the fog-banks. There’ll come rain before morning, for the wind’s fallen a lot already.”
He departed, and soon afterwards Mrs Beer also returned to her home. Then Minnie tidied up the kitchen, brought in from his kennel her sole companion—a great yellow mongrel dog, loved of Daniel—and then locked the door.
Next she turned out from a drawer in the kitchen table a piece of brown wood and examined it very closely. It was the bowl of a pipe broken roughly from the stem. The fragment had been carved to represent a fox’s mask, and upon the bottom of it were cut in small letters “T.S. from D.S.” Minnie Sweetland collected some of the shreds of Mr Sim’s tobacco and compared it with that still pressed into the broken pipe. Thus, while the footman walked home well satisfied with the progress of events, and full of dreams for his future prosperity, she upon whom it rested had made a remarkable discovery. That Titus Sim was involved in the murder of Thorpe, Minnie could not guess or prove; but that he was implicated in the recent raid—that it was, in fact, Sim who had fallen in the quarry—it seemed impossible to doubt.
The young woman’s first thought was to tell her father-in-law upon the following day. But she abandoned the idea. “I’ll go on alone,” she said to herself. “My Dan shall have none to thank but me. I’ll prove afore all the world that he told the truth; an’ maybe I’ll live to bring the truth to light. An’ if there’s danger in it, let the danger fall on me. I never was afeared of a human an’ never will be, please God.”