"What's the game?" he demanded. "Why am I brought here? What's the matter with you people? Do you mean to charge me with killing this man? What have I done to any of you? Damn your town, anyhow—the rotten, lying, hypocritical lot of you all!"
"The less you say the better," said the coroner; and the sheriff's steady gaze cautioned Don Lane yet more.
"Now, gentlemen," went on Blackman, "we have heard a number of witnesses here, and we have not found any man here that could bring forward any sight or sound of any suspicious character in this town. There hasn't been a tramp or outsider seen here, unless we except this young man now testifying here. The man on whose body we now are a-setting hadn't a enemy in this town, so far as has been shown here—no, nor so far as anyone of us knows. There has been no motive proved up here which would lead us to suspect anyone else of this crime."
Ben McQuaid once more leaned over to whisper to his seat-mate: "It's a likely thing a man would be running for his health, a night like last night, when he didn't have to! Ain't that the truth?"
The coroner rapped with his pencil on the table top. He was well filled with the sense of his own importance. In his mind he was procureur-general for Spring Valley. And in his mind still rankled the thought of the fiasco in his courtroom but the day before, in which he had made so small a figure.
"I want to ask you, Mr. Cowles," he said, turning to the sheriff, "if you ever have seen this young man before."
"Only once," said the sheriff, standing up. "Last night or this morning, just after the clock had struck one—say, two or three minutes or so after one o'clock—I was going out of my office and going over to the east side of the square. I met this young man then. As he says, he was running—that is, he was coming back from this direction, and running toward the southeast corner of the square, the direction of his own home."
"Was he in a hurry—did he seem excited?"
"He was panting a little bit. He was running. He didn't seem to see me."
"Oh, yes, I did," said Don. "I remember you perfectly—that is, I remember perfectly passing some man in the half darkness under the trees as I came along that side of the square. As I said, it was warm."