“They have been poisoned!” he whispered, in a harsh, gurgling voice.
CHAPTER XXI.
Ned Mitchell was not the sort of man to waste much time in the indulgence of an outbreak of passion. After a few minutes’ contemplation of the dead bodies of his hounds, he pulled himself together and prepared for action. There had flashed into his mind the recollection of the evening on which his illness began. He had forgotten until that moment all the details of his arrival home, his groping about for a light, the sounds he had heard as of a person moving in one of the rooms, and the glimpse he had caught of an opening door as he fell senseless to the floor. It now occurred to him for the first time, as he went over the small incidents of that night one by one, that the fall from the effects of which he was suffering was caused by a heavy blow from some one who had forced an entrance into the little cottage during his absence.
“A murderous blow!” he muttered to himself as—alone, in the dusk, with his dead hounds encumbering the ground at his feet—he staggered along by the walls, reproducing the sensations he had felt just before his fall. “It must have been in here that he was hidden,” he went on to himself, as he found himself at the door of the room where he had first kept his hounds. “For it was on my right hand as I came in that I heard the noise; I am sure of it.” Speaking thus, slowly, to himself, he at last turned the handle and went into the unused room. It was musty and close, and he had to open the windows before he could breathe easily. He had a match box in his pocket; striking a light, he examined every corner of the empty room with the utmost care, and discovered at last, close to the wall in a nook where the light from the windows scarcely penetrated, two dried-up, evil-smelling scraps of meat. “Ah!” said he to himself. “Poisoned, of course! And as the first attempt wouldn’t do, he had to try again.”
He removed the meat carefully from the room, and hid it away for further examination. Poor, trembling Mrs. Wall having by this time returned to her place in the kitchen, he went in and asked her, in a dry voice, if she had heard anybody about the place in his absence.
“No, sir,” quavered she. “Indeed I didn’t.”
“You were out, of course?”
“No, sir; at least, I’d only gone just half-way down t’ hill as far as t’ post office, to get in a pound of sugar because you’re out of it, sir; and I give you my word, sir, I’d never ha’ gone if I hadn’t ha’ thought as Abel was upstairs, and—”
“And you came back just a minute or two before I did?”
“Yes, sir; not so very long.”