“Yes, sir. She had her face all muffled up in her veil, the way she always did, but I specially noticed her slippers. They were awfully pretty shiny silver slippers, and when I let her out at the corner before Orchards it was sort of muddy, and I thought they sure were foolish little things to walk in, but that it was a terrible pity to spoil ’em like that.”
“How long did it take you to cover the distance between the point from which you picked Mrs. Bellamy up to the point at which you set her down?”
“About eight minutes, I should say. It’s a little over two miles—nearer two and a half, I guess.”
“Did she seem in a hurry?”
“Yes, sir, she surely did; when she got out at the Orchards corner she started off almost at a run. I pretty nearly called to her to look out or she’d trip herself, but then I decided that it wasn’t none of my business, and of course it wasn’t.”
“How do you fix the date and the time, Turner?”
“Well, that’s easy. It was my last trip that night to Perrytown, see? And about the date, next morning I saw how there had been the—a—well, a murder at Orchards, and I remembered her and those silver slippers, and that black cloak, so I dropped in at headquarters to tell ’em what I knew—and it was her all right. They made me go over and look at her, and I won’t forget that in a hurry, either—no, sir.”
The boy who had driven her to Orchards set his lips hard, turning his eyes resolutely from the little black cloak. “I got ’em to change my route the next day,” he said, his pleasant young voice suddenly shaken.
“You say that you had driven her over several times before?”
“Well, two or three times, I guess—all in that last month too. I only had the route a month.”