“Exactly.”
Jarvis slipped the note into his pocket and got away as quickly as he could. It was but the slenderest thread of a clew, but it spanned one of the many gaps he had been vainly trying for a fortnight to bridge.
At the very beginning of his investigation the reporter had stumbled upon Harding’s disguise—the wig and the false beard—in the West Denver Gasthaus; and a painstaking inquiry into the habits of the red-haired and fiery-bearded lodger had developed the fact that he was seen often in company with another man whose description Jarvis had gathered from many sources, but whom he was as yet unable to identify.
So far as could be ascertained, the unidentified one had disappeared on the night of the tragedy. He had been seen alone at Draco’s in the earlier hours of that night, and he had not been seen by any of Jarvis’s informants since that time. Apart from the overheard conference in Heddrigg’s restaurant—a conference in which Jarvis had long since recognised Harding in his character of red-beard and the unknown man as the two participants—there was nothing to remotely connect the unidentified man with Brant’s affair; nothing, unless the forged letter to Mrs. Seeley might be taken as a connecting link. But just here the reporter’s incomplete knowledge of the facts hampered him. He knew nothing of the papers at which the burglary pointed, and could only guess from the overheard conversation in Heddrigg’s restaurant that the burglar was an emissary of Harding’s. At the finding of the forged letter he had jumped to the conclusion that the house-breaker and Harding’s unknown companion were one and the same person; but cooler after-thought brought doubt, and a leaning toward the William Langford hypothesis.
“I am afraid it was the young fellow, after all,” he said at the summing up. “That guess fits the other guesses a little more as if it belonged. Nobody but a fool of a boy would do such a thing and get stone blind in the middle of it; and there is nobody else in the whole shooting match that Brant would go out of his way to shield. As for the clothes and the letter, they don’t count very hard. Even as big a fool as the boy would have sense enough not to wear his everyday clothes while he burgled a house.”
So Jarvis concluded; and he did not change his mind when, later in the day, in another talk with Deverney, he learned that Harding’s unknown companion had always appeared in dingy “pepper-and-salt.” That was a mere coincidence, he argued; and the pattern was certainly common enough to warrant the supposition.
It was in the evening of this same day that the reporter asked his chief to procure him an order to visit the prisoner, or, rather, asked if such an order could be procured.
“I don’t know,” said the night editor. “It’s after hours. But we can try. What have you stumbled upon—anything new?”
“Nothing much. Write me the request for an order, and I’ll tell you about it when I come back. I have an idea.”
The request was written and Jarvis forthfared to the jail. His idea was but the piecing together of some irrelevant facts. He had learned from his chief that Brant had at one time taken a pistol from Harding, and from the editor’s description the weapon was a facsimile of the one found on the floor of the card room after the murder. Out of this the reporter built a new theory, and an interview with Brant was needed to confirm or disprove it.