“No, Mr. Jarvis, my brother did not do it. I have thought of that—I have been driven to think of it, dreadful as it is; and I have watched him—God forgive me!—I have watched him as an enemy might. He did not do it!”
Jarvis threw up his head and drew a deep breath of the crisp night air, as a swimmer who feels the bottom under his feet while yet the shore of ultimate safety is afar off.
“That helps out a whole lot,” he said; and his involuntary sigh was a measure of the relief which her assurance gave him. “May I walk back with you? I’m not half through.”
She suffered him, and he went quickly forward in the path she had cleared for him.
“We are now a long way ahead of any point that has been reached hitherto,” he began. “Brant didn’t do it, and your brother didn’t do it. But a man was killed, and if he did not commit suicide, somebody must have killed him. Happily, we don’t have to wrangle with the suicide theory, so we may safely fall back on the alternative. Do you follow me?”
Her “Yes” was not a whisper this time; it was an eager little gasp of expectancy.
“Good. Now, while I have been holding the William Langford possibility in suspension, as it were, I have been filling in the time by hunting desperately for this shadowy ‘somebody.’ That is why I haven’t had much sleep since Monday night.”
“O Mr. Jarvis! Have you found any clew at all?”
“If I say Yes, you must understand that it isn’t any bigger than a spider’s web—just one strand of a spider’s web, at that. For a week or so before the shooting Harding was seen here and there and everywhere in company with a man whom everybody can describe after a fashion and nobody can identify. They seemed to be friends, but that doesn’t count for much among people of that kind. Still, there is only one little thing to connect this unknown man with the murder, so far.”
“And that is?”