“One demnition grind, isn’t it? Anything new?”
“No. Business has been mighty quiet with us since that scrap in Number Seven.”
“Go shy, do they? That will wear off in time. By the way, Binkie, there wasn’t anybody else in the big room that night when George Brant went in, was there?”
“Not a soul.” The man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and then added, as one who seeks to divide a harassing burden: “That’s what I told the police, and it’s what I say now. But for all that, there was a blamed queer thing happened that I haven’t told anybody, and I’ve sweat about it till I’m galded raw.”
“What was it?” Jarvis forced himself to ask the question carelessly, but anxiety and eagerness were fairly suffocating him.
“Why, it was this: George came up and asked me about those two fellows, and which room they were in, and I told him. Then I saw him go swinging up the middle of the big room with that get-out-of-my-road gait of his as plain as I see you now. Well, about two minutes afterward I got up to go and close a window in the far end of the hall, and when I got back to my chair at the door there he was yet, still going up the room the same as I’d seen him before. Blame me, if I didn’t think I’d got ’em again, for a minute!”
“You are sure it was Brant?” said Jarvis, hungering and thirsting for the negative answer which he did not dare to so much as suggest.
“Sure enough,” said the doorkeeper briefly. “At first I wasn’t so cocksure; it seemed like he’d gone thinner just in that minute or two, so that his clothes didn’t fit him so well; and he wasn’t swinging along any more—he was going cautiouslike, as if he were listening for something that he couldn’t hear. But of course it was George. It couldn’t have been anybody else, or I’d have seen him come up the stairs. See?”
If the man craved buttressing in his own belief it was not denied him.
“Of course, it couldn’t have been any one else,” Jarvis agreed. “Most likely George came back to ask you something, didn’t find you at the door, and went on again. Well, I must get a move. Good night.”