Thus Jarvis, with every word of the nonchalant reply carefully weighted down with disinterest. But when he had left the latter-day Egyptian on the corner, repressed excitement found speech commensurate with the importance of the new miracle.
“Holy Smoke! and yet they say there isn’t any such thing as a miracle nowadays! Why, good Lord! here there have been two of them within an hour—within fifteen minutes—and they go together like the foot and the shoe! Yes, it was Brant—like fits! It was his double in the stolen suit of black clothes—that’s what Binkie saw! And he has been keeping it dark because he was afraid of losing his job if he admitted that some one might have made a sneak on him.”
This time Jarvis went straight to the editorial rooms of the Plainsman, and, finding them untenanted, sat down to wait with what patience he could muster for the others to come in. The interval was not ill spent. Before the reporter’s reverie was interrupted he had cleared up more of the mysteries—so many of them, indeed, that only one of any magnitude remained to baffle him. But that one was impregnable. If the unknown one were the murderer—and with this Jarvis had closed as with a fact assured—why had the man shot his late confederate?
In the meantime Antrim had killed his hour, and had driven once more to Altamont Terrace. He found the judge ready to accompany him, and from the elder man’s grave preoccupation he argued that something of moment had occurred in the interval of slain time.
As prefigured, they drove by way of the Union Depot and stopped to pick up Hobart. The train was not yet in, and Antrim had time to run up to the telegraph office. When he came down he was scowling and cursing his luck.
Whereupon the judge came out of his preoccupation enough to ask what had happened.
“Oh, it’s that despatcher at Voltamo again; he is always getting sick at the wrong time. I’ve got to drop everything and ‘sub’ for him, and I suppose I shall have to go up on Seventeen. That lets me out of the conference, but I don’t know that I could do any good if I stayed. It isn’t going to make any difference. It’s all up with poor Brant.”
The judge shook his head. “I must confess I don’t see any light; but since Dorothy has told me—” He broke off abruptly. “Do you know what she believes, Harry?”
Antrim nodded.
“I—I more than half believe it myself, now,” the judge admitted, and his voice had in it a tremulous quaver which was not of age. “It is the height of incredibility; it is more like a chapter out of some old romance of the dead-and-gone age of chivalry, but—but——”