What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being subjected. When he stole a glance at the pair on the porch, Johnson was shaking his head slowly; and he did it again after a second thoughtful stare. Griswold, missing completely now what Bainbridge was saying, overheard the teller's low-toned rejoinder to the detective's urgings: "It's no use, Mr. Broffin; I'd have to swear positively to it, you know, and I couldn't do that.... No, I don't want to hear your corroborative evidence; it might make me see a resemblance where there is none. Wait until Mr. Galbraith recovers: he's your man."
Griswold hardly knew how he made shift to get away from Bainbridge finally; but when it was done, and he was crossing the little triangular park which filled the angle between the business squares and the lake-fronting residence streets, he was sweating profusely, and the departing fear-mania was leaving him weak and tremulous.
Passing the stone-basined fountain in the middle of the park he stopped, jerked the pistol from his pocket, spilled the cartridges from its magazine, and stooped to grope for a loose stone in the walk-border. With the fountain base for an anvil and the loosened border stone for a hammer he beat the weapon into shapeless inutility and flung it away.
"God knows whom I shall be tempted to kill, next!" he groaned; and the trembling fit was still unnerving him when he went on to keep the appointment made by Charlotte Farnham.
XXXIX
DUST AND ASHES
A full moon, blood-red from the smoke of forest fires far to the eastward, was rising over the Wahaska Hills when Griswold unlatched the gate of the Farnham enclosure and passed quickly up the walk.
Since the summoning note had stressed the urgencies, he was not surprised to find the writer of it awaiting his coming on the vine-shadowed porch. In his welcoming there was a curious mingling of constraint and impatience, and he was moved to marvel. Miss Farnham's outlook upon life, the point of view of the ideally well-balanced, was uniformly poiseful and self-contained, and he was wondering if some fresh entanglement were threatening when she motioned him to a seat and placed her own chair so that the light from the sitting-room windows would leave her in the shadow.