“Because many a man will steal where only one will commit murder. It is possible, of course, that the two may be the same. The probabilities, however, are against it.”
“What follows then?” demanded McManus.
“That the actor in at least one case, and possibly in both, was not the principal; and that the more there are engaged in the affair, the better chance we have of discovery. It is the one-man affair that baffles.”
None the less, when McManus was gone, Trafford summed up the successes of three weeks and found them mortifyingly few. A package of papers missed and not found; an innocent man under suspicion; a woman of prominence proved the mother of an illegitimate child; a thwarted attempt upon his own life; a wounded Canadian apparently wiped off the earth; and a respectable citizen traced on a midnight visit to another respectable citizen at Waterville. It was not on such achievements as these that he had built his reputation.
With the thought of the missing Canadian, his anxiety returned. It was impossible that he had been spirited away to Canada, yet it was undeniable that he was gone. He went out and looked at the river. After two weeks of dry weather the water was falling. On the edge of the falls, rocks showed that a week before were under water. In eddies and shallow places he could see, as with his physical eye, drift and débris collecting, and sometimes in this drift and débris strange matter was thrown up. He had hesitated to do it, but he felt that he had no right to hesitate longer, and so he gave directions for a careful search of the river banks and shallow places from Millbank to Pishon’s Ferry. It was the last chance, and he had refused to consider it until it would be criminal to refuse longer.
That was the physical part of the task, which he could set others to do; but there was another part, and that he took with him to his room in the hotel and spent much of the night with it. All the evening he turned and re-turned it, looking at every side and phase, and then went to bed and to sleep, with the knowledge that more than once that which the most earnest thought fails to unravel becomes by some strange alchemy clear under the magic of sleep. Would it be so with this?
To that query, which came involuntarily, he answered with a doubt.
“I’m fighting my conviction,” he said, almost plaintively, “instead of giving myself up to its free course. I can’t expect to be helped as long as I do that; but I can’t, I won’t believe. A man in my mood can’t solve anything!”
So it came to pass that the night brought him no help, and he rose in the morning without that sense of rest which a single hour’s sleep brings under the stimulus of success.
About noon, a country lad on horseback brought a message from a point some six miles below the village. Obeying the message, he started at once with the coroner and physician.