“Then you mean to say that you have seen from the first that if men looked for motives, they’d fasten on us?”
“I mean to say exactly that,” Frank Hunter answered; “and unless we can dig up something that shows that somebody else was in as bad a position as we, it will go hard with us, unless we can tire the detectives out and make them give it up as a bad job.”
It was Henry Matthewson’s turn to look and feel uneasy. Born to affluence, raised in wealth, and encouraged to high ambition, he had already gone far for a young man, and it seemed a piteous thing that in his own house, with his wife and children almost within call of his voice, he should be told that unless men could be made to forget and so abandon their interest in the Wing murder, it might go hard with him—that he might become an object of suspicion.
“I don’t mean,” Hunter said, “that we are in any danger of being convicted of Wing’s murder, or even of being arrested for it. That’s way beyond reason. But how much better off would we be, if the community should take up the suspicion that we were interested in Wing’s death; that we procured it? The public is an unreasoning brute. Look at poor Oldbeg!”
“Poor Oldbeg!” repeated Matthewson. “What in the name of thunder makes you so tender of Oldbeg?”
“It is Charles more than I,” Hunter said, referring to his brother. “He insists that the man is innocent; that there’s not a scintilla of proof against him, and he won’t consent that the unreasoning whim of the people shall do such injustice; and in fact, when I think that our time may come at any moment, I can’t help feeling a good deal that way myself.”
In the shrubbery outside the window a man, who had followed Hunter from Millbank, listened and watched. He could hear nothing and see as little, but hour after hour he kept his post, with dogged patience, using a night to catch a single hint. Had Hunter known how closely he was followed and watched, he would have been still more uneasy and disturbed.
“What is it about this new corpse that’s been found at Millbank?” Matthewson asked.
“Oh, merely a drowned logger. Nobody knows him and he’s been unceremoniously put under ground. Nobody’d have thought anything of it at any other time, for there’s never a spring that one or more of them don’t turn up; but just now we are living on sensations, and it added to the interest that Trafford was on hand and almost the first on the spot.”
“Wasn’t it one of Trafford’s men who found it?” the other asked.