"Oh, rot!" I said. "You can't bend a perfectly straight woman to help in such a crime unless she's bent that way by nature, and she isn't."
He grinned in a complacent, maddening way.
"I guess Barker could. He's as subtle as the serpent in Eden. Besides, how can you be so sure what kind of a girl she is? Who knows anything of these Whitehalls? They came from the West two years ago and settled on a farm—quiet, ladylike women—but not a soul has any real information about them or their antecedents. And they haven't given out much. They've been curiously secretive all along the line. I'm not saying the girl's a natural born criminal—she doesn't look the part—but you'll have to admit her speech and her actions are not those of a simple-minded rustic beauty. In my opinion she's fallen under Barker's spell, and he's molded her to his purpose. He's the one, he's the brain. She and Ford were only the two hands."
We'd reached the place he was bound for, and I was glad to break away. I wanted to think, and the more I thought the more wild and fantastic and incredible it seemed. A week ago a girl like any other girl, and today suspected of complicity in a primitively savage crime. I thought of the case they were building up against her and I thought of her in her room that morning, and it seemed the maddest nightmare. Then her face that day in the Whitney office rose on my memory, the stealthily watching eyes with their leaping fires, the equivocations, the lies! I walked for the rest of the afternoon, miles, somewhere out in the country. My brain was dried like a sponge in the sun as I came home—I couldn't get anywhere, couldn't get beyond that fundamental conviction that it wasn't true. I think if she'd confessed it with her own lips I'd have gone on persisting she was innocent.
Two days after that a chain of events began that put an end to all inaction and plunged the Harland case deeper than ever into sinister mystery. I will write them down in the order in which they occurred.
The first was on Tuesday—the Tuesday night following Molly's dinner with Tony Ford. That night an unknown man attacked Ford in his room, leaving him for dead.
For some years Ford had lived in a lodging house on the East Side near Stuyvesant Park. The place was decent and quiet, run by a widow and her daughter, the inmates of a shabby-genteel class—rather an odd place for a man of Ford's proclivities to house himself. It was one of those old-fashioned, brown-stone fronts, set back from the street behind a little square of garden, a short flagged path leading to the front door.
On the evening of the attack Ford had come in about half-past eight, and, after a few words with his landlady, who was sitting in the reception room, had gone upstairs. A little after ten, as they were closing up for the night, there was a ring at the bell and the door was opened by the servant, a Swede. The widow was as economical with her gas as lodging-house keepers usually are, and the Swede said she could only dimly see the figure of a man in the vestibule. He asked for Mr. Anthony Ford, and she told him Mr. Ford was in and directed him to a room on the third floor back. Without more words he entered and went up the stairs. After locking the door she followed him, being on her way to bed. When she reached the third floor he was standing at Ford's door, and, as she ascended to the fourth, she heard his knock and Ford's voice from the inside call out, "Hello, who's that?"
When the police asked her about the man's appearance her description was meager. He had worn the collar of his overcoat turned up and kept on his hat. All that she could make out in the brief moment when he crossed the hall to the stairs was that his eyes looked bright and dark, that he wore glasses, and that he had a large aquiline nose. She thought he had a white mustache, but on this point was uncertain, as the upturned collar hid the lower part of his face.
Babbitts, who reported the affair for the Dispatch and for the Whitney office on the side, questioned the girl carefully. She was stupid, not long landed, and could only be sure of the nose and the glasses. But one thing he elicited from her was an important touch in this impressionist picture—the man was small. When he passed her in the hall she noticed that he was not so tall as she was, and he moved quickly and lightly as he went up the stairs.