"Not necessarily, Mr. Tate. Let us go back a little. It had been in your power once to do Avery a great favor, a very great favor. That's true, isn't it?"
Tate stared, clearly surprised, but his quivering lips framed no answer.
"You had known him from boyhood, and shortly after his marriage to your sister it had been in your power to do him a great favor; you had helped him out of a hole and saved the quarry for him. It cost me considerable money to find that out, Mr. Tate, and not a word of help have I had from Avery: be sure of that! He had been guilty of something just a little irregular—in fact, the forging of your name to a note—and you had dealt generously with him, out of your old-time friendship, we will say, or to spare your sister humiliation."
"George was in a corner," said Tate weakly but with manifest relief at the turn of the talk. "He squared it all long ago."
"It's natural, in fact, instinctive, for a man to protect himself, to exhaust all the possibilities of defense when the law lays its hand upon him. Avery did not do so, and his meek submission counted heavily against him. But let us consider that a little. You and Reynolds left the bungalow together, probably after the interview had added to your wrath against him, but you wished to renew the talk out of Avery's hearing and volunteered to guide Reynolds to the station where the Chicago train was to stop for him. You didn't go back, Mr. Tate——"
"Good God, I tell you I wasn't there! I can prove that I was in Louisville; I tell you——"
"We're coming bade to your alibi in a moment," said the governor patiently. "We will assume—merely assume for the moment—that you said you would take the train with Reynolds and ride as far as Ashton, where the Midland crosses and you would get an early morning train home. Avery went to sleep at the bungalow wholly ignorant of what had happened; he was awakened in the morning with news that Reynolds had been killed by blows on the head inflicted near the big derrick where you and Reynolds—I am assuming again—had stopped to argue your grievances. Avery—shocked, dazed, not comprehending his danger and lying there in the bungalow prostrated and half-crazed by the horror of the thing—waited: waited for the prompt help he expected from the only living person who knew that he had not left the bungalow. He knew you only as a kind, helpful friend, and I dare say at first he never suspected you! It was the last thing in the world he would have attributed to you, and the possibility of it was slow to enter his anxious, perturbed mind. He had every reason for sitting tight in those first hideous hours, confident that the third man at that bungalow gathering would come forward and establish his innocence with a word. As is the way in such cases, efforts were made to fix guilt upon others; but Avery, your friend, the man you had saved once, in a fine spirit of magnanimity, waited for you to say the word that would dear him. But you never said that word, Mr. Tate. You took advantage of his silence; a silence due, we will say, to shock and horror at the catastrophe and to his reluctance to believe you guilty of so monstrous a crime or capable of allowing him, an innocent man, to suffer the penalty for it."
Tate's big eyes were bent dully upon the governor. He averted his gaze slowly and reached for a glass of water, but his hand shook so that he could not lift it, and he glared at it as though it were a hateful thing.
"I wasn't there! Why——" he began with an effort at bravado; but the words choked him and he sat swinging his head from side to side and breathing heavily.
The governor went on in the same low, even tone he had used from the beginning: