“I’ll add a thousand to Mr. Goddard’s! Work as you never did before!—Inspector, can such a fearful thing have occurred? It is incredible! How could the little chap have fallen down to the cellar without being seen? I suppose any outcry he might have made would have been drowned by the noise of the coal itself but—oh, it is too utterly horrible!”
His shocked, broken tones trailed away into silence and then from below there ascended through the open chute the ring of shovels and the clatter of coal falling rhythmically into the baskets. A tortured groan was forced from Goddard’s lips. Max crouched with his forepaws hanging over the edge of the aperture and his nose low between them, the hair rising in a ridge along his back and a soft, anxious whine pulsing from his throat.
Dennis turned away with a shiver, and saw that Gardner Sloane had joined his son on the fringe of the group. Snape and the maids of Mrs. Bellamy’s staff were gathered in a little knot just behind, with the Parsons’ chauffeur, Danny Sayre the page boy, and the aged butler of the Sloanes, while Benjamin Parsons himself had emerged upon the steps of his home and the lower windows of the Goddard house were thronged with the servants. From a window just above Orbit’s conservatory the staring face of little Fu Moy looked down in shrinking wonder.
The rhythmic, dreadful scrape and rumble from beneath their feet went on as though it would never end. Goddard swayed weakly but Trafford flung an arm about his shoulders. The inspector had replied to Orbit with noncommittal gravity and now they conversed together in an aside, while Dennis edged over to McCarty.
“Why ever didn’t you tell me?” he whispered. “No wonder you said ’twas fair sickening to think of, Mac! If the poor boy’s found down there ’twill be one crime that’s no crime at all! How did you know?”
“I don’t know!” McCarty responded candidly. “’Tis the only guess, though, that will cover the facts as they come to me, but Max needed none; I’m banking on the dog’s instinct, Denny.”
“Look at the back of him! It makes my own hair lift the hat from my head to see it!” Dennis shivered again. “Will they never have done with the shoveling? I could scream like a woman!”
Some of the Bellamy servants had indeed begun to sob hysterically but they quieted at a look from McCarty. Parsons was slowly crossing the street and his chauffeur stepped aside for him. Dennis saw that several older men from the detective bureau were circulating unobtrusively among the different groups and two of the officials who had come in the car with the inspector approached him now. He presented them to Orbit and the interrupted consultation was resumed now between the four.
Dennis surreptitiously took out his watch, an ancient affair of the turnip variety. The men had been at work for nearly forty minutes; he recalled the blowing of the one o’clock whistles when Martin came to relieve him at the east gate. In a little while, now, they would know the worst! If only the dog would stop whining!
He looked at Trafford and the young man met his glance with a stare of agonized inquiry but the man he was supporting reeled and he braced himself for a firmer hold. Then Benjamin Parsons stepped quietly to Goddard’s other side.