After vainly waiting for some remark in response, McCarty asked:
“You were all in to-night? Did any one leave this house since afternoon except Hughes?”
“No one.”
There was a suggestion of finality in the oddly chanting tones now and the discomfited questioner shrugged and rejoined the inspector and Dennis who were waiting on the sidewalk before the many-turreted house next door. All the lights had been extinguished except one on the top floor which gleamed down upon them like a single wakeful eye.
“What were you getting out of that Chink?” Dennis demanded as they started toward the eastern gate where the watchman waited.
“Not a living thing that I wanted except a list of the other servants of the household and word that none of them but Hughes had left the doors this night,” McCarty responded disgustedly. “What he got out of me was my goat! I sprung it on him quick that Hughes had croaked and he never turned a hair nor uttered a word but just waited politely for me to go along about my business!”
“It is conceivable that Orbit told him when he went to bring his guests,” the inspector observed dryly.
“Did he strike you as being the sort that would stop then to talk to one of the servants? He didn’t me,” McCarty averred. “He may tell this Ching Lee, as he called him, after his three neighbors go, but it’ll be only so that he can break the news to the others before the morning papers come out. Twenty-two years this Hughes has been with him and Orbit knew no more about his affairs than the day he hired him! ’Tis unnatural that never once in all that time did they talk together as man to man and yet I don’t think Orbit lied, at that. Look at the way he treated us! He was polite and friendly enough and never once could you have laid your finger on a word or a look from him that was haughty or arrogant like the most of them act over here when the police get snooping around, and yet didn’t you kind of feel as though you were talking to a Royal Duke at the least? It’s the grand manner of him, that he don’t even know he’s got.”
“A fine gentleman, Mr. Orbit,” Dennis agreed. “We’ve found out nothing, though, about what Hughes was doing down in Mike Taggart’s precinct nor why he ran like that till he dropped, and likely we’ll not find it here between these two gates.”
“There’s something more than that on your mind, Mac!” the inspector declared shrewdly. “You’d never have insisted on questioning Orbit’s friends if you hadn’t some idea of what caused Hughes’ seizure, and that it led back here! What did you see before he died that you’re keeping to yourself?”