“—ton’s Body——”
Storm caught his breath, and for a moment the page wavered and blurred before his eyes. Could it mean Horton’s body? Had it been discovered? He craned his neck, leaning as far forward and to one side as he dared; but by a perverse fate the older man moved also, his shoulder effectually concealing the rest of the message.
Storm cursed him softly beneath his breath, still maneuvering desperately to read the lines so tantalizingly withheld from him. Confound the old dotard! If he would shift that paper only a bit to one side, hold it a matter of a few inches higher, the whole article could be read, for he sat so near that even the small type would be plainly legible to Storm’s sharp eyes.
While he writhed impotently the unconscious reader turned the page, and in the flirt of the paper Storm caught a fleeting glimpse of the last word on the headline. It looked like “Found,” but he dared not trust the evidence of that swift glance. He felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to stride across to the other man and tear the paper from his hands; but the reader must have lost the thread of the article in which he was engrossed, for even as Storm struggled with his maddened impatience he turned back, raising the paper so that the whole upper part was in plain view.
“Horton’s Body Found.”
His instinct had been right, after all! Storm’s heart hammered in his chest, and for a second time his vision blurred, only to clear the next instant; and he read without effort through to the end of the brief news item. It told only what he of all men already knew, what he had wished the world to learn.
The older man folded his paper, yawned, and departed, and Storm called for his check and strolled out of the hotel with a serenely detached air; but although the night was warm he shivered as if a sudden chill had swept over him. That phase of the investigation was over; now the search would begin in earnest for the black bag.
Suddenly he recalled Millard’s conviction about the telephone message which Chief Nairn had received in their presence and the added reservation in the latter’s manner when he bade them good-bye. Millard must have been right; that message was a report of the finding of the body!
As he journeyed homeward he felt a sense of relief that the suspense was over. Horton was no longer lying out there—but what did Horton matter? He was dead and that was an end of it. How easily his skull had caved in beneath the force of that single blow! How easily the whole thing had been accomplished!
But was the money really safe in his apartment now that the search would narrow down to the bag and its contents? Would it not be wiser if he were to hire a safe-deposit box somewhere under an assumed name——? But even as the thought came he negatived it. Wise or not, he realized that he could not know a moment’s rest with the money for which he had risked so much out of his immediate possession. He would wait until the bag was discovered and the news of it had been forgotten and then slip unostentatiously away. This might come at any day; he must be prepared.