George shook his head slowly.
“I don’t know. He must be right about the numbered bills. I thought of that myself and wondered why the papers didn’t make a point of it. The men, too, on the Drive; I would like to have a talk with that policeman.”
“Are you going to turn detective, too?” Storm’s laugh grated unpleasantly on his own ears.
“No, but I believe if the authorities followed that lead they would be on their way to the truth,” George responded gravely. “I can’t help feeling that I’m right about poor old Jack. He would never have taken his hand off his number if he had not been absolutely sure of his company.”
“It seems to me that you are a little over-confident of the character of a man you haven’t seen in twenty years!” Storm sneered, his equanimity partially restored. It was evident that George suspected nothing. “How do you know what he might have done, what impulses may have guided him?”
“A man’s whole nature doesn’t change, even in a generation,” the other observed. “I studied him at college as I did the rest of the crowd, and subsequent events have proved that my judgment in any of them wasn’t far wrong. Moreover, the testimony of this Saulsbury girl, of his employers and everyone who was associated with him in these later years bears out my estimate of him. Jack was done in at a single blow by someone he knew and trusted, and I say it is a damned shame and outrage!”
“Well, don’t get excited about it,” his host advised coolly. “It won’t help the poor chap now, you know. I take more stock myself in that story of the motor car on the Drive than the possibility of one of the two pedestrians having been Jack.”
“The fact that the bag was found at the terminal, of which you reminded me, would have no more bearing on the theory that his body was brought there than that he had walked to the spot where he was murdered,” George contended tenaciously. “Odd about those papers which were stuffed into the bag, wasn’t it? About the outside sheets being missing, I mean. They were for the twenty-eighth, thirtieth and thirty-first of May, and the first, third and fourth of June, he said; didn’t he? I wish I had thought to ask him what newspapers they were. It presents a rather nice little problem.”
Storm’s breath fluttered in his throat, but he contrived to reply with an assumption of carelessness.
“Oh, that’s nothing! Newspapers cannot be traced. That was just a mere detail.”