This was the most extraordinary, unheard-of coincidence in all the world! But even as his slow-moving mind strove to grasp it, the conviction came that it could not be a coincidence! One newspaper, maybe, or two, but not six and only six with the inner sheets gone; the same six whose outer pages were missing from those in Horton’s bag!
As the monstrous, almost unbelievable fact was borne in upon him, George started back from the table, both hands clutching at the meager hair on his temples. He must be going mad! His mind, usually slow and groping, raced back over the events of the past few days, seizing upon events scarcely considered then but now standing out in awful confirmation.
On Wednesday afternoon at the club Colonel Walker had told of meeting Storm near the Grand Central Station on Wednesday of the previous week around dinner time; the day and hour at which the train Horton took from Poughkeepsie arrived! Storm had tried to deny it, but when Walker added that it was raining as additional proof of the day, Storm hurriedly admitted an errand to his tobacconist’s. Why had he denied it at first?
Then, too, when George arrived at the club he heard Griffiths commiserating with Storm over having been swindled by Du Chainat, and Storm indignantly denying that, too. He remembered the conversation later at dinner in the grill-room, when he had taxed Storm with concealing his acquaintance with the swindler from him. Storm said that he had not told him of it because he was ashamed to admit that Du Chainat had almost duped him. Almost? Had Storm not been fleeced, he would not have concealed his acquaintance with the swindler! His egotism would have made him boast of his escape at the moment of the furore over the Du Chainat exposure!
Griffiths had said that Storm was down in the swindler’s list for sixty thousand; that would have meant every cent and more than George knew Storm possessed in the world! From whence, if he had indeed lost that, had come the money for this long foreign trip so suddenly decided upon without apparent reason?
George recalled his own theory of Horton’s death: that he had met someone he knew well and trusted absolutely, and placing himself utterly in the supposed friend’s hands, had been done to death without warning.
It could not have been Norman Storm! Not that old friend of twenty years, sleeping so peacefully upstairs! George tried to thrust the thought from him in an agony of unspeakable horror, but it remained and would not be exorcised.
Suppose by sheer accident or stroke of fate Horton and Storm had met near the station and the latter had taken Horton to his rooms? His rooms, which were so near the place on the Drive where the body was afterward found! Suppose Horton had told of the huge amount in cash that he carried, exhibited it, perhaps, and the sight proved too great a temptation for Storm, already half-crazed with the loss of the last of his fortune?
George could not conceive of the man he had loved as a brother deliberately planning a cold-blooded murder, but every known fact fitted in with this hideous supposition. Storm could not have killed Horton in his own rooms and conveyed the body to the place where it was found, but if he could have induced Horton to accompany him there on some pretext——
Then the testimony of the policeman whom he himself had met and questioned on Wednesday evening recurred to George’s mind, and he commenced to pace the floor in short, nervous steps as though to get away from the fearful thought that hounded him.