A DEARTH OF CLEWS
Garrison's ride on the train was a matter of several hours' duration. Not only did he read every line of the story in the Star, which he felt convinced had been furnished by young Robinson, but he likewise had time to reflect on all the phases, old and new, of the case in which he was involved.
But wander where they would, his thoughts invariably swung around the troubled circle to Dorothy and the topic was she married or not, and if she was,—where was the man?
He could not reach a decision.
Heretofore he had reasoned there could be no genuine Fairfax; to-night he entertained many doubts of his former deductions. He found it possible to construe Dorothy's actions both ways. She was afraid to have him search out the man who had written her wedding certificate, perhaps because it was a fraud, or perhaps because there was a Fairfax somewhere, concerning whom something must be hidden.
The murder mystery, the business of the will, even the vengeance he promised himself he would wreak on Theodore, sank into significance in the light of his personal worry. There was only one thing worth while, and that was love.
He was rapidly approaching a frame of mind in which no sacrifice would be too great to be made, could he only be certain of winning Dorothy, heart-free, for his own.
For more than an hour he sat thinking, in the car, oblivious to the flight of time, or to the towns through which he was passing. He gave it up at last and, taking from his pocket a book he employed for memoranda, studied certain items there, supplied by Dorothy, concerning her uncle and his ways of life. There were names of his friends and his enemies among the scribbled data, together with descriptive bits concerning Hardy's personality.
Marking down additional suggestions and otherwise planning his work to be done at Rockdale, Garrison reflected there was little apparent hope of clearing young Durgin of suspicion, unless one trifling hint should supply the clew. Dorothy had stated that her Uncle John had long had some particularly bitter and malicious enemy, a man unknown to herself, from whom she believed Mr. Hardy might have been fleeing, from time to time, in the trips which had become the habit of his life.
That this constant moving from place to place had been the bane of his existence was a theory that Dorothy had formed a year before. Yet, for all she knew, it might have been young Foster Durgin whom her uncle was trying to avoid!