"Yes. I thought Mrs. Brace might tell me who that could have been—some fellow jealous of the girl, I'll bet."
The sheriff, who was a tall, lanky man with a high, hooked nose and a pointed chin that looked like a large knuckle, had a habit of thrusting forward his upper lip to emphasize his words. He thrust it forward now, making his bristly, close-cropped red moustache stand out from his face like the quills of a porcupine.
"I'd thought of that—all that," he continued. "Looks like a simple case to me—very."
"It may be," said Hastings, sure now that Crown would not suggest their working together.
"Also," the sheriff told him, "I'll take this."
He held out the crude weapon with which, apparently, the murder had been committed. It was a dagger consisting of a sharpened nail file, about three inches long, driven into a roughly rounded piece of wood. This wooden handle was a little more than four inches in length and two inches thick. Hastings, giving it careful examination, commented:
"He shaped that handle with a pocket-knife. Then, he drove the butt-end of the nail file into it. Next, he sharpened the end of the file—put a razor edge on it.—Where did you get this, Mr. Crown?"
"A servant, one of the coloured women, picked it up as I came in. You were still in the library."
"Where was it?"
"About fifteen or twenty feet from the body. She stumbled on it, in the grass. Ugly thing, sure!"