"However, none of the latter saw the Japanese. Okiu, as I think I have said before, is a clever man. He saw that something was ripe, or considered to be so by the Poles, and so he clung to them secretly after they had reached the capital. And within an hour he had learned that Miss Corbin was at the Tillinghast! The observation of all this was a deft piece of observation upon the part of Culberson's fellows. They are much more deserving than I ever gave them credit for."
There was quiet a long period in which nothing more passed between the two men. Indeed the train was slowing up to stop when Fuller asked:
"You have given up all thought of the girl or Warwick having had any hand in the death of Dr. Morse?"
"I never had any such thought," said Ashton-Kirk. "To be sure," smilingly, "they puzzled me more than a little from time to time. The girl's fear of the police, from the very first, was a thing that interested me. But that may be safely attributed to a natural uncertainty. There was bad blood between her lover and her uncle; perhaps the former in a fit of rage had killed the latter. She feared this possibility, and in consequence dreaded the police."
"And the shoes with the caked soil upon the soles?"
"As I remarked at the time you discovered them, our own shoes were in like condition."
"Okiu is a resourceful, secretive man," said Fuller. "And, being so, why did he tell Miss Corbin of the paper? Her knowledge of its existence could not benefit him in any way, and her possible discovery of it could only have hurt him."
Ashton-Kirk laughed.
"By telling her what he did, he gained a valued aide. He had planted an unwearying searcher in the house which he could in no other way enter. If the girl found the paper, so he figured, she would at once acquaint him with the fact. And I have no doubt but that this is the very thing that would have happened had not Warwick arrived with his newly created suspicions of the Japanese."