Allen had just poked away the first of two successively thrown balls in a sweet-running dribble, and sliced off the other in a sharp-angling "belly cross," when he raised his eyes and caught sight of the doctor and me coming down the steps. Swinging a bit uncertainly out of the saddle, he came toddling in a swaying childlike trot across the grass. His grip was firmer than I had expected, and the thought flashed through my mind that this was the very first time I had ever shaken hands with him.
"I've been wondering when you were going to turn up, Whitney," he exclaimed eagerly. "There's something I've been waiting to talk to you about." He spoke in generalities while the doctor lingered, saying that he had given up his old idea of returning to the Islands, and that, instead, he was hoping to get away before long to a back-blocks station he owned and ride the boundaries for a year or two. But when the specialist, evidently assured that his experiment was getting under way properly, quietly excused himself, Allen led me over to the wooden horse and launched at once into a subject which had doubtless occupied his mind for many days. From ancient habit he leaned, as he spoke, now on the hollow pigskin of his "pony," now on the flexible Malacca handle of his polo mallet.
"You're the only man in the world I can talk to about this now, Whitney," he said with a queer new quaver of weakness in his voice. "I suppose that's because you're the only person I ever talked to about it—before. I take it, Whitney, that you had no great difficulty in making up your mind as to who was responsible for—for my night of contemplation on the Cora?"
"Well," I began evasively, "I had such grave doubts about Ranga's guilt that I went to some little trouble to get him away. Mostly old 'Choppy' Tancred's work, though."
"Good old 'Choppy'!" said Allen with an appreciative grin; "on hand at the right time as usual." Then, with serious interest: "But the girl—how did she manage to get clear?"
"Just turned up and helped herself to a place in the launch I was sending Ranga off in," I replied, a bit worried at my failure to lead the conversation away from subjects "calculated to excite Sir Hartley nervously."
"And you were also convinced of her innocence, I suppose," he said, eyeing me with a strange smile across the leather-bound handle of his mallet.
"On the contrary," I answered; "I knew that she was guilty. I had taken your throwing-knife away from her the same night. I knew that Ranga was quite innocent, even though the police, through a silly ball-up, tracked him down with their dogs."
"Then why did you let the girl go?" he pressed.
"Because I thought I knew Rona well enough," I replied evenly, "to feel sure that she wouldn't have done—what she did, unless she was convinced in her own mind that she had a good reason for it." It was a stiff jolt for a sick man, that; yet, for the life of me, I couldn't have made an evasive answer.