"Now come on," he said. "We must have this over as soon as possible and then I'll take you to Sweetzer's and you are to pick out the biggest box of chocolates he can fill while we have time to wait. We'll go down Sherman Street first. Oh, Kittie, Kittie, what a dance you have been leading me for the last two weeks! I have been suspecting everybody but you. Now show me where the man stood."
"There," she said, pointing to the exact spot where Fullerton's body had been found.
"That, I think, settles everything," said Lyon, cheerfully. "You see, the law is particular, so I had to know exactly. It will be worth a month's salary to see old Howell's face when he hears your story."
He thought he had really placed the estimate too low when he sat watching that amazed gentleman listening to Kittie a few minutes later. That witch, whose terrors of the rigors of the law had been somewhat softened by Percy's manner of receiving her story, rose to the dramatic occasion and told her tale with a vividness and color that held Howell absorbed from the beginning. He let her tell the whole without interruption, and when it was over he turned to Lyon, drawing him aside so that Kittie should not hear.
"Perhaps you don't remember, but for several weeks before the murder there were stories of a man who lurked about that district, frightening women and eluding the police. There have been no such reports since Fullerton was killed. That explains the turned overcoat worn inside-out for a disguise, and the black silk muffler you found in the street. A quick change and the respectable, black-coated Fullerton had replaced the skulking vagrant in gray that the police might be inquiring for. I am not a pious man, but it strikes me as more than accident that the hand of an innocent girl should be the instrument, under Providence, to send him to his account. However, that is speculation. Thank heaven I have some facts to deal with, at last."
"And I've found the explanation of the cane business," said Lyon. "You can add that to your small but choice assortment of facts."
And he related his encounter with Mr. Wolcott, and the significant facts that had been evolved from that gentle old peace-maker of canine quarrels.
Howell rubbed his glasses, and put them on to look at Lyon, and then took them off to rub them again.
"Well!" he remarked. "Well, well!" It seemed inadequate, but it was the best he could do with Kittie present.
Then he called in a stenographer, and asked Kittie a number of questions slowly, and the stenographer wrote them down, and also, to Kittie's dismay, wrote her answers. This process seemed to her so uncanny that she could not keep her eyes from the point of the rapid pencil, and even when Mr. Howell bade her look at him and not at the stenographer, she could hardly keep herself from turning nervously to see if that thing was still going. Then she had to wait until it was all written out on the typewriter, and then Mr. Howell read it all over to her and asked her to sign it. It was all very exciting and interesting, and Kittie made good use of it as material for tales afterwards. But when it was over, and the box of chocolates had been duly selected and sampled, Kittie suddenly felt that she had been living up to the character of a reasonable being long enough, and when Lyon suggested that he would go back with her to the school and tell Miss Elliott what they had been doing, Kittie calmly announced that she was never going back there. Never.