"I hope most heartily that I may be able to give you the opportunity. You have done me a great service as it is. For the present, I can only tell you that your information will serve the cause of justice."
Can you guess my elation? I should certainly have astonished the staid people of the prim little town if I had allowed myself to express the state of my feelings. My wild goose chase had not been so wild, after all! I had not yet bagged the game, to be sure, but I felt that I had winged it. Certainly I ought to be able to convince any jury that if Barker's former partner was in the room from which the fatal shot had been fired, the chances were strong that he had had something to do with it. And that he was there I could prove. The apple in which he had left the imprint of his curiously irregular teeth was freshly bitten; and the toothache which had driven the cautious Diavolo from his cover of silence and forced him, by stress of physical agony, to the intimate personal relation of a patient with his dentist, had identified him as the man. It only remained to find--him!
What Eugene Benbow's connection with the affair could have been was so much of a mystery that I could form no conjecture. One thing at a time. When I had unearthed Diavolo, the other things might clear themselves up. Sometimes one missing piece will make a puzzle fall into shape and everything appear coherent.
I had been away from Saintsbury on this search for over a week, and I was anxious to get back. I wanted to find out whether my advertisement for Mary Doherty had brought any answer. I wondered whether Benbow had grown more communicative. I wanted to see Jean, who must be having a time of it, living with her queer, unaffectionate guardian. I wondered whether Fellows had attended to things at the office. But I didn't think of the one thing that had actually happened. I found out what it was when the newsboys came on the train with the Saintsbury papers. The Evening Samovar had exploded. It had come out with Clyde's story.
[CHAPTER XIII]
THE SAMOVAR EXPLODES
The Saintsbury papers were thrown on our train several stations beyond the town. I bought one, of course, and unfolded it with a cheerful feeling of being near home again,--and there stared at me from the first page the glaring headlines,--
CLYDE A CRIMINAL
THE REFORM CANDIDATE FOR MAYOR
A FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE
AMAZING RECORD OF CRIME AND
CONCEALMENT DISCOVERED BY
THE SAMOVAR
I tore my way through the leaded paragraphs. The only thing that was news to me was the clue on which the Samovar had worked.