"More than that. Do you remember the story that the Samovar printed about Mr. Clyde?"
"Well, rather!"
"It brought to my mind a story that Barker once told me. When I was a fresh kid from the country and he was teaching me the ways of the world and of the race-track, he told me that he had once stabbed a man in a Texas hotel for cheating at cards. He said that he and three other men were playing in the room of one of them, and that was the one that was killed. He told me that another man was arrested, tried and convicted, while he sat in the court room and watched the proceedings."
"What a monster!"
"He told the story merely to point out that every man had to take his chances,--good luck or bad,--just as it came. He was a great believer in luck. It was his luck to escape and the other man's luck to be convicted by mistake. But he said that the man escaped and was not hung. The Clyde story was so much like Barker's story that I wondered whether it might not be the same, and I went to Garney to ask if he knew whether Barker was the man who killed Henley. He would not admit knowing anything, but he let slip a word in his first anger that he could not take back. It was Barker."
"The villain! And he claimed to be merely a spectator in the court room, and that that was how he came to recognize Clyde! He probably studied his face pretty carefully during the days when he was watching Clyde in the dock where he knew he should have been himself! I don't wonder he recognized him. What a man!"
"I wonder if we can prove it," exclaimed Fellows.
"We have just discovered an old letter which will completely establish an alibi for Clyde,--I'll tell you the details later. But whether we can get your story before the court or not, it is undoubtedly the inner truth of the matter and it rounds out the story of Barker's villainy very completely. And he met the treachery he dealt out to others. He was slain by the hand of the false friend he trusted and whom he probably had never wronged."
"But if Garney killed him, what about Benbow?"
"I am going to see him now, and see if I can find out what it is that he is concealing. I'm glad I don't have to swear out a warrant against you, Fellows!"