He stopped and glanced uneasily at Alison.
“Go on,” she said coldly. “It is too late to shield me. The time to have done that was when I was your guest.”
“Well,” he went on, his eyes turned carefully away from my face, which must have presented certainly anything but a pleasant sight. “Miss West was going to do me the honor to marry me, and—”
“You scoundrel!” I burst forth, thrusting past Alison West’s chair. “You—you infernal cur!”
One of the detectives got up and stood between us. “You must remember, Mr. Blakeley, that you are forcing this story from this man. These details are unpleasant, but important. You were going to marry this young lady,” he said, turning to Sullivan, “although you already had a wife living?”
“It was my sister’s plan, and I was in a bad way for money. If I could marry, secretly, a wealthy girl and go to Europe, it was unlikely that Ida—that is, Mrs. Sullivan—would hear of it.
“So it was more than a shock to see my wife on the train, and to realize from her face that she knew what was going on. I don’t know yet, unless some of the servants—well, never mind that.
“It meant that the whole thing had gone up. Old Harrington had carried a gun for me for years, and the same train wouldn’t hold both of us. Of course, I thought that he was in the coach just behind ours.”
Hotchkiss was leaning forward now, his eyes narrowed, his thin lips drawn to a line.
“Are you left-handed, Mr. Sullivan?” he asked.