“Why, you see, the mischief must have lain between that beetle-powder and Crew’s pills. As Crew is so careful a man, I don’t think it could have been the pills; and that’s the truth.”
“But how could the beetle-powder have got anigh the children out of my pocket, sir?” she asked, her eyes wild. “I never put my hand into my pocket while I sat there; I never did.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” returned Duffham. “We may put our hands into our pockets fifty times a day without remembering it.”
“D’you suppose, sir, I should take out some o’ that there beetle-powder and cram it down the poor innocents’ throats?” she demanded, on the verge of further screaming.
“Where is the powder?” questioned Duffham.
The powder was where it had been all along: in the gown-pocket. Want of opportunity, through fear of Dovey’s eyes, or dread of touching the stuff, had kept her from meddling with it. When she took the gown off, the night of the inquest, she hung it up on the accustomed hook, and there it was still. The old mother went to the bedroom and brought it forward, handling it gingerly: a very smart print gown with bright flowers upon it.
Duffham looked round, saw a tin pie-dish, and turned the pocket inside out into it. A speckled sort of powder, brown and white. He plunged his fingers into it fearlessly, felt it, and smelt it. The blue paper it had been sold in lay amidst it, cracked all across. Duffham took it up.
“Poison!” read out he aloud, gazing at the large letters through his spectacles. “How came you to let it break open in your pocket, Ann Dovey?”
“I didn’t let it; it braked of itself,” she sobbed. “If you saw the black-beedles we gets here of a night, sir, you’d be fit to dance a hornpipe, you would. The floor be covered with ’em.”
“If the ceiling was covered with ’em too, I wouldn’t have that there dangerous stuff brought into the place—and so I’ve telled ye often,” roared Dovey.