That day was torture. Three people remarked that he didn’t look well. Black blasphemy yammered in his heart as he assured them that it was a touch of indigestion, nothing more. He lived all day in deepest hell, and that night he cursed himself because he had not kept Grahame’s notebook. There would be addresses in it, to one of which he could forward the letter. Nesbit’s suspicions would follow whoever kept the letter; but Colby knew no one who would accept the mail.
Of course he knew better than to go to the stream bank and dig down for the notebook. Nesbit would have somebody watching there, night and day.
Colby’s terror was the deeper because he did not know what to do. He dared not destroy the letter, for that would confirm Nesbit’s belief. He did not dare open it, because that would be detected when Nesbit had it again. He did not dare hold it. The frenzied helplessness that he felt racked his already tortured nerves unbearably.
On the ninth morning after the murder he made his first panic-stricken move. To make Nesbit doubtful, to get rid of the letter, which he knew to be a trap, to gain time—anything!—he scribbled an address on the envelope and crossed out his own. The address was meaningless, written at random. He mailed the letter openly, so that he would be seen.
At noontime he saw Nesbit go into the post office, where he remained for a long time. Colby had a nervous chill.
He had made a mistake. He should have burned the letter, written another, and put it into a precisely similar envelope. It would not matter to whom his own letter was addressed. He should have gone to Richmond and mailed it in the central post office, at the busiest possible instant, when it could hardly be picked out for Nesbit. It would be assumed that he had remailed the trap letter to a proper address for Grahame. Nesbit’s trap would have been useless.
This story, as you see, is instructive. That is the proper thing to do with embarrassing letters—burn them.
Colby had made a mistake; and four days later his hands were shaking uncontrollably as he stared down at a little white envelope in his fingers. It was the letter addressed to Grahame. A rubber-stamped notation with a penciled correction on the envelope showed that some postal clerk had been zealous in the effort to keep a piece of mail with no return card out of the dead letter office.
The notation read, in rubber-stamped characters, “Return”—in pencil, “to previous addressee”—and in rubber-stamped letters again, “For Better Address.”