“Yes, I took them,” admitted Barclay.
“Curse you for a meddlesome fool!” exclaimed Norcross, and his eyes were venomous. “I knew your history, and did everything to manufacture evidence against you; but you crossed me at every turn.”
“Why didn’t you speak of this sooner, Julian?” asked Ogden, breaking his long silence.
“Because I believed until after the inquest that James Patterson had been accidently killed by the discharge of one of Ogden’s cartridges,” answered Barclay. “That I took from him a miniature which I considered mine, and a torn half of my own photograph, I believed no one’s business but mine, and held my tongue about them. It never dawned on me that Patterson was killed on account of the miniature,” he paused and added wearily, “I wanted to help in investigating Tilghman’s death, but handicapped by my past, I dared not do so openly. You see, I had lost money heavily to Tilghman the night before the murder; I had loaned him my flask, and the poison had been administered in brandy; and I had no alibi—these, I knew, would prove damning facts against a man who had already been tried for murder.”
“And acquitted,” added Ethel. Barclay brightened at sound of her clear confident voice.
“I did go to see Dr. McLane,” he went on, “to tell him what little I knew of Tilghman’s death and my suspicions, and McLane——”
“Recognized you almost at once,” said the surgeon quietly. “There were not so many honor men in the senior class at Johns Hopkins University that I should not have recollected you, Barclay, even if I was only a freshman when you were there. And your trial absorbed my attention. Also,” he spoke with growing earnestness, “I have always regretted that you did not pursue your profession, for which as a student, you showed so brilliant an aptitude.”
“I owe you a great deal, McLane,” Barclay’s tone was husky. “Some day, perhaps—” he broke off abruptly.
Norcross smiled scornfully. “People do not desire a physician with sleep-walking propensities,” he sneered brutally. “I am hardly surprised you became a wanderer in other lands. And you”—swinging on the Japanese—“for you there will be no land of refuge—the Japanese never pardon a traitor.”
The man addressed laughed softly. “My Japanese is but skin deep and removable,” he said, rubbing off some of his make-up. “My somewhat Oriental cast of features enabled me to take this disguise on numerous occasions, as the United States Secret Service, to which I belong, believes in fighting the devil with fire.”