“If ye please, sor, Misther Ogden do be axin’ for ye, Doctor,” he announced. “And he’s in the divil of a hurry.”
McLane smiled. “I’ll come at once,” he paused at the door, and Ethel, walking at his heels, stopped herself just in time from bumping into him. “Please wait, Ethel, and find out if Barclay needs any beef tea or coffee,” he said, and slipped away; the quick-witted Irish servant hastening after him, conveniently blind to Ethel’s beckoning finger.
Slowly, shyly Ethel approached the bed. “Would you care for some bouillon?” she asked. Barclay watched her with passionate, longing eyes.
“What did you say?” He raised his bandaged head. “I can’t possibly hear you at that distance,” he protested, and her heart beating with maddening rapidity, Ethel drew nearer, step by step, until she reached his side.
“Would you like something?” she asked faintly, not meeting his eyes.
“Yes—you.” Barclay looked at her pleadingly, his voice deserting him. He reached up and imprisoned her hand, and as her fingers nestled in his broad palm a ring fell out of her grasp. “My ring?” he said, catching it up in his other hand.
“Yes. I was bringing it back to you——”
“Ethel!” Barclay’s face grew ghastly, as hope and happiness died away.
“Only to ask you to explain this sketch.” Ethel was stammering badly as she held her mother’s drawing before Barclay’s eyes. “Mother saw your hand, or what we thought your hand, wearing that ring, through the Pullman car window at the Atlanta station just at the time Dwight Tilghman was poisoned—and—and——”
Barclay looked at the sketch with dawning comprehension. “Will you hand me my tobacco pouch and the small book by it,” indicating a table by the bed. Ethel quickly laid the two articles in his outstretched hand, and tearing out a cigarette paper, Barclay held it in exactly the position indicated in the sketch. “It might very well be mistaken for a paper containing a powder,” he said. “When traveling about I make my own cigarettes, but in cities I buy them already made. I recall now starting to smoke on my return to the Pullman, but awoke from my preoccupation to realize that I must not smoke in that car, so I tipped up the paper at that angle to pour the tobacco back into my pouch just at the moment your mother saw me.”