The sound of voices from a room off one side of the hall now reached the detective’s ears, and in an affair of this kind Sheridan Keene did not stand upon ceremony. He at once approached the room, the door of which stood partly open.
It was a large, square bedroom, with two windows. A broad fireplace was at one end, but the half-burned logs were cold and dead, and the air was very chilly. A bed occupied the opposite end of the room, and there, upon its bloodstained linen, stiff and cold in death, lay the figure of a thin-faced, gray-haired old man, whose face in death, even, still carried an expression of that severity and hardness which had marked all the latter years of his life.
Three men were standing near the bed, and one, evidently a physician, was examining the body.
“The man has been dead many hours, not less than twelve, I should say,” he observed, as Sheridan Keene stepped softly into the room. “It is a shocking crime!”
“Can anything be done?” asked a tall, broad-shouldered young man at his elbow.
The physician shook his head.
“Not for him,” he replied. “You had better do nothing here, Mr. Thorpe, until after the arrival of the coroner.”
Sheridan Keene looked the latter over. He was a well-built man of twenty-five, this nephew of the deceased. He had a frank and rather attractive face, with dark eyes and hair, and was the style of a man most women would have fancied, despite Mabel Moore’s evident aversion to marrying him. His features were pale now, and his manner gravely composed.
“I have already sent for the coroner, doctor,” he replied.
“Let everything remain as it is, then, until he comes.”