“Exactly; that is an unaccountably brilliant remark for you to make. The point is this: I have never seen the man, either. I have seen his so-called pictures, in the papers, and so have both of you, I suppose, and I have always heard the very nicest things about him that one could hear of a very rich man who is rather in society, but who keeps out of it as much as possible. I want to see him, and talk with him, and size him up, and see how he withstands this blow, before I decide just what to say to him.�
“But,â€� said Patsy, “you will have to give an excuse for going there at all, won’t you? We are not supposed yet to know anything about the murder—or suicide, whichever it will be called in the newspaper reports.â€�
“I shall go there,� replied Nick quietly, “merely as a matter of duty, to report to him what Chick has already reported at the police station up there; merely that there were tracks in the snow, showing that some persons had entered his country home.�
“It may be,� said Chick, “that he will not yet have been notified of the tragedy.�
“I think it very likely that we will find it so.�
“I don’t see——â€� began Patsy.
“It is this way,� said the detective, interrupting: “In this snow it will take us, from the time we left that police station, about an hour and a half to get to his house. Now, up there it will be at least half an hour before those local police find the body; they will use up certainly an hour in looking about them before it will occur to them to telephone to Mr. Lynne, and probably more; so it is likely that we will get to his house before he hears anything about it. That’s all. Think that over; and now let’s ride on in silence for a while.�
Nick told Danny to stop the car directly in front of the residence on Riverside Drive, and, leaving the others to wait for him—it had long since stopped snowing—he ran up the front steps and pressed the button of the electric bell.
But he had to ring again and again before a sleepy butler at last appeared at the door and demanded, in a tone that was both haughty and surly, to know what was wanted.
“I must see Mr. Lynne at once,� said Nick, who knew by the very attitude of the butler that no intelligence of the crime had yet reached that house.