“Now, don’t let it get on your nerves,” he soothed—of course it is necessary to take a girl’s hand to soothe her when she is frightened. But Miss Smith calmly released her hand, only reddening a little; and she laughed. “Where—where were we at?” she asked in her unconscious Southern phraseology.
“Somewhere around Atkins, I think,” said the colonel; he laughed in his turn,—he found it easy to laugh, now that he knew how she felt toward Atkins. “You see, after I talked with Keatcham I couldn’t make anything but Atkins out of the whole business. But there were those stained cuffs and his changing his clothes—”
“Yes,” said she.
“How explain? There was only one explanation: that was, that perhaps Mercer had discovered Keatcham before we did, unconsciously spotted his cuffs, been alarmed by our approach and hidden, lest it should be the murderers returning. He might have wanted a chance to draw his revolver. Say he did that way, he might foolishly pretend to enter for the first time. If he made that mistake and then discovered the condition of his cuffs and the spots on his knee, what would be his natural first impulse? Why, to change them, trusting that they hadn’t been noticed. Maybe, then, he would wash them out—”
“No,” murmured Miss Smith meekly, with a little twinkle of her eye; “I did that; he hid them. How ridiculous of me to get in such a fright! But you know how Cary hated Mr. Keatcham; and you—no, you don’t know the lengths that such a temperament as his will go. I did another silly thing: I found a dagger, one of those Moorish stilettoes that hang in the library; it was lying in the doorway. When no one was looking I hid it and carried it off. I stuck it in one of the flower-beds; I stuck it in the ferns; I have stuck that wretched thing all over this yard. I didn’t dare carry it back and put it in the empty place with the others because some one might have noticed the place. And I didn’t dare say anything to Cary; I was right miserable.”
“So was I,” said the colonel, “thinking you were trying to protect the murderer. But do you know what I had sense to do?”
“Go to Mrs. Winter? Oh, I wanted to!”
“Exactly; and do you know what that dead game sport said to me? She said she found those washed and ironed cuffs and the trousers neatly cleaned with milka—what’s milka?—and the milka cleaned the spots so much cleaner than the rest that she had her own suspicions started. But says she, ‘Not being a plumb idiot, I went straight to Cary and he told me the whole story—’”
“Which was like your story?”
“Very near. And you see it would be like Atkins to leave incriminating testimony round loose. That is, incriminating testimony against Mercer and Tracy. The dagger, Tracy remembers, was not in the library; it was in the patio. Right to hand. Atkins must have got in and found Mr. Keatcham on the floor in a faint. Whether he meant to make a bargain with him or to kill him, perhaps we shall never know; but when he saw him helpless before him he believed his chance was come to kill him and get the cipher key, removing his enemy and making his fortune at a blow, as the French say. Voilà tout!”