“I learned of a little device that looks like a tiny currycomb and is so flat and small you can bind it on a man’s arm just over an artery. Just press on the spring and give the least scratch, and the man falls down in convulsions. I showed him a rat I had had fetched me, and killed it like a flash. He had his choice of walking out quietly with me—I had my hand on his arm—or dropping down dead. He went quietly enough.”
“That was the meaning of his look at me, was it?” Winter thought. He said only: “Did Endicott Tracy know about that?”
“Of course not,” Mercer denied. “Do you reckon I want to mix the boy up in this more than I have? And Arnold only knew I was trying some kind of bluff game.”
“I will lay odds, though,” the colonel ventured in his gentlest tone, “that Mr. Samurai, as Haley calls him, knew more. But when did you get rid of Atkins?”
“Mr. Keatcham discharged him at Denver. I met Mr. Keatcham here; it was arranged on the train. We had it planned out. If that plan had failed I had another.”
“Neat. Very neat. And then you became the secretary?”
Mercer flushed in an unexpected fashion. “Certainly not!” he said with emphasis. “Do you think I would take his wages and not do the work faithfully? No, suh. I assumed to be his secretary in the office; that gave me a chance to arrange everything. But I did it to oblige him. I never touched a cent of his money. I paid, in fact, for our board out of our own money. It would have burned my fingers, suh!”
“And the valet? Was he in your plot? Don’t answer if you—”
“He was not, suh,” replied Cary Mercer. “He is a right worthy fellow, and he thought, after he had seen to the tickets—which he did very carefully—and given them to me, he could go off on the little vacation which came to him by his master through me.”
“That’s a little bit evasive. However, I haven’t the right to ask you to give away your partners, anyhow.” He was peering at Mercer’s face behind his glasses, but the pallid, tired features returned him no clue to the thoughts in the head above them. “What have you done with Mr. Keatcham?” he concluded suddenly.