I found myself staring blankly at him; but, as often happens in moments of shock, I did not at first feel the full force of what he said. I interrupted him.
"I say—I hope you haven't been talking too much about that?" (I knew his weaknesses, and a perfectly open candor was one of the gravest of them.)
But "Lord, no!" he instantly reassured me. "Talking about it? Do you think I'm a——" the initials he used were those of the words "blind fiddler."
"I'm glad of that," I murmured.
And then it was that the full weight of what he had said began to sink into my mind.
"Then why did he shoot him?" I asked presently, when I was a little more master of myself. This conversation, I ought to have said, took place on the top of a bus going eastward down Piccadilly. I was on my way to the office, and I had found Monty with a finished drawing which he also was taking to Fleet Street. He looked away over the Green Park.
"Well, I'm not perfectly sure I'm right, of course," he replied, turning to me again. "In fact, I might be miles out—right off the map. But I did see him on the roof that morning, you know, and I've been trying to piece it all together again, and I must say it fits in pretty well."
"What fits in, and with what?"
He dropped his voice. "Well, you see, this fellow Smith waved his hand the way I told you—like this——" On the bus top he made that same aimless and wavering movement of his hand that I had seen him make in Esdaile's studio, that I had seen Mr. Harry Westbury make in the Chelsea public-house. "I think now he wanted the pistol back again, but of course I didn't give it him."
"What did he want it for?"