The roadster started again. "Yes, that's the name. Did you know him?"
"No. But wait a minute, please." The goggle-eyed man hurried back to his own car and returned with a handsome spray of white chrysanthemums. They were tied with a broad white ribbon bordered with heliotrope. "I'd like to have you take these if you will." He handed them up to the hearse-driver.
The man in the roadster fired another question. "Your name, please?"
"They are not from me. One of the ladies in the neighborhood sent them. She felt it was too sad—having him go away this way, all alone." He went back to his machine and was soon lost in the distance. And the funeral procession proceeded on its way to Mont-Mer.
The coroner's inquest was brief and perfunctory. Annisen was on the eve of retiring from office and seeking a more lucrative position in a Middle Western city where the inhabitants, as he contemptuously remarked, "were not afflicted like this place is with a chronic sleeping-sickness."
The jury returned the verdict that "the deceased came to his death by shooting himself in the head." After they had departed, Gifford held brief parley with the chief witness. "I suppose you'll attend to notifying the family?"
Richard Glover nodded. And at his direction the haggard body was removed from the cheap black coffin in which it had made the trip from Rest Hollow. Following Richard Glover's instructions, it was embalmed for the trip across the continent. But just as it was ready for the long journey, he announced to Gifford that he had received orders from the family to inter the body in the little cemetery of Mont-Mer. And so, on the following day, it was taken to the quiet resting-place overlooking the sea. In the presence of no one except the undertaker's assistants and Richard Glover there was lowered into the lonely grave a handsome gray casket with silver handles and a frosted silver plate on which was inscribed the name "Roger Kenwick."
CHAPTER VIII
The editor of the "San Francisco Clarion" tilted his chair far back and look quizzically at the young man sitting beside his desk. "Sure I remember you," he remarked. "Did some Sunday work for us some time ago, didn't you?"