“Margaret,” said the Judge that evening at supper, as I was waiting on him, “you must not be talking of this murder with any one. Remember that you are employed in my home. Furthermore, I have old-fashioned notions, and so, from now on, I have stopped the ‘Morning Chronicle’ from coming to the house and I don’t want any newspapers brought in until the trial is over.”
“And when will that be?” I asked.
“Soon, I hope,” he answered. “The district attorney, I understand, has conferred with the police again this afternoon, and believes he has enough evidence to hang Chalmers and that no more can be gathered. For some reason the defense is equally satisfied. Do you understand now?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “There won’t be much delay.”
“Not much delay,” he repeated over after me, and his voice shook as I never heard it shake before that minute.
“The beast!” I said.
“Hush,” said he. “He must be found guilty first. But if he is—”
He stopped there, but I saw the light in his eyes and his long, tight-clenched fingers turning white under the pressure, and I knew, if he passed sentence on John Chalmers, what it would be.
That was the last word I ever heard from him before the trial was over, and I had to be running over to the neighbors for all the news I got. A reporter came to ask me one day if I had seen a strange man loafing in the meadows the evening the thing happened. He was a red-haired, freckled young man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he had been the one who had discovered that two weeks before the murder the man had insured his wife’s life in his own favor and that before he had met and married her he had had a different name,—Mortimer Cross,—and been a runner for a hotel in Bermuda, and lost the place because, in a fit of anger, he had tried to knife a porter.
“The police haven’t half covered this case,” he said, with his green eyes snapping. “I’ve got more evidence for my paper than they can get for the State’s case. I haven’t slept four hours in forty-eight.”