Kent’s mouth puckered. He took a deep breath of musical inspiration—and exhaled it in painful noiselessness, flattening himself amid the greenery, as he saw a man emerge from the rear of Hedgerow House. The man was Gansett Jim. He carried a pick and a spade and walked slowly. Presently he disappeared in the willow-shaded place of mounds. The sound of his toil came, muffled, to the ears of the hidden man.
Cautiously Kent worked his way, now in the stream, now through the heavy growth on the banks, until he gained the roadway. Once there he went forward to the front gate of Hedgerow House. The bricked sidewalk runs, thence, straight and true to the rose-bowered square porch which is the mansion’s main entry. Kent paused for the merest moment. His gaze rested on the heavy black door. Heavier and blacker against the woodwork a pendant waved languidly in the faint breeze.
To the normal human being, the grisly insignium of death over a portal is provocative of anything rather than mirth. But Chester Kent, viewing the crape on Hedgerow House, laughed as he turned to the open road.
[CHAPTER XIII—LOOSE ENDS]
Meditation furrowed the brow of Lawyer Adam Bain. Customarily an easy-minded participant in the placid affairs of his community, he had been shaken out of his rut by the case in which Kent had enlisted him, and in which he had, thus far, found opportunity for little more than thought.
“Nobody vs. Sedgwick,” grumbled he. “Public opinion vs. Sedgwick,” he amended. “How’s a self-respecting lawyer going to earn a fee out of that? And Len Schlager standing over the grave of the corpus delicti with a warrant against searching, so to speak, in his hand. For that matter, this Professor Kent worries me more than the sheriff.”
A sharp humming rose in the air, and brought the idle counselor to his window, whence he beheld the prime author of his bewilderment descending from a car. A minute later the two men were sitting with their feet on one desk, a fairly good sign of mutual respect and confidence.
“Blair?” said Lawyer Bain. “No, I don’t know him, not even to see. Took Hogg’s Haven, didn’t he?”
“Then he doesn’t use this post-office?”
“No. Might use any one of half a dozen. See here.” He drew a county map from a shelf. “Here’s the place. Seven railroad stations on three different roads, within ten miles of it. Annalaka would be way out of his reach.”