“I wish you were at the bottom of that pit,” retorted the other grimly. “You and your scoundrel of a friend with you.”
“Thank you for myself,” said Sedgwick. “If you were twenty years younger I would break every bone in your body for that.”
“Steady, Frank,” put in Kent. “Judge no man by his speech who has been through what Alexander Blair has been through to-night. Mr. Blair,” he added, “you’ve refused my offer. It is still open. And as an extra, I will undertake, for Mr. Sedgwick and myself, that this night’s affair shall be kept secret. And now, the next thing is to cover the evidence. Spades, Frank.”
The two men took up their tools.
“I’ll spell you,” said Alexander Blair.
While the sheriff, mourning softly over his fractured wrist, sat watching the house in case of alarm, the scientist, the painter, and the trust magnate, sweating amid the nameless graves, hurriedly reinterred the sack of clean sand which bore the name of Wilfrid Blair.
“And now,” said Chester Kent, petting his blistered palms, as the last shovelful of dirt was tamped down, “I’ll take you back with me, Mr. Sheriff, to Sedgwick’s place, and do the best I can for you till the morning. About six o’clock we’ll find you unconscious below the cliffs where you fell in the darkness. Eh?”
Despite his pain the sheriff grinned. “I guess that’s as good as the next lie,” he acquiesced. “You fight fair, Professor.”
“Then answer me a fair question. What were you doing at Hedgerow House to-night?”
“Why, you see,” drawled the official, “I saw you fishin’ that stream, and it come to my mind that you was castin’ around for more than trout that wasn’t there. But I didn’t hardly think you’d come so soon, and I was asleep when the noise of the spade on the coffin woke me.”