"If Mr. Lemuel Shackford," remarked Coroner Whidden, softly joining the conversation to which he had been listening in his timorous, apologetic manner, "had chanced, in the course of his early sea-faring days, to form any ties of an unhappy complexion"--
"Complexion is good," murmured Mr. Craggie. "Some Hawaiian lady!"
--"perhaps that would be a branch of the case worth investigating in connection with the homicide. A discarded wife, or a disowned son, burning with a sense of wrong"--
"Really, Mr. Whidden!" interrupted Lawyer Perkins witheringly, "it is bad enough for my client to lose his life, without having his reputation filched away from him."
"I--I will explain! I was merely supposing"--
"The law never supposes, sir!"
This threw Mr. Whidden into great mental confusion. As coroner was he not an integral part of the law, and when, in his official character, he supposed anything was not that a legal supposition? But was he in his official character now, sitting with a glass of lemonade at his elbow in the reading-room of the Stillwater hotel? Was he, or was he not, a coroner all the time? Mr. Whidden stroked an isolated tuft of hair growing low on the middle of his forehead, and glared mildly at Mr. Perkins.
"Young Shackford has gone to New York, I understand," said Mr. Ward, breaking the silence.
Mr. Perkins nodded. "Went this morning to look after the real-estate interests there. It will probably keep him a couple of weeks,--the longer the better. He was of no use here. Lemuel's death was a great shock to him, or rather the manner of it was."
"That shocked every one. They were first cousin's weren't they?" Mr. Ward was a comparatively new resident in Stillwater.