“Good heavens!” Ramon exclaimed. “What brings him here now? I thought he had disappeared utterly. Do you think it could have been he in the library that night, come to take revenge for that fancied wrong, at last?”
“That is what I’m going to find out,” the detective responded, with a touch of grimness in his tones.
“But you don’t mean––it isn’t possible that Mr. Lawton was murdered! That he didn’t die of heart-disease, after all!”
“I traced Armstrong to the town where he was living in obscurity, and followed his movements.” Blaine’s reply seemed to be purposely irrelevant. “I could not, however, find where he had been on the night of Mr. Lawton’s death. Now that he has come to me voluntarily, we shall discover if the voice Miss Lawton overheard in that moment when she listened on the stairs, was his or not.... Come back this afternoon, Mr. Hamilton, and I will give you full information and instructions about that Long Bay errand. In the meantime, guard yourself well from a possible attack, although I do not think another attempt upon your life will be made so soon. Take this, and if you have need of it, do not hesitate to use it. We can afford no half-measures now. Shoot, and shoot to kill!”
He opened a lower drawer in his massive desk and, drawing from it a business-like looking revolver of large caliber, presented it to the lawyer. With a warm hand-clasp he dismissed him, and, going to the telephone, called up Anita Lawton’s home.
“I want you to attend carefully, Miss Lawton. I 112 am speaking from my office. A man will be here with me in a few minutes, and I shall seat him close to the transmitter of my ’phone, leaving the receiver off the hook. Please listen carefully to his voice. I only wish you to hear a phrase or two, when I will hang up the receiver, and call you up later. Try to concentrate with all your powers, and tell me afterward if you have ever heard that voice until now; if it is the voice of the man you did not see, who was in the library with your father just before he died.”
He heard her give a quick gasp, and then her voice came to him, low and sweet and steady.
“I will listen carefully, Mr. Blaine, and do my best to tell you the truth.”
The detective pulled a large leather chair close to the telephone, and Herbert Armstrong was ushered in.
The man was pitiful in appearance, but scarcely demented, as the operative had described him. He was tall and shabbily clothed, gaunt almost to the point of emaciation, but with no sign of dissipation. His eyes, though sunken, were clear, and they gazed levelly with those of the detective.