“I don’t think Burton ever did.”
“He may have done so for Mabel’s benefit, remember.”
“Ah! by Jove!” gasped my friend, “I never thought of that. If he wished to provide for her, he would leave his secret with some one whom he could implicitly trust. Yet he trusted us—up to a certain point. We are the only ones who have any real knowledge of the state of affairs,” and my tall, long-legged, fair-haired friend, who stood six feet in his stockings, the picture of the easy-going muscular Englishman, although engaged in the commerce of feminine frippery, stopped with a low grunt of dissatisfaction, and carefully lit a fresh cigar.
We passed a dismal evening strolling about the main streets of Manchester, feeling that in Burton Blair we had lost a friend, but when on the following morning we met Herbert Leighton, the solicitor, in the hall of the Queen’s, and had a long consultation with him, the mystery surrounding the dead man became considerably heightened.
“You both knew my late client very well, indeed,” the solicitor remarked, after some preliminaries. “Now, are you aware of the existence of any one who would profit by his sudden decease?”
“That’s a curious question,” I remarked. “Why?”
“Well, the fact is this,” explained the dark, sharp-featured man, with some hesitation. “I have every reason to believe that he has been the victim of foul play.”
“Foul play!” I gasped. “You surely don’t think that he was murdered? Why, my dear fellow, that couldn’t be. He was taken ill in the train, and died in bed in our presence.”
The solicitor, whose face had now become graver, merely shrugged his narrow shoulders, and said—“We must, of course, await the result of the inquest, but from information in my possession I feel confident that Burton Blair did not die a natural death.”
That same evening the Coroner held his inquiry in a private room in the hotel, and, according to the two doctors who had made the post-mortem earlier in the day, death was due entirely to natural causes. It was discovered that Blair had naturally a weak heart, and that the fatal termination had been accelerated by the oscillation of the train.