Worth," I said. "There was somebody in here just now."

"Couldn't have been, Jerry," he answered absently; then added, his eyes
on that stain, "I never could calculate what my father would do. But
when I talked to him last night, right here in this room, he didn't seem
to me a man ready to take his own life."

"You quarreled?"

"We always quarreled, whenever we met."

"But this quarrel was more bitter than usual?"

"The last quarrel would seem the bitterest, wouldn't it, Jerry?" he
asked. Then, after a moment, "Poor Jim Edwards!"

I caught my tongue to hold back the question. Worth went on,

"When I phoned him just now, he hadn't heard a word about it. Seemed
terribly upset."

"Hadn't heard?" I echoed. "How was that?"

"You know we saw him at Tait's last night. He took the Pacheco Pass road
from San Francisco; drove straight to his ranch without hitting Santa
Ysobel."

I wanted another look at that man Edwards. I was to have it. Worth went
on absently,

"He'll be along presently to stay here while I'm away Monday. Told me it
would be the first time he'd put foot in the house for four years. As
boys up in Sonoma county, he and father always disagreed, but sometime
these last years there was a big split over something. They were barely
on speaking terms--and good old Jim took my news harder than as though
I'd been telling him the death of a near friend."

"Works like that with us humans," I nodded. "Let some one die that
you've disagreed with, and you remember every row you ever had with
them; remember it and regret it--which is foolish."

"Which is foolish," Worth repeated, and seemed for the first time able
to get away from the spot at which he had stopped.

He went over to the empty, fireless hearth and stood there, his back to
the room, elbows on the mantel propping his head, face bent, oblivious
to anything that I might do. It oughtn't to be hard to find the way this
place could be entered and left by a man solid enough to cast a shadow,
with quick fingers to snap the light on and off. But when I made a
painstaking examination of a corner grate with a flue too small for
anything but a chimney swallow to go up and down, a ceiling solidly
beamed and paneled, the glass that formed the skylight set in firmly as
part of the roof, when I'd turned up rugs and inspected an unbroken
floor, even tried the corners of book cases to see if they masked a
false entrance, I owned myself, for the moment, beaten there