em to me
helplessly.

"You've read this all--carefully?" she sighed.

It shook me. To have Barbara, the girl I'd seen get meanings and facts
from a written page with a mere flirt of a glance, ask me that. What I
really wanted from her was an inspection of the book and blotter, and a
deduction from it. As though she guessed, she answered with a sort of
wail,

"I can't, I can't even remember what I did see when I looked at these
before. I--can't--remember!"

I went and knelt on the hearth with a pretext of laying a fire there,
since the shut-up room was chill. And when I glanced stealthily over my
shoulder, she had gone to work; not as I had ever seen her before, but
fumbling at the leaves, hesitating, turning to finger the blotter;
setting her lips desperately, like an over-driven school-child, but
keeping right on. I spun out my fire building to leave her to herself.
Little noises of her moving there at the table; rustle and flutter of
the leaves; now and again, a long, sobbing breath. At last something
like a groan caused me to turn my head and see her, with face pale as
death, eyes staring across into mine.

"It was Clayte--Edward Clayte--who killed Mr. Gilbert here--in this
room."

The hair on the back of my neck stirred; I thought the girl had gone
mad. As I ran over to the table and looked at what was under her hand,
it came again.

"He did. He did. It was Clayte--the wonder man!"

"Do--do you deduce that, Barbara?"

"Did I?" she raised to mine the face of a sick child. "I must have.
See--it's here on the blotter: 'y-t-e,' that's Clayte. Double l-e-r;
that's 'teller,' 'Avenue' is part of 'Van Ness Avenue Bank.' Oh, yes; I
deduced it, I suppose. Both crimes end in a locked room and a perfect
alibi. But--but--don't you see, if it is true--and it is--it is--we're
worse off than we were before. We've the wonder man against us."

"Barbara," I cried. "Barbara, come out of it!"

"See? You don't believe in me any more," and her head went down on the
table.

I let her cry, while I sat and thought. The broken sentences she'd
sobbed out to me began to fit up like a puzzle-game. By all theories of
good detective work, I should have seen from the first the similarity of
these crimes. But Clayte, slipping in here to do this murder--and why?
What mixed him up with affairs here? And then the icy pang--Dykeman had
seen a connection--Cummings had found one. With them, it was Clayte and
his gang--and his gang was Wor