up in his automobile, six miles outside of Washington and took me into
town. I couldn't have made that four miles on foot, no matter how I ran,
in approximately fifteen or twenty minutes.

"It's been proved that she was struck down after eleven anyway.--You
said the condition of the body showed that, doctor.--You see, I would
have had to make the four miles in less than twenty minutes--an
impossibility. You see?"

His eagerness to win their confidence put a disagreeable note, almost a
whimper, into his voice. It grated on Dr. Garnet.

It affected Hastings more definitely.

"Now," he decided, "he's lying--about something. But what?" He noted a
change in Russell's face, a suggestion of craftiness, the merest shadow
of slyness over his general attitude of anxiety. And yet, this part of
his story seemed straight enough.

Dr. Garnet's next question brought out the fact that it would be
corroborated.

"This Mr. Otis, Mr. Russell; where is he?"

"Right there, by the window," the witness answered, with a smug smile
which gave him a still more unprepossessing look.

Jury and spectators turned toward the man at the window. They saw a
clean-shaven, alert-looking person of middle age, who nodded slightly in
Russell's direction as if endorsing his testimony. There seemed no
possible grounds for doubting whatever Otis might say. Hastings at once
accepted him as genuine, an opinion which, it was obvious, was shared by
the rest of the assemblage.

Russell sensed the change of sentiment toward himself. Until now, it had
been a certainty that he would be held for the murder. But his producing
an outsider, incontestably a trustworthy man, to establish the truth of
his statement that he had been four miles away from the scene of the
crime a quarter of an hour after it had been committed--that was
something in his favour which could not be gainsaid.

Granting even that he had had an automobile at his disposal--a
supposition for which there was no foundation--his alibi would still
have been good, in view of the rain and the fact that one of the four
miles in question was "dirt road."

With the realization of this, the jury swung back to the animus it had
felt against Webster, the incredulity with which it had received his
statement that there had been between him and the dead woman no closer
relationship than that of employer and employe.

Webster, seated near the wall furthest from the jury, felt the inquiry
of many eyes upo