"But he's been up all day!" she corrected.

"And yet," he said, and stopped, reflecting.

"Tell me," she implored; "tell me, Mr. Hastings, do you suspect my
father--or not--of the----?"

He answered her unfinished question with a solemn, painstaking care:

"Miss Sloane, you're not one who would want to be misled. You can bear
the truth. I'd be foolish to say that he's not under suspicion. He is.
Any one of the men there that night may have committed the murder.
Webster, your father, Wilton--only there, suspicion seems totally
gratuitous--Eugene Russell, Jarvis--I've heard things about him--any one
of them may have struck that blow--may have."

"And father," she said, in a grieved bewilderment, "has paid Mrs. Brace
to stop saying she suspects Berne," she shuddered, facing the
alternative, "or himself!"

"You see," he framed the conclusion for her, "how hard he makes it for
us to keep him out of trouble--if that gets out. He's put his hand on
the live wire of circumstantial evidence, a wire that too often
thrashes about, striking the wrong man."

"And Berne?" she cried out. "I think I could stand anything if only I
knew----"

But this time the mutinous sobs came crowding past her lips. She could
not finish the inquiry she had begun.

XVIII

THE MAN WHO RODE AWAY

It was early in the afternoon of Wednesday when Mr. Hastings, responding
to the prolonged ringing of his telephone, took the receiver off the
hook and found himself in communication with the sheriff of Alexandria
county. This was not the vacillating, veering sheriff who had spent
nearly four days accepting the hints of a detective or sitting,
chameleon-minded, at the feet of a designing woman. Here was an
impressive and self-appreciative gentleman, one who delighted in his own
deductive powers and relished their results.

He said so. His confidence fairly rattled the wire. His words
annihilated space grandly and leaped into the old man's receptive ear
with sizzling and electric effect. Mr. Crown, triumphant, was glad to
inform others that he was making a hit with himself.

"Hello! That you, Hastings? Well, old fellow, I don't like to annoy you
with an up-to-date rendition of 'I told you so!'--but it's come out, to
the last syllable, exactly as I said it would--from the very first!"

Ensued a pause, for dramatic effect. The detective did not break it.

"Waiting, are you? Well, here she goes; Russell's alibi's been knocked
into a thous