The Sleuth of St. James Street [52]
my brother David rode away from my door - and you know that - I am free of obligation for him." "It is Cain's speech!" replied my father. The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers across his forehead. "Dillworth," cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of the room, "is the mark there?" The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl, the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the pistol lay. "Dillworth," he said calmly, "I know where he is. And the mark you felt for just now ought to be there." "Fool!" cried the hunchback. "If I killed him how could he ride away from the door?" "It was a thing that puzzled me," replied my father, "when I stood in this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery, rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child in gossip for all her days with a crime." "With a thief," snarled the man. "With a greater criminal than a thief," replied My father. "I was not certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded love of money. "I know what happened in that room. When your brother David struck the old secretary with his elbow, and the dozen indigo boxes fell and burst open on the hearth, you thought a great hidden treasure was uncovered. You thought swiftly. You had got the land by undue influence on your senile father, and you did not have to share that with your brother David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash. You sat at your father's table in the room. Your brother stood by the wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow - the head or face would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it." He paused. "But the other thing you did in that room was not so clever. A picture was newly hung on the wall - I saw the white square on the opposite wall from which it had been taken. It hung at the height of a man's shoulders directly behind the spot where your brother must have stood after he struck the secretary, and it hung in this new spot to cover the crash of a bullet into the mahogany panel!" My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled pistol out of the empty drawer. The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops and its light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback saw the thing and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic light. "Yes," continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, "this is your mistake to-night - to let me get your weapon. Your mistake that other night was to shoot before you counted the money. It was only a few hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would hold no great sum. But the thing was done, and you must cover it." He paused. "And you did cover it - with fiendish cunning. It would not do for your brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no motive. But if he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a horse to ride, the explanation would have solid feet to go on. I give you credit here for the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the thing. You caused your brother David and the horse to vanish. I saw, on that morning, the tracks of the horse where you led him from the stable to the door, and