The Winning Clue Part 19

"Dat key fallin' on de flo'. Who done drap it dar ef Perry ain' drapped it? Dat's whut I'd like to know. Ef he ain' had dat key, ain' n.o.body had it."

She lay down, weeping and sobbing from unhappiness and terror. Bristow and Greenleaf would have given much to have known her suspicions, suspicions which amounted to a moral certainty.

On the sleeping porch of No. 5, Manniston Road, Maria Fulton lay awake a long time and tortured herself by reviewing again and again the thoughts that had crushed her during the day. Miss Kelly, on a cot at the foot of the girl's bed, heard her stirring restlessly but could not know in the darkness how her long, slender fingers tore at the bed-covering, nor how her face was drawn with pain.

"The overturning of that chair,"--her mind whirled the events before her--"the sound of that whisper, that man's whisper, and the sight of that foot! He wore rubbers. I know he did. He always wears them when it's even cloudy. It was he! It was he!"

Her nails dug into her palms as she fought for something like self-control.

"If it was not he? I would never have fainted--never. That's what made me faint, the sickening, undeniable knowledge that that was who it was. And I loved him! But--but the rubber-shod foot, the size of it! Am I sure?

Could it have been----"

She groaned so that Miss Kelly lifted her head from her own pillow and listened intently, trying to determine whether the sufferer was asleep or awake.

"He's not stupid," she swept on, closing mutinous lips against the repet.i.tion of sound. "He knew Enid could do nothing--nothing more. I don't understand. Oh, I don't understand! I wonder now why I said I heard nothing.

"I wonder why I lay unconscious on the floor near the dining room door all those hours--until ten o'clock this morning. It was because the knowledge was too much for me to stand--just as it is too much now. And I can't share it with anybody. I'll never be able to get it off my conscience. If I did, they'd hang him--or the other one who----"

At that thought, she screamed aloud, a wild, eerie sound that chilled the blood of even Miss Kelly, accustomed as she was to the cries of suffering and despair. The nurse was at the hysterical girl's side in a moment, holding her quivering body in strong, capable arms.

"What was it? What was it, Miss Fulton?" she asked soothingly.

Maria brushed the back of her hand across her forehead, which was beaded with big, cold drops of perspiration.

"Nothing, Miss Kelly; nothing," she half-moaned. "A bad dream, a nightmare, I guess. Give me something to make me sleep."

She drank eagerly from a gla.s.s the nurse put to her lips.

"If I begin to talk in my sleep, Miss Kelly, call me, wake me up, will you?" she begged, the fright still in her voice.

"Yes, I will." This rea.s.suringly while Miss Kelly smoothed the pillows and readjusted the tumbled coverings.

Maria grasped her arm in a grip that hurt.

"But will you?" she demanded sharply. "Promise me!"

"Yes; indeed, I will. I promise."

Miss Kelly meant what she said. She was not anxious to be the recipient of the sick girl's confidences.

CHAPTER X

EYES OF ACCUSATION

Bristow, at his early breakfast, devoted himself, between mouthfuls, to the front page of _The Furmville Sentinel_. It was given up entirely to the Withers murder.

"Murder--murder horrible and mysterious--was committed early yesterday morning," announced the paper in large black-face type, "when the beautiful and charming Mrs. Enid Fulton Withers, wife of George S.

Withers, the well-known attorney of Atlanta, was choked to death in the parlour of her home at No. 5 Manniston Road. The most heinous crime that has ever stained the annals of Furmville," etc.

The article went on to recite that Chief Greenleaf of the Furmville police force had been fortunate in securing the a.s.sistance of a genius in running down the various clues that seemed to point to the guilty party.

Mr. Lawrence Bristow, of Cincinnati, now in town for his health, had worked with him all day in unearthing many circ.u.mstances "which, although each of them seemed trivial, led when summed up to the almost irrefutable conviction that the murder was done by a drunken negro, Perry Carpenter,"

etc.

In spite of this, the paper continued, the dead woman's husband, arriving unexpectedly on the scene, had employed by wire Samuel S. Braceway, the professional detective of Atlanta, who would reach Furmville early this morning and, probably, work with Chief Greenleaf, Mr. Bristow, and the plain-clothes squad in the effort to remove all doubts of the guilt of the accused negro.

There followed a sketch of Braceway which was enough to convince the readers that in him Mr. Withers had called into the case the shrewdest man in the South, "very probably the shrewdest man in the entire country."

"Evidently," Bristow was thinking when Greenleaf rang the door-bell, "while I'm a 'genius,' Braceway's the man everybody relies on when it comes to catching the murderer."

The chief was in a hurry, and the two men, going out of Bristow's back door, walked down to the corner of the sleeping porch of No. 7, the nurses' home. The frail wire fences that had served to part.i.tion the back lots of Nos. 5, 7, and 9 had either fallen down or been carried away, but there was a tall five-board fence at the rear of the three lots. From this board fence, the hill sloped down toward the southeast, the direction in which the negro settlement containing the home of Lucy Thomas was located.

Bristow, frankly bored by the belated search, let Greenleaf lead the way.

"I went up to the sanitarium late last night," the chief told him, "and had a long talk with Miss Hardesty. She says the man she saw night before last was right here, just a few yards from this Number Seven sleeping porch; and, it seemed to her, he made straight for the board fence. We'll follow in his footsteps. That will take up to the fence in the middle of the rear line of Number Seven's lot."

He was following this route as he talked, Bristow limping a few yards behind him.

Greenleaf overlooked nothing. The lot had been cleared of last winter's leaves, and the search was comparatively simple, but, if he saw even so much as a small stick on either side of him, he turned it over. They were soon at the fence, about twenty yards from the sleeping porch.

"There's not a trace--not a trace of anything, chief," said Bristow, leaning one elbow on the top board of the fence.

Greenleaf, however, was not to be discouraged. After he had walked around again and again in ever-widening circles, he stopped and thought.

"If that n.i.g.g.e.r was running away and trying to make good time," he exclaimed, suddenly inspired, "he didn't jump the fence in the middle there, where you are. He took a line slanting down toward that negro settlement. The chances are he went over the fence down at that corner."

He pointed to the southeastern corner back of No. 5 and, with his eyes on the ground, began to work toward it.

Barely a yard from the corner, he stooped down swiftly, picked up something and turned joyfully toward Bristow, who still leaned against the fence.

"Look here! Look here, Mr. Bristow," he called, hurrying across to him.

Bristow examined the object Greenleaf had found. It consisted of six links of a gold chain, three of the links very small and of plain gold, the other alternating three links being larger and chased with a fine, exquisite design of laurel leaves, the leaves so small as to be barely distinguishable to the naked eye.

The lame man shared the chief's excitement.

"By George! You've got something worth while. I should say so!"

"What do you make of it?" asked Greenleaf, eager and pleased. "It must have belonged to Mrs. Withers, don't you think?"

"There's one way to find out," Bristow answered, looking at his watch. It was half-past eight o'clock. "Let's go and ask Withers."

They went around to the front of No. 5.

"One of the end links is broken," Bristow said as they ascended the steps. "My guess is that this is a part of the necklace Mrs. Withers wore when she was killed. You remember the mark on the back of her neck. It might have been made by the jerk that would have been required to break these links."