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Chaos, my dear sir, chaos." "We see that at the store," Mr. Reynolds would say. "Accustom a lot of women to a silk sale on Fridays and then make it toothbrushes. That's chaos, all right." Well, Mr. Holcombe came in that night about ten o'clock, and I told him Ladley was back.
"My good woman, that dress has been described, to the last stilted arch and Colonial volute, in every newspaper in the United States!" That evening the newspapers announced that during a conference at the jail between Mr. Ladley and James Bronson, business manager at the Liberty Theater, Mr. Ladley had attacked Mr. Bronson with a chair, and almost brained him.
"Don't forget," he said, "to put a large knife where you left the one last night. I'm sorry the water has gone down, but I shall imagine it still at the seventh step. Good night, Mrs. Pitman." "Good night, Mr. Ladley," I said, smiling, "and remember, you are three weeks in arrears with your board." His eyes twinkled through his spectacles. "I shall imagine it paid," he said.
It would be easy enough to frame up something to look as if he'd made away with her. We'd get a week of excitement, more advertising than we'd ordinarily get in a year; you get a corking news story, and find Jennie Brice at the end, getting the credit for that. Jennie gets a hundred dollars and a rest, and Ladley, her husband, gets, say, two hundred. "Mr.
I went out, and I heard him close the door behind me. Then, through the door, I heard a great sputtering and coughing, and I knew he had got the whisky down somehow. I put the knife out, as he had asked me to, and went to bed. I was ready to drop. Not even the knowledge that an imaginary Mr. Ladley was about to commit an imaginary crime in the house that night could keep me awake. Mr.
"Oh! Well, he might have. He never said." "Now then, this towel, Mrs. Pitman. Did not the prisoner, on the following day, tell you that he had cut his wrist in freeing the boat, and ask you for some court-plaster?" "He did not," I said firmly. "You have not seen a scar on his wrist?" "No." I glanced at Mr. Ladley: he was smiling, as if amused. It made me angry.
Leaving the house that Sunday morning, and hearing the ticking of the clock up-stairs, I recognized that it was an onyx clock, clambered from my boat through an upper window, and so reached it. The clock showed fight, but after stunning it with a chair " "Exactly!" I said. "Then the thing Mrs. Ladley said she would not do was probably to wind the clock?" He dropped his bantering manner at once.
"This is where I entered the case," said Mr. Holcombe, "I rowed into the lower hall this morning, to feed the dog, Peter, who was whining on the staircase. Mrs. Pitman was coming down, pale and agitated over the fact that the dog, shortly before, had found floating in the parlor down-stairs a slipper belonging to Mrs. Ladley, and, later, a knife with a broken blade.
There was nothing said about a pillow-slip. Didn't he say he burned it accidentally?" "So he claimed." Mr. Holcombe made another entry in his book. "Then I said every murder had a weapon. He was to have a pistol at first, but none of us owned one. Mrs. Ladley undertook to get a knife from Mrs. Pitman's kitchen, and to leave it around, not in full view, but where it could be found."
Howell, a woman who might have been Jennie Brice. But if it was, why did not Mr. Howell say so? Mr. Ladley claimed she was hiding, in revenge. But Jennie Brice was not that sort of woman; there was something big about her, something that is found often in large women a lack of spite. She was not petty or malicious. Her faults, like her virtues, were for all to see.