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This man's name was Wollaston, and he worked at Dana's. Mr. Taggett's initial move was to make himself popular in the marble yard, and especially at the tavern, where he spent money freely, though not so freely as to excite any remark except that the lad was running through pretty much all his small pay, a recklessness which was charitably condoned in Snelling's bar-room.
The days were dragging heavily with her; she was missing Richard. Her own daring travels had never extended beyond Boston or Providence; and New York, with Richard in it, seemed drearily far away. Mr. Slocum withdrew to his chamber shortly after nine o'clock, and, lighting the pair of candles on the dressing-table, began his examination of Mr. Taggett's memoranda.
At midnight the watchman on his lonely beat saw those two candles still burning. Mr. Taggett's diary was precisely a diary, disjoined, full of curt, obscure phrases and irrelevant reflections, for which reason it will not be reproduced here. Though Mr.
Will you have the kindness to see that it is done at once?" A moment later Mr. Slocum stood alone in the office, with Mr. Taggett's diary in his hand. It was one of those costly little volumes gilt-edged and bound in fragrant crushed Levant morocco with which city officials are annually supplied by a community of grateful taxpayers.
The mutilated document which had so grimly clung to its secret was at last deciphered. It proved to be a recently executed will, in which the greater part of Lemuel Shackford's estate, real and personal, was left unconditionally to his cousin. "That disposes of one of Mr. Taggett's theories," was Mr. Slocum's unspoken reflection.
"I confess I am troubled." "If you doubt Richard for a second," said Margaret, with a slight quiver of her lip, "that will be the bitterest part of it to me." "I don't give any more credit to Mr. Taggett's general charges than you do, Margaret; but I understand their gravity better.
"No; he had no hand in it, no more than you or I. His fault was that he concealed his knowledge of the deed after it was done. He did not even suspect who committed the crime until two days' afterwards, when William Durgin" Richard's eyes lighted up as they encountered Mr. Taggett's. The priest mistook the significance of the glances.
"Could Richard have done that, could he have so much as laid his hand upon me if if" Mr. Slocum sunk back in the chair with a kind of groan. "Papa, you do not know him!" "Oh, Margaret, I am afraid that that is not the kind of evidence to clear Richard in Mr. Taggett's eyes." "Then Richard's word must do it," she said haughtily. "He will be home to-night." "Yes, he is to return to-night," said Mr.
Taggett every morning chiefly anonymous suggestions, and offers of assistance from lunatics in remote cities was enough in itself to expasperate a community. Covertly at first, and then openly, Stillwater began seriously to question Mr. Taggett's method of working up the case.
If William Durgin had testified falsely on that point, if he had swerved a hair's-breadth from the truth in that matter, then there was but one conclusion to be drawn from his perjury. A flash of lightning is not swifter than was Mr. Taggett's thought in grasping the situation. In an instant he saw all his carefully articulated case fall to pieces in his hands.
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