United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Truly, there had been some secret, surreptitious flittings in this old mansion. At that moment, in my abstraction, I was humming a little tune. I heard Stodger jovially speeding the departing reporters; and after the outside door closed behind the last of them, I shouted for him to enter the library. Our eyes met, and I indicated the secretary by the faintest of signs. "Mr.
"Fact," Stodger nodded his round head impressively, "Alfred Fluette." Here indeed was the promise of a pretty state of affairs! I left the four reporters to Stodger's tender mercies his instructions did not include any such extreme measures as Maillot had suggested confident that he was the proper person to relieve me of this unwelcome intrusion.
Stodger demanded, in deep perplexity. "Why should everything that happens in this house be pulled off there?" Why indeed? "Let's go back there and try to find out," I returned, stiffly, for my cheek was paining under the mass of plaster that Stodger had piled upon it.
After we were in condition to do so, Stodger and I set about an inspection of the scene. First of all, we did n't find a trace of our adversaries, or how many of them there might have been, until we came to the snow outside. An open dining-room window indicated their method of ingress, the trampled snow beneath their number. There had been five. "Why the bath room?"
It was short, and as he slowly returned it to its envelope his hand shook and his countenance grew more and more harassed and perplexed. I glanced at Burke's pallid features and found them as impassive as any Indian's. It was impossible to determine whether he was watching me or Maillot. Evidently assuming the incident to be closed, Stodger saw his opportunity to speak again.
It was a delight to watch the different expressions flit across her lovely countenance, to see them mingle and blend and give way to others wonder, amazement, awe, horror, terror I can't begin to name them all. A score of times she interrupted me, but it was always a welcome interruption. "Stodger 's a trump," I concluded.
"Go with this man to the library, Stodger," I peremptorily directed. "Burke, you come with me." In the next ten seconds I had the big library table between the two, Burke impassive, while Maillot glared at him savagely. This message I gave to him, requesting that he entrust it to either Callahan or O'Brien for delivery. "Tell 'em to clear out," I added; "I have no use for them here."
The face which Genevieve saw at the alcove curtains could be easily accounted for, since, with the exception of Stodger, who was in the second story, and the officer in the lower hall, everybody in the house was assembled in the library, and, of course, completely absorbed in the inquest.
Second, the fellow was an arrant coward, and he would never have offered the least resistance unless convinced that he was in imminent peril of his life which was improbable. The rear stairway was associated with the thought of Burke's cowardice, for he had chosen that way to accompany Stodger: whose shoe-sole had left the flattened fragment of paraffin there?
I rested my forearms upon the back of one; but the instant the door closed on Stodger and Burke, young Maillot sank with a groan into a chair by the table. "The devil! I'm glad you got rid of that fellow," he muttered. "He wears on one like the very deuce."
Word Of The Day