"Oh, get out of here!" Sloane interrupted again. "You've imposed on my daughter with your talk of being helpful, and all that rot, but you can't hoodwink me. What the devil do you mean by letting that sheriff come in here and subject me to all this annoyance and shock? You'd save us from unpleasantness!"

He spoke more slowly now, as if he cudgelled his brain for the most biting sarcasm, the most unbearable insolence.

"Don't realize the seriousness!--Flat-headed fiends!--Are you any nearer the truth now than you were at the start?--Try to understand this, Mr.

Hastings: you're discharged, fired! From now on, I'm in charge of what goes on in this house. If there's any trouble to be avoided, I'll attend to it. Get that!--and get out!"

Hastings, opening his mouth for angry retort, checked himself. He stood a moment silent, shaken by the effort it cost him to maintain his self-control.

"Humph!" Sloane's nasal, tw.a.n.gy exclamation was clearly intended to provoke him further.

But, without a word, he turned and left the room. Pa.s.sing the screen near the door, he heard Jarvis snicker, a discreet echo of Sloane's goading ridicule.

On his way back to the parlour, the old man made up his mind to discount Sloane's behaviour.

"I've got to take a chance," he counselled himself, "but I know I'm right in doing it. A big responsibility--but I'm right!"

Then he submitted this report:

"He says nothing new, Crown. Far as I can make out, nothing unusual waked him up that night--except chronic nervousness; he turned on that light to find some medicine; he knew nothing of the murder until Judge Wilton called him."

"Humph!" growled Crown. "And you fall for that!"

Hastings eyed him sternly. "It's the statement I'm going to give to the reporters."

The sheriff was silent, irresolute. Hastings congratulated himself on his earlier deduction: that Crown, unable to frighten Sloane into communicativeness, was thankful for an excuse to withdraw.

Hendricks had reported the two-hour conference between Crown and Mrs.

Brace late that afternoon. Hastings decided now: "The man's in cahoots with her. His ally! And he won't act until he's had another session with her.--And she won't advise an arrest for a day or two anyway. Her game is to make him play on Sloane's nerves for a while. She advises threats, not arrests--which suits me, to a T!"

He fought down a chuckle, thinking of that alliance.

Crown corroborated his reasoning.

"All right, Hastings," he said doggedly. "I'm not going back to his room. I gave him his chance. He can take the consequences."

"What consequences?"

"I'd hardly describe 'em to his personal representative, would I? But you can take this from me: they'll come soon enough--and rough enough!"

Hastings made no reference to having been dismissed by Sloane. He was glad when Crown changed the subject.

"Hastings, you saw the reporters this afternoon--I've been wondering--they asked me--did they ask you whether you suspected the valet--Jarvis?"

"Of what?"

"Killing her."

"No; they didn't ask me."

"Funny," said Crown, ill at ease. "They asked me."

"So you said," Hastings reminded, looking hard at him.

"Well!" Crown blurted it out. "Do you suspect him? Are you working on that line--at all?"

Hastings paused. He had no desire to mislead him. And yet, there was no reason for confiding in him--and delay was at present the Hastings plan.

"I'll tell you, Crown," he said, finally; "I'll work on any line that can lead to the guilty man.--What do you know?"

"Who? Me?" Crown's tone indicated the absurdity of suspecting Jarvis.

"Not a thing."

But it gave Hastings food for thought. Was Mrs. Brace in communication with Jarvis? And did Crown know that? Was it possible that Crown wanted to find out whether Hastings was having Jarvis shadowed? How much of a fool was the woman making of the sheriff, anyway?

Another thing puzzled him: why did Mrs. Brace suspect Arthur Sloane of withholding the true story of what he had seen the night of the murder?

Hastings' suspicion, amounting to certainty, came from his knowledge that the man's own daughter thought him deeply involved in the crime.

But Mrs. Brace--was she clever enough to make that deduction from the known facts? Or did she have more direct information from Sloanehurst than he had thought possible?

He decided not to leave the sheriff entirely subject to her schemes and suggestions. He would give Mr. Crown something along another line--a brake, as it were, on impulsive action.

"You talk about arresting Webster right away--or Sloane," he began, suddenly confiding. "You wouldn't want to make a mistake--would you?"

Crown rose to that. "Why? What do you know--specially?"

"Well, not so much, maybe. But it's worth thinking about. I'll give you the facts--confidentially, of course.--Hub Hill's about a hundred yards from this house, on the road to Washington. When automobiles sink into it hub-deep, they come out with a lot of mud on their wheels--black, loamy mud. Ain't any other mud like that Hub Hill mud anywhere near here. It's just special and peculiar to Hub Hill. That so?"

"Yes," agreed Crown, absorbed.

"All right. How, then, did Eugene Russell keep black, Hub Hill mud on his shoes that night if he went the four miles on foot to where Otis picked him up?"

"Eh?" said Crown, chin fallen.

"By the time he'd run four miles, his shoes would have been covered with the red mud of that mile of 'dirt road' or the thin, grey mud of the three miles of pike--wouldn't they? They'd have thrown off that Hub Hill mud pretty quick, wouldn't they?"

"Thunder!" marvelled Crown. "That's right! And those shoes were in his room; I saw 'em." He gurgled, far back in his throat. "Say! How did he get from Hub Hill to where Otis picked him up?"

"That's what I say," declared Hastings, very bland. "How?"

To Lucille, after Crown's departure, the detective declared his intention to "stand by" her, to stay on the case. He repeated his statement of yesterday: he suspected too much, and knew too little, to give it up.

He told her of the responsibility he had a.s.sumed in giving the sheriff the fict.i.tious Sloane statement. "That is, it's not fict.i.tious, in itself; it's what your father has been saying. But I told Crown, and I'm going to tell the newspaper men, that he says it's all he knows, really.

And I hate to do it--because, honestly, Miss Sloane, I don't think it is all. I'm afraid he's deceiving us."

She did not contradict that; it was her own opinion.

"However," the old man made excuse, "I had to do it--in view of things as they are. And he's got to stick to it, now that I've made it 'official,' so to speak. Do you think he will?"

She did not see why not. She would explain to him the importance, the necessity, of that course.