"I follow in your footsteps."--"Not for the first time."
The words echoed in Lyon's mind like a rebus which he must solve.
There was a puzzle in them. Could he, by turning them and trying them,
find the answer? Of course it wasn't really his business, but for some
reason the puzzle haunted his mind.
He had an assignment that evening to report a concert given at the
Hemlock Avenue Congregational Church, under the auspices of certain
ladies sufficiently prominent in society to ensure a special reporter.
He had timed himself to reach the church a little before nine, and as
he walked briskly up the north side of Hemlock Avenue, his attention
was attracted by the opening of a door in a house on the opposite side
of the street. The light, streaming out toward him into the snowy
whiteness of the night, showed a man at the door, parleying with the
maid-servant within. After a moment the door closed and the man came
slowly down the steps. He appeared to hesitate when he reached the
street, then he turned up the avenue in the same direction that Lyon
was going, and almost opposite him. As he passed under the street
lamp, Lyon saw, with a sudden quick pleasure, that the man was
Lawrence. He was walking laggingly, with his head bent. At the corner
he turned south on Grant Street, and so soon passed out of sight.
Lyon's lively personal interest in Lawrence made him glance back at
the house where his hero had evidently made an ineffective call, and
wonder who it might be that lived there. Hemlock was an avenue that
carried its air of sublimated respectability in every well-kept lawn
and unfenced lot. Each house was set back from the street and was
"detached," with trees and concrete walks and front lawn and back yard
of its own. It was not a show street, but it was supremely well-bred.
It struck Lyon, newly come from a busier city, as curious that, but
for himself, Lawrence was the only person moving in the street. Not
even a policeman was in sight.
This same seclusion and peace brooded over the scene when he retraced
his way down that block on his early return from the concert an hour
later. He was commenting upon the stillness to himself when he heard
the sound of running feet approaching, and in a moment he saw the
figure of a woman come running wildly toward him. About the middle of
the block she cut diagonally across the street and ran into one of the
houses opposite. Lyon had instinctively quickened his own pace, for
her panic flight suggested that she was pursued, but he could see no
one following her. Then he noticed that the house where she had run in
was, curiously enough, the same house where Lawrence had called
earlier that evening. She had not gone in at the front door but had
run around to the side of the house.
"Some servant maid who has overstayed her leave," he thought. "She ran
well, though,--uncommonly good form for a kitchen girl. Bet she's had
gymnasium work, whoever she is."
Reaching the end of the block he stopped and looked up and down the
cross-street, Sherman, from which the girl had seemed to come. There
was no one in sight. The street, snowily white and bare in the light
of the gas lamps, lay open before him for long blocks. The music from
a skating rink in the neighborhood came gayly to him on the frosty air
and an electric car clanged busily in the near distance. As he moved
on, his eye was caught by something dark on the white snow at the edge
of the pavement,--a black silk muffler it proved to be, when he picked
it up. Had the girl dropped it or merely hurried past it? It was a
man's muffler. He was about to toss it back into the street when some
instinct--the professional instinct of the reporter to understand
everything he sees--made him roll it up and tuck it instead into his
overcoat pocket.
He hurried on, meaning to catch the next car a few blocks below, when
the shrill and repeated call of a policeman's whistle cut across the
night. Lyon stopped. That sharp and insistent call suggested a more
exciting "story" than his church concert. He hurried back to Sherman
Street, and half-way down the block, midway between Hemlock Avenue and
Oak Street, he saw the officer standing. It was not until he came
close up that Lyon saw the gray heap on the ground near the officer's
feet.
"What's up?" he demanded.
"Man dead," the officer answered laconically.
Running feet were answering the signal of the whistle, and in less
time than it takes to tell it, they were the center of an excited
crowd. Donohue, the police officer, ordered the crowd sharply to stand
back, while he sent the first watchman who had come up to telephone
for the patrol wagon.
"If any one is hurt, I am a physician," one man said, pushing his way
to the front.
"He's hurted too bad for you to do him any good," Donohue said.
The physician knelt down beside the fallen man, however, and made a
hasty examination.
"The man is quite dead," he said, at length. "There's a bruise on the
temple,--the blow probably killed him instantly. But he has been dead
a few minutes only."
At that there were excited suggestions that the murderer could not
have got far away, and some one proposed an immediate search of the
neighborhood. But no one started. The center of interest was in that
gray-clad heap on the ground.
"Who is the man?--Do you know who it is, officer?" some one asked.
Donohue, obviously resentful of the presence of this unauthorized
jury, made no answer. Lyon, watchful professionally for all details,
suddenly recognized Lawrence in one of the men who stood nearest the
body. There was something in the fixity of the look which he was
bending upon the dead man that made Lyon's eye follow his, and then in
his amaze he pushed past Donohue and knelt to look into the face
resting against the curb.
"Good heavens, it's Fullerton,--Warren Fullerton, the lawyer," he
cried.
The volley of exclamations and questions which he drew down upon
himself by this declaration were interrupted by the clang of the
patrol wagon, which came down the street at a run. The three men on
the wagon swung themselves down and cleared the crowd out of their way
in a moment, and expeditiously lifted the limp gray body in. Donohue
swung himself on the step and the wagon drove off at a decorous gait,
leaving another police officer on the ground to watch the rapidly
dispersing crowd.
Lyon, well aware that a more experienced hand than his own would be
assigned to work up the story he had stumbled upon, deemed it his duty
to report at once to the office instead of trying to do anything
further on his own account, and hurried away to catch the car
down-town. A man came up behind and fell into his own hurried gait to
keep pace with him.
"You've struck an exciting story," said Lawrence's voice.
"Yes," said Lyon, eagerly. His eagerness was more due to the pleasant
surprise of having Lawrence single him out to walk with than to
anything else. His secret hero-worship had never brought him anything
more than a friendly nod before.
"Are you going to write it up?"
"I'll have to report for instructions. They'll probably send some one
else up to the station to follow matters up, but perhaps the city
editor will let me write up this part of it."
"You have a good deal of responsibility," said Lawrence.
"Responsibility?"
"I mean in the way of influencing public opinion."
"I have nothing to do but to tell the facts, and there aren't many of
them yet."
"You have to select the facts to speak of," Lawrence said. He was
keeping up with Lyon's quick pace, but his voice was so deliberate
that it made Lyon unconsciously pull up.
"I suppose so."
"If you wanted to make a sensational report, for instance, you could
work in the peaceful night and the deserted street and other things
that really have no relation to the facts in such a way as to connect
them in the public mind."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"That's what I meant about your responsibility,--responsibility to the
public and responsibility to the individuals you may happen to work
into your story."
Lyon nodded. He felt that there was something behind this not yet
clear to him.
"You were fortunate in being on the spot. You must have been the first
man there. I was close behind you, I think. I was not far behind you
when you came down Hemlock Avenue."
Then suddenly Lyon understood. It was quite as though Lawrence had
said, "I hope you will not consider it necessary to mention that a
minute or two after the time of the murder you saw a woman running in
terror from the spot and going into a house where I call." He had
quite forgotten the running girl for the moment. Now the sudden
bringing together of the two ideas staggered him.
"There are things that once said can never be unsaid," said Lawrence.
"Yes."
"That's why I am glad it has fallen into your hands to write it up
instead of into the hands of some sensation monger who would not have
the instinct of a gentleman about what to say and what to leave
unsaid. By the way, it was you who identified the man as Fullerton,
wasn't it?"
"Yes," said Lyon slowly. He recalled the fixed look that Lawrence had
bent upon the body in silence. It was impossible that he had not
recognized his enemy in the dead man. Why had he held back the natural
impulse to speak his name?
"I'll look for your report with interest. And, by the way, don't you
lunch at the Tillamook Club? Look me up some day. I'm usually there
between one and two. Glad to have seen you. Good night."
Lyon found that "story" more difficult to write up than he had
anticipated.