"Where did you get that?" I asked.
"Good heavens!" he said, raising himself on his elbow. "It belongs
to the doctor. He gave it to me to examine the fan belt. I must have
dropped it into my pocket."
And still I was nowhere. Suppose I had touched this flashlight at the
foot of the stairs and mistaken it for a revolver. Suppose that the
doctor, making his way toward the village and finding himself pursued,
had faced about and pretended to be leaving it? Grant, in a word, that
Doctor Lingard himself had been our night visitor--what then? Why had he
done it? What of the telephone-call, urging me to search the road? Did
some one realize what was happening, and take this method of warning us
and sending us after the fugitive?
I knew the Thomas Jenkins farm on the Elmsburg road. I had, indeed,
bought vegetables and eggs from Mr. Jenkins himself. That morning, as
early as I dared, I called the Jenkins farm. Mr. Jenkins himself would
bring me three dozen eggs that day. They were a little torn up out
there, as Mrs. Jenkins had borne a small daughter at seven A.M.
When I told Willie, he was evidently relieved. "I'm glad of it," he said
heartily. "The doctor's a fine old chap, and I'd hate to think he was
mixed up in any shady business."
He was insistent, that day, that I give up the house. He said it was not
safe, and I was inclined to agree with him. But although I did not
tell him of it, I had even more strongly than ever the impression that
something must be done to help Miss Emily, and that I was the one who
must do it.
Yet, in the broad light of day, with the sunshine pouring into the
rooms, I was compelled to confess that Willie's theory was more than
upheld by the facts. First of all was the character of Miss Emily as I
read it, sternly conscientious, proud, and yet gentle. Second, there was
the connection of the Bullard girl with the case. And third, there
was the invader of the night before, an unknown quantity where so much
seemed known, where a situation involving Miss Emily alone seemed to
call for no one else.
Willie put the matter flatly to me as he stood in the hall, drawing on
his driving gloves.
"Do you want to follow it up?" he asked. "Isn't it better to let it go?
After all, you have only rented the house. You haven't taken over its
history, or any responsibility but the rent."
"I think Miss Emily needs to be helped," I said, rather feebly.
"Let her friends help her. She has plenty of them. Besides, isn't it
rather a queer way to help her, to try to fasten a murder on her?"
I could not explain what I felt so strongly--that Miss Emily could only
be helped by being hurt, that whatever she was concealing, the long
concealment was killing her. That I felt in her--it is always difficult
to put what I felt about Miss Emily into words--that she both hoped for
and dreaded desperately the light of the truth.
But if I was hardly practical when it came to Miss Emily, I was
rational enough in other things. It is with no small pride--but without
exultation, for in the end it cost too much--that I point to the
solution of one issue as my own.
With Willie gone, Maggie and I settled down to the quiet tenure of our
days. She informed me, on the morning after that eventful night, that
she had not closed an eye after one o'clock! She came into the library
and asked me if I could order her some sleeping-powders.
"Fiddlesticks!" I said sharply. "You slept all night. I was up and
around the house, and you never knew it."
"Honest to heaven, Miss Agnes, I never slep' at all. I heard a horse
galloping', like it was runnin' off, and it waked me for good."
And after a time I felt that, however mistaken Maggie had been about her
night's sleep, she was possibly correct about the horse.
"He started to run about the stable somewhere," she said. "You can smile
if you want. That's the heaven's truth. And he came down the drive on
the jump and out onto the road."
"We can go and look for hoof-marks," I said, and rose. But Maggie only
shook her head.
"It was no real horse, Miss Agnes," she said. "You'll find nothing.
Anyhow, I've been and looked. There's not a mark."
But Maggie was wrong. I found hoof-prints in plenty in the turf beside
the drive, and a track of them through the lettuce-bed in the garden.
More than that, behind the stable I found where a horse had been tied
and had broken away. A piece of worn strap still hung there. It was
sufficiently clear, then, that whoever had broken into the house had
come on horseback and left afoot. But many people in the neighborhood
used horses. The clue, if clue it can be called, got me nowhere.