I’ve known you more than once to succeed where others have failed.”
The elderly man thus addressed, glanced down at his legs, now propped up on a stool which someone had brought him, and smiled, with the pathos of the old who sees the interests of a lifetime slipping gradually away.
“I am not what I was. I can no longer get down on my hands and knees to pick up threads from the nap of a rug, or spy out a spot of blood in the crimson woof of a carpet.”
“You shall have Sweetwater here to do the active work for you. What we want of you is the directing mind—the infallible instinct. It’s a case in a thousand, Gryce. We’ve never had anything just like it. You’ve never had anything at all like it. It will make you young again.”
The old man’s eyes shot fire and unconsciously one foot slipped to the floor. Then he bethought himself and painfully lifted it back again.
“What are the points? What’s the difficulty?” he asked. “A woman has been shot—”
“No, not shot, stabbed. We thought she had been shot, for that was intelligible and involved no impossibilities. But Drs. Heath and Webster, under the eye of the Challoners’ own physician, have made an examination of the wound—an official one, thorough and quite final so far as they are concerned, and they declare that no bullet is to be found in the body. As the wound extends no further than the heart, this settles one great point, at least.”
“Dr. Heath is a reliable man and one of our ablest coroners.”
“Yes. There can be no question as to the truth of his report. You know the victim? Her name, I mean, and the character she bore?”
“Yes; so much was told me on my way down.”
“A fine girl unspoiled by riches and seeming independence. Happy, too, to all appearance, or we should be more ready to consider the possibility of suicide.”
“Suicide by stabbing calls for a weapon. Yet none has been found, I hear.”
“None.”
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