FullReads

“I knew there was something wrong about him,” said the stranger. “It is my business to be observant.”

He dismounted and hitched his horse to a tree. The dead body was shown to him. He examined it very thoroughly. All the particulars were related to him over and over. Then he drew Superintendent Brainerd aside.

“My name is Terence O’Reagan,” he said, and in his voice was faintly distinguishable the brogue of the land whence the O’Reagans came. “I am a government detective. I have been sent to work up evidence in the case of some Italian counterfeiters. We had a clew pointing to a sub-contractor here–the very man who lies there dead. Our information was that he used some of the bogus bills in paying off his gang. Now, it isn’t going outside my mission to investigate his death–if you don’t object.”

“I would be glad to have you take hold of it,” Brainerd replied. “We can’t bring the authorities here before noon, at the earliest, and in the mean time you can perhaps clear it all up.”

The eagerly curious men had crowded close to this brief dialogue, and had heard the latter part of it. O’Reagan became instantly an important personage, upon whose smallest word or movement they hung expectantly, and nobody showed a keener interest than Gerald Heath. The detective first examined the body. The pockets of Ravelli’s clothes contained a wallet, with its money untouched, beside a gold watch.

“So robbery was not the object,” said O’Reagan to Brainerd. “The motive is the first thing to look for in a case of murder.”

Next, he found blood on the waistcoat, a great deal of it, but dried by the fire that had burned the shoulders and head; and in the baked cloth were three cuts, under which he exposed three stab wounds. Strokes of a knife had, it seemed, killed the victim before he was thrust partially into the furnace.

A storm was coming to Overlook unperceived, for the men were too much engrossed in what lay there on the ground, ghastly and horrible, to pay any attention to the clouding sky. Gloom was so fit for the scene, too, that nobody gave a thought from whence it came. To Gerald Heath the going out of sunlight, and the settling down of dusky shadows seemed a mental experience of his own. He stood bewildered, transfixed, vaguely conscious of peril, and yet too numb to speak or stir. Detective O’Reagan, straightening up from over the body, looked piercingly at Gerald, and then glanced around at the rest.

“Is there anybody here who saw Tonio Ravelli last night?” he asked.

“I did,” Gerald replied.

“Where and when?”

“At the same place where I met Eph, and immediately afterward.”

“Ah! now we are locating Eph and Ravelli together. That looks like the lunatic being undoubtedly the stabber.”

“And we must catch him,” Brainerd interposed. “I’ll send riders toward Dimmersville immediately.”

“No great hurry about that,” the detective remarked; “he is too crazy to have had any clear motive or any idea of escape. It will be easy enough to capture him.” Then he turned to Gerald, and questioned with the air of a cross-examiner: “Did the two men have any words together?”

“No,” was the ready answer; “I don’t know that they even saw each other at that time. Eph went away an instant before Ravelli came.”

“Did you talk with Ravelli?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“Not about Eph at all.”

“About what, then?”

Now the reply came reluctantly: “A personal matter–something that had occurred between us–an incident at the telegraph station.”

“The station where Eph had awakened the girl operator? Was it a quarrel about her?”

“That is no concern of yours. You are impertinent.”

“Well, sir, the question is pertinent–as the lawyers say–and the answer concerns you, whether it does me or not. You and Ravelli quarreled about the girl?”

“The young lady shall not be dragged into this. She wasn’t responsible for what happened between Ravelli and me.”

“What did happen between you and Ravelli?”