Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/240

224 woman was murdered, and murdered by somebody in this room!"

There was an uneasy stir along that line of anxious faces. I could even hear Copperhead Kate's soft murmur of "Hully Gee!" and see her sleepy eyes widen with the shock of what she had heard. But I wasn't thinking so much about Copperhead Kate as I was about old Ezra Bartlett, who stood there blinking abstractedly at the barrel of my automatic. His body never shifted an inch but his eye followed my movements so closely that it made me think of a zoo eagle blinking at a visitor on a rainy day.

"And you, you weasel-faced old rat," I cried out at him, hot with an unreasoning indignation which I couldn't control, "I want to know what you're doing about that will you're trying to put over on this house!"

"What does she mean by that?" cut in Wendy Washburn, from his end of the line. There was a note in his voice that puzzled me, a note of authority, of impatience, as though he had a perfect right to ask the question he had.

"I'm sure I don't know," answered the old weasel, looking me straight in the eye. "For I never saw this young woman before in my life!"