Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/142

120 out. He examined the lock, tried it once or twice with the key, which was in it; then he turned to me.

“What time do you leave in the morning?” he asked.

“About seven-thirty.”

“Seven-thirty—very well. Now I must be going. Look for me in the morning.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes—I’ll explain afterwards. Now let me out softly.”

“Wait,” I said, for I too had a sudden idea. “You have a photograph of Thompson, I suppose?”

“Yes, at the office.”

“Bring it up in the morning with you. I should like to look at it.”

“All right,” he said, and after I had made sure that the coast was clear, he stole away upon tiptoe.

For a long time after he had gone, I sat and thought over the evening’s events. In the first place, he had given me a complete and succinct story of the crime; I felt that I held in my hands all the details of the tragedy—all the threads that led toward its solution. As Godfrey had pointed out, the foundation was as yet too weak to support a theory—we needed more facts to build upon. The strands of circumstance we had woven about Tremaine were really mere cobwebs—any breath of wind might blow them away. Was there really any connection between him and Thompson? That they had both lived in the tropics proved nothing; and they could hardly have come to New