Page:The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916).pdf/128

106 "No!" Avery jerked out shortly.

Eaton's heart, from pulsating fast with Harriet Santoine's attempt at his defense, now constricted with a sudden increase of his terror and anxiety.

"All right, Mr. Eaton!" Connery now returned to his charge. "You are that man. So besides whatever else that means, you'd been in Seattle eleven days and yet you were the last person to get aboard this train, which left a full hour after its usual starting time. Who were you waiting to see get on the train before you yourself took it?"

Eaton wet his lips. To what was Connery working up? The probability, now rapidly becoming certainty, that in addition to the recognition of him as the man who had waited at Warden's—which fact any one at any time might have charged—Connery knew something else which the conductor could not have been expected to know—this dismayed Eaton the more by its indefiniteness. And he saw, as his gaze shifted to Avery, that Avery knew this thing also. All that had gone before had been only preliminary, then; they had been leading up step by step to the circumstance which had finally condemned him in their eyes and was to condemn him in the eyes of Harriet Santoine.

She, he saw, had also sensed the feeling that something else more definite and conclusive was coming. She had paled after the flush in which she had spoken in Eaton's defense, and her hands in her lap were clenched so tightly that the knuckles showed only as spots of white.

Eaton controlled himself to keep his voice steady.

"What do you mean by that question?" he asked.

"I mean that—however innocent or guilty may be