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Rh pecting to get from Warden some information that he needed, and that to prevent Warden's giving him this, Warden had been killed. Then Warden's death had caused Santoine to go to Seattle and take charge of many of Warden's affairs; Eaton had thought that the information which had been in Warden's possession might now be in Santoine's; Eaton, therefore, had followed Santoine onto the train.

Santoine had not had the information Eaton required, and he could not even imagine yet what the nature of that information could be. This was not because he was not familiar enough with Warden's affairs; it was because he was too familiar with them. Warden had been concerned in a hundred enterprises; Santoine had no way of telling which of this hundred had concerned Eaton. He certainly could recall no case in which a man of Eaton's age and class had been so terribly wronged that double murder would have been resorted to for the concealment of the facts. But he understood that, in his familiarity with Warden's affairs, he had probably been in a position to get the information, if he had known what specific matters it concerned. That, then, had been the reason why his own death would have served for the time being in place of Eaton's.

Those who had followed Eaton had known that Santoine could get this information; that accounted for all that had taken place on the train. It accounted for the subsequent attack on Eaton when it became known that Santoine was getting well. It accounted also—Santoine was breathing quickly as he recognized this—for the invasion of his study and the forcing of the safe last night.