Page:The Millbank Case - 1905 - Eldridge.djvu/185

 the first that if men looked for motives, they'd fasten on us?"

"I mean to say exactly that," Frank Hunter answered; "and unless we can dig up something that shows that somebody else was in as bad a position as we, it will go hard with us, unless we can tire the detectives out and make them give it up as a bad job."

It was Henry Matthewson's turn to look and feel uneasy. Born to affluence, raised in wealth, and encouraged to high ambition, he had already gone far for a young man, and it seemed a piteous thing that in his own house, with his wife and children almost within call of his voice, he should be told that unless men could be made to forget and so abandon their interest in the Wing murder, it might go hard with him—that he might become an object of suspicion.

"I don't mean," Hunter said, "that we are in any danger of being convicted of Wing's murder, or even of being arrested for it. That's way beyond reason. But how much better off would we be, if the community should take up the suspicion that we were interested in Wing's death; that we procured