Page:Wadsworth Camp--the gray mask.djvu/255

Rh whose edges were stained, showing where the knife had penetrated the shoulder. The wound didn't look deep or dangerous, and in his unconsciousness McDonald breathed regularly. So Garth hurried back to the bed and examined the knife. There was no ambiguity about the red stains on the blade. The knife, resting close to the dead hand, had wounded McDonald who had seemed to accuse the still form whose note projected the impression of having been written after death.

Garth smothered his morbid thoughts. McDonald's daughter was the living force, probably at large in this house, that he wanted to chain. If she were guilty of the earlier crime she had sufficient motive for this attempt to keep the old man silent. She could have got such a knife from the kitchen. So, for that matter, could Clara. But the eccentric had laughed. Was that merely coincidence? Garth ran across the hall and listened at her door with an increasing excitement. He heard the running of water, regularly interrupted, as if by hands being cleansed under an open faucet. He tried the door and found it unlocked. He entered, staring at the daring indifference of the old woman who stepped from the bath room, calmly drying her hands on a towel.

"Come in, policeman," she said in her high girlish voice. "Don't suffer in the black hall."

"Let me have that towel," he cried.

Without hesitation she offered him the piece of linen. It showed no stains, nor were there stains