The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery
with possibilities. It was Mr. Harbison finally
who took Jim’s candle and crawled through the
aperture. We waited in dead silence, listening
to his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching
the faint yellow light that came through the ragged
opening in the wall. Then he came back and called
through to us.
“Place is locked, over here,” he said.
“Heavy oak door at the head of the steps.
Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount
of labor for nothing.”
The weapon, a crowbar, lay on the ground beside the
bricks, and he picked it up and balanced it on his
hand. Dallas’ florid face was almost comical
in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy—he slammed
a piece of slag at the furnace and walked away.
At the door he turned around.
“Why don’t you accuse me of it?”
he asked bitterly. “Maybe you could find
a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me.”
He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas
and I went up together, but we did not talk.
There seemed to be nothing to say. Not until
I had closed and locked the door of my room did I
venture to look at something that I carried in the
palm of my hand. It was a watch, not running—a
gentleman’s flat gold watch, and it had been
hanging by its fob to a nail in the bricks beside
the aperture.
In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H.
and the picture of a girl, cut from a newspaper.
It was my picture.
Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the
coal cellar and stared at the hole in the wall, and
watched while Max took a tracing of it and of some
footprints in the coal dust on the other side.
I did not go. I went into the library with the
guilty watch in the fold of my gown, and found Mr.
Harbison there, staring through the February gloom
at the blank wall of the next house, and quite unconscious
of the reporter with a drawing pad just below him
in the area-way. I went over and closed the shutters
before his very eyes, but even then he did not move.
“Will you be good enough to turn around?”
I demanded at last.
“Oh!” he said wheeling. “Are
you here?”
There wasn’t any reply to that, so I took the
watch and placed it on the library table between us.
The effect was all that I had hoped. He stared
at it for an instant, then at me, and with his hand
outstretched for it, stopped.
“Where did you find it?” he asked.
I couldn’t understand his expression. He
looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.
“I think you know, Mr. Harbison,” I retorted.
“I wish I did. You opened it?”
“Yes.”
We stood looking at each other across the table.
It was his glance that wavered.
“About the picture—of you,”
he said at last. “You see, down there in
South America, a fellow hasn’t much to do in
the evenings, and a—a chum of mine and
I—we were awfully down on what we called
the plutocrats, the—the leisure classes.
And when that picture of yours came in the paper,
we had—we had an argument. He said—”
He stopped.
