McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end
of the business. I never liked it, and since
the strange case of the man in lower ten, I have been
a bit squeamish. Given a case like that, where
you can build up a network of clues that absolutely
incriminate three entirely different people, only
one of whom can be guilty, and your faith in circumstantial
evidence dies of overcrowding. I never see
a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners’
dock that I do not hark back with shuddering horror
to the strange events on the Pullman car Ontario,
between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night of
September ninth, last.
McKnight could tell the story a great deal better
than I, although he can not spell three consecutive
words correctly. But, while he has imagination
and humor, he is lazy.
“It didn’t happen to me, anyhow,”
he protested, when I put it up to him. “And
nobody cares for second-hand thrills. Besides,
you want the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and
I’m no hand for that. I’m a lawyer.”
So am I, although there have been times when my assumption
in that particular has been disputed. I am unmarried,
and just old enough to dance with the grown-up little
sisters of the girls I used to know. I am fond
of outdoors, prefer horses to the aforesaid grown-up
little sisters, am without sentiment (am crossed out
and was substituted.-Ed.) and completely ruled and
frequently routed by my housekeeper, an elderly widow.
In fact, of all the men of my acquaintance, I was
probably the most prosaic, the least adventurous,
the one man in a hundred who would be likely to go
without a deviation from the normal through the orderly
procession of the seasons, summer suits to winter flannels,
golf to bridge.
So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to
perch on my unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie
me up with a crime, ticket me with a love affair,
and start me on that sensational and not always respectable
journey that ended so surprisingly less than three
weeks later in the firm’s private office.
It had been the most remarkable period of my life.
I would neither give it up nor live it again under
any inducement, and yet all that I lost was some twenty
yards off my drive!
It was really McKnight’s turn to make the next
journey. I had a tournament at Chevy Chase for
Saturday, and a short yacht cruise planned for Sunday,
and when a man has been grinding at statute law for
a week, he needs relaxation. But McKnight begged
off. It was not the first time he had shirked
that summer in order to run down to Richmond, and
I was surly about it. But this time he had a
new excuse. “I wouldn’t be able
to look after the business if I did go,” he
said. He has a sort of wide-eyed frankness that
makes one ashamed to doubt him. “I’m
always car sick crossing the mountains. It’s
a fact, Lollie. See-sawing over the peaks does
it. Why, crossing the Alleghany Mountains has
the Gulf Stream to Bermuda beaten to a frazzle.”
