With another warning to Mrs. Tate as to silence, we
started back to Sunnyside. So Fanny Armstrong
knew of Lucien Wallace, and was sufficiently interested
to visit him and pay for his support. Who was
the child’s mother and where was she? Who
was Nina Carrington? Did either of them know
where Halsey was or what had happened to him?
On the way home we passed the little cemetery where
Thomas had been laid to rest. I wondered if
Thomas could have helped us to find Halsey, had he
lived. Farther along was the more imposing burial-ground,
where Arnold Armstrong and his father lay in the shadow
of a tall granite shaft. Of the three, I think
Thomas was the only one sincerely mourned.
A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE
The bitterness toward the dead president of the Traders’
Bank seemed to grow with time. Never popular,
his memory was execrated by people who had lost nothing,
but who were filled with disgust by constantly hearing
new stories of the man’s grasping avarice.
The Traders’ had been a favorite bank for small
tradespeople, and in its savings department it had
solicited the smallest deposits. People who had
thought to be self-supporting to the last found themselves
confronting the poorhouse, their two or three hundred
dollar savings wiped away. All bank failures
have this element, however, and the directors were
trying to promise twenty per cent. on deposits.
But, like everything else those days, the bank failure
was almost forgotten by Gertrude and myself.
We did not mention Jack Bailey: I had found
nothing to change my impression of his guilt, and
Gertrude knew how I felt. As for the murder of
the bank president’s son, I was of two minds.
One day I thought Gertrude knew or at least suspected
that Jack had done it; the next I feared that it had
been Gertrude herself, that night alone on the circular
staircase. And then the mother of Lucien Wallace
would obtrude herself, and an almost equally good case
might be made against her. There were times,
of course, when I was disposed to throw all those
suspicions aside, and fix definitely on the unknown,
whoever that might be.
I had my greatest disappointment when it came to tracing
Nina Carrington. The woman had gone without
leaving a trace. Marked as she was, it should
have been easy to follow her, but she was not to be
found. A description to one of the detectives,
on my arrival at home, had started the ball rolling.
But by night she had not been found. I told
Gertrude, then, about the telegram to Louise when
she had been ill before; about my visit to Doctor
Walker, and my suspicions that Mattie Bliss and Nina
Carrington were the same. She thought, as I
did, that there was little doubt of it.
I said nothing to her, however, of the detective’s
suspicions about Alex. Little things that I
had not noticed at the time now came back to me.
I had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Alex
was a spy, and that by taking him into the house I
had played into the enemy’s hand. But at
eight o’clock that night Alex himself appeared,
and with him a strange and repulsive individual.
They made a queer pair, for Alex was almost as disreputable
as the tramp, and he had a badly swollen eye.
