It was some time before he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, showing me a pencil mark on it. He closed the door before he did it.

“Some woman,” he said, “walked in the gate that night and went to the playhouse. She walked in, but from the look of the snow I’d say she ran out. That’s approximately the size of her foot.”

“A woman! You think a woman killed her?”

“I haven’t said that. I’ve said a woman was there. She went to the door of the playhouse and she left it in a hurry. That’s a small size, isn’t it?”

It was. Compared with my own it was almost an inch shorter. He saw what I was thinking, but he shook his head.

“It wasn’t Bessie,” he said. “If Maud Wainwright wanted to talk to her she would have done it right here. She didn’t. The way it looks now, she went to the playhouse to meet somebody; probably a woman. She took Tony’s gun with her. Maybe she got it after Bessie was shot, or let’s say Hilda got it for her. She hid it anyway. Now she’s going out at night to meet somebody she doesn’t trust. She carries it with her, and there’s a quarrel. The other woman gets the gun and—”

I put my hands to my ears. “Don’t, Jim,” I said. “I can’t bear it.”

“Got to face it, Pat,” he said. “Either that or she killed herself. Only two guesses, and you don’t think it was suicide.”

“I don’t know,” I said confusedly. “I can’t even think, Jim. She had been different lately. Only an hour or two before this happened we’d listed her jewels. I thought she meant to sell them. She’d talked of giving up this place too. You can ask Margery Stoddard about it. She knows.”

“She was pretty intimate with Mrs. Stoddard, wasn’t she?”

“She liked her. She wasn’t intimate with anybody.”

“Any reason for them to quarrel?”

“Good heavens, no.”

He resumed his restless pacing of the floor. He was sure all these things tied together, beginning with Don’s murder.

“Leave out Evans,” he said, “and think about it. Morgan is killed, here in the playhouse. Maybe Bessie sees something that night, and later on there’s an attempt to kill her too. Then come to Mrs. Wainwright. She’s all right after Don’s murder, but a day or so after it something happens to her. She learns something, and she has a heart attack. If we knew what she learned and how she learned it, maybe we’d know why she died; but first we have to find out why Don Morgan was killed. That’s the key to the whole thing.”

He continued. He had been on Don’s trail ever since his murder. He knew that he had come to America in the spring. He had come back first-class on a good boat, and if he was a sick man nobody on the ship had guessed it. He had made friends on that trip, and one of them gave him a position when he returned. With the exception of a few days in June he had worked until the first of August. Then all at once he had thrown up his job and left town.