"What an item that would have been if one paper had got hold of it and the others hadn"t! I suppose they all got on to it at the same time?"
"About that," said Brenton, "I don"t know, and I must confess that I do not care very much. But here is the trouble--my wife has been arrested for my murder, and she is as innocent as I am."
"Sure of that?"
"_Sure_ of it?" cried the other indignantly. "Of course I am sure of it."
"Then who is the guilty person?"
"Ah, that," said Brenton, "I do not yet know."
"Then how can you be sure she is not guilty?"
"If you talk like that," exclaimed Brenton, "I have nothing more to say."
"Now, don"t get offended, I beg of you. I am merely looking at this from a newspaper standpoint, you know. You must remember it is not you who will decide the matter, but a jury of your very stupid fellow-countrymen. Now, you can never tell what a jury _will_ do, except that it will do something idiotic. Therefore, it seems to me that the very first step to be taken is to find out who the guilty party is.
Don"t you see the force of that?"
"Yes, I do."
"Very well, then. Now, what were the circ.u.mstances of this crime? who was to profit by your death?"
Brenton winced at this.
"I see how it is," said the other, "and I understand why you don"t answer. Now--you"ll excuse me if I am frank--your wife was the one who benefited most by your death, was she not?"
"No," cried the other indignantly, "she was not the one. That is what the lawyers said. Why in the world should she want to poison me, when she had all my wealth at her command as it was?"
"Yes, that"s a strong point," said Speed. "You were a reasonably good husband, I suppose? Rather generous with the cash?"
"Generous?" cried the other. "My wife always had everything she wanted."
"Ah, well, there was no--you"ll excuse me, I am sure--no former lover in the case, was there?"
Again Brenton winced, and he thought of Roland sitting beside his wife with her hand in his.
"I see," said Speed; "you needn"t answer. Now what were the circ.u.mstances, again?"
"They were these: At a dinner which I gave, where some twenty or twenty-five of my friends were a.s.sembled, poison, it appears, was put into my cup of coffee. That is all I know of it."
"Who poured out that cup of coffee?"
"My wife did."
"Ah! Now, I don"t for a moment say she is guilty, remember; but you must admit that, to a stupid jury, the case _might_ look rather bad against her."
"Well, granted that it does, there is all the more need that I should come to her a.s.sistance if possible."
"Certainly, certainly!" said Speed. "Now, I"ll tell you what we have to do. We must get, if possible, one of the very brightest Chicago reporters on the track of this thing, and we have to get him on the track of it early. Come with me to Chicago. We will try an experiment, and I am sure you will lend your mind entirely to the effort. We must act in conjunction in this affair, and you are just the man I"ve been wanting, some one who is earnest and who has something at stake in the matter. We may fail entirely, but I think it"s worth the trying. Will you come?"
"Certainly," said Brenton; "and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your interest and sympathy."
Arriving at a brown stone building on the corner of two of the princ.i.p.al streets in Chicago, Brenton and Speed ascended quickly to one of the top floors. It was nearly midnight, and two upper stories of the huge dark building were brilliantly lighted, as was shown on the outside by the long rows of glittering windows. They entered a room where a man was seated at a table, with coat and vest thrown off, and his hat set well back on his head. Cold as it was outside, it was warm in this man"s room, and the room was blue with smoke. A black corn-cob pipe was in his teeth, and the man was writing away as if for dear life, on sheets of coa.r.s.e white copy paper, stopping now and then to fill up his pipe or to relight it after it had gone out.
"There," said Speed, waving his hand towards the writer with a certain air of proprietory pride, "there sits one of the very cleverest men on the Chicago press. That fellow, sir, is gifted with a nose for news which has no equal in America. He will ferret out a case that he once starts on with an unerringness that would charm you. Yes, sir, I got him his present situation on this paper, and I can tell you it was a good one."
"He must have been a warm friend of yours?" said Brenton, indifferently, as if he did not take much interest in the eulogy.
"Quite the contrary," said Speed. "He was a warm enemy, made it mighty warm for _me_ sometimes. He was on an opposition paper, but I tell you, although I was no chicken in newspaper business, that man would scoop the daylight out of me any time he tried. So, to get rid of opposition, I got the managing editor to appoint him to a place on our paper; and I tell you, he has never regretted it. Yes, sir, there sits George Stratton, a man who knows his business. Now," he said, "let us concentrate our attention on him. First let us see whether, by putting our whole minds to it, we can make any impression on _his_ mind whatever. You see how busily he is engaged. He is thoroughly absorbed in his work. That is George all over. Whatever his a.s.signment is, George throws himself right into it, and thinks of nothing else until it is finished. _Now_ then."
In that dingy, well-lighted room George Stratton sat busily pencilling out the lines that were to appear in next morning"s paper. He was evidently very much engrossed in his task, as Speed had said. If he had looked about him, which he did not, he would have said that he was entirely alone. All at once his attention seemed to waver, and he pa.s.sed his hand over his brow, while perplexity came into his face. Then he noticed that his pipe was out, and, knocking the ashes from it by rapping the bowl on the side of the table, he filled it with an absent-mindedness unusual with him. Again he turned to his writing, and again he pa.s.sed his hand over his brow. Suddenly, without any apparent cause, he looked first to the right and then to the left of him. Once more he tried to write, but, noticing his pipe was out, he struck another match and nervously puffed away, until clouds of blue smoke rose around him. There was a look of annoyance and perplexity in his face as he bent resolutely to his writing. The door opened, and a man appeared on the threshold.
"Anything more about the convention, George?" he said.
"Yes; I am just finishing this. Sort of pen pictures, you know."
"Perhaps you can let me have what you have done. I"ll fix it up."
"All right," said Stratton, bunching up the ma.n.u.script in front of him, and handing it to the city editor.
That functionary looked at the number of pages, and then at the writer.
"Much more of this, George?" he said. "We"ll be a little short of room in the morning, you know."
"Well," said the other, sitting back in his chair, "it is pretty good stuff that. Folks always like the pen pictures of men engaged in the skirmish better than the reports of what most of them say."
"Yes," said the city editor, "that"s so."
"Still," said Stratton, "we could cut it off at the last page. Just let me see the last two pages, will you?"
These were handed to him, and, running his eye through them, he drew his knife across one of the pages, and put at the bottom the cabalistic mark which indicated the end of the copy.
"There! I think I will let it go at that. Old Rickenbeck don"t amount to much, anyhow. We"ll let him go."
"All right," said the city editor. "I think we won"t want anything more to-night."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "She"s pretty as a picture."]
Stratton put his hands behind his head, with his fingers interlaced, and leaned back in his chair, placing his heels upon the table before him.
A thought-reader, looking at his face, could almost have followed the theme that occupied his mind. Suddenly bringing his feet down with a crash to the floor, he rose and went into the city editor"s room.
"See here," he said. "Have you looked into that Cincinnati case at all?"
"What Cincinnati case?" asked the local editor, looking up.
"Why, that woman who is up for poisoning her husband."
"Oh yes; we had something of it in the despatches this morning. It"s rather out of the local line, you know."