left them, I gathered that neither he nor any of the family had discovered that it was in running condition.
Assured of this, I astonished them by requesting to have it taken down and set up on the table, which they had no sooner done than it started to tick just as it had done under my hand a few nights before.
The girls, greatly startled, surveyed each other wonderingly.
“Why, it’s going!” cried Caroline.
“Who could have wound it!” marvelled Isabella.
“Hark!” I cried. The clock had begun to strike.
It gave forth five clear notes.
“Well, it’s a mystery!” Isabella exclaimed. Then seeing no astonishment in my face, she added: “Did you know about this, Miss Butterworth?”
“My dear girls,” I hastened to say, with all the impressiveness characteristic of me in my more serious moments. “I do not expect you to ask me for any information I do not volunteer. This is hard, I know; but some day I will be perfectly frank with you. Are you willing to accept my aid on these terms?”
“O yes,” they gasped, but they looked not a little disappointed.
“And now,” said I, “leave the clock where it is, and when your brother comes home, show it to him, and say that having the curiosity to examine it you were surprised to find it going, and that you had left it there for him to see. He will be surprised also, and as a consequence will question first you and then the police to find out who wound it. If they acknowledge having done it, you must notify me at once, for that’s what I want to know. Do you understand, Caroline? And, Isabella, do you feel that you can go through all this without dropping a word concerning me and my interest in this matter?”
Of course they answered yes, and of course it was with so much effusiveness that I was obliged to remind them that they must keep a check on their enthusiasm, and also to suggest that they should not come to my house or send me any notes, but simply a blank card, signifying: “No one knows who wound the clock.”
“How delightfully mysterious!” cried Isabella. And with this girlish exclamation our talk in regard to the clock closed.
The next object that attracted our attention was a paper-covered novel I discovered on a side-table in the same room.
“Whose is this?” I asked.
“Not mine.”
“Not mine.”
“Yet it was published this summer,” I remarked.
They stared at me astonished, and Isabella caught up the book. It was one of those summer publications intended mainly for railroad distribution, and while neither ragged nor soiled, bore evidence of having been read.
“Let me take it,” said I.
Isabella at once passed it into my hands.
“Does your brother smoke?” I asked.
“Which brother?”
“Either of them.”
“Franklin sometimes, but Howard, never. It disagrees with him, I believe.”
“There is a faint odor of tobacco about these pages. Can it have been brought here by Franklin?”
“O no, he never reads novels, not such novels as this, at all events. He loses a lot of pleasure, we think.”
I turned the pages over. The latter ones were so fresh I could almost put my finger on the spot where the reader had left off. Feeling like a bloodhound who has just run upon a trail, I returned the book to Caroline, with the injunction to put it away; adding, as I saw her air of hesitation: “If your brother Franklin misses it, it will show that he brought it here, and then I shall have no further interest in it.” Which seemed to satisfy her, for she put it away at once on a high shelf.
Perceiving nothing else in these rooms of a suggestive character, I led the way into the hall. There I had a new idea.
“Which of you was the first to go through the rooms upstairs?” I inquired.
“Both of us,” answered Isabella. “We came together. Why do you ask, Miss Butterworth?”
“I was wondering if you found everything in order there?”
“We did not notice anything wrong, did we, Caroline? Do you think that the—the person who committed that awful crime went up-stairs? I couldn’t sleep a wink if I thought so.”
“Nor I,” Caroline put in. “O, don’t say that he went up-stairs, Miss Butterworth!”
“I do not know it,” I rejoined.
“But you asked——”
“And I ask again. Wasn’t there some little thing out of its usual place? I was up in your front chamber after water for a minute, but I didn’t touch anything but the mug.”
“We missed the mug, but—O Caroline, the pin-cushion! Do you suppose Miss Butterworth means the pin-cushion?”
I started. Did she refer to the one I had picked up from the floor and placed on a side-table?
“What about the pin-cushion?” I asked.
“O nothing, but we did not know what to make of its being on the table. You see, we had a little pin-cushion shaped like a tomato which always hung at the side of our bureau. It was tied to one of the brackets and was never taken off; Caroline having a fancy for it because it kept her favorite black pins out of the reach of the neighbor’s children when they came here. Well, this cushion, this sacred cushion which none of us dared touch, was found by us on a little table by the door, with the ribbon hanging from it by which it had been tied to the bureau. Some one had pulled it off, and very roughly too, for the ribbon was all ragged and torn. But there is nothing in a little thing like that to interest you, is there, Miss Butterworth?”
“No,” said I, not relating my part in the affair; “not if our neighbor’s children were the marauders.”
“But none of them came in for days before we left.”
“Are there pins in the cushion?”
“When we found it, do you mean? No.”
I did not remember seeing any, but one cannot always trust to one’s memory.
“But you had left pins in it?”
“Possibly, I don’t remember. Why should I remember such a thing as that?”
I thought to myself, “I would know whether I left pins on my pin-cushion or not,” but every one is not as methodical as I am, more’s the pity.
“Have you anywhere about you a pin like those you keep on that cushion?” I inquired of Caroline.
She felt at her belt and neck and shook her head.
“I may have upstairs,” she replied.
“Then get me one.” But before she could start, I pulled her back. “Did either of you sleep in that room last night?”
“No, we were going to,” answered Isabella, “but afterwards Caroline took a freak to sleep in one of the rooms on the third floor. She said she wanted to get away from the parlors as far as possible.”
“Then I should like a peep at the one overhead.”
The wrenching of the pin-cushion from its place had given me an idea.
They looked at me wistfully as they turned to mount the stairs, but I did not enlighten them further. What would an idea be worth shared by them!
Their father undoubtedly lay in the back room, for they moved very softly around the head of the stairs, but once in front they let their tongues run loose again. I,