“I want to tell all of you the whole story,” he began.  “To-morrow I shall go to the district attorney and confess, but—­I want you all to have it first.  I can’t sleep again until I get it off my chest.  Mrs. Pitman has suffered through me, and Mr. Holcombe here has spent money and time—­”

Lida did not speak, but she drew her chair closer, and put her other hand over his.

“I want to get it straight, if I can.  Let me see.  It was on Sunday, the fourth, that the river came up, wasn’t it?  Yes.  Well, on the Thursday before that I met you, Mr. Holcombe, in a restaurant in Pittsburgh.  Do you remember?”

Mr. Holcombe nodded.

“We were talking of crime, and I said no man should be hanged on purely circumstantial evidence.  You affirmed that a well-linked chain of circumstantial evidence could properly hang a man.  We had a long argument, in which I was worsted.  There was a third man at the table—­Bronson, the business manager of the Liberty Theater.”

“Who sided with you,” put in Mr. Holcombe, “and whose views I refused to entertain because, as publicity man for a theater, he dealt in fiction rather than in fact.”

“Precisely.  You may recall, Mr. Holcombe, that you offered to hang any man we would name, given a proper chain of circumstantial evidence against him?”

“Yes.”

“After you left, Bronson spoke to me.  He said business at the theater was bad, and complained of the way the papers used, or would not use, his stuff.  He said the Liberty Theater had not had a proper deal, and that he was tempted to go over and bang one of the company on the head, and so get a little free advertising.

“I said he ought to be able to fake a good story; but he maintained that a newspaper could smell a faked story a mile away, and that, anyhow, all the good stunts had been pulled off.  I agreed with him.  I remember saying that nothing but a railroad wreck or a murder hit the public very hard these days, and that I didn’t feel like wrecking the Pennsylvania Limited.

“He leaned over the table and looked at me.  ’Well, how about a murder, then?’ he said.  ’You get the story for your paper, and I get some advertising for the theater.  We need it, that’s sure.’

“I laughed it off, and we separated.  But at two o’clock Bronson called me up again.  I met him in his office at the theater, and he told me that Jennie Brice, who was out of the cast that week, had asked for a week’s vacation.  She had heard of a farm at a town called Horner, and she wanted to go there to rest.

“‘Now the idea is this,’ he said.  ’She’s living with her husband, and he has threatened her life more than once.  It would be easy enough to frame up something to look as if he’d made away with her.  We’d get a week of excitement, more advertising than we’d ordinarily get in a year; you get a corking news story, and find Jennie Brice at the end, getting the credit for that.  Jennie gets a hundred dollars and a rest, and Ladley, her husband, gets, say, two hundred.’