“Well?” he said cheerfully.  “It was, wasn’t it?”

Gregory stopped dead and stared at him.  Then: 

“Old dog Tray!” he said sneeringly.  “If your brain was as good as your nose, Bassett, you’d be a whale of a newspaper man.”

“Don’t bother about my brain.  It’s working fine to-day, anyhow.  Well, what had he to say for himself?”

Gregory’s mind was busy, and he had had a moment to pull himself together.

“We both get off together,” he said, more amiably.  “That fellow isn’t Jud Clark and never was.  He’s a doctor, and the nephew of the old doctor there.  They’re in practice together.”

“Did you see them both?”

“Yes.”

Bassett eyed him.  Either Gregory was a good actor, or the whole trail ended there after all.  He himself had felt, after his interview, with Dick, that the scent was false.  And there was this to be said:  Gregory had been in the house scarcely ten minutes.  Long enough to acknowledge a mistake, but hardly long enough for any dramatic identification.  He was keenly disappointed, but he had had long experience of disappointment, and after a moment he only said: 

“Well, that’s that.  He certainly looked like Clark to me.”

“I’ll say he did.”

“Rather surprised him, didn’t you?”

“Oh, he was all right,” Gregory said.  “I didn’t tell him anything, of course.”

Bassett looked at his watch.

“I was after you, all right,” he said, cheerfully.  “But if I was barking up the wrong tree, I’m done.  I don’t have to be hit on the head to make me stop.  Come and have a soda-water on me,” he finished amiably.  “There’s no train until seven.”

But Gregory refused.

“No, thanks.  I’ll wander on down to the station and get a paper.”

The reporter smiled.  Gregory was holding a grudge against him, for a bad night and a bad day.

“All right,” he said affably.  “I’ll see you at the train.  I’ll walk about a bit.”

He turned and started back up the street again, walking idly.  His chagrin was very real.  He hated to be fooled, and fooled he had been.  Gregory was not the only one who had lost a night’s sleep.  Then, unexpectedly, he was hailed from the curbstone, and he saw with amazement that it was Dick Livingstone.

“Take you anywhere?” Dick asked.  “How’s the headache?”

“Better, thanks.”  Bassett stared at him.  “No, I’m just walking around until train-time.  Are you starting out or going home, at this hour?”

“Going home.  Well, glad the head’s better.”

He drove on, leaving the reporter gazing after him.  So Gregory had been lying.  He hadn’t seen this chap at all.  Then why—?  He walked on, turning this new phase of the situation over in his mind.  Why this elaborate fiction, if Gregory had merely gone in, waited for ten minutes, and come out again?

It wasn’t reasonable.  It wasn’t logical.  Something had happened inside the house to convince Gregory that he was right.  He had seen somebody, or something.  He hadn’t needed to lie.  He could have said frankly that he had seen no one.  But no, he had built up a fabric carefully calculated to throw Bassett off the scent.