CHAPTER V

THE MAN AT THE BROOK

Beside the brook stood a shabbily-dressed man, apparently fifty-five or sixty years old.  He wore an old rusty black coat and a soft hat with a hole in it.  His face was tanned and partly covered with a beard.

The man was acting in a manner to excite anybody’s curiosity.  He carried a stick in his hand, and was poking around in the water with it.  Every once in a while he looked around, to see if anybody was observing him.

Straining his eyes, Adam Adams saw a strip of white floating on the water.  Once or twice it disappeared.  Finally the end of the strip caught on an overhanging bush, and then the strange man withdrew his cane from the brook.

As he turned around the detective dodged out of sight.  Apparently satisfied that he was not observed, the strange man leaned down at the bank of the brook, took something from his pocket and placed it down on the moist dirt.  Then he took another object from his pocket and repeated the operation.

“Can they be shoes he has in his hands?” mused the detective.  “And if they are, what is he doing with them?”

Hearing the slamming of a door at the mansion, Adam Adams drew still further back among the bushes.  A minute later he saw the man make a long leap, clear the brook, and hurry away among the trees and brushwood on the other side.

“Humph!  Perhaps this is worth investigating,” mused the detective, and made his way to the spot the strange individual had occupied.  On the bank of the brook he saw the marks of the man’s broad shoes and also some prints made by smaller shoes.  The latter prints were irregular, and at once arrested the detective’s attention.  He smiled grimly to himself.

“Clue number one!” he muttered.

Adam Adams looked around in the water.  Soon he came upon the strip of white, and, pulling on it, brought to light a white silk shirtwaist, torn to ribbons in front and at one sleeve.  He wrung the water and mud from the garment and examined it.  Inside of the collar band were the initials, “M.  A. L.”

“Margaret A. Langmore,” he murmured.  “Those initials are hers.  If the shirtwaist was hers, how did that fellow get possession of it?  And did he place it here or find it here?”

Drying the garment as much as possible, he placed it in his pocket, and continued his search around the vicinity.  He spent fully an hour in the locality, and then walked back the way he had come, and into the mansion.  There he found Thomas Ostrello In conversation with the policeman.

“It is a terrible blow to me,” the commercial traveler was saying.  “And to think I was here just the day before it happened!  If I had remained here over night, it might not have occurred at all!”

“Well, that’s the way things happen,” answered the policeman.  “Once I was at one end of my beat when a thief broke into a store at the other end and stole sixteen dollars and two hams.”