But I had not yet had a reply to my telegram to headquarters, so I said nothing to Hall on this subject, and putting the photograph in my pocket continued to assist him to look for the will, but without success.  However, the discovery of the photograph had in a measure diverted my suspicions from Gregory Hall; and though I endeavored to draw him into general conversation, I did not ask him any definite questions about himself.

But the more I talked with him, the more I disliked him:  He not only showed a mercenary, fortune-hunting spirit, but he showed himself in many ways devoid of the finer feelings and chivalrous nature that ought to belong to the man about to marry such a perfect flower of womanhood as Florence Lloyd.

XI

LOUIS’S STORY

After spending an evening in thinking over the situation and piecing together my clues, I decided that the next thing to be done was to trace up that transfer.  If I could fasten that upon Gregory Hall, it would indeed be a starting point to work from.  Although this seemed to eliminate Mrs. Purvis, who had already become a living entity in my mind, I still had haunting suspicions of Hall; and then, too, there was a possibility of collusion between these two.  It might be fanciful, but if Hall and the Purvis woman were both implicated, Hall was quite enough a clever villain to treat the photograph lightly as he had done.

And so the next morning, I started for the office of the trolley car company.

I learned without difficulty that the transfer I had found, must have been given to some passenger the night of Mr. Crawford’s death, but was not used.  It had been issued after nine o’clock in the evening, somewhere on the line between New York and West Sedgwick.  It was a transfer which entitled a passenger on that line to a trip on the branch line running through West Sedgwick, and the fact that it had not been used, implied either a negligent conductor or a decision on the part of the passenger not to take his intended ride.

All this was plausible, though a far from definite indication that Hall might have come out from New York by trolley, or part way by trolley, and though accepting a transfer on the West Sedgwick branch, had concluded not to use it.  But the whole theory pointed equally as well to Mrs. Purvis, or indeed to the unknown intruder insisted upon by so many.  I endeavored to learn something from certain conductors who brought their cars into West Sedgwick late at night, but it seemed they carried a great many passengers and of course could not identify a transfer, of which scores of duplicates had been issued.

Without much hope I interviewed the conductors of the West Sedgwick Branch Line.  Though I could learn nothing definite, I fell into conversation with one of them, a young Irishman, who was interested because of my connection with the mystery.