Warrington lapsed back on his pillow and Dr. Mead beckoned to us to withdraw without exciting him any further.

“What difference does it make whether she knows about Forbes or not?” I queried as we tiptoed down the hall.

Garrick shook his head doubtfully.  “Can’t say,” he replied succinctly.  “It may be that Forbes, too, has aspirations.”

The idea sent me off into a maze of speculations, but it did not enlighten me much.  At any rate, I felt, Warrington had said enough to explain his presence in that part of the country.  On one thing, as I have said, Garrick had guessed right.  The blackmailing letter and what we had seen the night before at the crooked gambling joint had been too much for him.  He had not been able to rest as long as he was under a cloud with Miss Winslow until he had had a chance to set himself right in her eyes.

There seemed to be nothing that we could do for him just then.  He was in excellent hands, and now that the doctor knew who he was, a trained nurse had even been sent for from the city and arrived on the train following our own, thus relieving Mrs. Mead of her faithful care of him.

Garrick gave the nurse strict instructions to make exact notes of anything that Warrington might say, and then requested the doctor to take us to the scene of the tragedy.  We were about to start, when Garrick excused himself and hurried back into the house, reappearing in a few minutes.

“I thought perhaps, after all, it would be best to let Miss Winslow know of the accident, as long as it isn’t likely to turn out seriously in the end for Warrington,” he explained, joining us again in Dr. Mead’s car which was waiting in front of the house.  “So I called up her aunt’s at Tuxedo and when Miss Winslow answered the telephone I broke the news to her as gently as I could.  Warrington need have no fear about that girl,” he added.

The wrecked car, we found, had not yet been moved, nor had the broken fence been repaired.  It was, in fact, an accident worth studying topographically.  That part of the road itself near the fence seemed to interest Garrick greatly.  Two or three cars passed while we waited and he noted how carefully each of them seemed to avoid that side toward the broken fence, as though it were haunted.

“I hope they’ve all done that,” Garrick remarked, as he continued to examine the road, which was a trifle damp under the high trees that shaded it.

As he worked, I could not believe that it was wholly fancy that caused me to think of him as searching with dilated nostrils, like a scientific human bloodhound.  For, it was not long before I began to realize what he was looking for in the marks of cars left on the oiled roadway.

During perhaps half an hour he continued studying the road, above and below the exact point of the accident.  At length a low exclamation from him brought me to his side.  He had dropped down in the grease, regardless of his knees and was peering at some rather deep imprints in the surface dressing.  There, for a few feet, were plainly the marks of the outside tires of a car, still unobliterated.