“Oh, of course,” said the school-master deprecatingly.  “I threw it out only as the merest suggestion.  I shouldn’t think of—­of—­you understand me?”

“Is it beyond the dreams of probability,” said Mr. Craggie, appealing to Lawyer Perkins, “that clairvoyants may eventually be introduced into cases in our courts?”

“They are now,” said Mr. Perkins, with a snort,—­“the police bring ’em it.”

Mr. Craggie finished the remainder of his glass of sherry in silence, and presently rose to go.  Coroner Whidden and Mr. Ward had already gone.  The guests in the public room were thinning out; a gloom, indefinable and shapeless like the night, seemed to have fallen upon the few that lingered.  At a somewhat earlier hour tdhan usual the gas was shut off in the Stillwater hotel.

In the lonely house in Welch’s Court a light was still burning.

IV

A sorely perplexed man sat there, bending over his papers by the lamp-light.  Mr. Taggett had established himself at the Shackford house on his arrival, preferring it to the hotel, where he would have been subjected to the curiosity of the guests and to endless annoyances.  Up to this moment, perhaps not a dozen persons in the place had had more than a passing glimpse of him.  He was a very busy man, working at his desk from morning until night, and then taking only a brief walk, for exercise in some unfrequented street.  His meals were sent in from the hotel to the Shackford house, where the constables reported to him, and where he held protracted conferences with Justice Beemis, Coroner Whidden, Lawyer Perkins, and a few others, and declined to be interviewed by the local editor.

To the outside eye that weather-stained, faded old house appeared a throbbing seat of esoteric intelligence.  It was as if a hundred invisible magnetic threads converged to a focus under that roof and incessantly clicked ouit the most startling information,—­information which was never by any chance allowed to pass beyond the charmed circle.  The pile of letters which the mail brought to Mr. Taggett every morning—­chiefly anonymous suggestions, and offers of assistance from lunatics in remote cities—­was enough in itself to expasperate a community.

Covertly at first, and then openly, Stillwater began seriously to question Mr. Taggett’s method of working up the case.  The Gazette, in a double-leaded leader, went so far as to compare him to a bird with fine feathers and no song, and to suggest that perhaps the bird might have sung if the inducement offered had been more substantial.  A singer of Mr. Taggett’s plumage was not to be taught by such chaff as five hundred dollars.  Having killed his man, the editor proceeded to remark that he would suspend judgment until next week.

As if to make perfect the bird comparison, Mr. Taggett, after keeping the public in suspense for six days and nights, abruptly flew away, with all the little shreds and straws of evidence he had picked up, to build his speculative nest elsewhere.