The Mark of Cain

The coroner hesitated. He was afraid of this strange young man who seemed so daring and yet had an effect of bravado rather than guilt.

“Was it you, Mr. Landon who telephoned to Mr. Trowbridge the message we have heard reported?”

“It was not.”

“Did you telephone your uncle at all yesterday?”

“In the morning, yes. In the afternoon, no.”

“Do you know of any one else who could call him uncle?”

“No man, that I know of.”

“This was a man speaking, Miss Wilkinson?”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure it was a man. And Mr. Trowbridge called him nephew.”

“That means, then, Mr. Landon, that it was you speaking, or some other nephew of Mr. Trowbridge.”

“Might not the stenographer have misunderstood the words? The young lady reports a strange conversation. I would never have dreamed of offering my uncle stephanotis.”

“I cannot think any man would. Therefore, I think Miss Wilkinson must have misunderstood that part of the talk.”

A diversion was created just here by the arrival of a messenger from headquarters, who brought a possible clue. It was a lead pencil which had been found near the scene of the crime.

“Who found it?” asked the coroner.

“One of the police detectives. He’s been scouring ground by daylight, but this is all he found.”

“Ah, doubtless from Mr. Trowbridge’s pocket. Do you think it was his, Miss Trowbridge?”

Avice looked at the pencil. “I can’t say positively,” she replied. “It very likely was his. I think it is the make he used.”

“Not much of a clue,” observed Groot, glancing at the pencil.

“Kin I see it?” asked Fibsy, eagerly. And scarce waiting for permission, he stepped to the coroner’s table, and looked carefully at the new exhibit.

“Yep,” he said, “it’s the make and the number Mr. Trowbridge always has in the office. Keep it careful, Mr. Berg, maybe there’s finger marks on it, and they’ll get rubbed off.”

“That’ll do, McGuire. If you must see everything that’s going on, at least keep quiet.”

“No, it’s no clue,” grumbled Detective Groot. “There is no real clue, no key clue, as you may say. And you have to have that, to get at a mystery. This crime shows no brains, no planning. It isn’t the work of an educated mind. That’s why it’s most likely an Italian thug.”

Kane Landon’s deep gray eyes turned to the speaker. “Whoever planned that weird telephone message showed some ingenuity,” he said.

“And you did it!” cried the detective, “I meant you to fall into that trap, and you did. My speech brought it to your mind and you spoke before you thought. Now, what did you mean by it? What about the Caribbean Sea? Were you going to take your uncle off there? Was the trap laid for that?”

“One question at a time,” said Landon, with a look that he permitted to be insolent. “Does it seem to you the sender of that message was getting my uncle into a trap, or saving him from one? I believe the young woman reported that the message ran ‘He set a trap for you.’ Then was it not a rescuer telling of it?”

“Don’t be too fresh, young man! You can’t pull the wool over my eyes! And that telephone message isn’t needed to settle your case. When a man is found dead, and with his dying breath tells who killed him, I don’t need any further evidence.”

“Keep still, Groot,” said the coroner. “We’ve all agreed that those words about Cain, might mean any murderer.”

“They might, but they didn’t,” answered Groot, angrily.

“As Mr. Landon says,” spoke up Judge Hoyt, “it may be merely a coincidence that his name is Kane, when his uncle had so recently stigmatized his assailant as Cain. Surely such questionable evidence must be backed up by some incontrovertible facts.”

Landon looked at this man curiously. He knew him but slightly. He remembered him as a friend of his uncle’s, but he knew nothing of his attachment for Avice Trowbridge. Kane noted the fine face, the grave and scholarly brow, and he breathed a sigh of relief to think that the lawyer had said a kindly word for him. Landon’s was a peculiar nature. Reproof or rebuke always antagonized him, but a sympathetic word softened him at once.

Had Landon but known it, he had another friend present. Harry Pinckney, his college mate, recognized him the moment he entered the room. Then, obeying a sudden impulse, Pinckney drew back behind a pillar that divided the two drawing-rooms, as is the fashion of old houses, and had remained unseen by Landon all the morning. Pinckney himself could scarcely have told why he did this, but it was due to a feeling that he could not write his story for his paper with the same freedom of speech if Landon knew of his presence. For though he refused to himself to call it by so strong a term as suspicion, Pinckney felt that the coincidence of Cain and Kane was too unlikely to be true. Regretting his friend’s downfall, Pinckney thought, so far as he had yet discovered, that Landon was the most likely suspect. And so he did not want to meet him just yet. Later, perhaps, he could help him in some way or other, but the “story” came first.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MILK BOTTLE

“Nothing but an old milk bottle!” exclaimed Berg, disgustedly, as the exhibit was placed before him on the table.

That’s all it was, and yet somehow the commonplace thing looked uncanny when considered as evidence in a murder case. But was it evidence? Or was it merely the remnant of a last week’s picnic in the woods?

A search of the Swede’s house had brought the thing to light, and now the big fellow told again of his finding it.

Buried, he declared it was, not fifty feet from where he had seen the dying man. He had not thought at first, that it had any connection with the murder, and had taken it merely on an impulse of thrifty acquisition of anything portable. He told his wife to wash out the ill-smelling contents, and she had done so.

“If you’d only let it alone!” wailed Groot. “What did the stuff smell like? Sour milk?”

“No, no,” and Sandstrom shook his head vigorously. “It bane like a droog.”

“A droog?”

“Drugs, I suppose you mean,” said Berg. “What sort of a drug? Camphor? Peppermint? Or, say, did it smell like prussic acid? Peach pits? Bitter almonds? Hey?”

“Ay tank Ay don’t know those names. But it smell bad. And it had molasses.”

“You stick to that molasses! Well, then I say it’s an old molasses bottle long since discarded, and time and the weather had sunk it in the mud.”

“Na, not weathers. It bane buried by somebody. Ay tank the murderer.”

“The witness’s thinks would be of more value,” said the policeman who had brought the bottle, “if we hadn’t found this bit of property also, in his shanty.”

And then, before the eyes of all present, he undid a parcel containing a blood-stained handkerchief! Blood-soaked, rather, for its original white was as incarnadined as the hypothetical seas.

“Hid in between their mattresses,” he added; “looks like that settles it!”

It did look that way, but had there been a question as to the import of this mute testimony, it was answered by the effect on the two Swedes. The woman sank back in her chair, almost fainting, and the man turned ashy white, while his face took on the expression of despair that signifies the death of the last flicker of hope.

“Yours?” asked the coroner, pointing to the tell-tale thing and looking at Sandstrom.

“Na!” and the blue eyes looked hunted and afraid. “Ay bane found it anear the body, – ”