American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

leaped to his feet. ‘By Heaven, it was!’ he shouted. ‘I remember now!’ His voice trembled with excitement. ‘I had lowered my head, and across the streak of light between the seat edge and table flew a shadow – like a bird passing overhead.’ He stopped suddenly, the bewildered look on his face telling the sudden realization of his words. ‘How could you know that?’ he burst out.

‘The human brain is a curious thing,’ explained the blind man slowly. ‘It unconsciously records impressions the eyes give, but they are instantly forgotten – because the giving is so automatic – until something recalls them. Without sight I have been compelled to figure all things in my brain. Even the steps that you take without seeing must be mentally visualized by me. I knew it must have been a shadow that caused you to look up. To you it was merely one of the thousand unconscious-conscious things your eyes see during the day which are locked up in the brain until some outside influence brings them back.’

‘You can solve this thing!’ Rogers shot out the words as if he had just made a wonderful discovery. The blind man’s conscious power in himself had won the confidence of the lawyer; made him realize that there was some logical explanation for the thing which his eyes had seen, and which his reason refused to accept. He forgot that he was a prisoner formally charged with murder, he paced the room nervously. And the chief, scowling down at his desk, was silent. ‘If you can find the man who killed Jim Cartwright!’ The excitement died from Roger’s voice, a new tone came. ‘I knew him for thirty years, yet I never knew him until last night!’

‘I want to bring to justice the man that could kill a girl whose soul held the music of Miss Reynolds’s.’ There was unconscious rebuke in the problemist’s voice. All his powers he had brought to avenge the innocent girl; but he knew his efforts must be concentrated on the Cartwright murder because that was the key, the only key that would lead to the murderer.

‘The love-crazed kid did that! He –’ Rogers stopped, his eyes saw the two pistols side by side on the commissioner’s desk. Instantly his keen brain recognised the significance. ‘They’re the same!’ he exclaimed.

‘What were Cartwright’s relations with Miss Reynolds?’ It was a command, as Colton put it.

Rogers lifted his eyes from the two pistols.

‘You wrong Jim Cartwright,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve accepted the general opinion of him; the opinion he never cared enough about to refute. He wasn’t an angel, but he wasn’t the devil a thousand jealousies have painted him. I’m going to tell you the story he told me last night.’ And he did, with all the deep feeling of his friendship, splendidly, simply.

As the men listened they understood the tragedy of Cartwright’s love for the woman who had been killed in the first moments of her new-found happiness – and his; of the little girl he had taken from her dead mother’s arms to work for, to protect, to give the happiness the mother had been denied – only to see her foully murdered when her cup of joy had but just been filled. The fiendishness of it held them spell-bound. The two beings that Cartwright had loved had been snatched from him, and he had been killed, knowing in the last instant of his life that the real murderer of the girl was not even suspected, could not be suspected, because of the devilish ingenuity of his crime.

‘Kelly, the drunken magician, is the man who killed Cartwright!’ ejaculated the chief.

Rogers was startled for a moment, but Colton, with an inscrutable smile on his thin lips, put a question:

‘The father of the girl is dead, isn’t he?’

Rogers glanced at the blind man in surprise.

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘He died in the alcoholic ward of a Chicago hospital three months after his wife was killed. He was buried in the potters’ field.’

‘Where did you find that out?’ scowlingly demanded the chief.

‘That I didn’t proves the fact,’ answered the blind man crisply. ‘If Cartwright hadn’t known he was dead you’d have heard of him before. Do you want me to go on?’ he asked.

‘Might as well,’ granted the chief. ‘Maybe this is your lucky day.’

‘Then I’d like to ask a few questions of the boy who was arrested as Miss Reynolds’s murderer.’

The chief gave the order, but there was a light of triumphant anticipation in his eyes as he waited. Unlike the murderer of Cartwright, there was nothing mysterious in the killing of the girl, despite the clever efforts of the blind man to prove differently. A score of persons had seen the flash of the pistol from the rear of the box. His men had examined the velvet-hung wall toward which the girl’s back had been, and there was not a break in it, not a crack.

When the boy – he was little more – was led in by two detectives there came a look of pity to the faces of Sydney and Rogers. He staggered to a chair when the men released his arms. His lips were purple and torn where Cartwright had beaten him to the floor the night before. A haunting look of terror was in his eyes; his face was pasty white.

‘I didn’t do it! I didn’t! I didn’t!’ he whispered hoarsely, when he had wet his dry lips to make even the whisper possible.

Colton put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘I know you didn’t,’ he said, and there was a world of sympathy in his voice. A new look came to the boy’s eyes, a trembling hand sought that of the blind man.

‘I loved her and she loved me,’ he said chokingly. ‘We were going to be married – but that Cartwright –’ Shrill vehemence came to the tone, and he stopped.

Colton’s hand quieted him. ‘Listen closely now, Mr Nelson, and tell me if this is what