As he finished he took from his pocket a folded paper and handed it to Gabriel. He received it mechanically, and opened it. It was his wife's note of the preceding night. He took out his knife, still holding the letter, and with its blade began stirring the bowl of his pipe. Then after a pause, he asked cautiously--
"It was found by Sal Clark, brought to Mrs. Markle, and given to me. Its existence is known only to three people, and they are your friends."
There was another pause, in which Gabriel deliberately stirred the contents of his pipe. Mr. Maxwell examined him curiously.
"Well," he said, at last, "what is your defence?"
Gabriel sat up on the bed and rapped the bowl of his pipe against the bedpost to loosen some refractory encrustation.
"Wot," he asked, gravely, "would be _your_ idee of a good defence? Axin ye ez a lawyer having experin's in them things, and reck'nin' to pay ez high ez eny man fo' the same, wot would _you_ call a good defence?" And he gravely laid himself down again in an attitude of respectful attention.
"We hope to prove," said Maxwell, really smiling, "that when you left your house and came to my office the murdered man was alive and at his hotel; that he went over to the hill long before you did; that _you_ did not return until the evening--_after_ the murder was committed, as the 'secret' mentioned in your wife's mysterious note evidently shows. That for some reason or other it was her design to place you in a suspicious attitude. That the note shows that she refers to some fact of which she was cognisant and not yourself."
"Suthin' that she knowed, and I didn't get to hear," translated Gabriel, quietly.
"Exactly! Now you see the importance of that note."
Gabriel did not immediately reply, but slowly lifted his huge frame from the bed, walked to the open window, still holding the paper in his hands, deliberately tore it into the minutest shreds before the lawyer could interfere, and then threw it from the window.
"Thet paper don't 'mount ter beans, no how!" he said, quietly but explanatively as he returned to the bed.
It was Lawyer Maxwell's turn to become dumb. In his astonished abstraction he forgot to wipe his mouth, and gazed at Gabriel with his nervous smile as if his client had just perpetrated a practical joke of the first magnitude.