"All you have brought against Mr. Eaton is that he has been indefinite in his replies to your questions or has refused answers; isn't that all, Don?" she said. "So if Mr. Eaton is the one who had the appointment with Mr. Warden that night, does not that explain his silence?"
"We have Mr. Warden's word that Mr. Eaton came that night because he was in trouble--he had been outrageously wronged, Don. He was in danger. Because of that danger, undoubtedly, he has not made himself known since. May not that be the only reason he has avoided answering your questions now?"
Eaton's heart, from pulsating fast with Harriet Santoine's attempt at his defense, now constricted with a sudden increase of his terror and anxiety.
"All right, Mr. Eaton!" Connery now returned to his charge. "You are that man. So besides whatever else that means, you'd been in Seattle eleven days and yet you were the last person to get aboard this train, which left a full hour after its usual starting time. Who were you waiting to see get on the train before you yourself took it?"
Eaton wet his lips. To what was Connery working up? The probability, now rapidly becoming certainty, that in addition to the recognition of him as the man who had waited at Warden's--which fact any one at any time might have charged--Connery knew something else which the conductor could not have been expected to know--this dismayed Eaton the more by its indefiniteness. And he saw, as his gaze shifted to Avery, that Avery knew this thing also. All that had gone before had been only preliminary, then; they had been leading up step by step to the circumstance which had finally condemned him in their eyes and was to condemn him in the eyes of Harriet Santoine.
She, he saw, had also sensed the feeling that something else more definite and conclusive was coming. She had paled after the flush in which she had spoken in Eaton's defense, and her hands in her lap were clenched so tightly that the knuckles showed only as spots of white.
Eaton controlled himself to keep his voice steady.
"What do you mean by that question?" he asked.
"I mean that--however innocent or guilty may be the chance of your being at Mr. Warden's the night he was killed--you'll have a hard time proving that you did not wait and watch and take this train because Basil Santoine had taken it; and that you were not following him. Do you deny it?"