McKnight slid down in his chair until his weight rested on the small of his back, and put his feet on the big reading table.
“It is rather a facer,” he said. “It’s really too good a situation for a commonplace lawyer. It ought to be dramatized. You can’t agree, of course; and by refusing you run the chance of jail, at least, and of having Alison brought into publicity, which is out of the question. You say she was at the Pullman window when you were?”
“Yes; I bought her ticket for her. Gave her lower eleven.”
McKnight straightened up and looked at me.
“Then she thought you were in lower ten.”
“I suppose she did, if she thought at all.”
“But listen, man.” McKnight was growing excited. “What do you figure out of this? The Conway woman knows you have taken the notes to Pittsburg. The probabilities are that she follows you there, on the chance of an opportunity to get them, either for Bronson or herself.
“Nothing doing during the trip over or during the day in Pittsburg; but she learns the number of your berth as you buy it at the Pullman ticket office in Pittsburg, and she thinks she sees her chance. No one could have foreseen that that drunken fellow would have crawled into your berth.
“Now, I figure it out this way: She wanted those notes desperately—does still—not for Bronson, but to hold over his head for some purpose. In the night, when everything is quiet, she slips behind the curtains of lower ten, where the man’s breathing shows he is asleep. Didn’t you say he snored?”
“Now keep still and listen. She gropes cautiously around in the darkness, finally discovering the wallet under the pillow. Can’t you see it yourself?”
He was leaning forward, excitedly, and I could almost see the gruesome tragedy he was depicting.
“She draws out the wallet. Then, perhaps she remembers the alligator bag, and on the possibility that the notes are there, instead of in the pocket-book, she gropes around for it. Suddenly, the man awakes and clutches at the nearest object, perhaps her neck chain, which breaks. She drops the pocket-book and tries to escape, but he has caught her right hand.
“It is all in silence; the man is still stupidly drunk. But he holds her in a tight grip. Then the tragedy. She must get away; in a minute the car will be aroused. Such a woman, on such an errand, does not go without some sort of a weapon, in this case a dagger, which, unlike a revolver, is noiseless.