“Yes,” said Cray, “that must be done. But, please, all go out of this room, for the finger print experts and the photographers are coming soon, and every moment you people stay here, you help to cloud or destroy possible clues.”
Impressed by his sternness, they filed out and gathered in the living-room.
There they found a neighbor, Saltonstall Adams, awaiting them.
“I came over,” he said, with scant preliminary greetings, “because I have something to tell. You in charge, Mr. Cray?”
“This. I was awake late, night before last—the night Doc Waring died, and I was looking out my window, and it was pretty light, with the snow and the moonlight and all, and I saw a man—a small man, creeping along sly like. And I watched him, he went along past my house down toward the railroad tracks. He had a bag with him, and a bundle beside. I wouldn’t have noticed him probably, but he skulked along so and seemed so fearful that somebody’d see him.”
“Nogi?” said Gordon Lockwood, calmly, looking at the speaker.
“Don’t say it was, and don’t say it wasn’t. But I went down to the station and the station master told me that that Jap of Waring’s went off on the milk train.”
“He did!” cried Morton, “what time does that train go through?”
“’Bout half past four. The fellow passed my house ’long about half past twelve, I should say—though I didn’t look, and he must have waited around the station all that time till the milk train came along.”
“Is the station master sure it was Nogi?” asked Mrs. Peyton, greatly excited.
“Said he was, and there’s mighty few Japs in Corinth, all told.”
“Of course it was Nogi,” said Lockwood, and Morton snapped him up with, “Why are you so sure?”
Lockwood treated the detective to one of his most disconcerting stares, and said,
“You, a detective, and ask such a simple question! Why, since there are but a very few Japanese in this town, and since one of them left on that milk train, and since all the rest are accounted for, and only Nogi is missing—it doesn’t seem to me to require superhuman intelligence to infer that it was Nogi who took his departure.”
“And who was mixed up in the murder of Doctor John Waring?” cried Morton, exasperated beyond all caution by the ironic tone of Lockwood. “And, unless you can explain some matters, sir, you may be considered mixed in the same despicable deed!”