Dr. Mead had been standing by the cabinet as he talked. Now he opened it and took from it the bullet which he had probed out of the wound. He looked at it a minute himself, then handed it to Garrick. I bent over also and examined it as it lay in Guy's hand.

At first I thought it was an ordinary bullet. But the more I examined it the more I was convinced that there was something peculiar about it.

In the nose, which was steel-jacketed, were several little round depressions, just the least fraction of an inch in depth.

"It is no wonder Warrington was put out, even by that superficial wound," remarked Garrick at last. "His a.s.sailant's aim may have been bad, as it must necessarily have been from one rapidly approaching car at a person in another rapidly moving car, also. But the motor bandit, whoever he is, provided against that. That bullet is what is known as an anesthetic bullet."

"An anesthetic bullet?" repeated both Dr. Mead and myself. "What is that?"

"A narcotic bullet," Garrick explained, "a sleep-producing bullet, if you please, a sedative bullet that lulls its victim into almost instant slumber. It was invented quite recently by a Pittsburgh scientist. The anesthetic bullet provides the poor marksman with all the advantages of the expert gunman of unerring aim."

I marvelled at the ingenuity of the man who could figure out how to overcome the seeming impossibility of accurate shooting from a car racing at high speed. Surely, he must be a desperate fellow.

While we were talking, the doctor's wife who had been attending Warrington until a nurse arrived, came to inform him that the effect of the sedative, which he had administered while Warrington was restless and groaning, was wearing off. We waited a little while, and then Dr.

Mead himself informed us that we might see our friend for a minute.

Even in his half-drowsy state of pain Warrington appeared to recognise Garrick and a.s.sume that he had come in response to his own summons.

Garrick bent down, and I could just distinguish what Warrington was trying to say to him.

"Wh--where's Violet?" he whispered huskily, "Does she know? Don't let her get--frightened--I'll be--all right."

Garrick laid his hand on Warrington's unbandaged shoulder, but said nothing.

"The--the letter," he murmured ramblingly. "I have it--in my apartment--in the little safe. I was going to Tuxedo--to see Violet--explain slander--tell her closing place--didn't know it was mine before. Good thing to close it--Forbes is a heavy loser. She doesn't know that."

Warrington lapsed back on his pillow and Dr. Mead beckoned to us to withdraw without exciting him any further.

"What difference does it make whether she knows about Forbes or not?" I queried as we tiptoed down the hall.

Garrick shook his head doubtfully. "Can't say," he replied succinctly.

"It may be that Forbes, too, has aspirations."

The idea sent me off into a maze of speculations, but it did not enlighten me much. At any rate, I felt, Warrington had said enough to explain his presence in that part of the country. On one thing, as I have said, Garrick had guessed right. The blackmailing letter and what we had seen the night before at the crooked gambling joint had been too much for him. He had not been able to rest as long as he was under a cloud with Miss Winslow until he had had a chance to set himself right in her eyes.

There seemed to be nothing that we could do for him just then. He was in excellent hands, and now that the doctor knew who he was, a trained nurse had even been sent for from the city and arrived on the train following our own, thus relieving Mrs. Mead of her faithful care of him.

Garrick gave the nurse strict instructions to make exact notes of anything that Warrington might say, and then requested the doctor to take us to the scene of the tragedy. We were about to start, when Garrick excused himself and hurried back into the house, reappearing in a few minutes.

"I thought perhaps, after all, it would be best to let Miss Winslow know of the accident, as long as it isn't likely to turn out seriously in the end for Warrington," he explained, joining us again in Dr.

Mead's car which was waiting in front of the house. "So I called up her aunt's at Tuxedo and when Miss Winslow answered the telephone I broke the news to her as gently as I could. Warrington need have no fear about that girl," he added.

The wrecked car, we found, had not yet been moved, nor had the broken fence been repaired. It was, in fact, an accident worth studying topographically. That part of the road itself near the fence seemed to interest Garrick greatly. Two or three cars pa.s.sed while we waited and he noted how carefully each of them seemed to avoid that side toward the broken fence, as though it were haunted.

"I hope they've all done that," Garrick remarked, as he continued to examine the road, which was a trifle damp under the high trees that shaded it.

As he worked, I could not believe that it was wholly fancy that caused me to think of him as searching with dilated nostrils, like a scientific human bloodhound. For, it was not long before I began to realize what he was looking for in the marks of cars left on the oiled roadway.

During perhaps half an hour he continued studying the road, above and below the exact point of the accident. At length a low exclamation from him brought me to his side. He had dropped down in the grease, regardless of his knees and was peering at some rather deep imprints in the surface dressing. There, for a few feet, were plainly the marks of the outside tires of a car, still un.o.bliterated.

Garrick had pulled out copies of the photographs he had made of the tire marks that had been left at the scene of the finding of the unfortunate Rena Taylor's body, and was busy comparing them with the marks that were before him.

"Of course," Garrick muttered to me, "if the anti-skid marks of the tires were different, it would have proved nothing, just as in the other case where we looked for the tire prints. But here, too, a glance shows that at least it is the same make of tires."

He continued his comparison. It did not take me long to surmise what he was doing. He was taking the two sets of marks and, inch by inch, going over them, checking up the little round metal insertions that were placed in this style of tire to give it a firmer grip.

"Here's one missing, there's another," he cried excitedly. "By Jove, it can't be mere coincidence. There's one that is worn--another broken.

They correspond. Yes, that MUST be the same car, in each case. And if it was the stolen car, then it was Warrington's own car that was used in pursuing him and in almost making away with him!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE EXPLANATION

We had not noticed a car which had stopped just past us and Garrick was surprised at hearing his own name called.

We looked up from contemplating the discovery he had made in the road, to see Miss Winslow waving to us. She had motored down from Tuxedo immediately after receiving the message over the telephone, and with her keen eye had picked out both the place of the accident and ourselves studying it.

As we approached, I could see that she was much more pale than usual.

Evidently her anxiety for Warrington was thoroughly genuine. The slanderous letter had not shaken her faith in him, yet.

She had left her car and was walking back along the road with us toward the broken fence. Garrick had been talking to her earnestly and now, having introduced her to Dr. Mead, the doctor and he decided to climb down to inspect the wrecked car itself in the ravine below.

Miss Winslow cast a quick look from the broken fence down at the torn and twisted wreckage of the car and gave a suppressed little cry and shudder.

"How is Mortimer?" she asked of me eagerly, for I had agreed to stay with her while the others went down the slope. "I mean how is he really? Is he likely to be better soon, as Mr. Garrick said over the telephone?" she appealed.

"Surely--absolutely," I a.s.sured her, knowing that if Garrick had said that he had meant it. "Miss Winslow, believe me, neither Mr. Garrick nor Dr. Mead is concealing anything. It is pretty bad, of course. Such things are always bad. But it might be far worse. And besides, the worst now has pa.s.sed."

Garrick had already promised to accompany her over to Dr. Mead's after he had made his examination of the wrecked car to confirm what the doctor had already observed. It took several minutes for them to satisfy themselves and meanwhile Violet Winslow, already highly unstrung by the news from Garrick, waited more and more nervously.

In spite of his careful examination of the wrecked car, Garrick found practically nothing more than Dr. Mead had already told him. It was with considerable relief that Miss Winslow saw the two again climbing up the slope in the direction of the road.

A few minutes later we were on our way back, Dr. Mead and Garrick leading the way in the doctor's car, while I accompanied Miss Winslow in her own car.

She said little, and it was plain to see that she was consumed by anxiety. Now and then she would ask a question about the accident, and although I tried in every way to divert her mind to other subjects she unfailingly came back to that.

Tempering the details as much as I could I repeated for her just what had happened to the best of our knowledge.

"And you have no idea who it could have been?" she asked turning those liquid eyes of hers on my face.

If there were any secret about it, it was perhaps fortunate that I did not know. I don't think I am more than ordinarily susceptible and I know I did not delude myself that Miss Winslow ever could be anything except a friend to either Garrick or myself. But I felt I could not resist the appeal in those eyes. I wondered if even they, by some magic intuition, might not pierce the very soul of man and uncover a lying heart. I felt that Warrington could not have been other than he said he was and still have been hastening to meet those eyes.

"Miss Winslow," I answered, "I have no more idea than you have who it could be."

I was telling the truth and I felt that I could meet her gaze.