Nature has cursed me with a violent temper. During the last two years—since the dark days of the Hesketh tragedy—I’ve thought it was conquered—a leashed beast of which I was the master. Now suddenly it rose, pulling at its chain. I felt the old forgotten stir of it, the rush of boiling blood that in the end made me blind. I had sense enough left to know I’d got to keep it down and I did it. But if there’d been no need for restraint, for dissimulation, it would have burst out as it has in the past, burst against O’Mally with a fist in the middle of his cock-sure, sneering face. I heard my voice, husky, but steady, as I said, "That’s all very well, but how about what the chief has just said? Why should Barker _write_ when he could say what he wanted? Why did he, so cautious in every other way, do a thing a green boy would have known the danger of? You’re building up your whole case on the vaguest surmises." O’Mally took his cigar out of his mouth, his eyes narrowed and full of an ugly fire. "I suppose the initial fact that a murder’s been committed is surmise?" "No," I came nearer the table, the blood singing in my ears, "it’s your evidence against the woman, that you’re twisting and coloring to match your preconceived theories. There’s not an attempt been made to reconcile her previous record with the villainous act of which you accuse her. There’s a gulf there you can’t bridge. Why don’t you go down into the foundations of the thing instead of putting your attention on surface indications? Why don’t you go into the psychology of it, build on that, not the material facts that a child could see?" I don’t believe one of them guessed the state I was in—took my vehemence as an enthusiasm for impartial justice. But a few minutes more of it and the old fury would have broken loose. I saw O’Mally’s face, red through a red mist, saw he was mad, mad straight through, enraged at the aspersions on his ability. He got up, ready to answer, and Lord knows what would have happened—a rough and tumble round the room probably—if the door hadn’t opened and a clerk put in his head with the announcement: "A gentleman on the phone wants Mr. O’Mally." The words transformed the detective; his anger vanished as if it never had been. Quick as a wink he made for the door, flinging back over his shoulder: "I told them at the office if anything turned up I’d be here. There’s something doing." A hush fell on the rest of us, the tense quiet of expectancy. The fire in me died like a flame when a bellows is dropped. News—any news—might bring help for her, exonerate her, wipe away the stain of the suspicions that no one but we six would ever know. The door opened and O’Mally entered. His face was illuminated, shining with an irrepressible triumph, his movements quick and instinctively stealthy. Pushing the door to behind him he said as softly as if the walls had ears: "They’ve got Barker in Philadelphia." CHAPTER XII JACK TELLS THE STORY