"That’s so," said Ford, as Babbitts handed him the letters, "especially with his hat on. I noticed it myself." He selected two papers from the bunch and handed them to O’Mally. "There—those are the letters I spoke of. This one," he flicked it across the counterpane, "is just a note from Harland making a date. I don’t know how I happened to keep it." They were the three letters Babbitts had taken after the attack, copies of which at that moment were lying in O’Mally’s pocket. It was not till they were out on the hospital steps that they dared to speak. O’Mally’s face was a study, his mouth drooped down to his chin and his eyes dismal and despairing like he’d come from a tragedy. "Well!" he said, "what do you make of that?" "Zero!" "Not a thing to do with it, hasn’t a suspicion of it, no more involved in it than that sparrow there," he pointed to a sparrow that had lit on the step near-by. "I’ve had setbacks in my profession before—but this!" He stopped, stuck his hands into his pockets and stared blankly at the sparrow. "Well, if it lets him out," said Babbitts, "it tightens the cords round the other two." "Um," agreed O’Mally, still gazing stonily at the sparrow, "that’s what keeps your spirits up." "With him eliminated the whole thing concentrates on her and Barker." "It does, my son." O’Mally roused up and came out of his depression. "Instead of a brain and a pair of hands as we’ve called it, it was a brain and one hand—the smart hand, the right. That was the woman." He turned and began to descend the steps, taking Babbitts by the arm to draw him closer and speaking low: "Do you see how it went? They were in the private office when Ford came back—she and Barker and the dead man. When they heard him come they switched off the light and locked the door—and, Great Scott, can you imagine how they felt! Shut in there in the dark with their victim, not knowing who Ford could be or what he was doing, listening to him rummaging round, his steps coming nearer, his hand on the doorknob! I’m too familiar with murder to see any terrors in it—but _that_ situation! I’ve never known the beat of it in all my experience. Then when Ford goes—on his very heels—over and out with the thing they’d killed. And both of them back there again, or maybe stealing to the front windows and taking a look down at the crowd below." They walked up the street arm in arm, talking in hushed voices. As he looked at the faces of the people that passed the thought came to Babbitts that in a short time, maybe a few days, they’d be reading in the papers of the awful crime not one of them now had a suspicion of. CHAPTER XV MOLLY TELLS THE STORY I heard all this late that night from Babbitts. But there was more to it than I’ve told in the last chapter, for after they left the hospital O’Mally and Babbitts went to the Whitney office and had a séance with the old man and Mr. George.