"Thirty, I should say. Perhaps more. But what has it to do with Lennox?"
Negligently Jones flicked his ashes. "Well, it changes the subject. I
can't talk about the same thing all the time. It is too fatiguing."
As he spoke, he stood up.
Verelst put out a hand. "Dunwoodie is sure to look in. Where are you off
to?"
Jones smiled at him. "I am going to gaze in a window where there are
pippins on view."
"Go to the devil!" said Verelst, who also got up.
Fabulists tell strange tales. It is their business to tell them. Jones
had no intention of looking at pippins. What he had in mind was fruit of
another variety. It was some distance away. Before he could make an
appreciable move toward it, Verelst, who had turned from him, turned
back.
"There!"
Beyond, through the high-arched entrance, a man was limping. He had the
battered face of an old bulldog and the rumpled clothes of a young
ruffian.
"There's Dunwoodie!"
Verelst, a hand on Jones' elbow, propelled him toward the lawyer, who
gratified them with the look, very baleful and equally famous, with
which he was said to reverse the Bench.
But Verelst, afraid of nothing except damp sheets, stretched a hand.
"You know Ten Eyck Jones. He has something very important to tell you."
"Yes," said Jones. "In March, on the eighth or ninth, I have forgotten
which, but it must be in the 'Law Journal,' a decision was rendered----"
He got no farther. Other members, crowding about, were questioning,
surmising, eager for a detail, a prediction, an obiter dictum, for
anything they could take away and repeat concerning the murder, in which
all knew that the great man was to appear.
But Dunwoodie was making himself heard, and not gently either. It was as
though already he was at the district attorney's throat.
"Where is the evidence? Where is it? Where is the evidence? There is not
a shred, not a scintilla. On the absence of facts adduced, I shall
maintain what I assert until the last armed Court of Appeals expires.
Hum! Ha!"
Fiercely he turned on Jones. "What were you saying, sir?"
Before Jones could reply, Verelst cut in. "The stiletto is his. He has
the opera-ticket. He----"
"Imbeciles tell each other that great men think alike," Jones,
interrupting, remarked at Dunwoodie. "I merely happened to be
forestalling your views, when a recent decision occurred to me and----"
Jones' remarks were lost, drowned by others, by questions, exclamations,
the drivel that amazement creates.
"But, I say----" "Tell me this----" "No evidence!" "The stiletto his!"
"How did Lennox get it?" "Then what about----"
Dunwoodie, fastening on Jones, roared at him. "You tell me the
instrument is yours?"
Jones patted his chin. "I did not, but I will."
"How do you know, sir?"
"It has a little love message on it."
"Hum! Ha!" Dunwoodie barked. "Come to my office to-morrow. Come before
ten."
Dreamily Jones tilted his hat. "I am not up before ten. Where do you
live? In the Roaring Forties?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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