"All right," he announced, "we'll be getting back and having things over with. Shouldn't take much longer than an hour: Presley, our local garage man, will bring the jurors out in a bus, and they'll be no great distance behind us." He took the wheel, started the motor, and the three men were on their way back to Greenacres. Wiggly sat stiffly in the seat beside Sarbella, trying in vain to drive his brain over the hurdles. Time with him was short, for, as the doctor had just said, in another hour or so it would be over. The law would have finished with the Gilmore affair and write the easiest, most obvious ending to the dramatic business of the past night, charging the whole tragic account to Don Haskins and, through his death, mark the whole deed as "Paid." Once the verdict of the coroner's jury was in, Wiggly knew, it would be next to the impossible to have the case reopened again. He had just about sixty minutes longer to prove he was right, and that the rest of them were wrong. CHAPTER XXVIII THE BLACK SMUDGE Along the ribbon-smooth road Doctor Bushnell shot the car at a lively clip; one couldn't blame him, of course, for thinking of his private practice, and one of his patients had been telephoning for him all morning. He would have been the last man to hurry the Gilmore case to a legal finish, if he had thought there was anything to be gained by prolonging the investigation; but he considered that the affair had been solved to all reasonable satisfaction. In less than five minutes they arrived at Greenacres, and hardly had the three men stepped from the machine to the porch of the house when Kirklan Gilmore, evidently having seen them from a window, came rushing out, both hands stretched out toward the artist. There were tears in his eyes, and his voice was husky, trembling with emotion. "Thank God, Victor!" he cried. "I've just heard the whole inside of things from a man, the New York detective, that you're cleared, absolutely cleared! You don't know what a relief it has been to me, although I never did think, even when things were the blackest, that you did it." "And I appreciate your loyalty, Kirklan," answered Sarbella. The hands of the two men remained clasped. "Forgive me, Victor, for thinking last night that you--that you and Helen----" "That there had been an--ah--affair between your wife and me," finished Sarbella. "Yes, I was afraid that my silence would put dark thoughts into your head, but----" "Why didn't you tell me?" broke in Gilmore, and a peculiar expression convulsed his features. "Why didn't you tell me last night, out in the study, that she was the woman over whom your brother----" Sarbella shook his head. "No! I could not in honor do that," he protested. "You were my friend, and the woman was your wife. My lips were sealed. She was your wife; you loved her."