Houston slumped back into his corner. Ten minutes later, he found an opportunity to exchange cards with the young physician and sought his berth. To himself, he could give no reason for establishing the identity of the smoking-compartment informant. He had acted from some sort of subconscious compulsion, without reasoning, without knowing why he had catalogued the information or of what possible use it could be to him. But once in his berth, the picture continued to rise before him; of a big room in a hospital, of doctors gathered about, and of a man "killing" another with a mallet. Had it been Worthington? Worthington, the tired-eyed, determined, over-zealous district attorney, who, day after day, had struggled and fought to send him to the penitentiary for life? Had it been Worthington, striving to reproduce the murder of Tom Langdon as he evidently had reconstructed it, experimenting with his experts in the safety of a different city, for points of evidence that would clinch the case against the accused man beyond all shadow of a doubt? Instinctively Houston felt that he just had heard an unwritten, unmentioned phase of his own murder case. Yet--if that had been Worthington, if those experts had found evidence against him, if the theories of the district attorney had been verified on that gruesome night in the "dead ward" of Bellstrand Hospital-- Why had this damning evidence been allowed to sink into oblivion? Why had it not been used against him? CHAPTER XVI It was a problem which Barry Houston, in spite of wakefulness, failed to solve. Next morning, eager for a repetition of the recital, in the hope of some forgotten detail, some clue which might lead him to an absolute decision, he sought the young doctor, only to find that he had left the train at dawn. A doorway of the past had been opened to Houston, only to be closed again before he could clearly discern beyond. He went on to Boston, still struggling to reconstruct it all, striving to figure what connection it might have had, but in vain. And with his departure from the train, new thoughts, new problems, arose to take the place of memories. His purposes now were of the future, not of the past. And naturally, he turned first to the office of his father's attorney,--the bleak place where he had conferred so many times in the black days. Old Judge Mason, accustomed to seeing Barry in time of stress, tried his best to be jovial. "Well, boy, what is it this time?" "Money." Houston came directly to the point. "I've come back to Boston to find out if any one will trust me." "With or without security." "With it--the best in the world." Then he brought forward a copy of the contract. Mason studied it at length, then, with a slow gesture, raised his glasses to a resting place on his forehead. "I--I don't know, boy," he said at last. "It's a rather hard problem to crack. I wish there was some one in the family we could go to for the money." "But there isn't."