"I have a little sherry in my office, Mr. Knox--twenty-six years in the wood. If you--" "For God's sake, Hawes, there's nothing the matter with me!" I exclaimed, and he went. But I heard him stand a perceptible time outside the door before he tiptoed away. Almost immediately after, some one entered the waiting-room, and the next moment I was facing, in the doorway, a man I had never seen before. He was a tall man, with thin, colorless beard trimmed to a Vandyke point, and pale eyes blinking behind glasses. He had a soft hat crushed in his hand, and his whole manner was one of subdued excitement. "Mr. Knox?" he asked, from the doorway. "Yes. Come in." "I have been here six times since noon," he said, dropping rather than sitting in a chair. "My name is Lightfoot. I am--was--Mr. Fleming's cashier." "Yes?" "I was terribly shocked at the news of his death," he stumbled on, getting no help from me. "I was in town and if I had known in time I could have kept some of the details out of the papers. Poor Fleming--to think he would end it that way." "End it?" "Shoot himself." He watched me closely. "But he didn't," I protested. "It was not suicide, Mr. Lightfoot. According to the police, it was murder." His cold eyes narrowed like a cat's. "Murder is an ugly word, Mr. Knox. Don't let us be sensational. Mr. Fleming had threatened to kill himself more than once; ask young Wardrop. He was sick and despondent; he left his home without a word, which points strongly to emotional insanity. He could have gone to any one of a half dozen large clubs here, or at the capital. Instead, he goes to a little third-rate political club, where, presumably, he does his own cooking and hides in a dingy room. Is that sane? Murder! It was suicide, and that puppy Wardrop knows it well enough. I--I wish I had him by the throat!" He had worked himself into quite a respectable rage, but now he calmed himself. "I have seen the police," he went on. "They agree with me that it was suicide, and the party newspapers will straighten it out to-morrow. It is only unfortunate that the murder theory was given so much publicity. The _Times-Post_, which is Democratic, of course, I can not handle." I sat stupefied. "Suicide!" I said finally. "With no weapon, no powder marks, and with a half-finished letter at his elbow." He brushed my interruption aside. "Mr. Fleming had been--careless," he said. "I can tell you in confidence, that some of the state funds had been deposited in the Borough Bank of Manchester, and--the Borough Bank closed its doors at ten o'clock to-day." I was hardly surprised at that, but the whole trend of events was amazing.