The Circular Staircase - Page 151/154

But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied the

situation carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so

the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to all

appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to

enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished.

The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker

was suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and

with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan

was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an

attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room

shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco,

and palmed off for the supposed dead banker. What was simpler?

The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only

suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a

chambermaid in the hotel at C--, and it was evidently her intention to

blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable:

to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession. He denied the

whole thing, and she went to Halsey.

It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he

disappeared. He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the

lawn, had said something cruel to Louise. Then, furious at her

apparent connivance, he had started for the station. Doctor Walker and

Paul Armstrong--the latter still lame where I had shot him--hurried

across to the embankment, certain only of one thing. Halsey must not

tell the detective what he suspected until the money had been removed

from the chimney-room. They stepped into the road in front of the car

to stop it, and fate played into their hands. The car struck the

train, and they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the

road. This they did as I have told. For three days Halsey lay in the

box car, tied hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at

times, and discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his

life.

To go back to Paul Armstrong. At the last moment his plans had been

frustrated. Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been

rented without his knowledge! Attempts to dislodge me having failed,

he was driven to breaking into his own house. The ladder in the chute,

the burning of the stable and the entrance through the card-room

window--all were in the course of a desperate attempt to get into the

chimney-room.

Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great

stumbling-blocks. The plan had been to send Louise away until it was

too late for her to interfere, but she came back to the hotel at C--

just at the wrong time. There was a terrible scene. The girl was told

that something of the kind was necessary, that the bank was about to

close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest and disgrace in this

way, or kill himself. Fanny Armstrong was a weakling, but Louise was

more difficult to manage. She had no love for her stepfather, but her

devotion to her mother was entire, self-sacrificing. Forced into

acquiescence by her mother's appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the

girl consented and fled.