“By George!” muttered the cashier. “This is getting serious. You don’t mean to tell me that Doctor Stephen Follansbee is a scamp?”
“These things speak for themselves, don’t they?” Nick asked quietly. “And there are other straws which show the way the wind is blowing.”
The fires were now burning brightly in the great detective’s eyes.
“I’m of the opinion that this note isn’t more than a few hours old,” he said, tapping the paper signed by Stone. “The ink is still fresh, and, besides, there’s the date—the twenty-fifth.”
“What of that?” demanded the cashier. “The check is also dated to-day.”
“Still, I don’t see what you’re driving at. The check may have been dated ahead, and when the time approached for presenting it, Follansbee might have asked for the note to present along with it.”
“Doubtless that’s what happened, but what I’m getting at is this:
“This note purports to have been written at the Hotel Windermere on the twenty-fifth—to-day. I happen to know, however, that Stone hasn’t been at the hotel since about three o’clock this morning, and I’m pretty well aware of the manner in which he was occupied while he was there. It isn’t likely that he wrote this note between midnight and three o’clock, and even if he did do so, it isn’t probable that he would have dated it to-day. Under such circumstances a man would jot down the date of the day before, nine times out of ten.”
“Then you think that the note was written after he left the hotel?”
“I do, and I believe that the paper was thoughtfully given to him for the purpose, after having previously been removed from the hotel. That in itself is suspicious. It suggests a plot, and it, together with the character of the writing, hints that the note was written under pressure, or that Stone was not himself when he scribbled it. You can see the difference between the note, signature and all, and the signature on the check. The latter is big and bold and careless, but the note, although obviously written in the same hand, is tremulous and betrays agitation.”
Expert as he was, Carter was a little astray there. He was not in a position to know that the agitation revealed had been due not to any threats of Follansbee’s, but to the fact that Stone had been sane once more when he wrote it, and was suffering from the effects of his recent alarm and remorse.