His story was followed by that of a gawky, frightened-looking boy who kept his eyes riveted upon the prosecution's chief witness while he talked. He disclaimed all knowledge of the arrangements concerning the patient's guardianship, his business being merely to care for the garden and furnace. He had never come into close contact with the patient himself; had only seen him at a distance sometimes, wandering about the grounds alone. He had always seemed perfectly quiet and harmless, but he, the gardener, had been afraid that he might some time have a "spell" such as he had heard of in similar cases, and so had kept carefully out of his way.
In the late afternoon of November 21, he reported, when he returned from a far corner of the place where he had been pruning, he had found the patient lying in a faint on the floor of the garage. With some effort he had dragged him into the house and left him in the drawing-room, after bandaging his swollen leg as well as he could and forcing part of a glass of whisky down his throat. Then he had departed, after first making sure that the doors and windows on the ground floor were securely fastened. Late the following afternoon he had seen the prisoner standing at the dining-room window and had heard him call out in a threatening way to him. A moment afterward, without the slightest warning, the patient had doubled his fist and smashed the pane of glass to fragments. Convinced that this was one of the "spells" which he had dreaded, he had waited until he thought the patient was in bed and had then returned and boarded up the window.
Here Dayton interrupted. "And you believed the man in the house to be ill and alone, and yet you felt no concern about his care?"
"I didn't think he was alone. I had seen a woman around the place that afternoon, and I thought she was his nurse."
A murmur swept around the breathless court-room. Everybody in the audience made some comment to his neighbor upon this new development. The judge rapped sharply for order. "Go on," commanded the district attorney.
The witness proceeded to relate that he had gone to bed that night feeling nervous over the patient's conduct and had resolved to give up his employment at Rest Hollow. About eleven o'clock he had been roused from a fitful sleep by a knock at his door. Upon opening it he had found Gifford, the undertaker, standing on the threshold. Here he endeavored to recollect the exact words of the night caller, and after a moment's pause, produced the greeting: "Get up, boy. Do you know that there's been murder committed on this place to-night?" With Gifford he had hurried around to the dining-room side of the house and had discovered the dead body lying there under an oleander bush, near the very window which the patient had so unaccountably broken that same afternoon. Terrified, he had not paused to give the body even a fleeting glance, but had stumbled back to his room and made a hasty bundle of his clothes, determined not to pass another hour on that place. He remembered Gifford calling after him that he was not going to touch the body until the coroner had seen it. Ten minutes later he had fled, leaving his door unlocked behind him.