"Your name is Sam, I believe?" she asked suddenly.
"Oh, Sam anything. Whatever you say; I aim to please."
"You’ve said that before," he remarked placidly. "You said I was a burglar and a house-breaker, too."
Rosalind had no patience with people who fenced, but she checked her temper for the moment.
"After what I observed at an early hour this morning," she said, "I cannot see that there is any doubt of it. You entered and robbed—or attempted to rob—Mr. Davidson’s house."
"Well," he said slowly, looking up at her, "I don’t happen to be on the witness-stand. But I might remark that I didn’t enter or attempt to enter Mr. Witherbee’s house at any rate."
She flushed angrily, but she had learned something.
"It’s a matter of no importance," she added hastily. "I believe you understand that I am a guest at the Witherbees’."
"Of course," he assented. "I expect you explained the whole thing to them this morning."
She looked at him narrowly, but his face was impassive behind its beard. Nevertheless, she had a disquieting feeling that he suspected she had not explained anything—and did not care to explain.
"But you were simply a plain intruder at Mr. Davidson’s," Rosalind went on.
"Oh, why quibble about it?" she exclaimed.
"All right, then; we won’t quibble," he answered, after a second’s thought. "We’ll go to it a little bit straighter. I’ll say this: I did land on Mr. Davidson’s island. That’ll be enough for a while—except this: I wasn’t working alone."
"Always," remarked Sam confidentially, "when there’s a house-breaking to be pulled off—that is, ’most always—a man doesn’t work alone. He has to have one pal. If he does the inside work, his pal sticks around outside, doing lookout duty, and to help make the getaway. It’s one of the most important parts of the job. Now, whatever I did or didn’t do at Davidson’s last night, the fact remained that I needed my pal a whole lot when it came to making a quick duck."
He paused and studied her, a faint twinkle in his dark eyes.
"I mean that my pal started an engine that I couldn’t have started in a year," he added, complacently.
Rosalind had risen to her feet. Her hand crept to a pocket in her sweater.
"You hit on a new name that time, ma’am."
"You dare to say," she exclaimed in an unsteady voice, "that I was in any way associated with—with—whatever you did at Mr. Davidson’s?"