“You need a hospital, man,” said Lanagan curtly, “and I’m going to take you there. Wait.” He placed his hand again on the man’s shoulder. But the manikin-like creature flung the hand viciously from him and again flashed that strange look of blended hate, fear, and timidity upon the newspaper man.
A car clanged to the safety station. The grotesque figure, still half-hunched over at the paroxysm from Lanagan’s Manila, started for it and Lanagan made no further effort at detention. He climbed laboriously to the platform, and Lanagan shrugged his shoulders.
“I certainly am not going to dry-nurse you, old man, but I ought to at that. If I ever saw a man marked for death, you’re that man.”
Despite a long afternoon idled away beneath mine host Pastori’s shade trees and the somnolent influence of cobwebbed Chianti, Lanagan found his miser’s features constantly before him.
“He’s my miser, too,” he mused, in the vernacular of childhood. “I shouldn’t have let him escape me after finding him.”
Returning late, Lanagan for once in his life went to his room without his inevitable last call at police headquarters. Consequently he was several hours late in the morning on the news of a very fine police story when he awakened to find his miser--Thaddeus Miller of Oakland--pictured on the front pages of all the morning papers. There was no mistaking that face. It was his miser. He had been murdered in his cabin, a clumsy attempt having been made to fire the cabin to destroy the crime and its evidence.
A young clerk, a neighbour to the miser, was under arrest. It appeared that the clerk, James Watson, was found named in the will as sole legatee to an estate valued at close to a quarter of a million dollars. Upon the Watson porch had been found a hammer, freshly washed, the handle not yet dry. But clinging to the claws, unobserved by whoever had washed the blood from the hammer, were two strands of white hair that brought the hammer home to the crime in the cabin. Watson, the stories related, had only known Miller for a few months. He had been seen leaving the cottage shortly before eight o’clock. The fire was discovered smouldering at nine-thirty o’clock, extinguished, and Miller found with his skull crushed, lying on a kerosene-soaked bunk, to which, fortunately, the clumsily started fire had not yet communicated.
