“Mr. Halliday,” he said, “says that he believed that this car was Mr. Bethel’s and started toward it, giving you his revolver and leaving you alone; that he found no car there, and turned back. To support this statement, he says that a boat, lying in the creek there, had excited his suspicions because the oar-locks were wrapped. Muffled oar-locks are not uncommon things.”
“The position of the boat was suspicious.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But that was a matter for me to determine, not Mr. Halliday. As to the strips he maintains were wrapped around the oar-locks, I am not saying they were not there; but I am saying that they were gone when I went over the next morning to examine the boat.”
What he had hoped to gain by that I do not know. He shifted rapidly, perhaps in the hope of somehow tra
