The After House

Their condition was pitiable. Unable to speak for himself, he

lay raving in his room, talking to Vail and complaining of a

white figure that bothered him. The key that Elsa Lee picked up

was another clue, and in their attempt to get rid of it I had

foiled them. Mrs. Johns, an old friend and, as I have said, an

ardent partisan, undertook to get rid of the axe, with the result

that we know. Even Turner's recovery brought little courage. He

could only recall that he had gone into Vail's room and tried to

wake him, without result; that he did not know of the blood until

the next day, or that Vail was dead; and that he had a vague

recollection of something white and ghostly that night--he was

not sure where he had seen it.

The failure of their attempt to get rid of the storeroom key was

matched by their failure to smuggle Turner's linen off the ship.

Singleton suspected Turner, and, with the skillful and not

over scrupulous aid of his lawyer, had succeeded in finding in Mrs.

Sloane's trunk the incriminating pieces.

As to the meaning of the keys, file, and club in Singleton's

mattress, I believe the explanation is simple enough. He saw

against him a strong case. He had little money and no influence,

while Turner had both. I have every reason to believe that he

hoped to make his escape before the ship anchored, and was

frustrated by my discovery of the keys and by an extra bolt I

put on his door and window.

The murders on the schooner-yacht Ella were solved.

McWhirter went back to his hospital, the day after our struggle,

wearing a strip of plaster over the bridge of his nose and a new

air of importance. The Turners went to New York soon after, and

I was alone. I tried to put Elsa Lee out of my thoughts, as she

had gone out of my life, and, receiving the hoped-for hospital

appointment at that time, I tried to make up by hard work for a

happiness that I had not lost because it had never been mine.

A curious thing has happened to me. I had thought this record

finished, but perhaps-Turner's health is bad. He and his wife and Miss Lee are going to

Europe. He has asked me to go with him in my professional capacity!

It is more than a year since I have seen her.

The year has brought some changes. Singleton is again a member of

the Turner forces, having signed a contract and a temperance pledge

at the same sitting. Jones is in a hospital for the insane, where

in the daytime he is a cheery old tar with twinkling eyes and a huge

mustache, and where now and then, on Christmas and holidays, I send

him a supply of tobacco. At night he sleeps in a room with opaque

glass windows through which no heavenly signals can penetrate. He

will not talk of his crimes,--not that he so regards them,--but

now and then in the night he wraps the drapery of his couch about

him and performs strange orisons in the little room that is his.

And at such times an attendant watches outside his door.