aw falling.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, pulling himself together with a
sudden desperate self-possession that caused Sweetwater to cast a quick
significant glance at the coroner, as he withdrew to his corner, leaving
the bottle on the table.

"That," answered the district attorney, "was picked up at a small hotel
on Cuthbert Road, just back of the markets."

"I don't know the place."

"It's not far from The Whispering Pines. In fact, you can see the
club-house from the front door of this hotel."

"I don't know the place, I tell you."

"It's not a high-class resort; not select enough by a long shot, to
have this brand of liquor in its cellar. They tell me that this is of
very choice quality. That very few private families, even, indulge in
it. That there were only two bottles of it left in the club-house
when the inventory was last taken, that those two bottles are now
gone, and that--"

"This is one of them? Is that what you want to say? Well, it may be for
all I know. I didn't carry it there. I didn't have the drinking of it."

"We have seen the man and woman who keep that hotel. They will talk, if
they have to."

"They will?" His dogged self-possession rather astonished them. "Well,
that ought to please you. I've nothing to do with the matter."

A change had taken place in him. The irritability approaching to
violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every
movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly,
and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not
a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to
inspire confidence. The district attorney showed that he was baffled,
and Dr. Perry moved uneasily in his seat, until Sweetwater, coming
forward, took up the cue and spoke for the first time since young
Cumberland entered the room.

"Then I have no doubt but you will do us this favour," he volunteered, in
his pleasantest manner. "It's not a long walk from here. Will you go
there in my company, with your coat-collar pulled up and your hat well
down over your eyes, and ask for a seat in the snuggery and show them
this bottle? They won't know that it's empty. The man is sharp and the
woman intelligent. They will see that you are a stranger, and admit you
readily. They are only shy of one man--the man who drank there on the
night of your sister's murder."

"You 're a--" he began, with a touch of his old violence; but real