Eaton, "I was there that evening. I was the one who came
there by appointment and waited till after Mr. Warden was brought home
dead."

"So you admit that?" Connery gloated; but he could not keep from Eaton
a sense that, by Eaton's admission of the fact, Connery had been
disappointed. Avery too plainly had expected Eaton to deny it; the
identification of Eaton with the man who had waited at Warden's was
less a triumph to Avery, now that it was confessed. Indeed, Eaton's
heart leaped with quick gratitude as he now met Harriet Santoine's eyes
and as he heard her turning it into a fact in his favor.

"All you have brought against Mr. Eaton is that he has been indefinite
in his replies to your questions or has refused answers; isn't that
all, Don?" she said. "So if Mr. Eaton is the one who had the
appointment with Mr. Warden that night, does not that explain his
silence?"

"Explain it?" Avery demanded. "How?"

"We have Mr. Warden's word that Mr. Eaton came that night because he
was in trouble--he had been outrageously wronged, Don. He was in
danger. Because of that danger, undoubtedly, he has not made himself
known since. May not that be the only reason he has avoided answering
your questions now?"

"No!" Avery jerked out shortly.

Eaton's heart, from pulsating fast with Harriet Santoine's attempt at
his defense, now constricted with a sudden increase of his terror and
anxiety.

"All right, Mr. Eaton!" Connery now returned to his charge. "You are
that man. So besides whatever else that means, you'd been in Seattle
eleven days and yet you were the last person to get aboard this train,
which left a full hour after its usual starting time. Who were you
waiting to see get on the train before you yourself took it?"

Eaton wet his lips. To what was Connery working up? The probability,
now rapidly becoming certainty, that in addition to the recognition of
him as the man who had waited at Warden's--which fact any one at any
time might have charged--Connery knew something else which the
conductor could not have been expected to know--this dismayed Eaton the
more by its indefiniteness. And he saw, as his gaze shifted to Avery,
that Avery knew this thing also. All that had gone before had been
only preliminary, then; they had been leading up step by step to the
circumstance which had finally condemned him in their eyes and was to
condemn him in the eyes of Harriet Santoine.

She, he saw, had also sensed the