It
was appalling! What a fiend incarnate this man Cleek was! Coming here at
Nigel's own bidding, and then suddenly manipulating the evidence, until
it caught him up in its writhing coils like a well-thrown lasso. Oh, if
he had only let well enough alone and not brought a detective to the
house. Yet how was he to know that the man would try to fix a murder on
him, himself? Useless for him to speak, to deny. The revolver-shot and
the cruel little bullet (which showed there were others who possessed
that sort of fire-arm besides himself) proved too easily, upon the
circumstantial evidence theory at all events, that his word was naught.
He went through the next hour or two like a man who has been tortured.
Silent, but bearing the mark of it upon his white face and in his haggard
eyes. And indeed his situation was a terrible and strange one. He had set
the wheels of the law in motion; he himself had brought the relentless
Hamilton Cleek into the affair and now he was called a murderer!
In the little cell where they placed him, away from the gaping,
murmuring, gesticulating knot of villagers that had marked his progress
to the police-station--for news flies fast in the country, especially
when there is a viper-tongue like Borkins's to wing it on its way--he was
thankful for the momentary peace and quiet that the place afforded.
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