The Dusky Hour Read Online Free Page B

apparently.”
    â€œWe found some papers in the car of the poor chap that’s got himself killed,” the colonel explained. “They make it seem as if he may have been in the States, too. We thought possibly he might be going to call on Mr. Hayes, especially as there is some suggestion he had been asking how to get to Way Side. We wondered if he could have confused Sevens and Way Side?”
    â€œDon’t see how,” said Mr. Moffatt, “curious, though. I’ve a man here to-night – came down from town to chat and talk business. A Mr. Pegley. I believe he’s been in America, and I think he mentioned Denver. I asked him if he knew Hayes, but he didn’t seem to. Quite a big town, he tells me – Denver.”
    â€œInteresting,” said the colonel, who had known about Mr. Pegley before, but had wished Mr. Moffatt to be the first to mention him. “Perhaps he can help us. I must ask him, if I may.”
    â€œHe is in the drawing-room,” Mr. Moffatt explained. “If you’ll come along, Ena will give you a cup of coffee and you can ask Pegley himself. Do you know his name? The dead man’s, I mean.”
    â€œWe think it is Bennett – Arthur Bennett,” Colonel Warden answered, “but it’s an odd thing again – there were no papers or letters or anything of that kind in his pocket; no personal card either; nothing in the way of name or address. The papers we found were rather tucked away – in an envelope behind a cushion. And,” continued the colonel slowly, “they rather suggested Mr. Bennett – if that’s his name – was engaged in – well, share-pushing, they call it.”
    Mr. Moffatt fairly jumped. The card Larson had so negligently dropped before him was in his waistcoat pocket and now seemed suddenly to bulk enormous there, so that he expected Colonel Warden to point at it an inquiring finger. Bewilderedly he wondered if he ought to produce it, and how doing so would conform with his duty as a host.
    â€œThat is why,” Colonel Warden continued, apparently as unaware of that hidden card as though it shouted not its presence and its message to the whole world in the way Mr. Moffatt felt it must surely be doing, “we rang up Scotland Yard, as we knew they had been chasing American share-pushers lately, and asked them to send us down someone who might perhaps be able to identify the body. Detective-Sergeant Owen was good enough to come along by the next train.”
    He indicated Bobby as he spoke. Bobby bowed slightly. Mr. Moffatt said:
    â€œOh, yes – Reeves told me. Knew him, apparently.” The colonel looked surprised, even startled. Bobby looked a trifle surprised, too, and said:
    â€œYour butler? He knew me? I didn’t recognise him.” He took out his notebook and made an entry. But Mr. Moffatt was thinking of something else. He said:
    â€œThere were papers in the car but none on the body? Isn’t that rather queer?”
    â€œWe thought it so,” answered the colonel cautiously. “Everyone has some sort of document in his pocket,” declared Mr. Moffatt, “if it’s only a notebook or an old envelope. Can they have been taken by someone – removed?”
    â€œWe thought it possible,” agreed the colonel, still cautiously.
    â€œBut, then, that would mean,” said Mr. Moffatt hesitatingly, “that would mean – murder?”
    â€œWe thought it possible,” agreed the colonel once again.

CHAPTER 3
STORY OF CARD-SHARPERS
    Mr. Moffatt looked very disturbed, even uneasy, but excited and interested as well. Murder was certainly a dreadful thing, but also, in a way, impersonal. It was like a war in Spain, a famine in China, a revolution in Mexico or Brazil, tragic, deplorable, but also comfortably remote. Startling, certainly, that this time it had come even as near as Battling Copse, three miles away, on the west far boundary of the