The car started
forward, passed out of the lighted zone of the town's main street--and
in the darkness, headed toward New York, Jimmie Dale, his nonchalance
gone now, leaned forward over the wheel, and the big sixty horse-power
car leaped into its stride like a thoroughbred at the touch of the spur,
and tore onward at dare-devil speed through the night.
His lips twisted in a smile that held little of humour. Back there in
that room they would call a doctor, and they would call the police. And
the doctor would establish the fact that Forrester had died from the
effects of a dose of prussic acid; and the police would establish--what?
Prussic acid was swift in its effect. If Forrester had died from that
cause, how had he taken it himself, and out of what had he taken it?
What the police would see would be quite a different thing from what he,
Jimmie Dale, had seen when he opened the door of that room! Instead of
the evidence of suicide, there was now every evidence of _murder_. The
bank examiners on entering the room, started at what they saw, obsessed
with the wreckage of the bank, might still for the moment have jumped to
the conclusion, natural enough under the circumstances, of suicide; but
the police, after ten minutes of unemotional investigation, would father
a very different theory.
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