He looked at me narrowly across the table.
"There was hardly any mystery about his death," he said. "The
man shot himself with an old dueling pistol that hung above the
mantel in his library. The family, when they found him, put the
pistol back on the nail and fitted the affair with the stock
properties of a mysterious assassin.
"The explanation was at once accepted. The man's life, in the
public mind, called for an end like that. St. Alban after his
career, should by every canon of the tragic muse, go that way."
He made a careless gesture with his fingers.
"I saw the disturbed dust on the wall where the pistol had been
moved, the bits of split cap under the hammer, and the powder
marks on the muzzle.
"But I let the thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destiny
of the man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was all
fated, as the Gaelic people say . . . . I saw no reason to
disturb it."
"Then there was some other mystery?" I ventured.
He nodded his big head slowly.
"There is an ancient belief," he said, "that the hunted thing
always turns on us. Well, if there was ever a man in this world
on whom the hunted thing awfully turned, it was St.
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