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said Mrs. Meade a little bit
quickly.
    “The maid. Mrs. Lansbury’s maid. Seems she
overheard him say something funny last night that put her mind onto
it.”
    “When she—oh, yes. That would be it.” Mrs.
Meade nodded, reflectively. “ ‘It couldn’t have been planned any
better’ —that was it, wasn’t it?”
    “That’s it. You were there too, weren’t you?
Now, what I want to know is why . The maid gave me a long
rigamarole about a romance and a rival and a rose and I don’t know
what all, and I’m blamed if I can make head or tail of it.”
    “That’s very nearly it,” said Mrs. Meade;
and, tailoring her narrative style to her audience, she gave him,
with as little sentiment as possible, a description of the state of
affairs between Mark Lansbury, Rose Grey and Steven Emery.
    Royal listened, and grunted without much
interest when she finished. “All nice for a novel,” he said. “But I
don’t see what it’s got to do with the fire. Still what the kid
said sure makes it look like he had something to do with
it.”
    “You’d think appearances were even blacker
against him, I’m afraid, if you had heard what he was saying to me
yesterday afternoon,” said Mrs. Meade, “about how a man is only
given a chance to prove himself in a ‘trial by fire’.”
    Andrew Royal nearly jumped out of his chair.
“What!”
    He listened much more intently as Mrs. Meade
explained the whole of the conversation she had had with Mark in
the garden. “So you think,” he said, “that he started the house on
fire, so he could rescue the girl or somebody, and make himself out
to be a hero?”
    “I should hate to think that!” said Mrs.
Meade with surprising energy. “It’s only that I made up my mind to
be frank with you from the first, Andrew, whatever my own opinions
may be. I know it certainly wouldn’t do Mark any good if you were
to hear of such a thing later on.”
    The sheriff leaned forward in his chair,
examining her keenly from under his bushy eyebrows. “Tell the
truth, Lettie. You think the boy did it.”
    “I don’t know, Andrew,” said Mrs. Meade,
looking down at her folded hands in her lap and shaking her head.
“I’ve known Mark since he was a little boy, and I would not have
thought him the kind to risk harming other people by doing
something that could go so horribly, dangerously wrong. But he was
terribly in love, and very wrought up over it, and he could have
reached the point where he was ready to do something reckless.”
    Royal grunted again. “He’d have had to be
pretty far gone. What kind of idiot sets his own house on
fire?”
    “Well, it’s rather less audacious then
setting someone else’s house on fire,” said Mrs. Meade. “If it
comes to that, Mrs. Lansbury says the house was well insured. Mark
likely would have known about that.”
    Andrew Royal plucked at his moustache for a
moment. “Insured, eh?” he said. “Where’s Lansbury Senior, now? His
wife said he was suddenly called away on business yesterday.”
    “In Denver. But I don’t believe he was called
away; he told us all he’d decided to go himself.”
    “On the board of a railroad company, isn’t
he?” said Royal. “What’s he up to just now?”
    “I understand he’s been planning the
construction of a short new line to connect two busy existing
ones—a rather bold project, I believe, since it will have to cross
some mountains to do so.”
    “Mmm-hmm,” said Royal. “I was talking to that
Steven Emery fellow, too. He said Lansbury’s having a job trying to
raise the capital for it.”
    “Did Mr. Emery tell you why he had
chosen not to invest in it?” inquired Mrs. Meade rather
pointedly.
    One corner of the sheriff’s moustache bent
upwards. “I think Emery’s a fellow who likes to put his investments
in a basket he can be sure won’t come back full of broken
eggs.”
    “Mr. Lansbury is no charlatan,” said Mrs.
Meade, raising her eyebrows just a trifle.
    “I’ll wager he’s no