I barely waited to snatch a hasty supper before riding back to the village.

From there I sent a fifty-word telegram to the chief of police in Seattle asking for any information as to the whereabouts of Jefferson Gaylord on the nineteenth of May.
It was ten o'clock the next morning before an answer came.

So sure was I of what it was going to contain, that I read the words twice before comprehending them.
"Jefferson Gaylord spent May nineteenth in lumber camp thirty miles from Seattle.

Well-known character.

Mistaken identity impossible.
"HENRY WATERSON, "_Police Commissioner_." I had become so obsessed with the horror of my new theory; so sure that Jeff was the murderer of his father that I could not readjust my thoughts to the idea that he had been at the time of the crime three thousand miles away.