"
"Is that all, Rawlins?" Sanderson asked.
"'Bout all that 'mounts to anything," the laborer deprecated. "But they
was somethin' else that struck me as a little funny, when I come to
think of it--"
"Well?" Sanderson prodded, as the man halted uncertainly.
"Well, it's like I told you, it was my job to burn the papers. That
scar-face maid of Mis' Selim's put everything--garbage and trash--in a
big garbage can outside the back door, and I burnt 'em up. So I was
kinder surprised Sat'dy mornin', when I went to stoke up the laundry
heater, to find somebody'd been meddlin' with my drafts and had let the
fire go clean out. I had to clean out the ashes and build a new fire--"
"You're trying to say, I suppose, that you could tell by the ashes that
someone had been burning papers in the laundry heater?" Sanderson asked,
with a quick glance at Dundee's tense face.
"That's right, sir," Rawlins agreed eagerly. "You know what kind of
ashes a mess o' paper makes--layers of white ashes, sir, that kinder
looks like papers yit."
"Yes, I know.... And you found layers of white ashes, which you took
particular pains to clean out?" Sanderson asked bitterly.
"Yes, sir. So's I could build a new fire--"
"Did you speak to the maid--ask her if she'd been 'meddlin' with your
drafts'?"
"Yes, sir, I did!" the man answered with a trace of the belligerence he
had undoubtedly shown to Lydia.
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