【英文原著类】The Man in Lower Ten(下层人).pdf

The Man in Lower Ten
The Man in Lower Ten
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
1
The Man in Lower Ten
CHAPTER I
I GO TO PITTSBURG
McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business. I
never liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten, I have
been a bit squeamish. Given a case like that, where you can build up a
network of clues that absolutely incriminate three entirely different people,
only one of whom can be guilty, and your faith in circumstantial evidence
dies of overcrowding. I never see a shivering, white-faced wretch in the
prisoners' dock that I do not hark back with shuddering horror to the
strange events on the Pullman car Ontario, between Washington and
Pittsburg, on the night of September ninth, last.
McKnight could tell the story a great deal better than I, although he
can not spell three consecutive words correctly. But, while he has
imagination and humor, he is lazy.
"It didn't happen to me, anyhow," he protested, when I put it up to him.
"And nobody cares for second-hand thrills. Besides, you want the
unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that. I'm a
lawyer."
So am I, although there have been times when my assumption in that
particular has been disputed. I am unmarried, and just old enough to dance
with the grown-up little sisters of the girls I used to know. I am fond of
outdoors, prefer horses to the aforesaid grown-up little sisters, am without
sentiment (am crossed out and was substituted.-Ed.) pletely ruled
and frequently routed by my housekeeper, an elderly widow.
In fact, of all the men of my acquaintance, I was probably the most
prosaic, the least adventurous, the one man in a hundred who would be
likely to go without a deviation from the normal through the orderly
procession of the seasons, summer suits to winter flannels, golf to bridge.
So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my
unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime,