THE FOURTH PROBLEM THE FLYING DEATH

I.

The last sobbing notes of the violin died away. Slowly, reverently, the girl lowered the bow and lifted her chin; the throat-filling hush wrought by the conjuring of her music became wild, unrestrained applause as the spell broke. The beating surges of sound from the gallery, the balcony, the floor seemed to frighten her a little; the frail body in its simple white frock shrank before it; but the girlish lips smiled bravely as she bowed her way to the wings.

Clamorous, insistent, the applause continued. She reappeared; silence came as she lifted the violin to her chin. The lilting fantasy of a folk-song rollicked from under the dancing bow. Once more came the enthusiastic outburst when she finished. She gestured her thanks, smiled an instant at the upper right-hand box, laughed and kissed her hand to the lone occupant of lower left and ran from the stage.

“Sheer genius, Sydney!” murmured Thornley Colton, in expression of the reverence good music always aroused in him; for music, to the blind man, held all the pleasures that painting, sculpture, and beautiful architecture hold for those whom God has given sight. Now his whole face, from the 131high forehead to the lean, cleft chin, was alight; even the sightless eyes seemed to shine behind the great blue circles of the smoked-glass, tortoise-shell-rimmed library spectacles that accentuated the striking whiteness of his face and hair.

“Wonderful!” breathlessly agreed the red-cheeked, black-haired Sydney Thames, secretary and constant companion of the blind man.

“It makes my woids muss up when I try to talk,” gulped The Fee, freckle-faced, red-haired, blue-eyed boy, who had become a member of the Colton household at the conclusion of a particularly baffling murder case. Thornley Colton laughed softly and pushed back his chair. Then real alarm came to the boy’s voice. “Gee, yuh ain’t goin’ now?” he pleaded. “They’s a coupla comedy acr’bats an’ a wop knife t’rower yet!”

“We’ll wait,” promised Colton, as he made room for a pale-faced young man who had just risen to hurry past him and out of the box.

The problemist moved his chair farther back, and whispered to Sydney. “Our friend who just left seems to be troubled with a mighty bad case of nerves,” he observed. “My cane could feel his chair trembling under him the whole time the girl was playing. He seemed to jump a foot when she left the stage that last time, and he’s been muttering under his breath ever since. What happened?”

“I’d say he was wildly in love with her, and madly jealous of some one else,” accounted Sydney. “She smiled up at him an instant after that last encore, but she immediately turned and kissed her hand to the man in the lower left-hand box. If ever black rage shone in a man’s face it was on that of our neighbour. He isn’t more than twenty-two or three, and he doesn’t look as if he had ever learned to curb a nasty temper.”

132“He left as if he were going in search of some one’s heart blood,” smiled the blind man, leaning back in his chair.

One of the comedy acrobats had just succeeded in pushing the other from a high table, and was joyously dancing on his rubber stomach, to the great delight of The Fee, and some fourteen or fifteen hundred others.

“You don’t happen to know the occupant of lower left?” asked Colton. Somehow the thought of sordid jealousy of two men, and a girl whose witchery could produce such music, seemed to jar.

Sydney gazed covertly down at the occupant of lower left. He was a big-bodied man, and fat. There were fleshy pouches of good living and bad drinking under his eyes; but no dissipation could hide the iron will, the dominant arrogance the heavy chin showed. He sat back in the deep box, the black of his evening clothes verging into the black of the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall behind him. The white expanse of shirt front contrasted strikingly with the sombre background; one white fist rested on the back of a gold chair.

“It’s James P. Cartwright, the theatrical manager!” returned Sydney suddenly. “Her manager!” he supplemented in sudden anger as he compared the innocent girlishness of the violinist and the coarse grossness of the recognized man in the box. Sydney Thames deified all women from afar, for he had forbidden himself the joys of propinquity, because he could never forget that he had no name but that of the English river on the banks of which Thornley Colton had found him, a bundle of dirty baby-clothes, years before.

“Cartwright has an unenviable reputation among his women of the stage,” muttered Colton. The smile was gone from the thin, expressive lips now. 133The rocking notes of the fantastic folk-song still haunted him; the sobbing cadence of the piece she had played before was in his mind: an omen of tragedy. A soul that could conjure music like that—and a Cartwright who, gossip said, demanded his price for others’ success!

The two comedy acrobats had disinterred themselves from an avalanche of chairs and a table; the first to his feet had been promptly knocked down by the other, and dragged off the stage by his heels, while The Fee and a few hundred others shouted and clapped their approval. A card announced Signor Delvetoi and his marvellous whirling knives.

Sydney, watching the occupant of the lower left, saw him take out a big watch impatiently, lean ponderously back in a chair, and summon an usher. The uniformed man came, listened a moment, nodded, and opened the door at the stage end of the box, to reappear a moment later and whisper his message, or news. Cartwright nodded, and turned his attention idly toward the stage, where the signor sent a whirling knife toward the high boards before which his yellow-haired partner had set a red apple swinging on a long string. The knife point thudded into the wood; the cut string parted, and the apple rolled to the stage floor.

“Gee, that’s some stunt!” ecstatically exclaimed The Fee, as he enthusiastically described the feat of the black-bearded signor to Colton.

A handful of playing cards flurried before the wooden stop. Three whirling knives shot across the whole length of the stage; three cards were pinned fast, and the assistant held them up triumphantly to show the pierced ace spots.

Cartwright inclined his head in a nod of grudging approval, then turned quickly as he heard the door that led back to the stage open. Sydney saw the 134girl who had played appear in her street clothes, a simple white shirt waist and dark skirt, her coat thrown over her arm. He gritted his teeth at the greeting she gave the theatrical manager, and as he saw the flush of happiness on the winsome face, while the thick lips of the man grinned as he took her coat. Cartwright jerked his thumb toward the stage where the dexterous signor had just succeeded in planting five knives in a black spot not bigger than a half dollar.

He pulled his chair close to that of the girl, and they sat talking; the girl with many pretty, unconscious gestures, the man listening, with a jerky nod now and then. They were in the rear of the box, not three feet from the heavy velvet hangings that covered the wall back of them. They could not be seen from the body of the theatre, but from the upper box opposite, where Sydney sat, everything in their box was visible.

Sydney interrupted The Fee’s excited description of the signor’s act long enough to tell the news to Colton; and he made no excuse for his spying. The blind man nodded grimly, and continued his patient listening to The Fee, who was having the time of his young life. The signor, in his suit of black silk and his black, pointed beard, had performed miracles with the whirling knives. Now the boy waited breathlessly for this last feat, because the soft music of the orchestra told him it would be the best of all. A huge frame was being lowered from the flies. The blond assistant stepped to the small shelf, thrust her hands through the leather loops, and stood against the golden back, arms spread wide, feet apart. The signor brought his table of glittering knives to the footlights; the frame and the assistant swung aloft. The lights went out. Darkness for a few brief seconds, then 135the calcium from the balcony outlined the suspended woman and the gold background.

“Ah!” The Fee’s gasp swelled a thousand others, as the knife shot into the calcium beam from the darkness below, whirled with a thousand silver fires, and buried its point in the wood, blade grazing the cheek of the woman. A few seconds of breathless suspense, and another followed, to graze the ear. Even Sydney forgot the man and girl in the box as he watched the whirling blades. The weirdness of the thing held him fascinated; the knives, hurled from the hands of the man who was invisible in the darkness below the single light beam, pinwheeled through the light to find their place unerringly.

Then something caused Sydney Thames to turn his eyes again to the lower box. At the instant a flash of lurid light leaped from the darkness, silhouetting with startling vividness the seated man and girl. The roar of a pistol came to his ears; and while the light cut the darkness he saw behind the seated man and girl the face of the youth who had been in the box with them; the man whose jealousy had been shown so plainly.

Pandemonium followed instantly. A chair crashed over in the darkness across the theatre; clear above the cries of the panic-stricken men and women came the scream of a man:

“My God! I didn’t do it! I didn’t! I didn’t!”

The scream stopped. “Lights!” frenziedly called some one from the darkness.

They came. In the box opposite, Sydney Thames saw Cartwright struggling with the man whose face he had seen so distinctly in the pistol’s flash. On the floor of the box, face downward, was the girl of the violin. Between her shoulders, on the white shirt waist, was a widening splotch of crimson.

136

II.

The girl was dead. The white-coated ambulance surgeon who examined her had shaken his head, and refused to take her in the ambulance. The morgue waggon had taken the body but a short time after the police reserves had beaten their way through a mob of thousands to arrest the white-faced, hysterical prisoner, who cried his innocence through lips battered by the fist of Cartwright.

In the precinct station the prisoner had collapsed, and Cartwright told his story. He had heard a slight noise, and swung around in his chair. At that instant came the flash of the pistol behind him. He heard the man drop it, and he leaped to grapple with him. Yes, he knew the prisoner; name was Nelson, a half-baked kid, who had bothered Miss Reynolds for months. Yes, this was Miss Reynolds’s first engagement; her first appearance on any stage. He was her manager. No, nothing else. Emphatically!

The prisoner, brought around roughly, swore that he was innocent. He had known Miss Reynolds for months, they had been friends in Europe. She had asked him to be present at her first appearance, and at the end of her act he had gone to meet her at the stage entrance. It was there that he was told that she had an engagement with Cartwright. That this made him wild with jealousy he admitted; he knew Cartwright by reputation, and Miss Reynolds was but a girl, innocent, unsophisticated.

He had walked around outside the theatre for about fifteen minutes, then he had decided to go to the box and demand an explanation. The theatre was in darkness for the knife-throwing act, but he knew his way. His hand had been on the black velvet hangings when he stopped. And the 137revolver flash had come from the air not a foot ahead of him. No, he could not explain how the shot had been fired. No one could have moved from the spot where the pistol had been, because the weapon dropped on his toe!

He was taken away to a cell on a charge of murder.

Cartwright, leaving the station when the last of the curious crowd had drifted away, seemed to have aged ten years since the tragedy. He was haggard, the grim, hard smile that had been characteristic was gone, his big hands trembled. He tried in vain to get permission to remove the girl’s body from the morgue immediately. But the law demanded that the coroner see it first; and the official was out of town.

Cartwright remembered his political friends. He tried to locate a dozen over the telephone and failed. Then, by chance, he met the one man in the city who could help him; the one man among the four millions whom he could trust: Theodore Rogers, the theatrical lawyer, a friend for thirty years.

He tried to tell Rogers what he wanted, but his nervousness made his words a jumble.

“What is it, Jim? What’s the trouble?” Rogers shook him, and he looked into his eyes anxiously.

Cartwright told him of the shooting. “And, by God, Ted!” he finished passionately. “I won’t rest a minute till I see that devil in the electric chair! God! To kill a girl like that!”

The lawyer looked at him curiously. This was not the cool, suave Cartwright he had known so long.

Cartwright read the look on the lawyer’s face, and the thoughts behind it. “Not that! I swear it’s not that, Ted!” he choked.

138“Come, have a drink,” pleaded Rogers, pulling him toward the lighted entrance of a rathskeller.

“With that girl on a slab in the morgue?”

“One drink,” insisted Rogers. “You are worse than useless this way. Come!”

He dragged Cartwright down the steps. The clock over the bar said half-past two, and the leather-seated booths were in darkness. But drinks could be had. The barman dozed, and the lone waiter yawned as he carried a tray toward the booths in the rear. Rogers led the theatrical man to a seat at the side of the room in front of the bar, ordered whisky, and waited patiently until Cartwright had gulped down the liquor.

“Now tell me about it, Jim,” demanded Rogers.

Cartwright, as near the end of the leather seat as he could get, glanced at the dark booths in the back, then turned and surveyed the front of the place. The rathskeller was empty, except for the dozing barman and the waiter, who had gone into one of the front booths to figure his day’s checks.

“Don’t think—what you’ve been thinking about me and that girl, Ted.” There was almost pathetic pleading in the manager’s voice; it was pitched so low that even the lawyer at the other side of the narrow table could scarcely hear. “She was—a daughter to me—the daughter of the only woman I ever loved.”

Rogers stared. This from the man Broadway thought it knew!

“Remember twenty years ago?” continued Cartwright, in that same low, pleading voice. “The girl I took away from Kelly, that drunken burlesque magician?”

The lawyer nodded, a look of understanding in his eyes.

“You know we loved each other, and we ran 139away; she, and I, and the six months’ old kid,” he went on. “You know how she died: killed in the C. & O. wreck two hours out of Chicago, two hours after we started—and the kid under her body, alive! I guess that’s what woke me up. All I thought about after that was making money for the kid. I put her with good people, and I didn’t tell them who she was, or who I was. When she got old enough to understand, I adopted her legally. But she never knew who her father and mother were. I couldn’t tell her about the drunken sot that died in the Chicago alcoholic ward. A thing like that would have spoiled her.

“She was born with music in her. I kept her away from me and the people that knew me. I sent her abroad. And to-night was her try-out! I wanted to see if she could face the lights, because I wouldn’t have her laughed at by the highbrows if she couldn’t make good. And she did! God, how they went wild! I wouldn’t tell a soul that she was my adopted daughter—until to-morrow. Now―⁠―” He fingered his whisky glass with twitching hands.

Theodore Rogers, whose heart was reputed to be of stone, felt a lump in his throat. He pushed his gloves from the table, so in bending he would get the needed instant to hide his feelings. Something made him jerk up his head! He saw―⁠―

The roar of the pistol in his ears deafened him. He cried out as the long-barrelled gun recoiled across the table and struck him, butt foremost, on the chest. His glass was crashed to a hundred pieces as the pistol fell on the table before him. The white shirt front of Cartwright was black, a small circle of fire glowed in the linen; on his face was an awful look of horror as his head pitched forward on his arms.

140And then Rogers understood what his eyes had first seen; the picture that had lasted but the hundredth part of a second, perhaps, but which would be graven on his mind for a lifetime.

He had seen the pistol against Cartwright’s heart, with nothing to hold it there; the recoil of the explosion had driven it across the table before it fell, because no human hand had grasped it; no finger had pulled the trigger!

III.

In the darkness of his library Thornley Colton paced back and forth. The cigarette-end glowed and died as he puffed thoughtfully. Each detail of the girl’s murder at the theatre, described to him by the excited Sydney, while panic had raged above them and below them in the playhouse the night before, was being visualized by the wonderful brain that so unerringly found logic in seeming absurdity; explanation in apparent impossibility—because that brain had never been tricked by seeing eyes.

The murder of the girl had moved him mightily; the stilling forever of that wonderful music seemed more a crime against the world than against an individual. And as he paced the curtained room the mosaics of detail became a complete picture, and he knew—knew—that the man who had left their box so hurriedly the night before; the man whom Sydney had seen fire the shot, was guiltless of the murder!

He turned to face the door as hurried footsteps proclaimed to his trained, supersensitive ears that Sydney Thames was approaching.

“Cartwright has been murdered!” cried the red-cheeked secretary breathlessly. “It happened too late for the morning papers, but The Fee got some 141early extras of the evening editions with full details.”

“Where? How?” asked Colton.

“In an up-town rathskeller. He was shot by Theodore Rogers, the lawyer.”

“He was not,” corrected the blind man quietly.

“How did you hear of it?” demanded Sydney, in surprise.

“This is the first intimation I had of such a thing, but your statement was just a little too positive; your voice told me that you believe Rogers guilty because of the utter impossibility of the story he must have given the police.”

Sydney flushed. “But his story is crazy, insane!” he insisted.

“Perhaps if I heard it―⁠―” suggested Colton.

Excitedly, with utter disbelief in his voice, Sydney Thames told of the unheld pistol Rogers swore he saw; of its firing with no finger near the trigger; of its recoil, and fall.

“Of course the police arrested him,” continued Sydney. “Cartwright held a lot of Rogers’s paper. That’s the motive. They’ve got a clear case, as clear as the one against the love-crazed kid who shot the violinist.”

“Just as clear,” echoed Colton slowly. Then: “But haven’t you withheld the fact that the pistols used in both murders are exactly alike?”

“How—did you know—that?” gasped Sydney. Many times he had heard the blind man make such amazing statements, but they always startled him.

“Because both crimes were committed by the same man in the same way!”

“But Nelson, the kid who shot the girl, was locked up in a cell,” protested Thames.

“Exactly,” admitted the blind man. “But he killed Cartwright as surely as he murdered the girl.”

142It was several seconds before the meaning of that sentence struck Sydney. “He shot that girl in the back!” rebelled Thames. “I saw his face over the flash of the pistol. Even he admits that no one else could have fired it, because it fell on his toe!”

“Rogers swears that no one did fire the bullet which killed Cartwright,” reminded Colton. “And the pistol fell on the table in front of him.”

“That’s impossible,” asserted Thames emphatically. “Some one must have held the gun. Some one must have pulled the trigger. There can be no explanation of what he says he saw. The days of ghosts and black magic have passed.”

“But not the days of black murder,” retorted Colton. “There is no black art, ghosts, or hypnotism in the murders of last night. The method is unique, that’s all.”

He picked up the slim, hollow stick he always carried. “I’m going to find that murderer,” he said. “A man who could kill a girl like that is either a fiend or a hideous blunderer. I think it’s the latter. Will you call the machine?”

The big automobile was always ready for instant service, day or night, and ten minutes later they were on their way down town. Beside the driver, eager-eyed, joyful, was The Fee. Colton had promised to let him help on the case, and the boy’s cup of happiness was full. The Fee had but two heroes: Thornley Colton in real life; Nick Carter in his favourite fiction.

“We’ll go to police head-quarters first,” decided Colton. “The prisoners will be there this morning, and I’d like to question Rogers.” Then he got from Sydney all the details the papers had given of Cartwright’s murder.

The Fee found a friendly doorman when they reached police head-quarters and prepared to have 143the time of his life. Colton’s card secured them grudging admittance to the office of the chief of detectives. The chief, like his men, had all the professional’s scorn for the amateur, but he knew the blind man, with his wide acquaintance with influential people, was not a person to antagonize. And the police had found Rogers a different proposition from the youth whose infatuation had led him to the dark box and the murder charge. The lawyer was well known, and his story demanded respect despite the utter impossibility of the thing he described. Of course, the barman and the waiter had been arrested as witnesses, but they had not seen the actual shooting. The barman had been dozing, and the waiter had been busy in a front booth. The shot had aroused them.

“Going to give us some more pointers?” asked the chief tolerantly, when he had shaken hands with Colton and nodded curtly to Sydney.

“I’d like to look into that double-murder case a bit,” confessed the problemist, paying no attention to the tone.

“You mean the two murders committed last night,” corrected the chief gruntingly. “Nothing to ’em. We’ve got the goods on young Nelson. Twenty people in the three front rows saw him do it. And Rogers’s fool story is enough to hang any man.” The real detective’s scorn for the criminal whose methods are crude came to his voice. “He might have got away with a suicide story—Cartwright was all broken up about the girl—but Rogers swears it wasn’t suicide, because the manager’s hands were not near the pistol when it was fired. He says Cartwright’s look was one of horror, as if he’d seen his end coming, and couldn’t get away from it.”

“He did see his death coming,” put in Colton 144quietly; “and I think that during the last instant he lived he realized at whose hand it came.”

“You think he got wise to Rogers at the end, eh?” guessed the chief.

“No!” The negative was sharp. “Rogers had no more to do with the murder than you or I. Cartwright was killed by a man who had been planning the murder for years; the death of the girl was a terrible mistake.”

The chief jumped from his chair. “What do you know?” he demanded.

“Nothing—definitely. With a little help from you I think I can show you the real murderer.”

“You can’t show me any murderer but Rogers and Nelson,” snapped the chief, with an air of finality. “Because you can’t convince me or anybody else that a man could see what Rogers says he saw. A pistol with no hand near it. It’s impossible! It’s dam’ foolishness!” He snorted.

Unconsciously Sydney Thames found himself nodding confirmation. That was the whole thing: an impossibility. No one had been near Cartwright but Rogers. The girl had been shot in the back, and no one could have been behind her but Nelson. This last Sydney knew, and had seen.

“Let me see the pistols which killed Cartwright and the girl, and I’ll convince you that the same man murdered both,” offered Colton.

“Duplicate guns aren’t so rare,” instantly resented the chief. This man was practically telling him that he didn’t know his business!

“Those two pistols—and others that may be in the possession of the murderer—are the only ones of their kind in the world!”

“Look at ’em, then.” The chief grabbed them from his desk. “They’re a standard German make, single-shot target pistols, blued steel, with barrels 145six inches long, numbered and sold all over Europe.”

Colton took the two pistols, and Sydney drew his chair closer to see.

“In the first place,” began the blind man, as his thin, supersensitive fingers examined one gun, while the other lay on his knees, “murderers don’t usually have this kind of pistol. They can’t be carried in any ordinary pocket, and”—his forefinger-tip rested over the shallow slot near the muzzle—“you never before saw target pistols without front sights!”

“Took ’em off so they wouldn’t catch in the pocket,” grunted the chief knowingly.

Colton’s lips curved in a smile. “An ingenious theory,” he grunted. “Have you one to fit the banged-up appearance of these butts?” He held out the pistol and indicated the nicks and scratches.

“Been used to hammer nails,” declared the chief, exaggerated weariness in his voice. “Gun owners use ’em that way sometimes, like a woman uses a hairbrush. Nothing to that.”

“Yes there is! No gun owner in the world ever drove a nail by holding a gun vertically, hand on the barrel, and pounding it up and down like a pile driver! See, the hard usage doesn’t show on the bottom of the butt, as it would have done had the pistol been swung as a hammer. The dents and scratches are all on the outside edge!”

The chief took the extended gun. The sarcastic smile on his lips faded as he tried the two ways of holding it. The blind man was right! No driving of nails could have made nicks and scratches where they were on this pistol! “What’s that got to do with the murder?” he growled.

“Everything,” answered the problemist shortly. He took the other pistol on his palm. “Didn’t it 146strike you that these were two finely balanced pistols, even for target use?” Before the chief could reply Colton shot another inquiry: “Didn’t you wonder at the fact that both triggers had been filed to a hair so that the slightest jar would cause the hammer to fall? See!” He cocked the pistol and jammed the muzzle against the chief’s desk. The hammer choked down sharply. He tried it again, this time jamming the butt down on a chair arm. Once more the hammer snapped on the empty chamber.

The chief’s jaw dropped. “That’s how those nicks were made!” he ejaculated, shocked from his supercilious attitude. The lightning-like questions, the proving of fact after fact by Colton, had disconcerted him. In ten minutes the man who was sightless had shown him details that neither his keen eyes nor the eyes of his hundred men had seen, and Colton had made of those details startling, vivid possibilities.

“May I speak to Mr. Rogers?” Colton asked the question quietly, simply, but under his voice was a subtle note that was dominantly compelling; a note that had made bigger and stronger men than the chief of the New York detective bureau bow to his wishes.

“That’s all very interesting stuff,” began the chief pompously, “but Rogers is the man who shot Cartwright, and we know that Cartwright held a dozen thousand dollars’s worth of his paper.”

The door opened to admit an attaché, and Sydney hid a grin with his hand. He had seen the chief press the call button even before he began to speak.

“Bring Rogers here,” grunted the head of the detective bureau.

The lawyer came in a moment later, and the two men who accompanied him were curtly ordered out. 147The strong face of the prisoner was marred by lines indicating loss of sleep; his lips were shut grimly, a scowl creased his forehead, his eyes, sharp and piercing, were fixed on the chief.

“This is Mr. Colton, Rogers,” introduced the detective shortly. “He’s got a sort of a theory on the Cartwright murder.”

“If it’s the right one he’ll save you a lot of trouble,” snapped the lawyer ungraciously. He turned to Colton. “I’ve heard of your work on the Villers case.” His tone was almost amiable; then into it came dull wonder. “But that was simplicity itself beside this. I saw that revolver before the shot was fired, unsupported by human hands, against Jim Cartwright’s shirt front. It must have flown there on invisible wings!”

The chief grunted sarcastically, as he had grunted at each repetition of that unvarying statement.

Thornley Colton, tapping his foot lightly with his thin stick, looked up. “That is just what it did do!” he said. The three men stared blankly. The blind man continued: “According to the newspapers, Mr. Rogers, you said that something caused you to jerk up your head in time to see that picture. Do you know what it was?”

“I do not.” Rogers shook his head. “I can only describe it as some inner impulse.”

“Wasn’t it”—Thornley Colton’s tone was impressive—“wasn’t it a shadow, a swift-passing shadow, your eyes saw on the floor?”

Rogers leaped to his feet. “By Heaven, it was!” he shouted. “I remember now!” His voice trembled with excitement. “I had lowered my head, and across the streak of light between the seat edge and table flew a shadow—like a bird passing overhead.” He stopped suddenly, the bewildered look on his face telling the sudden 148realization of his words. “How could you know that?” he burst out.

“The human brain is a curious thing,” explained the blind man slowly. “It unconsciously records impressions the eyes give, but they are instantly forgotten—because the giving is so automatic—until something recalls them. Without sight I have been compelled to figure all things in my brain. Even the steps that you take without seeing must be mentally visualized by me. I knew it must have been a shadow that caused you to look up. To you it was merely one of the thousand unconscious-conscious things your eyes see during the day which are locked up in the brain until some outside influence brings them back.”

“You can solve this thing!” Rogers shot out the words as if he had just made a wonderful discovery. The blind man’s conscious power in himself had won the confidence of the lawyer; made him realize that there was some logical explanation for the thing which his eyes had seen, and which his reason refused to accept. He forgot that he was a prisoner formally charged with murder, he paced the room nervously. And the chief, scowling down at his desk, was silent. “If you can find the man who killed Jim Cartwright!” The excitement died from Roger’s voice, a new tone came. “I knew him for thirty years, yet I never knew him until last night!”

“I want to bring to justice the man that could kill a girl whose soul held the music of Miss Reynolds’s.” There was unconscious rebuke in the problemist’s voice. All his powers he had brought to avenge the innocent girl; but he knew his efforts must be concentrated on the Cartwright murder because that was the key, the only key that would lead to the murderer.

149“The love-crazed kid did that! He―⁠―” Rogers stopped, his eyes saw the two pistols side by side on the commissioner’s desk. Instantly his keen brain recognised the significance. “They’re the same!” he exclaimed.

“What were Cartwright’s relations with Miss Reynolds?” It was a command, as Colton put it. Rogers lifted his eyes from the two pistols.

“You wrong Jim Cartwright,” he said quietly. “You’ve accepted the general opinion of him; the opinion he never cared enough about to refute. He wasn’t an angel, but he wasn’t the devil a thousand jealousies have painted him. I’m going to tell you the story he told me last night.” And he did, with all the deep feeling of his friendship, splendidly, simply.

As the men listened they understood the tragedy of Cartwright’s love for the woman who had been killed in the first moments of her new-found happiness—and his; of the little girl he had taken from her dead mother’s arms to work for, to protect, to give the happiness the mother had been denied—only to see her foully murdered when her cup of joy had but just been filled. The fiendishness of it held them spell-bound. The two beings that Cartwright had loved had been snatched from him, and he had been killed, knowing in the last instant of his life that the real murderer of the girl was not even suspected, could not be suspected, because of the devilish ingenuity of his crime.

“Kelly, the drunken magician, is the man who killed Cartwright!” ejaculated the chief.

Rogers was startled for a moment, but Colton, with an inscrutable smile on his thin lips, put a question:

“The father of the girl is dead, isn’t he?”

Rogers glanced at the blind man in surprise. 150“Yes,” he admitted. “He died in the alcoholic ward of a Chicago hospital three months after his wife was killed. He was buried in the potters’ field.”

“Where did you find that out?” scowlingly demanded the chief.

“That I didn’t proves the fact,” answered the blind man crisply. “If Cartwright hadn’t known he was dead you’d have heard of him before. Do you want me to go on?” he asked.

“Might as well,” granted the chief. “Maybe this is your lucky day.”

“Then I’d like to ask a few questions of the boy who was arrested as Miss Reynolds’s murderer.”

The chief gave the order, but there was a light of triumphant anticipation in his eyes as he waited. Unlike the murderer of Cartwright, there was nothing mysterious in the killing of the girl, despite the clever efforts of the blind man to prove differently. A score of persons had seen the flash of the pistol from the rear of the box. His men had examined the velvet-hung wall toward which the girl’s back had been, and there was not a break in it, not a crack.

When the boy—he was little more—was led in by two detectives there came a look of pity to the faces of Sydney and Rogers. He staggered to a chair when the men released his arms. His lips were purple and torn where Cartwright had beaten him to the floor the night before. A haunting look of terror was in his eyes; his face was pasty white.

“I didn’t do it! I didn’t! I didn’t!” he whispered hoarsely, when he had wet his dry lips to make even the whisper possible.

Colton put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I know you didn’t,” he said, and there was a world of sympathy in his voice. A new look came to the boy’s eyes, a trembling hand sought that of the blind man.

151“I loved her and she loved me,” he said chokingly. “We were going to be married—but that Cartwright―⁠―” Shrill vehemence came to the tone, and he stopped.

Colton’s hand quieted him. “Listen closely now, Mr. Nelson, and tell me if this is what happened: You groped your way to the box with your right hand on the wall. You felt the black velvet hangings, stopped, and the pistol went off while your right hand was stretched above you, on the hangings, and you were facing the door that led back off the stage.”

“I remember that!” interjected Sydney. “His left side was towards Cartwright and the girl!”

“Yet you said that the pistol flash crossed his body.”

“It did!” broke in the boy. “It was not twelve inches ahead of me! My right foot was extended to take another step, and the pistol fell on my toe!”

Colton turned to the three listening men. “To have fired that shot he would have had to double his left arm behind him and have shot around his body—a physical impossibility, even with a long-barrelled pistol.” He placed his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder once more. “Go outside to the men who brought you in,” he said. “You will be free in a few hours.”

Silently the boy obeyed. When Colton faced them again there was a curious expression on his face; the expression of a man who has seen a thoughtless boy destroy a priceless work of art by his clumsiness.

“He killed that girl as surely as if he had placed the pistol at her back,” he said sadly. “Yet he is as innocent of her murder as a child unborn!”

Eager questions, demands for an explanation of 152that cryptic remark, were fairly hurled at the blind man by the excited Rogers. What did he mean? How could the boy have killed Miss Reynolds and not be guilty of her murder? How had she been killed? By whom? Sydney Thames forbore the questions he knew would not be answered. The chief scowled down at the two pistols, silent, thoughtful. Colton’s statement regarding the firing of the pistol across the boy’s body had struck him like a dash of cold water. It was true! The boy could not have fired the shot that killed the girl! Once more the blind man’s unerring instinct for truth had torn down the case he and his men had been building for hours. In less than five minutes the sightless problemist had proved a fact that twenty pairs of eyes had failed to see.

“Where are the two men who were arrested in the rathskeller?” asked Colton curtly, utterly ignoring the questions.

“Bailed by their boss,” answered the chief. “They can only establish details anyway.”

“I want to interview at least one of them,” declared Colton. “I also want to visit the rathskeller. Can Mr. Rogers go, in your company, of course?”

“Yes.” The chief took the responsibility unhesitatingly. He realized that he must see the thing through now.

“Is your machine down here? I want to send my boy on an errand with mine.”

“Outside, waiting.” The chief took his hat and coat from the tree. “I’ll go with Rogers while he gets his,” he added, as he opened the door.

The blind man hurried out, feet unerringly retracing the steps his brain had registered when they entered. The red-haired boy ran from the group of detectives he had been entertaining.

153“Shrimp!” The blind man used the name he always called the boy, and took him aside. He whispered instructions, thrust two or three bills into the other’s hand. The youngster darted for the machine, and jumped up beside the driver as the chief and Rogers came from the front door.

In silence the quartet climbed into the car; in silence they made the journey to the rathskeller, where James Cartwright had been shot a few hours before. The waiter who had been on duty early in the morning was again on hand, heavy-eyed. The barman was at his home.

“Where’s the booth you occupied?” asked Colton of Rogers, when the chief had established their identity with the nervous proprietor.

The lawyer went to it, stopped at the table, and stared down at the dark stain that could not be removed.

“This is where we were,” he said huskily.

Colton stepped in between the table and the seat edge, and sat down, facing the rear of the rathskeller. “Cartwright was seated at the end of the seat, like this?” He illustrated.

Rogers nodded. “He was on the extreme end, so he could assure himself that no one would hear.”

Colton rose, and with only the slim stick to guide him, made his way to a booth that faced the front of the rathskeller, at right angles to the one where the watching men still stood.

“Who was in this booth when Cartwright was shot?” It was snapped out like the crack of a whip to the waiter.

“No-body,” faltered the serving man, wincing under the battery of eyes.

“There was!” The voice held accusation. “A man was in this booth, and he entered a moment or so before Mr. Rogers and Mr. Cartwright!”

154The waiter brushed his dry lips with the back of his hand. “He couldn’t have had nothin’ to do with it,” he mumbled, fingers twisting and untwisting the napkin in his hands.

“No one said he did!” said the blind man sharply. “You’ve been a witness in a murder case before, haven’t you?”

The watching men saw a look of alarm come to the man’s eyes. The chief stepped toward him menacingly. “Yes, sir,” muttered the waiter, shrinking. “I saw a man shot while I was at the Royal. The police kept me in the detention for three months, and I lost my job.”

There was a grim smile on Colton’s lips as he nodded understandingly. “You weren’t going to take a chance on that again, were you?” His tone was less brusque. “I’ll assure you that you won’t be held a minute if you give me a description of the man.”

The chief opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap.

“Then I’ll tell you,” consented the waiter eagerly. “He was a good-sized guy, with a yellow, old-lookin’ face, bald-headed, with a scar on the top, and he had eyes that was like slits. He came in that door.” He pointed to one that opened at the rear corner of the rathskeller, apparently on a side street. “He was so drunk he couldn’t hardly walk, and he almost fell into the seat. I was goin’ to put him out, we closed in half an hour, an’ I didn’t want to have to throw no drunks in the street. But he wanted a whisky and―⁠―” The waiter flushed and stopped.

“Go on,” prodded Colton.

The waiter looked at the proprietor and gulped nervously. “He gave me a five-spot, an’ told me to keep the change. I was bringin’ the drink when the 155other two came in. I got theirs, and went up front to figger my checks. Then I heard the shot. When I thought of the drunk again he was gone. But he couldn’t ’a’ done nothin’. He had a horrible bun, an’ we seen the gun layin’ in front of this guy.” He indicated Rogers. “Me an’ the bartender figgered we wouldn’t say nothin’ about him. If we did the police ’ld put us in the detention till they found him. His gettin’ out like that would ’a’ looked suspicious to them if it didn’t to nobody else. He was scared sober an’ beat it quick. That’s my idear.”

“Probably he’d had an experience in the house of detention, too,” declared the blind man dryly; then: “You never saw him before?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s all. Let’s go, chief. There’s a detail I want to clear up at the theatre. I’ve got to prove that girl’s murder.” Again there was the ominous ring in the problemist’s voice.

The chief glowered at the waiter. “You stay right here till I want you,” he warned. “If you try to beat it you go up the river.” He turned to Colton. “Wait a minute, until I call up headquarters. I’ll give ’em the description of that drunk, and have every man in the city on his trail.”

“And spend a week following up clues,” snapped the blind man impatiently. “I’ll show you where he is in less than an hour!”

He paid no further attention to the gaping chief of detectives, but made his way out of the place, the silent Sydney Thames at his elbow, the latter’s coat sleeve lightly touching that of Thornley Colton. And the chief followed meekly.

The blind man climbed into the front seat with the driver, and Sydney realized that he wanted to avoid interrogation; to figure out the last steps 156alone. But in the tonneau the men could not resist voicing the questions that filled their minds. Who had killed Miss Reynolds, and what could have been the object of the murder? What connection could a drunken man have with the murder of Cartwright; with a pistol that had been fired without the aid of human hands?

They were at the theatre. The box-office had just been opened for the day, and the manager took them into the darkened house. The big interior, dim and tomblike, sent a shudder through Sydney Thames. Last night there had been brilliant lights, happy men, laughing women—and the girl of the violin. To-day the great stage gaped before them, huge, untenanted; the seats were covered with their white dust cloths; voices sounded eerie in the barnlike emptiness. The velvet hangings at the rear of the box, which had looked so striking with their sleek blackness the night before, now appeared worn and dusty. The overturned chairs had been righted, the blood-stained carpet had been replaced.

Thornley Colton’s thin stick located the chairs. His right hand groped along the wall, so that the velvet moved under it. He thrust his slim cane under his arm, and the wonderful fingers went over the velvet inch by inch, sometimes so strongly that the thick stuff moved under them, then the pressure was so light that not a quiver of the loose velvet betrayed their presence. Inch by inch the feeling fingers made their way, as the men watched breathlessly. Rogers could stand it no longer.

“Was the murderer concealed behind those hangings?” he asked excitedly.

“No,” Colton answered him, without moving. “The pistol flash came from this side of the velvet.”

Silence came again. The slow-moving fingers 157stopped. The blind man looked up; then his doubly keen ears caught the sound of hurrying footsteps coming toward them down the aisle.

“A telephone message for me?” he asked, as the attaché stopped.

“Mr. Colton?”

“Yes.” He turned to the others. “Come! I think this is the last detail.”

They were at his heels as he entered the boxlike office. Tense, expectant, though they knew not for what, they listened to the one-sided conversation.

“Yes. Good. Did you see him? No, that’s all right. Stay there until we come.” He spoke an aside to the ticket-seller: “Will you please take this address for me?” The man picked up his pencil and drew a small pad toward him. “Nine hundred and ninety-seven West Forty-fourth.” The blind man hung up the receiver.

“What is it?” The question was chorused by the excited men.

“The address of the man who murdered Cartwright and Miss Reynolds!”

IV.

Before the gasps of amazement, the ejaculations of incredulity could become coherent questions, Thornley Colton had turned and made his way from the office, light stick dangling idly from his fingers. Dazedly they followed him from the theatre and into the waiting automobile. He had located the murderer of Cartwright and the girl! They were dumb with the wonder of it. Swiftly, unerringly, the blind man had found the murderer whose very being they had not suspected a short time before. To the men who had followed every step of the problemist, who had seen things that he could not 158see, the finding seemed magic comparable only to the magic of the pistol that had apparently flown from the air to deal its death. There was a new expression on the face of the chief of detectives now. The scowl was gone; the sarcastic curve of lips had vanished. In their place had come wonder, tinged with awe toward the man who had builded a wonderful structure of truth from the pieces he and his hundred men had either discarded or had not seen.

The car turned into Forty-fourth, passed the brownstone houses where every door bore its sign: “Table Board. Furnished Rooms.” A red-headed boy ran out into the street, and the chauffeur slowed up.

“It’s t’ree houses down, Mr. Colton.” The Fee’s voice fairly trembled with excitement. “He’s on the top floor. Kin I go with yuh?”

Colton nodded and stepped down from the machine. “We’ll walk the rest of the way,” he told them. He started, the bright-eyed boy at his elbow.

They mounted the steps of a brownstone house, and Colton rang the bell. A frowsy-haired lady in a grease-spotted kimono opened the door. The smell of cooking onions assailed their nostrils; somewhere within a piano banged out a ragtime tune; a raucous voice screeched: “I call her Little Hy’cinth, but her name’s M‘Swigg;” from the depths of the house a squeaky clarinet piped off-key opera.

“Profesh’n?” snapped the lady of the kimono suspiciously before any one had a chance to speak.

“We want to see Signor Delvetoi,” said the blind man quietly.

Sydney Thames never remembered the short colloquy that followed; never recollected just how they entered the house. Signor Delvetoi! That 159name drove everything else from his mind. Once more he saw the black-clothed, black-bearded man at the theatre; again he saw the whirling knives flashing from the darkness into the beam of the calcium to bury their points beside the woman of the golden frame; once more came to his mind the wonderful skill that had directed those keen-pointed knives toward their target of living flesh—to brush a cheek and not even scratch it.

Then he found himself following the others up the narrow stairs. In the second floor hall-way a fat, greasy-faced woman murmured husky endearments to a monkey in her arms, while a goose waddled at her side. A dozen discordant tunes came from the closed rooms. This was the place they had come to arrest a murderer!

On the third floor Thornley Colton stopped and knocked on a door panel. Thames could feel the tenseness of the men’s bodies as they crowded up close to the door as it slowly opened. Standing before them, framed in the light that came into the hallway from the room, stood a big man in a stained red bath-robe that trailed the floor behind the worn carpet-slippers. His head was bald, and across the skull ran a livid scar; his face was a deep-lined, jaundiced yellow.

“We want you for the murder of Cartwright and the girl at the theatre.” That was all Colton said, and his voice was low.

For an instant the face of the man went a fish-belly white; then murderous red rage leaped to the cheeks, and darted from the slit eyes.

“You devils!” he shrieked.

The red robe was flung back; but with a movement as quick as light itself Colton’s hand darted out, closed with a grip of steel on a wrist, and the red robe whirled as the man spun to his knees.

160“Better handcuff him,” advised the blind man quietly, as he pushed aside the fallen knife with the thin cane that had warned him of the murderous movement. The handcuffs clicked on the knife-thrower’s wrists as the chief dragged him to a chair.

“So you’re the one, eh?” The detective chief tried to make his tone casual, but he could not keep the wonder from his eyes, or voice.

“Oh, you got me right,” sneered the knife-thrower.

“How did you do it?” put in Rogers dazedly. The picture he had seen the night before was still in his mind.

A cunning light leaped to the half-closed eyes of the red-robed man. “D’you want to hear the whole thing?” he asked. “You might as well,” he boasted. “I’ll never swing for it.”

“Go ahead,” growled the chief, drawing his chair up closer and placing his revolver on his knees. The knife-thrower grinned sneeringly.

“Well,” he began, and his evil eyes seemed to gloat at them. “I’m the only man in the world that could have pulled the trick. It took years of practice to get it down pat, but there’s Indian blood in me, mixed with the Irish. They don’t know much about me in this country, and I didn’t want them to, till I got Jim Cartwright. But in Europe I’m the best in the business, and I’m the only one that could ever plant five knives in a spot the size of a half dollar at thirty feet, and do it on the level.”

There was boasting in the tone, but to Sydney Thames, who had seen his amazing work of the night before, it was not idle boasting.

“The story of why I killed Cartwright is the same old game: I had a woman and he took her. She wasn’t much good, only a doll-faced fool, and there 161was a squalling kid that got on my nerves; but she was mine, body and soul.” The listening men gritted their teeth at the tone, and he sneered at them for it. “Cartwright took her, and I went after them both. I had a little money, I was headin’ the olio in a burlesque. Before I started I went in a place along the river front in Chicago, where I was. I musta showed my roll, because—now I don’t expect you to believe what’s comin’, and I don’t give a damn whether you do or not!” There was sullen defiance in the voice. “But I woke up in a hospital I never saw before, and the nurse talked German! It was in Berlin, and it was ten years after! Oh, it wasn’t anything new, the doctors told me. One of the Windy City thugs had lead-piped me for my roll; you can see the scar I got. Something cracked in my head then, and when I woke I’d just been in a German train smash-up. The doctors said the bump I got there straightened me out.

“I remembered everything after a while. I was doin’ a knife-throwin’ act. Some wop had picked me up when I didn’t know my own name, and brought me to Europe with him. Somehow the kink had kept me off the booze, and I was even better than him, and he was the best in the world, bar none. He died a few months after I got out, and I copped his layout. We’d been rehearsin’ a stunt that was going to make ’em all sit up. The Flyin’ Death, we called it, and we threw pistols instead of knives. We had a blank board at one end of the stage, and a target at the other. We’d stand in the centre, let it fly at the blank board, duck, and the butt striking would jar down the trigger, and the bullet’d go over our heads and hit the bull’s-eye three times out of five. It was big stuff! But I wasn’t satisfied, because I wanted to 162hit the bull’s-eye every time. I was goin’ to play that act fer one man; the one that stole my wife and ten years out of my life. So I put in two more years on the Continent, still practisin’. If you looked at the nicks in the pistol-butts you can see how many times they’d been used.

“When I got so I couldn’t go wrong I came to the States. I learned I was dead—one of the thugs that got my coin and papers, I guess. But that suited me right down to the ground. I found Cartwright was the big cheese in the business, but I couldn’t find the wife, or the kid. I wanted to get them, too; ten years don’t make no difference to me.” Again came the sneer to the evil, yellow face, as his eyes caught their looks of horror and disgust. “I spent a year touring here before I could book Cartwright’s house. I wanted to get him right before everybody’s eyes. That’s why I had that dark act. He was up to the rehearsal in the mornin’ with a kid that looked something like the woman he stole, but it wasn’t my kid, because he made it plain he was only her manager. You can bet he’d a showed it if he had claims. I heard him make a date for the box after her act, and that looked good to me, because I’d get him right beside her.

“Under the knives for the spotlight act was the pistol with a real cartridge, of course. I only used minichure ones with a pinch of powder for the act. The guns was balanced special in Germany, and the front sights was off the barrels so they could slide out of my hand. I could see the white of the girl’s waist and his shirt between every knife-throw, because I waited a few seconds each time to get ’em right. Then, when I knew I couldn’t make a mistake, I let the gun fly. I was goin’ to have the butt hit the wall in back of him, and bullet catch 163him between the shoulders. It was easy, because I was above him on the stage, and I thought there couldn’t be any suspicion because I was in front of him, and he’d be shot in the back. But that darn’ fool kid,” he spat out snarlingly, “had to have his hands on the hanging just when the gun hit, and throw it off enough to kill the girl.”

Sydney Thames gasped audibly.

“It wasn’t my fault she was in the way, but a little thing like that wasn’t going to keep me from gettin’ the man I wanted. I got another of the guns out of my prop trunk and went after him. I couldn’t get him right until I heard the other feller arguin’ with him in front of the rathskeller. I ducked around to the side-door. I’d been in there before, but I’d had my black stage-whiskers and wig on, and the waiter didn’t know me. I played drunk, and gave the waiter a five-spot for a drink, and told him not to turn on the booth-light.

“Cartwright faced my booth, but I was in the dark. They started to whisper. The waiter was out of sight, and the bartender was sleepin’. I had the gun ready for five minutes. This man bent down—and I let her fly. There wasn’t going to be any mistake this time, because I was going to put another half turn on the gun and make it jam its muzzle against his heart. No chance of missin’ that way! And he saw the gun comin’ when it was too late to dodge! And he knew me then! And the last thing he ever saw was me grinnin’ at him! It was a cinch to slope out in the excitement after.”

There was silence in the room when he had finished. From beyond the closed door came the discordant medley of the tinny piano, the screeching clarinet, the hoarse-voiced singers. Before them a manacled man, with sneers in his voice, and boasts, 164and snarls, had just told them of the man whose death he had accomplished with such fiendish cunning; of the innocent girl whose life he had destroyed.

“Do you mean to say that you could fling those pistols as accurately as all that?” demanded the chief, who was a policeman, first, last, and all the time. The case, to him, had ceased to be one of human emotions, of sorrow and tragedy; it was a matter of proof, of conviction. Such is the policeman’s philosophy of life—and death.

“Do you want me to prove it?” taunted the murderer. “There’s the other pistol for the act on the bureau. It ain’t loaded. Get it and I’ll show you.”

“Better take his word,” suggested Colton warningly.

“I’ll see that he plays no tricks,” boasted the chief. It was his case now. He got the pistol from the bureau. “I’ll take one cuff off, and I’ll have this gun on you every second!” he snapped.

The knife-thrower leered at him with his bloodless lips, and the slit eyes shone with an exultant gleam. He took a stubby pencil from his bath-robe pocket and drew a small circle on the blank wall. He walked to the other end of the room, the chief watching him like a hawk. The pistol dangled from the man’s hand as he turned. A snap of the arm, and it became a flying whirl of blue. The muzzle struck the exact centre of the small circle, the hammer snapped down, and for an instant the gun seemed suspended against the wall before it jangled to the floor.

“God! That’s what I saw last night!” choked Rogers.

The knife-thrower picked up the pistol. “It’s just as easy to make the butt strike first, with the 165muzzle pointed at me, as it should have pointed at Cartwright’s back last night.”

The commissioner watched every move as he walked to the end of the room.

Suddenly Colton’s voice rang out:

“Don’t let him throw that pistol!”

The chief jumped from his chair as the red arm swung.

A line of fire leaped from the blank wall toward the scarlet-robed figure across the room. The explosion echoed and re-echoed in the room. The pistol clattered on the bare boards under the small circle it had struck so unerringly. On the butt were flakes of the white plaster where it had been driven into the wall. The red robe seemed slowly to crumple as the knife-thrower sank to the floor; and as they ran to where he lay, the lips twisted in an evil leer of triumph, the slit eyes gleamed their gloating.

“I told you I’d never swing for it!” he sneered up at them. “Palming that cartridge was easy. I used to be a magician—when my name was—Kelly!”

V.

“Yes, Sydney, he paid the price the State puts on murder, and I guess it is just as well.” A fleeting smile crossed Colton’s thin lips for an instant. “But the chief is naturally angry that such a spectacular murderer should escape his clutches so easily. My keen ears caught the click of the breech as he put in the cartridge. But I was too late; he had waited until the last second.”

The two men were in the library of the old-fashioned house, where the blind man had come to spend his regular afternoon four hours in darkness that meant insurance against the splitting 166headaches too-long-continued light on his sensitive, sightless eyes always caused. The knife-thrower had lived but a few minutes, for his skill had not failed him, and the bullet had pierced one of his lungs. Rogers had gone to arrange for the funerals of Cartwright and the daughter he had loved. They were to be side by side in death, and the story would go to their graves. On that the men had agreed in the big bare room where the last act of the tragedy had been played.

“How did you ever connect the knife-thrower with the murders?” asked Sydney finally.

“Your story of the shooting in the box, as you told it to me while we were waiting for the panic to cease in the theatre, gave me the first clue,” explained the blind man thoughtfully. “The fact that you saw the face of Nelson so plainly told me that the flash must have crossed his body, and, in groping his way in the darkness, his right hand must have been on the hangings. Shrimp’s enthusiastic description of the knife-thrower’s act told me how wonderful it was, and—he was the possibility.

“Then the murder of Cartwright was the proof needed. There could be no explanation but that of a thrown pistol for the thing Rogers saw. And the two pistols being identical was the last link. But no one would believe the theory without irrefutable proof. That I got, first by the nicked-up butts of the guns, showing how long they had been used in practice. Then Rogers’s story of Cartwright told me the guilty person. But then came the necessity of explaining where he had been all the years. I sent Shrimp to the stage-entrance to get the knife-thrower’s address and locate him. He did, and, being a boy, he aroused not the slightest suspicion when he made an inquiry at the house. I knew also that at least one of the two employees of the rathskeller 167must have known another man had been on hand when the murder was committed. I had to go there to see why they had withheld the information from the police. The explanation was logical enough, but the police would never have seen it. Then I had to go to the theatre and find the place where the butt of the gun had struck on the wall. The finding was more of a job than I thought. In his excitement the boy must have moved the hangings a foot, for the scar in the velvet was a foot lower than I should have found it. And you must remember that it was a scar that no eye could have seen, one that could only be found with a microscope, or supersensitive finger-tips like mine. Then came the message from Shrimp, whom I had told to call me up either at the rathskeller or the theatre.”

Silence came in the darkened room. When Thornley Colton spoke again his voice was low, solemn, its tone one of reverent wonder. “The death of that girl is one of the higher mysteries, Sydney. Was she murdered because of a terrible mistake, or did a merciful Providence send a thoughtless, foolish boy to grope in the darkness at just the right instant to deflect that pistol, and send the bullet into her back? She died in the happiest moment of her life; joy was in her heart and on her lips. If the pistol had not been turned by the moving velvet, Cartwright would have died. Her whole story would have had to come out then; she would have heard it bandied by unclean lips on the street-corners; to know that her father, the father who did not even recognize her, was a murderer. A merciful Providence? I’ll always wonder, Sydney.”

168