lied a match. It went off like a
flash of dry gunpowder, burning through from end to end in a fraction of
a second.

"Go on," said Ballard, speaking for the first time since the playwright
had begun his unravelling of the tangled threads of disaster.

"We dismiss the quarry catastrophe and come to the fall of a great
boulder from the hill-crags on the farther side of the river some two
weeks later. This heaven-sent projectile smashed into the dam structure,
broke out a chunk of the completed masonry, killed two men outright and
injured half a dozen others--correct me if I distort the details, Mr.
Bromley. This time there was no investigation worthy of the name, if I
have gathered my information carefully enough. Other rocks had fallen
from the same slope; and after Fitzpatrick had assured himself that
there were no more likely to fall, the matter was charged off to the
accident account. If you and Michael Fitzpatrick had been the typical
coroner's jury, Mr. Bromley, you couldn't have been more easily
satisfied with purely inferential evidence. I wasn't satisfied until I
had climbed painfully to the almost inaccessible ledge from which the
boulder had fallen. Once there, however, the 'act of God' became very
plainly the act of man. The 'heel' used as a fulcrum in levering the
rock from the ledge was still in place; and the man in the case, in his
haste or in his indifference to discovery, had left the iron crowbar
with which he had pried the stone from its bed. The crowbar is still
there."

"Is that all?" asked Bromley, wetting his lips again.

"By no manner of means," was the equable rejoinder. "I could go on
indefinitely. The falling derrick may or may not have been aimed
specially at Macpherson; but it committed premeditated murder, just the
same--the broken guy cable was rotted in two with acid. Again you will
demand to know how I know. I satisfied myself by making a few simple
tests on the broken ends with chemicals filched out of Colonel
Craigmiles's laboratory up yonder in the second story of his electric
plant. No; I'm no chemist. But you will find, when you come to write
stories and plays, that a smattering knowledge of every man's trade
comes in handy. Otherwise you'll be writing yourself down as a
blundering ass in every second paragraph."

Wingfield paused, but it was only to relight his pipe. When the tobacco
was burning again he went on, in the same even tone.

"The falling derrick brings us down to