ter a fashion by
the reflection from the mounting flames without.

The tenant was in bed; he lay on his side with his face turned to the
wall; he made no answer to their hails. When they bent over him they
knew why. No need to touch him, then, with that look on his face and
that stare out of his popped eyes. He was dead, all right enough; but
plainly had not been dead long; not more than a few minutes, apparently.
One of his hands was shoved up under his pillow with the fingers
touching a small roll containing seven ten-dollar bills and one
five-dollar bill; the other hand still gripped a fold of the coverlet as
though the fatal stroke had come upon the old man as he lifted the
bedclothing to draw it up over his face. These incidental facts were
noted down later after the coroner had been called to take charge; they
were the subject of considerable comment next day when the inquest took
place. The coroner was of the opinion that the old man had been killed
by a heart seizure, and that he had died on the instant the attack came.

However, this speculation had no part in the thoughts of the two
startled firemen at the moment of the finding of the body. What most
interested them, next only to the discovery of the presence of the dead
man there in the same room with them, was a queer combination of shadows
which played up and down against the wall beyond the bed, it being
plainly visible in the glare of the small conflagration just outside.

With one accord they turned about, and then they saw the cause of the
phenomenon, and realised that it was not very much of a phenomenon after
all, although unusual enough to constitute a rather curious
circumstance. A crippled, tailless rat had somehow entangled its neck in
a loop at the end of the dangling cord of the half-drawn shade at the
side window on the opposite side of the room and, being too weak to
wriggle free, was still hanging there, jerking and kicking, midway of
the window opening. The glow of the pile of burning leaves and brush
behind and beyond it, brought out its black outlines with remarkable
clearness.

The patterned shadow upon the wall, though, disappeared in the same
instant that the men outside began spraying their chemical compound from
the two extinguishers upon the ambitious bonfire to douse it out, and
one of the firemen slapped the rat down to the floor and killed it with
a stamp of his foot.

CHAPTER II

THE BROKEN SHOELACE

I

In the