the
fine gold chain you wear over your ear?"

I didn't want to touch the thing: the stain at the end made me shudder.
But with a baker's dozen of suspicious eyes--well, we'll say fourteen:
there were no one-eyed men--I took the fragment in the tips of my
fingers and looked at it helplessly.

"Very fine chains are much alike," I managed to say. "For all I know,
this may be mine, but I don't know how it got into that sealskin bag. I
never saw the bag until this morning after daylight."

"He admits that he had the bag," somebody said behind me. "How did you
guess that he wore glasses, anyhow?" to the amateur sleuth.

That gentleman cleared his throat. "There were two reasons," he said,
"for suspecting it. When you see a man with the lines of his face
drooping, a healthy individual with a pensive eye,--suspect astigmatism.
Besides, this gentleman has a pronounced line across the bridge of his
nose and a mark on his ear from the chain."

After this remarkable exhibition of the theoretical as combined with the
practical, he sank into a seat near-by, and still holding the chain, sat
with closed eyes and pursed lips. It was evident to all the car that the
solution of the mystery was a question of moments. Once he bent forward
eagerly and putting the chain on the window-sill, proceeded to go
over it with a pocket magnifying glass, only to shake his head in
disappointment. All the people around shook their heads too, although
they had not the slightest idea what it was about.

The pounding in my ears began again. The group around me seemed to be
suddenly motionless in the very act of moving, as if a hypnotist had
called "Rigid!" The girl in blue was looking at me, and above the din
I thought she said she must speak to me--something vital. The pounding
grew louder and merged into a scream. With a grinding and splintering
the car rose under my feet. Then it fell away into darkness.

CHAPTER VIII. THE SECOND SECTION

Have you ever been picked up out of your three-meals-a-day life, whirled
around in a tornado of events, and landed in a situation so grotesque
and yet so horrible that you laugh even while you are groaning, and
straining at its hopelessness? McKnight says that is hysteria, and that
no man worthy of the name ever admits to it.

Also, as McKnight says, it sounds like a tank drama. Just as the
revolving saw is about to cut the hero into stove lengths, the second
villain blows up the sawmill. The hero goes u