red the excited journals, had been skilful.
No clue was left. The explosion had taken care of that. The police (with
the characteristic stupidity of a corps of former truck-drivers and
bartenders, decorated with brass buttons and shields and without further
qualification dubbed "detectives") vacillated from theory to theory.
Their putty-and-pasteboard fantasies did not long survive the Honorable
William Linder's return to consciousness and coherence. An "inside job,"
they had said. The door was locked and bolted, Mr. Linder declared,
and there was no possible place for an intruder to conceal himself.
Clock-work, then.

"How would any human being guess what time to set it for," demanded the
politician in disgust, "when I never know, myself, where I'm going to be
at any given hour of any given day?"

"Then that Dutch horn-player threw the bomb," propounded the head of the
"Detective Bureau" ponderously.

"Of course; tossed it right up, three stories, and kept playing his
infernal trombone with the other hand all the time. You ought to be
carrying a hod!"

Nevertheless, the police hung tenaciously to the theory that the
musician was involved, chiefly because they had nothing else to hang to.
The explosion had been very localized, the room not generally wrecked;
but the chair which seemed to be the center of disturbance, and from
which the Honorable William Linder had risen just in time to save his
life, was blown to pieces, and a portion of the floor beneath it was
much shattered. The force of the explosion had been from above the floor
downward; not up through the flooring. As to murderously inclined foes,
Mr. Linder disclaimed knowledge of any. The notion that the trombonist
had given a signal he derided as an "Old Sleuth pipe-dream."

As time went on and "clues" came to nothing, the police had no greater
concern than quietly to forget, according to custom, a problem beyond
their limited powers. With the release of the German musician, who
was found to be simple-minded to the verge of half-wittedness, public
interest waned, and the case faded out of current print.

Average Jones, who was much occupied with a pair of blackmailers
operating through faked photographs, about that time, had almost
forgotten the Linder case, when, one day, a month after the explosion,
Waldemar dropped in at the Astor Court offices. He found a changed
Jones; much thinner and "finer" than when, eight weeks before, he had
embarked on his n