bel Crone was a man that had come to Berwick about three years before
this, from heaven only knows where, and had set himself up in business as
a marine-store dealer, in a back street which ran down to the shore of
the Tweed. He was a little red-haired, pale-eyed rat of a man, with
ferrety eyes and a goatee beard, quiet and peaceable in his ways and
inoffensive enough, but a rare hand at gossiping about the beach and the
walls--you might find him at all odd hours either in these public places
or in the door of his shop, talking away with any idler like himself. And
how I came to get into talk with him on that particular night was here:
Tom Dunlop, Maisie's young brother, was for keeping tame rabbits just
then, and I was helping him to build hutches for the beasts in his
father's back-yard, and we were wanting some bits of stuff, iron and wire
and the like, and knowing I would pick it up for a few pence at Crone's
shop, I went round there alone. Before I knew how it came about, Crone
was deep into the murder business.

"They'll not have found much out by this time, yon police fellows, no
doubt, Mr. Moneylaws?" he said, eyeing me inquisitively in the light of
the one naphtha lamp that was spurting and jumping in his untidy shop.
"They're a slow unoriginal lot, the police--there's no imagination in
their brains and no ingenuity in their minds. What's wanted in an affair
like this is one of those geniuses you read about in the storybooks--the
men that can trace a murder from the way a man turns out his toes, or by
the fashion he's bitten into a bit of bread that he's left on his plate,
or the like of that--something more than by ordinary, you'll understand
me to mean, Mr. Moneylaws?"

"Maybe you'll be for taking a hand in this game yourself, Mr. Crone?"
said I, thinking to joke with him. "You seem to have the right instinct
for it, anyway."

"Aye, well," he answered, "and I might be doing as well as anybody else,
and no worse. You haven't thought of following anything up yourself, Mr.
Moneylaws, I suppose?"

"Me!" I exclaimed. "What should I be following up, man? I know no more
than the mere surface facts of the affair."

He gave a sharp glance at his open door when I thus answered him, and
the next instant he was close to me in the gloom and looking sharply
in my face.

"Are you so sure of that, now?" he whispered cunningly. "Come now, I'll
put a question to yourself, Mr. Moneylaws. What for did you not let on in
yo