only pressure on a certain part was
needed to force out the needle with its death-carrying smear of some
subtle Indian poison. I never dreamed it was like an alarm clock."

"Well, it was," said Mr. Kettridge. "I can easily see all the parts,
now that I have taken it apart, and the time-setting arrangement is
very compact, simple and effective."

"You were careful not to scratch yourself on the needle?" asked the
colonel quickly.

"Oh, yes indeed! I took that out first. But do you think, Colonel, in
spite of what I have said about Jimmie not knowing how this watch
operated, and, presumably, not having done any work on it--do you think
he can have planned to kill Mrs. Darcy with it?"

"Hardly. And yet it is possible that Mrs. Darcy may have been killed
by the watch."

"Killed by it?--how?" gasped Jack Young. "I thought she was stabbed,
and her skull fractured."

"She had both those injuries, it is true. But what is to have
prevented her from having been punctured by the watch just before she
received those hurts?

"I mean in this way," went on the colonel. "We will assume that Singa
Phut, finding some trifling thing the matter with his devilish watch,
brought it to the Darcy shop, where he was fairly well known.

"Darcy promised to fix the timepiece but neglected or forgot to do it,
leaving it on his table. Then, remembering it early in the
morning--perhaps feeling guilty at having spent part of the night
working on his electric lathe--he got up to do as he had promised,
and--"

"Finds his cousin dead!" interrupted Mr. Kettridge.

"So he _says_!" added Jack Young significantly.

"Well, we won't go into that," observed the colonel. "I was going to
make another point. Leaving Darcy out of it, and assuming that he had
left the watch on his table intending to get up in the morning and fix
it, what is to have prevented Mrs. Darcy from coming down to her
store--say, before midnight, after Darcy left her.

"She saw the watch on the table, and, picking it up, may have wound it.
This set in motion the death-dealing mechanism, and her hand may have
been punctured with the poison."

"But, even then," put in Young, as he puffed out another cloud of
smoke, "if the poison from the watch killed her, why would any one
strike her on the head and stab her?"

"That may have occurred just after her hand was punctured by the needle
of the watch," said the detective, "and before the poison had time to
work. It is