rely the victims of his
abhorrent cruelty. He loved the look of sick surprise in their starting
eyes. He got a filthy joy out of seeing a man turn pale. He rubbed his
hands in glee when a woman swooned. He----"

"I can't stand that--can't stand it!" Sloane protested, hands over his
eyes.

"What more do you want, to prove his guilt, his abominable guilt?"
Hastings swept on. "You have the motive, hatred of this woman here and
her daughter--you have the proof of the letter sent to him making the
compulsory appointment--you have his own crazy explanation of his
homicidal impulse, from which, by the way, he never sought relief, a
queer 'impulse' since it gave him time, hours, to plan the crime and
manufacture the weapon with which he killed!"

"I said at the start," Wilton put in hoarsely, "this man Hastings was
only theorizing. If he had anything to connect me with----"

"I have!" Hastings told him, and came to a standstill in front of the
sheriff, bending over him, as if to drive each statement into Crown's
reluctant mind.

"He got that letter a little after five in the afternoon. He left me
here, in this room, with Sloane and Webster, and was gone three-quarters
of an hour. That was just before dinner. He had the second floor, on
that side of the house, entirely to himself. He took a nail-file from
Webster's dressing case, and in Webster's room put a sharper point on it
by filing it roughly with the file-blade of his own pen knife.

"That's doubly proved: first, my magnet, with which I went over the
floor in Webster's room, picked up small particles of steel. Here they
are."

He produced a small packet and, without unwrapping it, handed it to
Crown.

"Again: you'll find that the file-blade of his knife retained particles
of the steel in the little furrows of its corrugated surface. I know,
because last Sunday, as your car came up the driveway, I borrowed his
knife, on the pretext of tightening a screw in the blade of mine. And I
examined it."

He put up a silencing hand as Wilton forced a jeering laugh.

"But there's more to prove his manufacture and ownership of the weapon
that killed the woman. He made the handle from the end of a slat on the
bed in the room which I occupied that night. The inference is obvious:
he didn't care to risk going outside the house to hunt for the wood he
needed; he wouldn't take it from an easily visible place; and, having
stolen something from one room, he paid his attention to