he
first, but, what was more startling, that he had evidently
pre-deceased that first victim by several days; for, when found,
decomposition had already set in."

"Hum-m-m! I see!" said Cleek, arching his brows and stirring his tea
rather slowly. "A clear case of what Paddy would term 'the second
fellow being the first one.' Go on, please. What next?"

"Oh, a perfect fever of excitement, of course; for it now became
evident that a crime had been committed in both instances; and
the Press made a great to-do over it. Within the course of the
next fortnight it was positively frothing, throwing panic into the
public mind by the wholesale, and whipping up people's fears like a
madman stirring a salad; for, by that time a third body had been
found--under some furze bushes, upward of half a mile distant from
where the second had been discovered. Like the first body, this
one was wearing night clothes; but it was in an even more advanced
state of decomposition than the second, showing that the man must
have died long before either of them!"

"Oho!" said Cleek, with a strong rising inflection. "What a
blundering idiot! Our assassin is evidently a raw hand at the
game, Mr. Narkom, and not, as I had begun to fancy, either a
professional or the appointed agent of some secret society following
a process of extermination against certain marked men. Neither
the secret agent nor the professional bandit would be guilty of
the extreme folly of operating several times in the same locality,
be assured; and here is this muddling amateur letting himself be
lulled into a feeling of security by the failure of anybody to
discover the bodies of the first victims, and then going at it
again in the same place and the same way. For it is fair to assume,
I daresay, that the fourth man was discovered under precisely
similar circumstances to the first."

"Not exactly--very like them, but not exactly like them, Cleek. As a
matter of fact, he was alive when found. I didn't credit the report
when I first heard it (a newspaper man brought it to me), and sent
Petrie to investigate the truth of it."

"Why didn't you believe the report?"

"Because it seemed so wildly improbable. And, besides, they had
hatched up so many yarns, those newspaper reporters, since the
affair began. According to this fellow, a tramp, crossing the heath
in quest of a place to sleep, had been frightened half out of his
wits by hearing a voice which _he_ described as being l