squeeze
to fit his 'quarter' in between the 'at' and the 'to,' showing that the
latter were already written. The man who wrote all his words first is
undoubtedly the man who planned the affair."

"Excellent!" cried Mr. Acton.

"But very superficial," said Holmes. "We come now, however, to a point
which is of importance. You may not be aware that the deduction of a
man's age from his writing is one which has brought to considerable
accuracy by experts. In normal cases one can place a man in his true
decade with tolerable confidence. I say normal cases, because ill-health
and physical weakness reproduce the signs of old age, even when the
invalid is a youth. In this case, looking at the bold, strong hand of
the one, and the rather broken-backed appearance of the other, which
still retains its legibility although the t's have begun to lose their
crossing, we can say that the one was a young man and the other was
advanced in years without being positively decrepit."

"Excellent!" cried Mr. Acton again.

"There is a further point, however, which is subtler and of greater
interest. There is something in common between these hands. They belong
to men who are blood-relatives. It may be most obvious to you in the
Greek e's, but to me there are many small points which indicate the same
thing. I have no doubt at all that a family mannerism can be traced in
these two specimens of writing. I am only, of course, giving you
the leading results now of my examination of the paper. There were
twenty-three other deductions which would be of more interest to experts
than to you. They all tend to deepen the impression upon my mind that
the Cunninghams, father and son, had written this letter.

"Having got so far, my next step was, of course, to examine into the
details of the crime, and to see how far they would help us. I went up
to the house with the Inspector, and saw all that was to be seen. The
wound upon the dead man was, as I was able to determine with absolute
confidence, fired from a revolver at the distance of something over
four yards. There was no powder-blackening on the clothes. Evidently,
therefore, Alec Cunningham had lied when he said that the two men were
struggling when the shot was fired. Again, both father and son agreed
as to the place where the man escaped into the road. At that point,
however, as it happens, there is a broadish ditch, moist at the bottom.
As there were no indications of bootmarks about this dit