nife
that looked as though it might have lain in the mud and wet for hours.

"Have you ever seen this knife before?" he asked. And Doyle, lifting up
his eyes one instant, groaned, shuddered, and said,--

"Oh, my God, yes!"

"Whose property is it or was it?"

At first he would not reply. He moaned and shook. At last--

"Sure the initials are on the top," he cried.

But the official was relentless.

"Tell us what they are and what they represent."

People were crowding the hall-way and forcing themselves into the room.
Cram and Ferry, curiously watching their ill-starred comrade, had
exchanged glances of dismay when the knife was so suddenly produced. Now
they bent breathlessly forward.

The silence for the moment was oppressive.

"If it's the knife I mane," he sobbed at last, desperately, miserably,
"the letters are S. B. W., and it belongs to Lieutenant Waring of our
bathery."

But no questioning, however adroit, could elicit from him the faintest
information as to how it got there. The last time he remembered seeing
it, he said, was on Mr. Waring's table the morning of the review. A
detective testified to having found it among the bushes under the window
as the water receded. Ferry and the miserable Ananias were called, and
they, too, had to identify the knife, and admit that neither had seen it
about the room since Mr. Waring left for town. Of other witnesses
called, came first the proprietor of the stable to which the cab
belonged. Horse and cab, he said, covered with mud, were found under a
shed two blocks below the French Market, and the only thing in the cab
was a handsome silk umbrella, London make, which Lieutenant Pierce laid
claim to. Mrs. Doyle swore that as she was going in search of her
husband she met the cab just below the Pelican, driving furiously away,
and that in the flash of lightning she recognized the driver as the man
whom Lieutenant Waring had beaten that morning on the levee in front of
her place. A stranger was seated beside him. There were two gentlemen
inside, but she saw the face of only one,--Lieutenant Waring.

Nobody else could throw any light on the matter. The doctor, recalled,
declared the knife or dagger was shaped exactly as would have to be the
one that gave the death-blow. Everything pointed to the fact that there
had been a struggle, a deadly encounter, and that after the fatal work
was done the murderer or murderers had left the doors locked and barred
and escaped