loured flesh and with a sinister dash of clotted blood running
away from them. Then Goldberger, taking a deep breath, voiced the
thought which had sprung into my own brain.

"Why, it looks like a snake-bite!" he said, his voice sharp with
astonishment.

And, indeed, it did. Those two tiny incisions, scarcely half an inch
apart, might well have been made by a serpent's fangs.

The quick glance which all of us cast about the room was, of course,
as involuntary as the chill which ran up our spines; yet Godfrey and
I--yes, and Simmonds--had the excuse that, once upon a time, we had
had an encounter with a deadly snake which none of us was likely ever
to forget. We all smiled a little sheepishly as we caught each
other's eyes.

"No, I don't think it was a snake," said Godfrey, and again bent
close above the hand. "Smell it, Mr. Goldberger," he added.

The coroner put his nose close to the hand and sniffed.

"Bitter almonds!" he said.

"Which means prussic acid," said Godfrey, "and not snake poison." He
fell silent a moment, his eyes on the swollen hand. The rest of us
stared at it too; and I suppose all the others were labouring as I
was with the effort to find some thread of theory amid this chaos.
"It might, of course, have been self-inflicted," Godfrey added, quite
to himself.

Goldberger sneered a little. No doubt he found the
incomprehensibility of the problem rather trying to his temper.

"A man doesn't usually commit suicide by sticking himself in the hand
with a fork," he said.

"No," agreed Godfrey, blandly; "but I would point out that we don't
know as yet that it _is_ a case of suicide; and I'm quite sure that,
whatever it may be, it isn't usual."

Goldberger's sneer deepened.

"Did any reporter for the _Record_ ever find a case that _was_
usual?" he queried.

It was a shrewd thrust, and one that Godfrey might well have winced
under. For the _Record_ theory was that nothing was news unless it
was strange and startling, and the inevitable result was that the
_Record_ reporters endeavoured to make everything strange and
startling, to play up the outre details at the expense of the rest of
the story, and even, I fear, to invent such details when none
existed.

Godfrey himself had been accused more than once of a too-luxuriant
imagination. It was, perhaps, a realisation of this which had
persuaded him, years before, to quit the detective force and take
service with the _Record_. What might have been