ial," 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 been 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
crossings, 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 tended 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 boot-marks about this ditch, I was
absolutely sure not only that the Cunninghams had again lied, but that
there had never been any unknown man upon the scene at all.

"And now I had to consider the motive of this singular crime. To get at
this I endeavoured first