e only trouble being that you carried it too far. You
made Jeff commit both the robbery and the murder, while as a matter of
fact he did neither. Then when you found a part of your theory was
untenable you rejected the whole of it.

"This is how the matter stood: Jeff Gaylord was pretty desperately in
need of money. I suspect that the charge against him, whatever it was,
was true. The money he had taken had to be returned and somebody's
silence bought before the thing could be hushed up. Anyway, Seattle was
too hot to hold him and he lit out and came East. He applied to Radnor,
but Radnor was in a tight place himself and couldn't lay his hands on
anything except what his father had given him for a birthday present.
That was tied up in another investment and if he converted it into cash
it would be at a sacrifice. So it ran along for a week or so, while Rad
was casting about for a means of getting his brother out of the way
without any fresh scandal. But Mose's suddenly taking to seeing ha'nts
precipitated matters. Realizing that his father's patience had reached
its limit, and that he couldn't keep you off the scent much longer, he
determined to borrow the money for Jeff's journey back to Seattle, and
to close up his own investment.

"That same night he drove Jeff to the station at Kennisburg. The
Washington express does not stop at Lambert Junction, and anyway
Kennisburg is a bigger station and travellers excite less comment. This
isn't deduction; it's fact. I rode to Kennisburg this morning and
proved it. The station man remembers selling Radnor Gaylord a ticket to
Washington in the middle of the night about three weeks ago. Some man
who waited outside and whose face the agent did not see, boarded the
train, and Rad drove off alone. The ticket seller does not know Rad
personally but he knows him by sight--so much for that. Rad came home
and went to bed. When he came down stairs in the morning he was met by
the information that the ha'nt had robbed the safe. You can see what
instantly jumped into his mind--some way, somehow, Jeff had taken those
bonds--and yet figure on it as he might, he could not see how it was
possible. The robbery seemed to have occurred while he was away. Could
Jeff merely have pretended to leave? Might he have slipped off the train
again and come back? Those are the questions that were bothering Radnor.
He was honest in saying that he could not imagine how the bonds had been
stolen, and yet he w