e's got something on, but he was precious close about it."

Here the sergeant shut up rather suddenly--perhaps contrasting his own
conduct with that of his superior.

"Let us have these new bones out on the table," said the police-surgeon.
"Take that sheet off, and don't shoot them out as if they were coals.
Hand them out carefully."

The labourer fished out the wet and muddy bones one by one from the
sack, and as he laid them on the table the surgeon arranged them in
their proper relative positions.

"This has been a neatly executed job," he remarked; "none of your clumsy
hacking with a chopper or a saw. The bones have been cleanly separated
at the joints. The fellow who did this must have had some anatomical
knowledge, unless he was a butcher, which, by the way, is not
impossible. He has used his knife uncommonly skilfully, and you notice
that each arm was taken off with the scapula attached, just as a butcher
takes off a shoulder of mutton. Are there any more bones in that bag?"

"No, sir," replied the labourer, wiping his hands with an air of
finality on the posterior aspect of his trousers; "that's the lot."

The surgeon looked thoughtfully at the bones as he gave a final touch
to their arrangement, and remarked:

"The inspector is right. All the bones of the neck are there. Very odd.
Don't you think so?"

"You mean--"

"I mean that this very eccentric murderer seems to have given himself
such an extraordinary amount of trouble for no reason that one can see.
There are these neck vertebrae, for instance. He must have carefully
separated the skull from the atlas instead of just cutting through the
neck. Then there is the way he divided the trunk; the twelfth ribs have
just come in with this lot, but the twelfth dorsal vertebra to which
they belong was attached to the lower half. Imagine the trouble he must
have taken to do that, and without cutting or hacking the bones about,
either. It is extraordinary. This is rather interesting, by the way.
Handle it carefully."

He picked up the breast-bone daintily--for it was covered with wet
mud--and handed it to me with the remark: "That is the most definite
piece of evidence we have."

"You mean," I said, "that the union of the two parts into a single mass
fixes this as the skeleton of an elderly man?"

"Yes, that is the obvious suggestion, which is confirmed by the deposit
of bone in the rib-cartilages. You can tell the inspector, Davis, that I
have checked