hief.

"Well, not particularly. But I've a fair recollection of him. A rather
pale, stiffish-built man, lightish brown hair and moustache, dressed in a
dark suit. He'd no luggage, and he paid me for supper, bed, and breakfast
when he booked his room," replied the landlady. "Quite a quiet,
respectable man--he said something about being unexpectedly obliged to
stop for the night, but I didn't pay any great attention."

The chief looked attentively at the open page of the register. Then he
drew the attention of those around him to the signature of John Barcombe.
It was a big, sprawling signature, all the letters sloping downward from
left to right, and being of an unusual size for a man.

"That looks to me like a feigned handwriting," he said. "However, note
this. You see that entry of Frank Herman? Observe his handwriting. Now
compare it with the writing on the card which was fixed on the door of
27--Herman's room. Look!"

He drew the card out of its envelope as he spoke and laid it beside the
entry in the register. And Marshall Allerdyke, bending over his shoulder
to look, almost cried out with astonishment, for the writing on the card
was certainly the same as that which Chettle had shown him on the
post-card found on Lydenberg, and on the back of the photograph of James
Allerdyke discovered in Lydenberg's watch. It was only by a big effort
that he checked the exclamation which was springing to his lips, and
stopped himself from snatching up the card from the table.

"You observe," said the chief quietly, "you can't fail to observe that
the writing in the register, is not the writing of the card pinned on the
door of Number 27. They are quite different. The writing of Frank Herman
in the register is in thick, stunted strokes; the writing on the card is
in thin, angular, what are commonly called crabbed strokes. Yet it is
supposed that Herman put that card outside his bedroom door. How is it,
then, that Herman's handwriting was thick and stunted when he registered
at seven o'clock and slender and a bit shaky when he wrote this card at,
say, half-past ten or eleven? Of course, Herman, or whatever his real
name is, never wrote the line on that card, and never pinned that card on
his door!"

The landlord opened his heavy lips and gasped: the landlady sighed with a
gradually awakening interest. Amidst a dead silence the chief went on
with his critical inspection of the handwriting.

"But now look at the signature of t