cott, that the very cleverness of your scheme will
penetrate the eyes of the blindfolded goddess of justice. Burnham, if
you will have the kindness to summon the police, I will take all the
responsibility for the arrest of these people."

THE SILENT BULLET

BY ARTHUR B. REEVE

"Detectives in fiction nearly always make a great mistake," said
Kennedy one evening after a conversation on crime and science. "They
almost invariably antagonize the regular detective force. Now in real
life that's impossible--it's fatal."

"Yes," I agreed, looking up from reading an account of the failure
of a large Wall Street brokerage house, Kerr Parker & Co., and the
peculiar suicide of Kerr Parker. "Yes, it's impossible, just as it is
impossible for the regular detectives to antagonize the newspapers.
Scotland Yard found that out in the Crippen case."

"My idea of the thing, Jameson," continued Kennedy, "is that the
professor of criminal science ought to work with, not against, the
regular detectives. They're all right. They're indispensable, of
course. Half the secret of success nowadays is organization. The
professor of criminal science should be merely what the professor in
a technical school often is--a sort of consulting engineer. For
instance, I believe that organization plus science would go far toward
clearing up that Wall Street case I see you are reading."

I expressed some doubt as to whether the regular police were
enlightened enough to take that view of it.

"Some of them are," he replied. "Yesterday the chief of Police in a
Western city sent a man East to see me about the Price murder--you
know the case?"

Indeed I did. A wealthy banker of the town had been murdered on the
road to the golf club, no one knew why or by whom. Every clue had
proved fruitless, and the list of suspects was itself so long and so
impossible as to seem most discouraging.

"He sent me a piece of a torn handkerchief with a deep blood-stain
on it," pursued Kennedy. "He said it clearly didn't belong to the
murdered man, that it indicated that the murderer had himself been
wounded in the tussle, but as yet it had proved utterly valueless as a
clue. Would I see what I could make of it?

"After his man had told me the story I had a feeling that the murder
was committed by either a Sicilian laborer on the links or a negro
waiter at the club. Well, to make a short story shorter, I decided to
test the blood-stain. Probably you didn't know it