d paste the
end of the string, drawn through another hole hidden by the tapestry, to
a page of the book he had selected as the one most likely to appeal to a
detective as a clue source....

No, wait! He had had to do more! Dundee bent and examined the metal
cover of the register. The circumference of the hole the murderer had
chosen as the one which would be directly in front of Dundee's heart
gleamed brightly. It had been necessary to enlarge it considerably. _The
murderer had left a trace after all!_

But the book was open in Dundee's hands and his eyes rapidly scanned
page 410. And he found what the murderer had not expected him to live to
read, but which he had counted on as an explanation of the note which
the police would have puzzled over, if all had gone well with his
scheme....

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Dundee laughed, the parrot which had saved his life echoing his mirth
raucously, as his eyes hit upon the following lines of fine print
halfway down the third column of page 410 of "Who's Who in America":

BURNS, William John, detective; b. Baltimore, Oct. 19, 1861--

"A taunt and a joke which turned sour, 'my dear Watson'!" he exulted to
the parrot. "A joke I was not intended to live to laugh over!"

He closed the book and replaced it in the bookcase, careless of
fingerprints, for he was sure the murderer had been too clever to leave
any behind him in that room--or upon the gun and silencer either, for
that matter.

Interestedly, Dundee surveyed the scene of his attempted murder. If he
had unsuspectingly gone up to the high shelf to reach for the book he
would have stood so close to the register that there would have been
powder burns on his shirt front--just as there had been on Dexter
Sprague's. And he would have been shot so near an open window--no chance
for fingerprints there, either, since he had not closed the windows on
his departure for New York, not wishing to return to a stuffy
apartment--that the police would have been justified in thinking he had
been shot from outside. It was an old-fashioned house in more ways than
in the manner of its heating. Outside of one of his two unscreened
windows there was an iron grating--the topmost landing of a fire escape.
Dundee could imagine Captain Strawn's positiveness in placing the
murderer there--crouching in wait for his victim....

Yes, damned ingenious, this attempted murder! Undoubtedly Strawn would
have dismissed the note as the work