of a crank, not hitting upon the
fact that it had been written in that very room, on Dundee's own
typewriter and stationery. Strawn might even have got a mournful sort of
amusement out of the fact that Dundee had been advised to call upon a
greater detective than himself for assistance!... Yes, ingenious indeed!
And so amazingly simple----

Suddenly the young detective snatched for his hat. If the murderer was
so ingenious in this case, might he not have been equally clever in
planning and executing the murder of Nita Leigh Selim?

Twenty minutes later he parked his car in the rutty road before the
Selim house in Primrose Meadows, and honked his horn loudly to attract
the attention of the plainclothesmen Captain Strawn had detailed
immediately after the murder to guard the premises during the day. There
was no answer. And a violent ringing of the doorbell also brought no
response. The guard had been withdrawn, probably to join the small army
of plainclothesmen and patrolmen who had been foolishly and futilely
searching for the New York gunman--the keystone of Captain Strawn's
exploded theory.

With an oath, Dundee used his skeleton key to release the Yale lock with
which the front door was equipped. Straight down the main hall he went
and into the little foyer between the hall and Nita's bedroom. He
snatched up the telephone and to his relief it was not dead. He gave the
number of Captain Strawn's home, and had the pleasure of learning that
he had interrupted his former chief at a late Sunday breakfast.

"When did you withdraw the guard from the Selim house?" he asked
abruptly, cutting short Strawn's cordial welcome-home.

"Late Thursday afternoon," the Chief of the Homicide Squad answered
belligerently. "I needed all my men, and the Selim house had been gone
over with a fine tooth comb half a dozen times.... Why?"

"Oh, nothing!" Dundee retorted wearily, and hung up the receiver after
assuring his old friend that he would call on him later in the day.

No use to explain now to Strawn that the murderer had been given every
chance to remove any betraying traces of his crime. Besides, his first
excited hunch, after his own attempted murder, might very well be a
wild, groundless one. In his--Dundee's case--the impossibility of the
murder's being delayed or arranged so that the detective might be slain
when the whole "crowd" was assembled was obvious. The murderer had read
in a late Saturday afternoon extra--a copy o