plied Baumgartner; "here's' the journalistic wonder of the
age, and there you are in its most important column. I brought it up for
you to see."

The boy bit his lips as he read. His deed had been promoted to leaded
type and the highest rank in headlines. It appeared, in the first place,
that no arrest had yet been made; but it was confidently asserted (by the
omniscient butt of Teutonic sallies) that the police, wisely guided by the
hint in yesterday's issue (which Pocket had not seen), were already in
possession of a most important clue. In subsequent paragraphs of pregnant
brevity the real homicide was informed that his fatal act could only be
the work of a totally different and equally definite hand. Pocket
gathered that there had been a certain commonplace tragedy, in a street
called Holland Walk, in the previous month of March. A licensed messenger
named Charlton had been found shot under circumstances so plainly
indicative of suicide that a coroner's jury had actually returned a
verdict to that effect. There appeared, however, to have been an element
of doubt in the case. This the scribe of the leaded type sought to remove
by begging the question from beginning to end. It had not been a case of
suicide at all, he declared, but as wilful a murder as the one in Hyde
Park, to which it bore a close and sinister resemblance. Both victims had
been shot through the heart in the early hours of the morning; both
belonged to one neighbourhood, and to the same dilapidated fringe of the
community. A pothouse acquaintanceship was alleged between them; but the
suggestion was that the link lay a good deal deeper than that, and that
the two dead men were known to the police, who were busy searching for a
third party of equal notoriety in connection with both murders.

"But we know he had nothing to do with the second one," said the boy,
looking up at last. "It wasn't a murder, either; neither was the first,
according to the coroner's jury, who surely ought to know."

"One would have thought so," said Baumgartner, with his sardonic smile;
"but the yellow pressman knows better still, apparently."

"Do you suppose there's a word of truth in what he says? I don't mean
about Charlton or--or poor Holdaway," said Pocket, wincing over his
victim's name, which he had just gleaned from the paper. "But do you
think the police are really after anybody?"

"I don't know," said Baumgartner. "What does it matter?"

"It would