father, and you did not have to share that with your brother
David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash.
You sat at your father's table in the room. Your brother stood by the
wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the
quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over
the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow--the head or face
would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was
cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up
and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it."

He paused.

"But the other thing you did in that room was not so clever. A picture
was newly hung on the wall--I saw the white square on the opposite wall
from which it had been taken. It hung at the height of a man's shoulders
directly behind the spot where your brother must have stood after he
struck the secretary, and it hung in this new spot to cover the crash of
a bullet into the mahogany panel!"

My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled pistol
out of the empty drawer.

The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops and its
light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback saw the thing
and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic light.

"Yes," continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, "this is your
mistake to-night--to let me get your weapon. Your mistake that other
night was to shoot before you counted the money. It was only a few
hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would hold no great sum. But the
thing was done, and you must cover it."

He paused.

"And you did cover it--with fiendish cunning. It would not do for your
brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no motive. But if
he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a horse to ride, the
explanation would have solid feet to go on. I give you credit here for
the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the thing. You caused your brother
David and the horse to vanish. I saw, on that morning, the tracks of
the horse where you led him from the stable to the door, and his tracks
where you led him, holding the dead man in the saddle, from the door to
the ancient orchard where the grass grows over the fallen-down chimney
of your grandsire's house. And there, at your cunning, they wholly
vanished."

The mad courage in the hunchback got control, and he began to advance on
my father with no weapon and