m a
corpse if the murderer touched it."

"Do you really mean," demanded his friend, "that you think the two
methods equally valuable?"

"I think them equally valueless," replied Brown. "Blood flows, fast or
slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we
can ever know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have
to flow up the Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to
shed it."

"The method," remarked the other, "has been guaranteed by some of the
greatest American men of science."

"What sentimentalists men of science are!" exclaimed Father Brown, "and
how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a
Yankee would think of proving anything from heart-throbs? Why, they must
be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if she
blushes. That's a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by
the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too."

"But surely," insisted Flambeau, "it might point pretty straight at
something or other."

"There's a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight," answered the
other. "What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the
opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right
end. I saw the thing done once and I've never believed in it since." And
he proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.

It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was chaplain to his
co-religionists in a prison in Chicago--where the Irish population
displayed a capacity both for crime and penitence which kept him
tolerably busy. The official second-in-command under the Governor was an
ex-detective named Greywood Usher, a cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee
philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage with an odd
apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a slightly patronizing way;
and Father Brown liked him, though he heartily disliked his theories.
His theories were extremely complicated and were held with extreme
simplicity.

One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according to his custom,
took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered with papers, and
waited. The official selected from the papers a scrap of newspaper
cutting, which he handed across to the cleric, who read it gravely. It
appeared to be an extract from one of the pinkest of American Society
papers, and ran as follows:

"Society's brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner st