w my whistle long and loud, and our fellows came running up to
secure him."

"It would have been rather awkward," remarked Brown, "if you had found
he was a popular athlete practising a mile race."

"He was not," said Usher grimly. "We soon found out who he was; but I
had guessed it with the first glint of the moon on him."

"You thought it was the runaway convict," observed the priest simply,
"because you had read in the newspaper cutting that morning that a
convict had run away."

"I had somewhat better grounds," replied the governor coolly. "I pass
over the first as too simple to be emphasized--I mean that fashionable
athletes do not run across ploughed fields or scratch their eyes out
in bramble hedges. Nor do they run all doubled up like a crouching dog.
There were more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man
was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something more
than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting as to be quite
grotesque; even as he appeared in black outline against the moonrise,
the coat-collar in which his head was buried made him look like a
hunchback, and the long loose sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It
at once occurred to me that he had somehow managed to change his convict
clothes for some confederate's clothes which did not fit him. Second,
there was a pretty stiff wind against which he was running; so that I
must have seen the streaky look of blowing hair, if the hair had not
been very short. Then I remembered that beyond these ploughed fields
he was crossing lay Pilgrim's Pond, for which (you will remember) the
convict was keeping his bullet; and I sent my walking-stick flying."

"A brilliant piece of rapid deduction," said Father Brown; "but had he
got a gun?"

As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added apologetically:
"I've been told a bullet is not half so useful without it."

"He had no gun," said the other gravely; "but that was doubtless due to
some very natural mischance or change of plans. Probably the same policy
that made him change the clothes made him drop the gun; he began to
repent the coat he had left behind him in the blood of his victim."

"Well, that is possible enough," answered the priest.

"And it's hardly worth speculating on," said Usher, turning to some
other papers, "for we know it's the man by this time."

His clerical friend asked faintly: "But how?" And Greywood Usher threw
down the newspapers and to