he local authorities at Briar Lake on the charge of homicide. I had
read the meager dispatch in the morning papers and had wondered what the
whole story might be.

"You see, Professor Kennedy," she began in an agitated voice as soon as
she arrived at the laboratory and introduced herself to us, "day before
yesterday, Fraser was boxing at the Country Club with another young man,
Irving Evans."

Kennedy nodded. Both of them were well known. Ferris had been the
All-America tackle on the University football team a couple of years
previous and Evans was a crack pitcher several years before.

"Irving," she continued, adding, "of course I call him Irving, for his
mother and I were schoolgirls together--Irving, I believe, fell
unconscious during the bout. I'm telling you just what Fraser told me.

"The other men in the Club gymnasium at the time carried him into the
locker-room and there they all did what they could to revive him. They
succeeded finally, but when he regained consciousness he complained of a
burning sensation in his stomach, or, rather, as Fraser says, just below
the point where his ribs come together. They say, too, that there was a
red spot on his skin, about the size of a half-dollar.

"Finally," she continued with a sigh, "the other men took Irving
home--but he lapsed into a half-comatose condition. He never got better.
He--he died the next day--yesterday."

It was evidently a great effort for Mrs. Ferris to talk of the affair
which had involved her son, but she had made up her mind to face the
necessity and was going through it bravely.

"Of course," she resumed a moment later, "the death of Irving Evans
caused a great deal of talking. It was natural in a community like Briar
Lake. But I don't think anything would have been thought about it, out
of the way, if the afternoon after his death--yesterday--the body of one
of the Club's stewards, Benson, had not been found jammed into a trunk.
Apparently, it had been dumped off an automobile in one of the most
lonely sections of the country.

"In fact," she went on, "it was the sort of thing that might have taken
place, one would say, in the dark alleys of a big city. But in a country
resort like Briar Lake, the very uncommonness of such a case called
added attention to it."

"I understand," agreed Craig, "but why did they suspect your son?"

"That's the ridiculous part of it, at least to me," hastened the mother
to her son's defense. "Both Irving and