er.
He glanced at the windows of the old room. His sunken, infused eyes
nearly closed.

"I know how you feel, and that's a little punishment maybe you deserve.
I'll say this for your comfort. You probably followed the plan that had
been impressed on your brain by Mr. Graham. You came here, no doubt, and
stood around. With an automatic appreciation of your condition you may
have taken that old precaution of convivial men returning home, and
removed your shoes. Then your automatic judgment may have warned you that
you weren't fit to go in at all, and you probably wandered off to the
empty house."

"Then," Bobby asked, "you don't think I did it?"

"God knows who did it. God knows what did it. The longer I live the surer
I become that we scientists can't probe everything. Whenever I go near
Silas Blackburn's body I receive a very powerful impression that his
death in that room from such a wound goes deeper than ordinary murder,
deeper than a case of recurrent aphasia."

His eyes widened. He turned with Graham and Bobby at the sound of an
automobile coming through the woods.

"Probably the coroner at last," he said.

The automobile, a small runabout, drew up at the entrance to the court. A
little wizened man, with yellowish skin stretched across high cheek
bones, stepped out and walked up the path.

"Well!" he said shrilly. "What you doing, Doctor Groom?"

"Waiting to witness another reason why coroners should be abolished," the
doctor rumbled. "This is the dead man's grandson, Coroner; and Mr.
Graham, a friend of the family's."

Bobby accepted the coroner's hand with distaste.

"Howells," the coroner said in his squeaky voice, "seems to think it's a
queer case. Inconvenient, I call it. Wish people wouldn't die queerly
whenever I go on a little holiday. I had got five ducks, gentlemen, when
they came to me with that damned telegram. Bad business mine, 'cause
people will die when you least expect them to. Let's go see what Howells
has got on his mind. Bright sleuth, Howells! Ought to be in New York."

He started up the path, side by side with Doctor Groom.

"Are you coming?" Graham asked Bobby. Bobby shook his head. "I don't want
to. I'd rather stay outside. You'd better be there, Hartley."

Graham followed the others while Bobby wandered from the court and
started down a path that entered the woods from the rear of the house.

Immediately the forest closed greedily about him. Here and there, where
the trees