d a horn or an honest man. And if a struggling man
staggers a bit over the line in his youth, in the lower parts of the
law which are pretty dingy, anyhow, there's always some old vampire
to hang on to him all his life for it."

"Guatemalan Golcondas, wasn't it?" said Fisher, sympathetically.

Harker suddenly shuddered. Then he said, "I believe you must know
everything, like God Almighty."

"I know too much," said Horne Fisher, "and all the wrong things."

The other three men were drawing nearer to them, but before they
came too near, Harker said, in a voice that had recovered all its
firmness:

"Yes, I did destroy a paper, but I really did find a paper, too; and
I believe that it clears us all."

"Very well," said Fisher, in a louder and more cheerful tone; "let
us all have the benefit of it."

"On the very top of Sir Isaac's papers," explained Harker, "there
was a threatening letter from a man named Hugo. It threatens to kill
our unfortunate friend very much in the way that he was actually
killed. It is a wild letter, full of taunts; you can see it for
yourselves; but it makes a particular point of poor Hook's habit of
fishing from the island. Above all, the man professes to be writing
from a boat. And, since we alone went across to him," and he smiled
in a rather ugly fashion, "the crime must have been committed by a
man passing in a boat."

"Why, dear me!" cried the duke, with something almost amounting to
animation. "Why, I remember the man called Hugo quite well! He was a
sort of body servant and bodyguard of Sir Isaac. You see, Sir Isaac
was in some fear of assault. He was--he was not very popular with
several people. Hugo was discharged after some row or other; but I
remember him well. He was a great big Hungarian fellow with great
mustaches that stood out on each side of his face."

A door opened in the darkness of Harold March's memory, or, rather,
oblivion, and showed a shining landscape, like that of a lost dream.
It was rather a waterscape than a landscape, a thing of flooded
meadows and low trees and the dark archway of a bridge. And for one
instant he saw again the man with mustaches like dark horns leap up
on to the bridge and disappear.

"Good heavens!" he cried. "Why, I met the murderer this morning!"

* * *

Horne Fisher and Harold March had their day on the river, after all,
for the little group broke up when the police arrived. They declared
that the coincidence