bsolutely drinkless, he was everywhere. He was looking for Peter Kelly.
Wherever crowds were gathered, the Investigator was there, searching for
Kelly. In the great concourse of the Grand Central Station, Kent moved
to and fro, peering into everybody's face. An official touched him on
the shoulder. "Stop peering into the people's faces," he said. "I am
unravelling a mystery," Kent answered. "I beg your pardon, sir," said
the man, "I didn't know."

Kent was here, and everywhere, moving ceaselessly, pro and con, watching
for Kelly. For hours he stood beside the soda-water fountains examining
every drinker as he drank. For three days he sat on the steps of
Masterman Throgton's home, disguised as a plumber waiting for a wrench.

But still no trace of Peter Kelly. Young Kelly, it appeared, had lived
with his uncle until a little less than three years ago. Then suddenly
he had disappeared. He had vanished, as a brilliant writer for the New
York Press framed it, as if the earth had swallowed him up.

Transome Kent, however, was not a man to be baffled by initial defeat.

A week later, the Investigator called in at the office of Inspector
Edwards.

"Inspector," he said, "I must have some more clues. Take me again to the
Kelly residence. I must re-analyse my first diaeresis."

Together the two friends went to the house. "It is inevitable," said
Kent, as they entered again the fateful billiard-room, "that we have
overlooked something."

"We always do," said Edwards gloomily.

"Now tell me," said Kent, as they stood beside the billiard table, "what
is your own theory, the police theory, of this murder? Give me your
first theory first, and then go on with the others."

"Our first theory, Mr. Kent, was that the murder was committed by a
sailor with a wooden leg, newly landed from Java."

"Quite so, quite proper," nodded Kent.

"We knew that he was a sailor," the Inspector went on, dropping again
into his sing-song monotone, "by the extraordinary agility needed to
climb up the thirty feet of bare brick wall to the window--a landsman
could not have climbed more than twenty; the fact that he was from the
East Indies we knew from the peculiar knot about his victim's neck. We
knew that he had a wooden leg----"

The Inspector paused and looked troubled.

"We knew it." He paused again. "I'm afraid I can't remember that one."

"Tut, tut," said Kent gently, "you knew it, Edwards, because when he
leaned against the billiard ta