and the splashes all around mark the spot. Traces of carpet slippers and 'number nine' boots, you observe, but all very confused. Then two sets of tracks leading to and from the kitchen; whoever the murderer was, he came in that way. You have the boot, Hastings? Give it to me." He compared it carefully with the prints. "Yes, both made by the same man, Robert Grant. He came in that way, killed the old man, and went back to the kitchen. He had stepped in the blood; see the stains he left as he went out? Nothing to be seen in the kitchen--all the village has been walking about in it. He went into his own room--no, first he went back again to the scene of the crime--was that to get the little jade figures? Or had he forgotten something that might incriminate him?"

"Perhaps he killed the old man the second time he went in?" I suggested.

"Mais non, you do not observe. On one of the outgoing footmarks stained with blood there is superimposed an ingoing one. I wonder what he went back for--the little jade figures as an afterthought? It is all ridiculous--stupid."

"Well, he's given himself away pretty hopelessly."

"N'est-ce pas? I tell you, Hastings, it goes against reason. It offends my little gray cells. Let us go into his bedroom--ah, yes; there is the smear of blood on the lintel and just a trace of footmarks--the blood-stained. Robert Grant's footmarks, and his only, near the body--Robert Grant the only man who went near the house. Yes, it must be so."

"What about the old woman?" I said suddenly. "She was in the house alone after Grant had gone for the milk. She might have killed him and then gone out. Her feet would leave no prints if she hadn't been outside."

"Very good, Hastings. I wondered whether that hypothesis would occur to you. I had already thought of it and rejected it. Betsy Andrews is a local woman, well-known hereabouts. She can have no connection with the Big Four; and, besides, old Whalley was a powerful fellow, by all accounts. This is a man's work--not a woman's."

"I suppose the Big Four couldn't have had some diabolical contrivance concealed in the ceiling--something which descended automatically and cut the old man's throat and was afterwards drawn up again?"

"Like Jacob's ladder? I know, Hastings, that you have an imagination of the most fertile--but I implore of you to keep it within bounds."

I subsided, 

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