LITMIR.BIZ

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up the slope we met another hansom coming down; and when the cabby kissed his hand and smiled at us, we guessed that he was the sportsman we had been following.

      "But there was no time to ask questions. It is an awkward station with a lot of different exits, and it looked a good deal as if our quarry had got away. However, I took a chance. I remembered that the Southampton express was due to start about this time, and I took a short cut across the lines and made for the platform that it starts from. Just as Badger and I got to the end, about thirty yards from the rear of the train, we saw a man and a woman running in front of us. Then the guard blew his whistle and the train began to move. The man and the woman managed to scramble into one of the rear compartments and Badger and I raced up the platform like mad. A porter tried to head us off, but Badger capsized him and we both sprinted harder than ever, and just hopped on the foot-board of the guard's van as the train began to get up speed. The guard couldn't risk putting us off, so he had to let us into his van, which suited us exactly, as we could watch the train on both sides from the look-out. And we did watch, I can tell you; for our friend in front had seen us. His head was out of the window as we climbed on to the foot-board.

      "However, nothing happened until we stopped at Southampton West. There, I need not say, we lost no time in hopping out, for we naturally expected our friends to make a rush for the exit. But they didn't. Badger watched the platform, and I kept a look-out to see that they didn't slip away across the line from the off-side. But still there was no sign of them. Then I walked up the train to the compartment which I had seen them enter. And there they were, apparently fast asleep in the corner by the off-side window, the man leaning back with his mouth open and the woman resting against him with her head on his shoulder. She gave me quite a turn when I went in to look at them, for she had her eyes half-closed and seemed to be looking round at me with a most horrible expression; but I found afterwards that the peculiar appearance of looking round was due to the cast in her eye."

      "They were dead, I suppose?" said Thorndyke.

      "Yes, sir. Stone dead; and I found these on the floor of the carriage."

      He held up two tiny yellow glass tubes, each labelled "Hypodermic tabloids. Aconitine Nitrate gr. 1/640."

      "Ha!" exclaimed Thorndyke, "this fellow was well up in alkaloidal poisons, it seems; and they appear to have gone about prepared for emergencies. These tubes each contained twenty tabloids, a thirty-second of a grain altogether, so we may assume that about twelve times the medicinal dose was swallowed. Death must have occurred in a few minutes, and a merciful death too."

      "A more merciful death than they deserved," exclaimed Stephen, "when one thinks of the misery and suffering that they inflicted on poor old uncle Jeffrey. I would sooner have had them hanged."

      "It's better as it is, sir," said Miller. "There is no need, now, to raise any questions in detail at the inquest. The publicity of a trial for murder would have been very unpleasant for you. I wish Dr. Jervis had given the tip to me instead of to that confounded, over-cautious—but there, I mustn't run down my brother officers: and it's easy to be wise after the event.

      "Good night, gentlemen. I suppose this accident disposes of your business as far as the will is concerned?"

      "I suppose it does," agreed Mr. Winwood. "But I shall enter a caveat, all the same."

       The End

      A SILENT WITNESS

       Table of Contents

       I. The Beginning of the Mystery

       II. The Finding of the Reliquary

       III. "Who Is Sylvia?"

       IV. Septimus Maddock, Deceased

       V. The Lethal Chamber

       VI. A Council of War

       VII. An Unseen Enemy

       VIII. It's an Ill Wind—

       IX. Thorndyke Takes Up the Scent

       X. The Unheeded Warning

       XI. A Chapter of Accidents

       XII. Miss Vyne

       XIII. A Mysterious Stranger

       XIV. A Lonely Woman

       XV. Exit Dr. Jardine

       XVI. Enter Father Humperdinck

       XVII. The Palimpsest

       XVIII. A Visitor From the States

       XIX. Tenebrae

       XX. The Hue and Cry

       XXI. The Final Problem

       XXII. Thorndyke Reviews the Case

      I. The Beginning of the Mystery

       Table of Contents

      The history upon which I am now embarking abounds in incidents so amazing that, as I look back on them, a something approaching to scepticism contends with my vivid recollections and makes me feel almost apologetic in laying them before the reader. Some of them indeed are so out of character with the workaday life in which they happened that they will appear almost incredible; but none is more fraught with mystery than the experience that befell me on a certain September night in the last year of my studentship and ushered in the rest of the astounding sequence.

      It was past eleven o'clock when I let myself out of my lodgings at Gospel Oak; a dark night, cloudy and warm and rather inclined to rain. But, despite the rather unfavourable aspect of the weather, I turned my steps away from the town, and walking briskly up the Highgate Road, presently turned into Millfield Lane. This was my favourite walk and the pretty winding lane, meandering so pleasantly from Lower Highgate to the heights of Hampstead, was familiar to me under all its aspects.

      On sweet summer mornings when the cuckoos called from the depths of Ken Wood, when the path was spangled with golden sunlight, and saucy squirrels played hide and seek in the shadows under the elms (though the place was within earshot of Westminster and within sight of the dome of St. Paul's); on winter days when the Heath wore its mantle of white and the ring

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