with the force and his careful maintenance of the friendships formed at that time gave him an entree to places denied to less-fortunate reporters.  I had never known him to do a dishonourable thing—­to fight for a cause he thought unjust, to print a fact given to him in confidence, or to make a statement which he knew to be untrue.  Moreover, a lively sense of humour made him an admirable companion, and it was this quality, perhaps, which enabled him to receive Goldberger’s thrust with a good-natured smile.

“We’ve got our living to make, you know,” he said.  “We make it as honestly as we can.  What do you think, Simmonds?”

“I think,” said Simmonds, who, if he possessed an imagination, never permitted it to be suspected, “that those little cuts on the hand are merely an accident.  They might have been caused in half a dozen ways.  Maybe he hit his hand on something when he fell; maybe he jabbed it on a buckle; maybe he had a boil on his hand and lanced it with his knife.”

“What killed him, then?” Godfrey demanded.

“Poison—­and it’s in his stomach.  We’ll find it there.”

“How about the odour?” Godfrey persisted.

“He spilled some of the poison on his hand as he lifted it to his mouth.  Maybe he had those cuts on his hand and the poison inflamed them.  Or maybe he’s got some kind of blood disease.”

Goldberger nodded his approval, and Godfrey smiled as he looked at him.

“It’s easy to find explanations, isn’t it?” he queried.

“It’s a blamed sight easier to find a natural and simple explanation,” retorted Goldberger hotly, “than it is to find an unnatural and far-fetched one—­such as how one man could kill another by scratching him on the hand.  I suppose you think this fellow was murdered?  That’s what you said a minute ago.”

“Perhaps I was a little hasty,” Godfrey admitted, and I suspected that, whatever his thoughts, he had made up his mind to keep them to himself.  “I’m not going to theorise until I’ve got something to start with.  The facts seem to point to suicide; but if he swallowed prussic acid, where’s the bottle?  He didn’t swallow that too, did he?”

“Maybe we’ll find it in his clothes,” suggested Simmonds.

Thus reminded, Goldberger fell to work looking through the dead man’s pockets.  The clothes were of a cheap material and not very new, so that, in life, he must have presented an appearance somewhat shabby.  There was a purse in the inside coat pocket containing two bills, one for ten dollars and one for five, and there were two or three dollars in silver and four five-centime pieces in a small coin purse which he carried in his trousers’ pocket.  The larger purse had four or five calling cards in one of its compartments, each bearing a different name, none of them his.  On the back of one of them, Vantine’s address was written in pencil.

There were no letters, no papers, no written documents of any kind in the pockets, the remainder of whose contents consisted of such odds and ends as any man might carry about with him—­a cheap watch, a pen-knife, a half-empty packet of French tobacco, a sheaf of cigarette paper, four or five keys on a ring, a silk handkerchief, and perhaps some other articles which I have forgotten—­but not a thing to assist in establishing his identity.