Then, too, in one corner stood a fine old mahogany desk of quaint design and many drawers and pigeonholes, one and all sacked, their contents turned out to litter the floor.  In another corner, a curio cabinet had fared as ill.  Even bookcases had not been overlooked, and stood with open doors and disordered shelves.

Not, however, with any notion of concerning himself with the assassin’s apprehension and punishment did P. Sybarite waste that moment of hasty survey.  His eyes were only keen and eager to descry the yellow Western Union message; and when he had looked everywhere else, his glance dropped to his feet and found it there—­a torn and crumpled envelope with its enclosure flattened out and apart from it.

This last he snatched up, but the envelope he didn’t touch, having been quick to remark the print upon it of a dirty thumb whose counterpart decorated the face of the message as well.

“And a hundred more of ’em, probably,” P. Sybarite surmised as to the number of finger marks left by November:  “enough to hang him ten times over ... which I hope and pray they don’t before I finish with him!”

As for the dead man, he read his epitaph in a phrase, accompanied by a meaning nod toward the disfigured and insentient head.

“It was coming to you—­and you got it,” said P. Sybarite callously, with never a qualm of shame for the apathy with which he contemplated this second tragedy in the house of Shaynon.

Too much, too long, had he suffered at its hands....

With a shrug, he turned back to the hall door, listened an instant, gently opened it—­with his handkerchief wrapped round the polished brass door-knob to guard against clues calculated to involve himself, whether as imputed principal or casual witness after the fact.  For he felt no desire to report the crime to the police:  let them find it out at their leisure, investigate and take what action they would; P. Sybarite had lost no love for the force that night, and meant to use it only at a pinch—­as when, perchance, its services might promise to elicit the information presumably possessed by Red November in regard to the fate of Marian Blessington....

The public hall was empty, dim with the light of a single electric bulb, and still as the chamber of death that lay behind.

Never a shadow moved more silently or more swiftly than P. Sybarite, when he had closed the door, up the steps to Peter Kenny’s rooms.  Hardly a conceivable sound could be more circumspect than that which his knuckles drummed on the panels of Peter’s door.  And Peter earned a heartfelt, instant, and ungrudged blessing by opening without delay.

“Well?” he asked, when P. Sybarite—­with a gesture enforcing temporary silence—­had himself shut the door without making a sound.  “Good Lord, man!  You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

On the verge of agitated speech P. Sybarite checked to shake an aggrieved head.