The doctor looked up into the keen eyes bent upon him, his own equally keen.  He did not know whether he liked this man of the law or not.  Something of the man’s personality, unfortunate as had been its revelation during this past trying hour, had caught him in its thrall.  He measured him, eye for eye, but Cleek’s never wavered.

“I’ve no instruments,” he said at last, hedging for time.

“I have plenty—­upstairs.  I have dabbled a little in surgery myself, when occasion has arisen.  I’ll fetch them in a minute.  You will?”

The doctor stood up between the two tall policemen who had a hand upon either shoulder.  His face was set like a mask.

“It’s a damned outrage, but I will,” he said.

Dollops was gone like a flash.  In the meantime Cleek cleared the room.  He sent Merriton off to the smoking room in charge of Petrie and Hammond, and Borkins with them—­though Borkins was to be kept in the hallway, away from his master’s touch and voice.

Cleek, Mr. Narkom, and the doctor remained alone in the room of death, where the doctor set to his gruesome task.  Outside, Constable Roberts’s burly voice could be heard holding forth in the hall upon the fact that he’d been after a poacher on Mr. Jimmeson’s estate over to Saltfleet, and wasn’t in when they came for him.

And the operation went quietly on....

...  In the smoking room, with Hammond and Petrie seated like deaf mutes upon either side of him, Merriton reviewed the whole awful affair from start to finish, and felt his heart sink like lead in his breast.  Oh, what a fool he had been to have these men down here!  What a fool!  To see them wilfully trumping up a charge of murder against himself was—­well, it was enough to make any sane man lose hold on his reason.  And ’Toinette!  His little ’Toinette!  If he should be convicted and sent to prison, what would become of her?  It would break her heart.  And he might never see her again!  A sudden moisture pricked at the corners of his eyes.  God!—­never to call her wife!...  How long were those beasts going to brood in there over the dead?  And was there not a chance that the bullet might be different?  After all, wasn’t it almost impossible that the bullet should be the same?  His was an unusual little revolver made by a firm in French Africa, having a different sort of cartridge.  Every Tom, Dick, and Harry didn’t have one—­couldn’t afford it, in the first place....  There was a chance—­yes, certainly there was a chance.

...  His blood began to hammer in his veins again, and his heart beat rapidly.  Hope went through him like wine, drowning all the fears and terrors that had stalked before him like demons from another world.  He heard, with throbbing pulses, approaching footsteps in the hall.  His head was swimming, his feet seemed loaded with lead so that he could not rise.  Then, across the space from where Cleek stood, the revolver in one hand and the tiny black object that had nested in a dead man’s brain in the other, came the sound of his voice, speaking in clear, concise sentences.  He could see the doctor’s grave face over the curve of Mr. Narkom’s fat shoulder.  For a moment the world swam.  Then he caught the import of what Cleek was saying.