He was silent a moment, looking grimly through his glasses; then he added:  “The thing has one advantage—­that it clears most people of suspicion at one stroke.  If you or I or any normally made man in the country were accused of this crime, we should be acquitted as an infant would be acquitted of stealing the Nelson column.”

“That’s what I say,” repeated the cobbler obstinately; “there’s only one man that could have done it, and he’s the man that would have done it.  Where’s Simeon Barnes, the blacksmith?”

“He’s over at Greenford,” faltered the curate.

“More likely over in France,” muttered the cobbler.

“No; he is in neither of those places,” said a small and colourless voice, which came from the little Roman priest who had joined the group.  “As a matter of fact, he is coming up the road at this moment.”

The little priest was not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly brown hair and a round and stolid face.  But if he had been as splendid as Apollo no one would have looked at him at that moment.  Everyone turned round and peered at the pathway which wound across the plain below, along which was indeed walking, at his own huge stride and with a hammer on his shoulder, Simeon the smith.  He was a bony and gigantic man, with deep, dark, sinister eyes and a dark chin beard.  He was walking and talking quietly with two other men; and though he was never specially cheerful, he seemed quite at his ease.

“My God!” cried the atheistic cobbler, “and there’s the hammer he did it with.”

“No,” said the inspector, a sensible-looking man with a sandy moustache, speaking for the first time.  “There’s the hammer he did it with over there by the church wall.  We have left it and the body exactly as they are.”

All glanced round and the short priest went across and looked down in silence at the tool where it lay.  It was one of the smallest and the lightest of the hammers, and would not have caught the eye among the rest; but on the iron edge of it were blood and yellow hair.

After a silence the short priest spoke without looking up, and there was a new note in his dull voice.  “Mr. Gibbs was hardly right,” he said, “in saying that there is no mystery.  There is at least the mystery of why so big a man should attempt so big a blow with so little a hammer.”

“Oh, never mind that,” cried Gibbs, in a fever.  “What are we to do with Simeon Barnes?”

“Leave him alone,” said the priest quietly.  “He is coming here of himself.  I know those two men with him.  They are very good fellows from Greenford, and they have come over about the Presbyterian chapel.”

Even as he spoke the tall smith swung round the corner of the church, and strode into his own yard.  Then he stood there quite still, and the hammer fell from his hand.  The inspector, who had preserved impenetrable propriety, immediately went up to him.