After he rejoined us, Kennedy next examined the fireplace.  It was full of ashes from the logs which had been lighted on the fatal night.  He noted attentively the distance of Lewis Langley’s chair from the fireplace, and remarked that the varnish on the chair was not even blistered.

Before the chair, on the floor where the body had been found, he pointed out to us the peculiar ash-marks for some space around, but it really seemed to me as if something else interested him more than these ash-marks.

We had been engaged perhaps half an hour in viewing the room.  At last Craig suddenly stopped.

“Tom,” he said, “I think I’ll wait till daylight before I go any further.  I can’t tell with certainty under these lights, though perhaps they show me some things the sunlight wouldn’t show.  We’d better leave everything just as it is until morning.”

So we locked the room again and went into a sort of library across the hall.

We were sitting in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts on the mystery, when the telephone rang.  It proved to be a long-distance call from New York for Tom himself.  His uncle’s attorney had received the news at his home out on Long Island and had hurried to the city to take charge of the estate.  But that was not the news that caused the grave look on Tom’s face as he nervously rejoined us.

“That was uncle’s lawyer, Mr. Clark, of Clark & Burdick,” he said.  “He has opened uncle’s personal safe in the offices of the Langley estate—­you remember them, Craig—­where all the property of the Langley heirs is administered by the trustees.  He says he can’t find the will, though he knows there was a will and that it was placed in that safe some time ago.  There is no duplicate.”

The full purport of this information at once flashed on me, and I was on the point of blurting out my sympathy, when I saw by the look which Craig and Tom exchanged that they had already realised it and understood each other.  Without the will the blood-relatives would inherit all of Lewis Langley’s interest in the old Langley estate.  Tom and his sister would be penniless.

It was late, yet we sat for nearly an hour longer, and I don’t think we exchanged a half-dozen sentences in all that time.  Craig seemed absorbed in thought.  At length, as the great hall-clock sounded midnight, we rose as if by common consent.

“Tom,” said Craig, and I could feel the sympathy that welled up in his voice, “Tom, old man, I’ll get at the bottom of this mystery if human intelligence can do it.”

“I know you will, Craig,” responded Tom, grasping each of us by the hand.  “That’s why I so much wanted you fellows to come up here.”

Early in the morning Kennedy aroused me.  “Now, Walter, I’m going to ask you to come down into the living-room with me, and we’ll take a look at it in the daytime.”

I hurried into my clothes, and together we quietly went down.  Starting with the exact spot where the unfortunate man had been discovered, Kennedy began a minute examination of the floor, using his pocket lens.  Every few moments he would stop to examine a spot on the rug or on the hardwood floor more intently.  Several times I saw him scrape up something with the blade of his knife and carefully preserve the scrapings, each in a separate piece of paper.