The boot-lace drew Kent’s eyes.  It was impossible not to see it, forty-eight inches long and quarter-inch-wide buckskin.  He began seeking for its mate, and found it on the floor where Marette Radisson had been standing.  And again the unanswerable question pounded in Kent’s brain—­why had Kedsty’s murderer used a tress of hair instead of a buckskin lace or one of the curtain cords hanging conspicuously at the windows?

He went to each of these windows and found them locked.  Then, a last time, he bent over Kedsty.  He knew that in the final moments of his life Kedsty had suffered a slow and torturing agony.  His twisted face left the story.  And the Inspector of Police was a powerful man.  He had struggled, still partly dazed by the blow.  But it had taken strength to overcome him even then, to hold his head back, to choke life out of him slowly with the noose of hair.  And Kent, now that the significance of what he saw began to grow upon him more clearly, felt triumphing over all other things in his soul a slow and mighty joy.  It was inconceivable that with the strength of her own hands and body Marette Radisson had killed Kedsty.  A greater strength than hers had held him in the death-chair, and a greater strength than hers had choked life from the Inspector of Police!

He drew slowly out of the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.  He found that the front door was as Kedsty had left it, unlocked.

Close to that door he stood for a space, scarcely allowing himself to breathe.  He listened, but no sound came down the dimly illumined stairway.

A new thing was pressing upon him now.  It rode over the shock of tragedy, over the first-roused instincts of the man-hunter, overwhelming him with the realization of a horror such as had never confronted him before.  It gripped him more fiercely than the mere killing of Kedsty.  His thought was of Marette, of the fate which dawn and discovery would bring for her.  His hands clenched and his jaws tightened.  The world was against him, and tomorrow it would be against her.  Only he, in the face of all that condemning evidence in the room beyond, would disbelieve her guilty of Kedsty’s death.  And he, Jim Kent, was already a murderer in the eyes of the law.

He felt within him the slow-growing inspiration of a new spirit, the gathering might of a new force.  A few hours ago he was an outcast.  He was condemned.  Life, for him, had been robbed of its last hope.  And in that hour of his grimmest despair Marette Radisson had come to him.  Through storm that had rocked the earth under her feet and set ablaze the chaotic blackness of the sky over her head she had struggled—­for him.  She had counted no cost.  She had measured no chances.  She had simply come—­because she believed in him.  And now, upstairs, she was the victim of the terrible price that was the first cost of his freedom.  For he believed, now that the thought came to him like a dagger stroke, that this was so.  Her act in freeing him had brought about the final climax, and as a result of it, Kedsty was dead.