“The letter, or whatever it was, shall be looked for,” declared the constable.

Sweetwater bowed, his eyes roving restlessly into every nook and corner of the room.

“James was the stronger of the two,” he remarked; “yet there is no evidence that he made any attempt at suicide.”

“How do you know that it was suicide John attempted?” asked someone.  “Why might not the dagger have fallen from James’s hand in an effort to kill his brother?”

“Because the dent in the floor would have been to the right of the chair instead of to the left,” he returned.  “Besides, James’s hand would not have failed so utterly, since he had strength to pick up the weapon afterward and lay it where you found it.”

“True, we found it lying on the table,” observed Abel, scratching his head in forced admiration of his old schoolmate.

“All easy, very easy,” Sweetwater remarked, seeing the wonder in every eye.  “Matters like those are for a child’s reading, but what is difficult, and what I find hard to come by, is how the twenty-dollar bill got into the old man’s hand.  He found it here, but how—­”

“Found it here?  How do you know that?”

“Gentlemen, that is a point I will make clear to you later, when I have laid my hand on a certain clew I am anxiously seeking.  You know this is new work for me and I have to advance warily.  Did any of you gentlemen, when you came into this room, detect the faintest odour of any kind of perfume?”

“Perfume?” echoed Abel, with a glance about the musty apartment.  “Rats, rather.”

Sweetwater shook his head with a discouraged air, but suddenly brightened, and stepping quickly across the floor, paused at one of the windows.  It was that one in which the shade had been drawn.

Peering at this shade he gave a grunt.

“You must excuse me for a minute,” said he; “I have not found what I wanted in this room and now must look outside for it.  Will someone bring the lantern?”

“I will,” volunteered Knapp, with grim good humour.  Indeed, the situation was almost ludicrous to him.

“Bring it round the house, then, to the ground under this window,” ordered Sweetwater, without giving any sign that he noticed or even recognised the other’s air of condescension.  “And, gentlemen, please don’t follow.  It’s footsteps I am after, and the fewer we make ourselves, the easier will it be for me to establish the clew I am after.”

Mr. Fenton stared.  What had got into the fellow?

The lantern gone, the room resumed its former appearance.

Abel, who had been much struck by Sweetwater’s mysterious manoeuvres, drew near Dr. Talbot and whispered in his ear:  “We might have done without that fellow from Boston.”

To which the coroner replied: 

“Perhaps so, and perhaps not.  Sweetwater has not yet proved his case; let us wait till he explains himself.”  Then, turning to the constable, he showed him an old-fashioned miniature, which he had found lying on James’s breast, when he made his first examination.  It was set with pearls and backed with gold and was worth many meals, for the lack of which its devoted owner had perished.