, quite close to the flag," said Marlowe. "He lay on his
back, his arms were stretched abroad, his jacket and heavy overcoat were
open; the light shone hideously on his white face and his shirt-front;
it glistened on his bared teeth and one of the eyes. The other ... you
saw it. The man was certainly dead. As I sat there stunned, unable for
the moment to think at all, I could even see a thin dark line of blood
running down from the shattered socket to the ear. Close by lay his soft
black hat, and at his feet a pistol.

"I suppose it was only a few seconds that I sat helplessly staring at
the body. Then I rose and moved to it with dragging feet; for now the
truth had come to me at last, and I realized the fullness of my
appalling danger. It was not only my liberty or my honor that the maniac
had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the
degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not
hesitated to end his life--a life which was, no doubt, already
threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last
agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the
thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could
see at the moment, my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had been
desperate on the assumption that Manderson meant to denounce me as a
thief, what was it now that his corpse denounced me as a murderer?

"I picked up the revolver and saw, almost without emotion, that it was
my own--Manderson had taken it from my room, I suppose, while I was
getting out the car. At the same moment I remembered that it was by
Manderson's suggestion that I had had it engraved with my initials, to
distinguish it from a precisely similar weapon which he had of his own.

"I bent over the body and satisfied myself that there was no life left
in it. I must tell you here that I did not notice, then or afterwards,
the scratches and marks on the wrists which were taken as evidence of a
struggle with an assailant. But I have no doubt that Manderson
deliberately injured himself in this way before firing the shot; it was
a part of his plan.

"Though I never perceived that detail, however, it was evident enough as
I looked at the body that Manderson had not forgotten, in his last act
on earth, to tie me tighter by putting out of court the question of
suicide. He had clearly been at pains to hold the pistol at arm's
length, and there was not a trace