s to social functions in Bellevale. One was a
bill for dues in a boating-club; another contained the tabulated
pedigree of a horse owned in Kentucky. A very brief one was in the
same handwriting as the missive he had first read, was signed "E. W.,"
and merely said that she would be at home in the evening. But most of
them related to the business of the Brassfield Oil Company, and
referred to transactions in oil.

He lay back on the bed again, and thought, thought, thought, beginning
with the furthest stretch of memory, and coming down carefully and
consecutively--to the yawning chasm which had opened in his life and
swallowed up five years. Time and again, he worked down to this abyss,
and was forced to stop. He had heard of loss of memory from illness,
but this was nothing of the sort. He had been tired and nervous that
night at Elm Springs Junction, but not ill; and now he was in robust
health. Perhaps some great fit of passion had torn that obliterating
furrow through his mind. Perhaps in those five years he had become
changed from the man of strict integrity who had so well managed the
Hazelhurst Bank, into the monster who had robbed Eugene Brassfield
of--his clothes, his property, the most dearly personal of his
possessions--these, certainly (for Amidon knew the rule of evidence
which brands as a thief the possessor of stolen goods); and who could
tell of what else? Letters, bags, purses, money--these any vulgar
criminal might have, and bear no deeper guilt than that of theft; but,
the clothes! Mr. Amidon shuddered as his logic carried him on from
deduction to reduction--to murder, and the ghastly putting away of
murder's fruit. Imagination threw its limelight over the horrid
scene--the deep pool or tarn sending up oilily its bubbles of
accusation; the shadowy wood with its bulging mound of earth and leaves
swept by revealing rains and winds; the moldy vat of corrosive liquid
eating away the damning evidence; the box with its accursed stains,
shipped anywhere away from the fatal spot, by boat or ship, to be
relentlessly traced back--and he shivered in fearful wonder as to how
the crime had been committed. In some way, he felt sure, Eugene
Brassfield's body must have been removed from those natty clothes of
his, before Florian Amidon could have put them on, and with them donned
the personality of their former owner.

And here entered a mystery deeper still--the strange deception he
seemed to impose on