en that the inspector had used Garth's first name. It
seemed to bring the detective closer to his goal. During the daytime at
headquarters, however, their relations were scarcely altered. Garth
often suffered from lack of work there, probably because the inspector
didn't care to send him out on unimportant matters that the least
imaginative of his men could handle. When he had to assign him to an
unpromising task, either to spare him too prolonged idleness, or because
no other detective was available, the big man always assumed an
apologetic air. It was so when he started him on the mystifying Taylor
case.

"Nothing doing these days," he grumbled. "City must be turning pure,
Garth. Anyway I got to give it something for its money. Run up and take
a look at this suicide. Seems Taylor was a recluse. Alone with his
mother-in-law and the servants. Wife's in California. Suppose you had
other plans, but I don't see why the city should pay you to talk
moonshine to Nora."

He grinned understandingly, encouragingly.

So the detective nodded, strolled up town, and with a bored air stepped
into that curious house.

* * * * * *

Garth for a long time stared at the pallid features of the dead man.
Abruptly his interest quickened. Between the thumb and forefinger of the
clenched left hand, which drooped from the side of the bed, a speck of
white protruded. The detective stooped swiftly. The hand, he saw,
secreted a rough sheet of paper. He drew it free, smoothed the crumpled
surface, and with a vast incredulity read the line scrawled across it in
pencil.

"Don't think it's suicide. I've been killed--"

There was no more. Until that moment Garth had conceived no doubt of the
man's self-destruction. The bullet had entered the left side of the
breast. The revolver lay on the counterpane within an inch of the right
hand whose fingers remained crooked. The position of the body did not
suggest the reception or the resistance of an attack. In the room no
souvenir of struggle survived.

Here was this amazing message from the dead man. Its wording, indeed,
offered the irrational impression of having been written after death.

Garth thought rapidly. Granted its accusation, the note must have been
scrawled between the firing of the shot and the moment of Taylor's
death. But a murderer, arranging this appearance of suicide, would have
given Taylor no opportunity. On the other hand, the theory that Taylor