n with a good deal of pains. It was a
good plan, very ingenious, and showed an intelligent mind, not a feeble
one. It was a plan which was well calculated to ward off all suspicion
from its inventor. In the first place, he marked a candle into spaces
an inch apart, and lit it and timed it. He found it took three hours to
burn four inches of it. I tried it myself for half an hour, awhile ago,
up-stairs here, while the inquiry into Flint Buckner's character and
ways was being conducted in this room, and I arrived in that way at
the rate of a candle's consumption when sheltered from the wind. Having
proved his trial candle's rate, he blew it out--I have already shown it
to you--and put his inch-marks on a fresh one.

"He put the fresh one into a tin candlestick. Then at the five-hour mark
he bored a hole through the candle with a red-hot wire. I have already
shown you the wire, with a smooth coat of tallow on it--tallow that had
been melted and had cooled.

"With labor--very hard labor, I should say--he struggled up through the
stiff chaparral that clothes the steep hillside back of Flint Buckner's
place, tugging an empty flour-barrel with him. He placed it in that
absolutely secure hiding-place, and in the bottom of it he set the
candlestick. Then he measured off about thirty-five feet of fuse--the
barrel's distance from the back of the cabin. He bored a hole in the
side of the barrel--here is the large gimlet he did it with. He went on
and finished his work; and when it was done, one end of the fuse was in
Buckner's cabin, and the other end, with a notch chipped in it to expose
the powder, was in the hole in the candle--timed to blow the place up
at one o'clock this morning, provided the candle was lit about eight
o'clock yesterday evening--which I am betting it was--and provided
there was an explosive in the cabin and connected with that end of the
fuse--which I am also betting there was, though I can't prove it. Boys,
the barrel is there in the chaparral, the candle's remains are in it in
the tin stick; the burnt-out fuse is in the gimlet-hole, the other end
is down the hill where the late cabin stood. I saw them all an hour
or two ago, when the Professor here was measuring off unimplicated
vacancies and collecting relics that hadn't anything to do with the
case."

He paused. The house drew a long, deep breath, shook its strained cords
and muscles free and burst into cheers. "Dang him!" said Ham Sandwich,
"that's wh