as doubtless the poor
mother had, so infinitely inferior in point of strength to the murderer
as to be absolutely powerless in the wretch's grip from the very first
instant of the attack. He had fought for his life, poor fellow, but it
must have been a brief fight and death itself almost instantaneous; for
although the bedclothing was tangled round his feet in a manner which
could only have occurred in a struggle, he did not live long enough to
get off the bed itself or slide so much as one foot to the floor. He
died as his mother had died, and the verdict of the doctors and of the
coroner's jury was the same: 'Death from unknown causes'!"

"Hm-m-m!" said Cleek again. "And were all the symptoms--or, rather, the
absence of symptoms--the same?"

"Precisely. All the organs were discovered to be in a normal condition,
the blood was untainted by any suggestion of either mineral or animal
poison, the heart was sound, the lungs healthy--there was neither an
internal disturbance nor an external wound, unless one could call a
'wound' a slight, a very slight, swelling upon the left side of the
neck; a small thing, not so big as a sixpence."

"And appearing very much like the inflammation resulting from the bite
of a gnat or a spider, Captain?"

"Exactly like it, Mr. Cleek. In fact, the doctors fancied at first that
it was the result of his having been bitten by some poisonous insect,
and were for accounting for his death that way. But, of course, the
entire absence of poison in the blood soon put an end to that idea, so
it was certain that whatever he died from, it was not from a bite or a
sting of any sort."

"Clever chaps, those doctors," commented Cleek with a curious one-sided
smile. "However, they were quite correct in that, I imagine, poison,
either animal, vegetable, or mineral, was not the means of destruction.
Still, I should have thought that at this second post-mortem the
likeness of the son's case to that of the mother's would have impelled
them to extra vigilance, and resulted in a much more careful searching,
and minute examination of the viscera. If my theory is correct, I do not
suppose they would have found anything in the contents of the thorax or
the abdomen, but it is just possible that analysis of the matter removed
from the cranial cavity might have revealed a small blood-clot in the
brain."

The Captain twitched up his eyebrows and stared at him in open-mouthed
amazement.

"Of all the--By Jove! yo