not have awakened and made good his escape. It was the
upper floor which had caught; the stairs had stood to the last. It
was beyond calculation. Even if he had been asleep!

And he had not been asleep. This second and infinitely more
appalling discovery began to be known. Slowly. By a hint, a breath
of rumour here; there an allusion, half taken back. The man, whose
incinerated body still lay curled in its bed of cinders, had been
dressed at the moment of disaster; even to the watch, the
cuff-buttons, the studs, the very scarf-pin. Fully clothed to the
last detail, precisely as those who had dealings at the bank might
have seen Campbell Wood any week-day morning for the past eight
months. A man does not sleep with his clothes on. The skull of the
man had been broken, as if with a blunt instrument of iron. On the
charred lacework of the floor lay the leg of an old andiron with
which Boaz Negro and his Angelina had set up housekeeping in that
new house.

It needed only Mr. Asa Whitelaw, coming up the street from that
gaping "Noah's Ark" at the bank, to round out the scandalous circle
of circumstance.

"Where is Manuel?"

Boaz Negro still sat in his shop, impassive, monumental, his thick,
hairy arms resting on the arms of his chair. The tools and materials
of his work remained scattered about him, as his irresolute
gathering of the night before had left them. Into his eyes no change
could come. He had lost his house, the visible monument of all those
years of "skinning his fingers." It would seem that he had lost his
son. And he had lost something incalculably precious--that hitherto
unquenchable exuberance of the man.

"Where is Manuel?"

When he spoke his voice was unaccented and stale, like the voice of
a man already dead.

"Yes, where is Manuel?"

He had answered them with their own question.

"When did you last see him?"

Neither he nor they seemed to take note of that profound irony.

"At supper."

"Tell us, Boaz; you knew about this money?"

The cobbler nodded his head.

"And did Manuel?"

He might have taken sanctuary in a legal doubt. How did he know what
Manuel knew? Precisely! As before, he nodded his head.

"After supper, Boaz, you were in the shop? But you heard something?"

He went on to tell them what he had heard: the footfalls, below and
above, the extraordinary conversation which had broken for a moment
the silence of the inner hall. The account was bare, the phrases
monosyllabic