oad, one of the quietest of
London's main thoroughfares. There he met a big man, dressed in tweeds,
whose manifest concern at the moment seemed to center in a rather bad
wrapping of a very good cigar.

"Ah! How goes it, Charles?" cried the big man heartily, affecting to be
aware of Furneaux's presence when the latter had walked nearly a hundred
yards down a comparatively deserted street.

"What's wrong with the toofa?" inquired Furneaux testily.

"My own carelessness. Stupid things, bands on cigars.... Well, what's
the rush?"

"There's a train to Steynholme at five o'clock. I want you to take hold.
I must have help. Like your cigar, this case has come unstuck."

Mr. James Leander Winter, Chief Inspector under the Criminal
Investigation Department, whistled softly.

"Tut, tut!" he said. "One can never trust the newspapers. Reading this
morning's particulars, it looked dead easy."

"Tell me how it struck you. Sometimes the uninformed brain is vouchsafed
a gleam of unconscious genius."

Winter appeared to be devoting his mind to circumventing the vagaries of
a fragile tobacco-leaf. He was a man of powerful build, over forty, heavy
but active, deep-chested, round-headed, with bulging blue eyes which
radiated kindliness and strength of character. The press photographer
described him accurately to Grant. The average Londoner would have taken
him for a county gentleman on a visit to the Agricultural Show at
Islington, with a morning at Tattersall's as a variant. Yet, Sam Weller's
extensive and peculiar knowledge of London compared with his as a
freshman's with a don's of a university. It would be hard to assess, in
coin of the realm, the value of the political and social secrets stowed
away in that big head.

"First, I must put a question or two," he said, smiling at a baby which
cooed at him from the shaded depths of a passing perambulator. "Is there
another woman?"

"Yes, the postmaster's daughter, Doris Martin."

"Shy, pretty little bird, of course?"

"Everything that is good and beautiful."

"Is Grant a Lothario?"

"Excellent chap. Quarter of an hour before the murder he was giving Doris
a lesson in astronomy in the garden of The Hollies."

"Never heard it called _that_ before."

"This time the statement happens to be strictly accurate."

"Honest Injun?"

"I'm sure of it. If anything, the death of Adelaide Melhuish cleared the
scales off their eyes. Those two have never kissed or squeezed--yet.
They