er nothing from the monosyllables which he uttered, except
that the matter under discussion was profoundly serious. Finally, he
jammed down the receiver.

"Good God, Walter," he exclaimed, "Murchie's been murdered!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE TOXIN OF FATIGUE

He gave me no time for questions, and I had no ability to reconstruct my
own theory of the case as we hustled into our clothes to catch the early
morning train.

"Broadhurst is at the Idlewild Hotel," Kennedy said, as we left the
apartment, "and I think we can make it quicker by railway than by
motor."

The turfman met us at the station.

"Tell me just what happened," asked Kennedy.

"No one seems to understand just what it was," Broadhurst explained,
"but, as nearly as I remember, Murchie was the lion of the Idlewild
grillroom all the evening. He had 'come back.' Once, I recall, he was
paged, and the boy told him someone was waiting outside. He went out,
and returned, considerably flushed and excited.

"'By George,' he said, 'a man never raises his head above the crowd but
that there's somebody there to take a crack at it! There must have been
some crank outside, for before I could get a look in the dark, I was
seized. I managed to get away. I got a little scratch with a knife or a
pin, though,' he said, dabbing at a cut on his neck."

"What then?" prompted Kennedy.

"None of us paid much attention to it," resumed Broadhurst, "until just
as another toast was proposed to Lady Lee and someone suggested that
Murchie respond to it, we turned to find him huddled up in his chair,
absolutely unconscious. The house physician could find nothing wrong
apparently--in fact, said it was entirely a case of heart failure. I
don't think any of us would question his opinion if it had not been for
Murchie's peculiar actions when he came back to the room that time."

Murchie's body had been removed to the local undertaking establishment.
As Broadhurst drove up there and we entered, Kennedy seemed interested
only in the little jab and a sort of swelling upon the neck of the dead
man. Quickly he made a little incision beside it, and about ten or a
dozen drops of what looked like blood-serum oozed out on a piece of
gauze which Craig held.

As we turned to leave the undertaker's, a striking, dark-haired girl,
with the color gone from her cheeks, hurried past us and fell on her
knees beside Murchie's body. It was the woman who had congratulated him
the day before, the