s clustering about the old wing. They nodded from
time to time while the doctor held them in the desolate room with the
dead man, speaking of the other deaths it had sheltered.

Silas Blackburn's great grandfather, he told the detective, had been
carried to that bed from a Revolutionary skirmish with a bullet at the
base of his brain. For many hours he had raved deliriously, fighting
unsuccessfully against the final silence.

"It has been a legend in the family, as these young people will tell you,
that Blackburns die hard, and there are those who believe that people who
die hard leave something behind them--something that clings to the
physical surroundings of their suffering. If it was only that one case!
But it goes on and on. Silas Blackburn's father, for instance, killed
himself here. He had lost his money in silly speculations. He stood where
you stand, detective, and blew his brains out. He fell over and lay where
his son lies, his head on that pillow. Silas Blackburn was a money
grubber. He started with nothing but this property, and he made a
fortune, but even he had enough imagination to lock this room up after
one more death of that kind. It was this girl's father. You were too
young, Katherine, to remember it, but I took care of him. I saw it. He
was carried here after he had been struck at the back of the head in a
polo match. He died, too, fighting hard. God! How the man suffered. He
loosened his bandages toward the end. When I got here the pillow was
redder than it is to-day. It strikes me as curious that the first time
the room has been slept in since then it should harbour a death behind
locked doors--from a wound in the head."

Paredes's fingers were restless, as if he missed his customary cigarette.
The detective strolled to the window.

"Very interesting," he said. "Extremely interesting for old women and
young children. You may classify yourself, doctor."

"Thanks," the doctor rumbled. "I'll wait until you've told me how these
doors were entered, how that wound was made, how this body turned on its
side in an empty room."

The detective glanced at Bobby. His voice lacked confidence.

"I'll do my best. I'll even try to tell you why the murderer came back
this afternoon to disturb his victim."

Bobby went, curiously convinced that the doctor had had the better of
the argument.

For a moment Katherine, Graham, Paredes, and he were alone in the
main hall.

"God knows what it was," Graham sai