ed once more
before him in the red hollows of the fire.

"As I said, it was years ago. I was waiting here in Paris for some
fellows who were to join me in a campaign we'd arranged against the
African big game. I never was more fit for anything of that sort than I
was then. I only tell you this to show you that the thing can't be
accounted for by my nerves having been out of order at all.

"Well: I was dining alone that day, at the Cafe Anglais. It was late
when I sat down to my dinner in the little salon as usual. Only two
other men were still lingering over theirs. All the time they stayed
they bored me so persistently with some confounded story of a murder
they were discussing, that I was once or twice more than half-inclined
to tell them so. At last, though, they went away.

"But their talk kept buzzing abominably in my head. When the waiter
brought me the evening paper, the first thing that caught my eye was a
circumstantial account of the _probable_ way the fellow did his murder.
I say probable, for they never caught him; and, as you will see
directly, they could only suppose how it occurred.

"It seemed that a well-known Paris banker, who was ascertained beyond
doubt to have left one station alive and well, and with a couple of
hundred thousand francs in a leathern _sac_ under his seat, arrived at
the next station the train stopped at with his throat cut and _minus_
all his money, except a few bank-notes to no great amount, which the
assassin had been wise enough to leave behind him. The train was a night
express on one of the southern lines; the banker travelled quite alone,
in a first-class carriage; and the murder must have taken place between
midnight and 1 A.M. next morning. The newspapers supposed--rightly
enough, I think--that the murderer must have entered the carriage _from
without_, stabbed his victim in his sleep--there were no signs of any
struggle--opened the _sac_, taken what he wanted, and retreated, loot
and all, by the way he came. I fully indorsed my particular writer's
opinion that the murderer was an uncommonly cool and clever individual,
especially as I fancy he got clear off and was never afterward laid
hands on.

"When I had done that I thought I had done with the affair altogether.
Not at all. I was regularly ridden with this confounded murder. You see
the banker was rather a swell; everybody knew him: and that, of course,
made it so shocking. So everybody kept talking about him: they