Chapter 10

YET ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH

Next morning my head ached. After all I'd suffered, I could hardly
bear to recur to the one subject that now always occupied my
thoughts. And yet, on the other hand, I couldn't succeed in
banishing it. To relieve my mind a little, I took out the
photographs I had brought from the box at The Grange, and began to
sort them over according to probable date and subject.

They were of different periods, some old, some newer. I put them
together in series, as well as I could, by the nature of the
surroundings. The most recent of all were my father's early attempts
at instantaneous electric photography--the attempts which led up at
last to his automatic machine, the acmegraph, that produced all
unconsciously the picture of the murder. Some of these comparatively
recent proofs represented men running and horses trotting: but the
best of all, tied together with a bit of tape, clearly belonged to a
single set, and must have been taken at the same time at an athletic
meeting. There was one of a flat race, viewed from a little in
front, with the limbs of the runners in seemingly ridiculous
attitudes, so instantaneous and therefore so grotesquely rigid were
they. There was another of a high jump, seen from one side at the
very moment of clearing the pole, so that the figure poised solid in
mid-air as motionless as a statue. And there was a third, equally
successful, of a man throwing the hammer, in which the hammer, in
the same way, seemed to hang suspended of itself like Mahomet's
coffin between earth and heaven.

But the one that attracted my attention the most was a photograph of
an obstacle-race, in which the runners had to mount and climb over a
wagon placed obtrusively sideways across the course on purpose to
baffle them. This picture was taken from a few yards in the rear;
and the athletes were seen in it in the most varied attitudes. Some
of them were just climbing up one side of the wagon: others had
mounted to the top ledge of the body: and one, standing on the
further edge, was in the very act of leaping down to the ground in
front of him. He was bent double, to spring, with a stoop like a
hunchback, and balanced himself with one hand held tightly behind
him.

As my eye fell on that figure, a cold thrill ran through me. For a
moment I only knew something important had happened. Next instant I
realised what the thrill portended. I could only see the man's back,
to be sure, but I knew him in a second. I had no doubt as to who it
was. This was HIM--the murderer!

Yes, yes! There could be no mistaking that arched round back that
had haunted me so long in my waking dreams. I knew him at sight. It
was the man I had seen on the night of the murder getting out