Chapter 10 - Page 2

of the
window!

Perhaps I was overwrought. Perhaps my fancy ran away with me. But I
didn't doubt for a second. I rose from my seat, and in a tremulous
voice called Jane into the room. Without one word I laid both
pictures down before her together. Jane glanced first at the one,
then turned quickly to the other. A sharp little cry broke from her
lips all unbidden. She saw it as fast and as instinctively as I had
done.

"That's him!" she exclaimed, aghast, and as pale as a sheet. "That's
him, right enough, Miss Una. That's the very same back! That's the
very same hand! That's the man! That's the murderer!"

And indeed, this unanimity was sufficiently startling. For nothing
could have been more different than the dress in the two cases. In
the murder scene, the man seemed to wear a tweed suit and
knickerbockers,--he was indistinct, as I said before, against the
blurred light of the window: while in the athletic scene, he wore
just a thin jersey and running-drawers, cut short at the knee, with
his arms and legs bare, and his muscles contracted. Yet for all
that, we both knew him for the same man at once. That stooping back
was unmistakable; that position of the hand was characteristic and
unique. We were sure he was the same man. I trembled with agitation.
I had a clue to the murderer!

Yet, strange to say, that wasn't the first thought that occurred to
my mind. In the relief of the moment, I looked up into Jane's eyes,
and exclaimed with a sigh of profound relief:

"Then you see how mistaken you were about the hands and Aunt Emma!"

Jane looked close at the hand in the photograph once more.

"Well, it's curious," she said, slowly. "That's a man, sure enough:
but he'd ought to be a Moore. The palm's your aunt's as clear as
ever you could paint it!"

I glanced over her shoulder. She was perfectly right. It was a man
beyond all doubt, the figure on the wagon. Yet the hand was Aunt
Emma's, every line and every stroke of it; except, of course, the
scars. Those, I saw at a glance, were wholly wanting.

And now I had really a clue to the murderer.

Yet how slight a clue! Just a photograph of men's backs. What men?
When and where? It was an athletic meeting. Of what club or society?
That was the next question now I had to answer. Instinctively I made
up my mind to answer it myself, without giving any notice to the
police of my discovery.

Perhaps I should never have been able to answer it at all but for
one of the photographs which, as I thought, though lying loose by
itself, formed part of the same series. It represented the end of a
hundred-yard race, with the winners coming in at the tape by a