Forrester admitted. “Have you questioned anybody?”
“I’ll say I have,” the coroner retorted with a twinkle in his eye. “Got two state troopers to ride herd on ’em, and put ’em through their paces in great shape. Gosh, they’re one scared crowd! Everybody agrees Milsted shot himself, but if I asked any one of ’em, ‘Why did you kill him?’ I’ll bet a dollar he’d break down and confess.
“Well”—he turned to the body with a brisk, professional air—“I wonder why the old coot did kill himself?”
With the deftness of long practice, covering the repugnance he felt for his task with a running fire of cynical comment, the young physician examined the remains, noted the position of the wound, the pistol in the dead hand and the posture of the body.
“Plain as a pike-staff,” he announced, rising and dusting his trousers knees. “Never saw an opener case of suicide in my life, but, as Bobbie Burns would say,
.
“‘One thing must still be greatly dark,
The reason why he did it.’”
.
“I shouldn’t be too cock-sure it’s suicide if I were you,” Professor Forrester replied.
“Eh? The devil you say!” Dr. Nesbit shot him a quick glance. “Why not?”
“Look at that wound again.”
“Thanks; I’ve already had a fine, grandstand view of it. Right through the frontal bone, slick and clean as a whistle.”
“But did you see any powder brand around it?” Forrester insisted. “Remember, in the nature of things, Milsted couldn’t have held that gun more than a foot from his head, and at that distance, even with smokeless powder, there would have been some burning of the tissues, or at least a scarification of the skin from the powder gases.”
“Hum; by the Lord Harry, Professor, you’re right!” the young official admitted. “I overlooked it. Still—”
“Try to take that pistol from his hand,” the Professor persisted.
“He’s certainly holding it,” the coroner admitted as he rose after tugging futilely at the weapon clasped in the dead man’s fingers. “Rigor mortis set in early—”
“Rigor fiddlesticks!” Forrester scoffed. “Feel his jaw and neck, man; that’s where the stiffening would begin, if it were rigor mortis. You’ll find those muscles still flaccid.”
“Right you are,” Dr. Nesbit agreed as he prodded the dead man’s facial muscles with a practiced forefinger. “But how do you account for his grasping that gun so—”
The Professor sighed in exasperation. “Did you ever hear of the condition known as cadaveric spasm?” he asked sharply. “That’s a perfect example of it. You know, as a physician—or you ought to, if you don’t—that when death takes place suddenly, especially from injury to the nervous system, as in this case, where the brain was pierced, the body, or parts of it, notably the hands, become rigid almost immediately. I remember once coming on the body of a poor chap who’d been murdered in the Gobi desert. Some brigands had shot him through the head from behind as he was in the act of eating a piece of mutton, and, though his body had almost completely mummified when we found him, he was still grasping the sheep bone as if it were a pole of a galvanic battery.”
“Right-o,” the coroner gave a short, affirmative nod. “Absolutely right, Professor. This man was shot through the brain, too, as you say. But that’s one of the surest indicia of suicide, you know. No murderer could put that gun in his hand after killing him and make his fingers grasp it as they do.”
“Exactly,” Forrester nodded in his turn. “But suppose that instead of shooting himself, Milsted had drawn his gun to shoot at someone else, and actually fired one shot before, or just as, the other potted him. What then? Wouldn’t we have just the conditions we find here?”
“Yes,” Nesbit conceded, “but the facts don’t match your theory. Only one shot was heard, and all the testimony, with one exception, is to the effect that there was nobody for Milsted to shoot at, even if there’d been someone to shoot him.”
“Right,” Forrester replied, “and it’s my ward, Miss Osterhaut, who says Milsted fired toward the window just before he fell. I’d take her word against a dozen of these scatter-brained young fools’ testimony. She has been brought up to observe things, and do it accurately.”
“But—”
“And here’s something else for you to chew on,” the Professor continued, brushing aside the half-uttered protest—“look at these—”
Leading the way to the museum he opened the empty cabinet and directed his companion’s gaze to the faint marks on its floor. “Recognize ’em?” he demanded.
“Can’t say I do.”
“Very well, then. I’ll tell you. They’re footprints. Somebody who had been walking through the snow, before it was deep enough to cover the ground completely, was standing in that cabinet today. You can make out the heel-and toe-prints of his shoes, and here you can see where the sand and gravel has been spread out in a film over the metal where the snow melted from his boots. It’s a glacial silt-deposit in miniature. That dates his visit. It didn’t start snowing till nearly six o’clock this afternoon, and the ground was frozen hard as bed-rock up to an hour or so before the storm began. The temperature rose several degrees—enough to thaw the very top of the ground—before the snow commenced, and for the first half-hour or so the flakes were wet. This sleet has been coming down only the last hour, maybe a little less. So I say somebody walked through the snow just after it began, got a scum of sand on his shoes and hid in this case without stopping to wipe his boots. He could stand here and see everything going on in the room through the slits in the cabinet door.”
Dr. Nesbit smiled ironically as he shook his head. “You may be able to take a piece of skull and build a man from it, or reconstruct a dinosaur from a splint of thigh-bone, Professor Forrester,” he conceded, “but I’m not ready to admit you’ve reconstructed a case of burglary and murder here.”
“Then look at this,” the Professor urged, leading the way back to the library and indicating the wall beneath the window. “This is the window that everybody agrees opened mysteriously just as the lights went out. Now, here on the baseboard, if you’ll look closely, you’ll find exactly such sand stains as are on the cabinet floor. And here—” he indicated the faint smudges on the wall—“are the foot marks where somebody took a running start, braced his feet first against the board, then the wall, and with his hands holding the window sill, swarmed up and yanked the casement open. And here—” he pointed triumphantly to the sill—“are other marks, not much more than dabs of sand, I’ll grant you, but still marks, where the fellow rested his feet on the sill before he started to leap to the ground outside.”
“But you’re assuming too much,” Nesbit objected. “These marks might easily have been made some other way. I know my house is forever getting all sorts of spots and splotches on it, no matter how hard my wife scrubs and dusts.”
Forrester snorted in disgust. “Can’t you use your eyes at all?” he demanded. “Look at this, and this, and this—” he thrust the envelopes in which his specimens were stored under
