Just then the door opened and Bennett burst in.
As he stood over the body, gazing down at it, repressing the emotions of a strong man, he turned to Elaine and in a low voice, exclaimed, "The Clutching Hand did this! I shall consecrate my life to bring this man to justice!"
He spoke tensely and Elaine, looking up into his face, as if imploring his help in her hour of need, unable to speak, merely grasped his hand.
Kennedy, who in the meantime had stood apart from the rest of us, was examining the telephone carefully.
"A clever crook," I heard him mutter between his teeth. "He must have worn gloves. Not a finger print—at least here."
. . . . . . . .
Perhaps I can do no better than to reconstruct the crime as Kennedy later pieced these startling events together.
Long after I had left and even after Bennett left, Dodge continued working in his library, for he was known as a prodigious worker.
Had he taken the trouble, however, to pause and peer out into the moonlight that flooded the back of his house, he might have seen the figures of two stealthy crooks crouching in the half shadows of one of the cellar windows.
One crook was masked by a handkerchief drawn tightly about his lower face, leaving only his eyes visible beneath the cap with visor pulled down over his forehead. He had a peculiar stoop of the shoulders and wore his coat collar turned up. One hand, the right, seemed almost deformed. It was that which gave him his name in the underworld—the Clutching Hand.