Quickly Leigh raised his face, lined, as it seemed to his friend, in one short five minutes with a whole lifetime of keenest suffering.
“Stop, Kenyon,” he said hoarsely, “and excuse my want of self-control. You are right, the loved and unforgotten dead are passed from us for a season, peace be with them! Now let us see what we can do to pay our debts—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, ay, and blood for blood! See here,” and he laughed a discordant laugh, which wrung Kenyon’s very soul by the pitiful wail with which it closed, as the strong man broke down and sobbed in a bitter agony of keen remembrance. “See here,” he said, as he again pulled himself together, and opened the back of his watch, from which he extracted a small scrap of paper, “they found this pinned to the coverlid of my darling’s bed.”
The detective reached over and took the paper, but before looking at it he poured out, and insisted upon Leigh drinking, a stiff glass of brandy, for he saw that his friend was completely unhinged.
This done, he turned his whole attention to the morsel of paper lying in his hand, and this was what he saw. Simply a small white sheet with a circular, dead black line drawn thus upon it:—
Pinned on a dead woman’s breast, what did this senseless hieroglyphic mean?
To doctors and detectives, nothing!
To the bereaved and desperate husband, nothing!!
To Stanforth Kenyon, the wily American detective, nothing!!!
“Nothing!” gentle reader, just that, and no more.