"No, sir," replied the laborer, wiping his hands with an air of finality on the posterior aspect of his trousers; "that's the lot."
The surgeon looked thoughtfully at the bones as he gave a final touch to their arrangement, and remarked:
"The inspector is right. All the bones of the neck are there. Very odd. Don't you think so?"
"You mean——"
"I mean that this very eccentric murderer seems to have given himself such an extraordinary amount of trouble for no reason that one can see. There are these neck vertebrae, for instance. He must have carefully separated the skull from the atlas instead of just cutting through the neck. Then there is the way he divided the trunk; the twelfth ribs have just come in with this lot, but the twelfth dorsal vertebra to which they belong was attached to the lower half. Imagine the trouble he must have taken to do that, and without cutting or hacking the bones about, either. It is extraordinary. This is rather interesting, by the way. Handle it carefully."
He picked up the breast-bone daintily—for it was covered with wet mud—and handed it to me with the remark:
"That is the most definite piece of evidence we have."
"You mean," I said, "that the union of the two parts into a single mass fixes this as the skeleton of an elderly man?"
"Yes, that is the obvious suggestion, which is confirmed by the deposit of bone in the rib-cartilages. You can tell the inspector, Davis, that I have checked this lot of bones and that they are all here."
"Would you mind writing it down, sir?" said the constable. "Inspector
Badger said I was to have everything in writing."