“For what conceivable reason.”
“Perhaps some idea that he was hiding it better. Perhaps for no reason at all. Reason plays little part in an insane murderer’s processes.”
“But an insane murderer leave tracks the same as any other man, and unless Haynes was completely fooled there were no such tracks or breakage of the shrubbery around the spot where you found the body, as must have been made by a man breaking his way through, particularly if he were carrying a heavy body.”
“What are you driving at?” asked Colton. “Well,” said the reporter thoughtfully, “this Ely business seems to me just about the strangest phase of this whole mystery. And it’s the strangest, most incomprehensible features of a problem that most often give you your clue.”
“Have you found one?”
“I’ve been thinking of another possible cause of such fractures as you described. Might not a fall have caused them?”
“Not unless it was from a height. And how could he have fallen from a height?”
“That is what I should like to know,” said Eldon Smith. “The scrub-oak where you found the body is badly smashed down—much more crushed and broken than the mere toppling over of a man would account for.”
Swift light broke in upon Colton. “That is what Haynes was trying to determine when he fell into the oak,” he cried.
“Trust him for that. Did he get down on his hands and knees afterward?”