Meantime at the Planet office Masterman Throgton was putting on his coat to go home.
"Excuse me, sir," said an employé, "there's a lot of green billiard chalk on your sleeve."
Throgton turned and looked the man full in the eye.
"That is not billiard chalk," he said, "it is face powder."
Saying which this big, imperturbable, self-contained man stepped into the elevator and went to the ground floor in one drop
CHAPTER V.
HAS ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY?
The inquest upon the body of Kivas Kelly was held upon the following day. Far from offering any solution of what had now become an unfathomable mystery, it only made it deeper still. The medical testimony, though given by the most distinguished consulting expert of the city, was entirely inconclusive. The body, the expert testified, showed evident marks of violence. There was a distinct lesion of the œsophagus and a decided excoriation of the fibula. The mesodenum was gibbous. There was a certain quantity of flab in the binomium and the proscenium was wide open.
One striking fact, however, was decided from the testimony of the expert, namely, that the stomach of the deceased was found to contain half a pint of arsenic. On this point the questioning of the district attorney was close and technical. Was it unusual, he asked, to find arsenic in the stomach? In the stomach of a club man, no. Was not half a pint a large quantity? He would not say that. Was it a small quantity? He should not care to say that it was. Would half a pint of arsenic cause death? Of a club man, no, not necessarily. That was all.
The other testimony submitted to the inquest jury brought out various facts of a substantive character, but calculated rather to complicate than to unravel the mystery. The butler swore that on the very day of the murder he had served his master a half-pint of arsenic at lunch. But he claimed that this was quite a usual happening with his master. On cross-examination it appeared that he meant apollinaris. He was certain, however, that it was half a pint. The butler, it was shown, had been in Kivas Kelly's employ for twenty years.