Robert Delamater had three small bits of metal, like tiny shot, and he racked his brain to connect these with the death. There were fingerprints, too, beautifully developed upon the mysterious missives--prints that tallied with none in the records. There were analyses of the paper--of the ink--and not a clue in any of them. Just three pellets of metal. Robert Delamater had failed utterly, and he was bitter in the knowledge of his failure. "He had you spotted, Del," the Chief insisted. "The writer of these notes may be crazy, but he was clever enough to know that this man _did_ see the Secretary. And he was waiting for him when he came back; then he killed him." "Without a mark?" "He killed him," the Chief repeated; "then he left--and that's that." "But," Delamater objected, "the room clerk--" "--took a nap," broke in the Chief. But Delamater could not be satisfied with the explanation. "He got his, all right," he conceded, "--got it in a locked room nine stories above the street, with no possible means of bringing it upon himself--and no way for the murderer to escape. I tell you there is something more to this: just the letter to the Secretary, as if this Eye of Allah were spying upon him--" The Chief waved all that aside. "A clever spy," he insisted. "Too clever for you. And a darn good guesser; he had us all fooled. But we're dealing with a madman, not a ghost, and he didn't sail in through a ninth story window nor go out through a locked door; neither did he spy on the Secretary of State in his private office. Don't try to make a supernatural mystery out of a failure, Del." The big man's words were tempered with a laugh, but there was an edge of sarcasm, ill-concealed. * * * * * And then came the next note. And the next. The letters were mailed at various points in and about the city; they came in a flood. And they were addressed to the President of the United States, to the Secretary of War--of the Navy--to all the Cabinet members. And all carried the same threat under the staring eye. The United States, to this man, represented all that was tyrannical and oppressive to the downtrodden of the earth. He proposed to end it--this government first, then others in their turn. It was the outpouring of a wildly irrational mind that came to the office of the harassed Chief of the United States Secret Service, who had instructions to run this man down--this man who signed himself The Eye of Allah. And do it quickly for the notes were threatening. Official Washington, it seemed, was getting jumpy and was making caustic inquiries as to why a Secret Service department was maintained. The Chief, himself, was directing the investigation--and getting nowhere.