“Don’t move too fast,” advised his colleague. “And, too, we want to interview those chambermaids. Though I think Miss Prall is at the back of the thing, she may have been aided by those women. They might have been paid——” “Now, look here,” put in Moore. “I know Miss Prall better than you two do. And I know if she undertook a thing of this desperate nature, she never called in any outside help. She’d be afraid to trust those women. And that companion of hers is all the help she’d want. No, sir, if the women Sir Binney recognized were Miss Prall and Miss Gurney, that’s all there was of them. Likewise, if it was those two chambermaids, that’s all there was of _them_. But they never combined forces; no, sir, they didn’t!” “I believe that.” Gibbs nodded his head. “Now, let’s take a look at this paper again.” The paper left by the dying man had been carefully placed between two small panes of glass, in order to keep it intact and undefaced. As Gibbs studied the passe-partout, he said, thoughtfully, “We must make up our minds what he meant in this second line. It’s unintelligible, but what _could_ he have meant? ‘Get bo——’” “I think it means get both,” said Corson, positively; “but it mayn’t be that at all. As it was the very last effort of his spent muscles, it is far from likely that he wrote just what he meant to write. He might have intended that second letter for a or o or g or, in fact, almost any letter! He lost control of his fingers and the pencil fell away from them.” “All right; I grant you all that,” Gibbs agreed. “But we’ve got to start somewhere. Now we know women killed him; he states that. Next, if this word is both, we know there were two women and two only.” “Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous!” guyed Corson. “And Miss Prall and Miss Gurney count up just two! Correct, so far.” “Don’t be funny. The chambermaids in question number two also. And there were most likely only two, for women don’t go round murdering in squads. But the point is, he says, get both,—if the word is both. That would seem to imply that one is more probable as a suspect than the other, but he adjures us to get the other one also.” “There’s something to that, Mr Gibbs,” and Bob Moore looked at the detective admiringly. “Now, if it was a case of Miss Prall and Miss Gurney, they’re so much together, that such a message would be practically unnecessary. So it may point to the chambermaids. You see, Maggie is on his floor, but he may have meant that Jane, too, was implicated.”