On the wall opposite the dining-room door were spots and streaks of blood, great, irregular streaks and smooches, as if drops and splotches that had spurted upon the wall paper had been rubbed and spread by the garments of persons engaged in a terrific struggle. A rug near by had been kicked into a shapeless heap near the baseboard. Nick merely glanced at these, then paused at the open door of the dining room, in which the scene was doubly shocking. The roller shades of both windows had been raised, admitting the morning sunlight. One lamp of an electric chandelier still was burning. It looked wan and yellow in contrast with the bright light from outside. “Great guns!” Chick Carter muttered, then at Nick’s elbow. “What a scene of disorder.” “It’s the limit,” Nick tersely agreed. “Slaughter pen is right,” added Chick, recalling the remark of the physician. The scene was, indeed, a shocking one. The table was out of place. Broken glasses from the sideboard strewed the floor. Chairs were overturned and broken. Spots and splashes of blood were everywhere. It stood in a great, partly dry and congealed pool on the floor between the table and the hall door--a pool in which the corpse of a murdered man was lying. He had fallen upon his back and was lying with face upturned in the sunlight shed through one of the windows. There was a great bruise under one eye and a gash in his cheek. He had been stabbed twice in the breast, and from the second wound still protruded the weapon used by his assailant, a knife driven home to the victim’s heart with all the merciless energy of bitter vengefulness, or utter desperation. He was a man in middle life and of powerful build, a smooth-shaven man of dark complexion, close-cut hair, and a hard, somewhat sinister cast of features. “Do you know him?” asked Nick, after viewing the scene for several moments. “No,” said Chick. “Do you?” Nick stepped into the room and bent above the corpse. With the tip of his finger he lifted the dead man’s upper lip, revealing a quantity of gold bridgework on three of the teeth. He turned the left hand, also, and found that part of the third finger had been amputated. “I thought I recognized him,” he remarked, rising and glancing again at the battered face. “We have his photograph in our album.” “Who is he?” Chick questioned. “Cornelius Taggart,” said Nick. “Better known to the police as Connie Taggart.” “By Jove, you’re right,” Chick declared, gazing. “I recognize him, now. Connie Taggart, the yegg and cracksman.” “He’s the man,” Nick nodded. “He has cracked his last crib and paid the price. He has been about as bad an egg, Chick, as one often finds in a basket. Have you examined this body, Doctor Boyden?” Sergeant Kennedy and the physician had approached as far as the open door. “Only superficially,” was the physician’s reply. “How long would you say he has been dead?” “Fully twelve hours, Mr. Carter; probably longer.”