“It _will_ make sense when we get it cleared up!” she promised. “And now that we’ve got hold of both ends of the string we’ll untangle it in short order. When we do, we’ll find who killed Willis Chase and who stole our jewelry. That isn’t all we’ll discover either. We’ll--drat the miserable collie!” she broke off. “Has he gone crazy? Make him be still, Thax!” For Macduff, failing to get free by struggling and by appealing whimpers, had now renewed his salvo of barking. Vail spoke harshly to the dog, tightening his hold on the collar. The brief interruption switched the current of Dr. Lawton’s thoughts back from this mystery of identity to a more startling and more professionally interesting mystery--to that of a man who had achieved the garishly impossible exploit of freezing to death in a sun-scourged temperature of 120 degrees or more. Again the doctor knelt by the body, swiftly renewing his examination. But even before he did so he knew he could not have been mistaken in his diagnosis. Lawton was a Berkshire physician of the old school. He had plied his hallowedly needful profession as country doctor among those tumbles of mountains and valleys for nearly half a century. Winter and summer he had ridden the rutted byroads on his errands of healing. Often in olden days and sometimes even now he had been called on to toil over unfortunates who had lost their way in blizzards with the mercury far below zero, and who had frozen to death before help could come. Every phase of freezing to death was professionally familiar to him. The phenomena were few and simple. They could not possibly be mistaken. And, past all chance of doubt, he knew now that Osmun Creede had frozen to death--that he had died from freezing in spite of the tropical torridity of the day. The fact that the thermometer was registering above one hundred in the shade and was many degrees higher here in the unchecked sun-glare--this did not alter the far more tremendous fact that Osmun Creede had just died from freezing. Lawton raised the rigidly frozen body in order to slip off from it the coat which impeded his work of inspection. Deftly he pulled the coat from the shoulders, the sleeves turning inside out in the process, and he tossed it aside. The flung coat landed on a twig-tangle of the nearest box-bush, hanging upside down from the twigs. From its inner pocket, thus reversed, fell a fat wallet. It flapped wide open to the bricks, the jar of contact shaking from its compartments three or four objects which glittered like colored fire as they caught and cast back a million sun-rays. Miss Gregg swooped down on the nearest of these glowing bits, retrieving it and holding it triumphantly out to Thaxton. “Doris’s marquise ring!” she announced. “And there’s my pearl-and-onyx brooch down there by your left toe. I said last night Oz Creede was the thief. I knew he couldn’t possibly be. But that made me know all the more he was.”