When he came to the end of all this I was balanced on the edge of the sofa, with my feet braced on the floor to keep from sliding off and my eyes glued on my loving spouse. "Do you mean he came _down_ from one window to the other, Soapy?" Babbitts nodded: "Lowering himself by a rope fastened to the upper cleat which his weight loosened." "But—my goodness!" I was aghast at the idea. "A man of Barker’s age dangling down along the wall that you could see for miles!" "You couldn’t have seen him twenty feet off. The wall’s dark and it was a black dark night. If you’d been watching with a glass you couldn’t have made out anything at that height and at that hour." "But the danger of it?" "He was on a desperate job and had to take chances. Besides it’s not as risky as it sounds. The distance he had to drop was short. The ceilings are low in those office buildings and the awning supports have to be unusually strong because of the summer storms. And then the man himself was small and light and is known to have kept himself in the pink of condition. With a strong rope thrown over the cleat he could easily have swung himself to the story below, stood on the stone ledge which his feet scratched, and pushed up the window which Ford had probably left slightly raised." "The whole thing was a plot?" "A consummate plot—not a murder committed on the spur of the moment but a murder carefully planned. Whitney thinks Barker had scented Harland’s suspicions long before they broke out in the quarrel, in fact that he had provoked it to give color to the suicide theory. When Barker went up that afternoon the rope was under his coat. When Ford left the Azalea Woods Estates early he knew every move he was to make from that time till he boarded the elevator. There were only two weak spots in it, the open window on the seventeenth floor and the length of time that Harland was supposed to have been in the corridor—the two points upon which Whitney based his suspicions." I was silent a minute, turning it over in my mind, then I said slowly: "When Barker was coming down that way—it would have taken some time wouldn’t it?—Harland must have been in the front office." "Yes. O’Mally’s puzzled over that point—What kept him there?" "Looks like he might have had a date with someone," I said pondering. "Ford, of course, but nobody can imagine what he wanted to see Ford about. Oh, there’s a lot of broken links in the chain yet." I looked on the floor, frowning and thoughtful: "It’s awful strange. I’d like to know what made him come down there—what was put up to him to lure him that way to his death." CHAPTER IX JACK TELLS THE STORY