“If he’s the man who stole the necklace,” Bruce remarked, “you won’t have to shoot. Not if I can get my hands on him.” I don’t very much mind admitting that my own emotions combined a lively curiosity about that door whose oiled hinges had indicated it as the robber’s hiding-place, with an intense desire to get back into the elevator. Try participating in a scene like that upon a pair of crutches before you allow yourself to feel too contemptuous over this admission. Bruce had already started for the door, but he couldn’t go in a straight line to it because of the corner of the billiard table. Before he could get around this obstruction a new voice spoke and halted him in his tracks. “Really there’s no need for any sort of violence,” it stated, irritably. “I’ll open the door myself. I’ll hold my hands out before me and you’ll see that it won’t be necessary to shoot. That’s quite understood, is it?” “Perfectly,” Mr. Smith agreed. “We won’t do anything impulsive. Open the door.” The door swung open noiselessly, and there, true to his promise, stood a man holding out a pair of empty hands. His appearance is rather hard to describe, since the obvious facts about it seemed fortuitous and somehow contradictory to the truer ones. He was, for example, unmistakably dirty and disheveled. Yet he looked as if he ought to be scrupulously clean and tidy. You felt that it was contradictory to his nature to go more than twenty-four hours without a shave, although a shadow of colorless beard upon his plump cheeks proclaimed that he had done so. He was plump, although he happened just now to be rather haggard and hungry-looking. His suit of clothes was cheap and shapeless, yet something about him proclaimed him a fop. His grimy hands were small and finely formed, and as fastidious as Mr. Smith’s. His glance shifted swiftly from one to another of us, coming to rest at last in sour contemplation upon Punch. The boy had been gazing at him intently, groping for an identification. Now he got it. “Why,” he cried, “he’s the man who was hanging the new window shades. He must have been in there ever since Wednesday.” That afforded me a grin. I turned to Mr. Smith. “That’s been Punch’s theory from the beginning, you know,” I remarked. “He discussed with me Wednesday morning the danger that one of the artisans about the place would conceal himself in the house and steal the necklace when he got a chance. He spent most of that day and the next patrolling the house, trying to guard against that very thing happening.” “Good for Punch,” said Mr. Smith, but in so preoccupied a tone that it fell far short of the handsome acknowledgment I wanted for the boy’s cleverness. I persisted, speaking now to Punch. “I wonder if you were right about the actual moment when the imitation necklace was taken?”