“We have our work cut out for us,” he said, very gravely. “I have never seen a stranger case. The murderer must have been a man of brute passions and brute strength. That nail is almost imbedded in the bone, and, I fancy, needed more than one blow of the hammer that drove it in. But first, as to the doors and windows. You tell me they were locked this morning?” “Yes, sir,” answered Griscom, the butler, as Moore looked at him. He was a smallish man, bald and with what are sometimes called pop-eyes. He stared in a frightened manner, but he controlled his voice as he went on to tell his story. “Yes, sir, I brought the master’s tea at nine o’clock, as always. The door was locked——” “Is it usually locked in the morning?” Moore interrupted. “Sometimes, not always. When it is locked, I knock and Mr. Tracy would get up and open the door. If unlocked, I walked right in.” “And this morning it was locked, and the key in the lock on the inside?” “Yes, sir. So I knocked, but when there was no answer, I got scared——” “Why were you scared?” “Because Doctor Rogers had often told me that Mr. Tracy was in danger of an apoplectic stroke, and that I must do anything I could to make him eat less and take more exercise. I’ve been with the master a long time, sir, and I had the privilege of a bit of talk with him now and then. So I did try to persuade him to obey the doctor’s orders, and he would laugh and promise to do so. But he forgot it as soon as he saw some dish he was fond of, and he’d eat his fill of it.” “Go on, Griscom,” Moore said, “what happened next?” “I went to Mr. Everett——” “Yes, he went to Everett,” broke in the aggrieved voice of Harper Ames. “Why did he do that, instead of coming to me, I’d like to know!” “Go on,” Moore instructed the butler. “I went to Mr. Everett, sir, he was up and dressed, and he said, at once, to get Louis—that’s the chauffeur—and tell him to bring some tools, I did that, and Louis first pushed the key out of the lock, and then poked around with a wire until he got the door open. Then we came in——” “Who came in?” “Mr. Everett and Mr. Ames and me, sir. And Mrs. Fenn—she’s the housekeeper—she saw Louis running upstairs, so she came, too.” “And you saw——?” “Mr. Tracy, just as he was when you first saw him, sir. Just as he is now, except for the things Doctor Rogers chucked out.” “Is that door, the one that was locked, the entrance to the whole suite?” “Yes, sir, that door is the only one connecting these rooms with the house.” “I see. Now what about the windows?” “They haven’t been touched, sir.”