"And this killing happened in the dark?" he asked when I had finished. "Well, which of you dressed up like a devil and done it?" Susan whimpered and bowed her head. Zoberg, outraged, sprang to his feet. "It was a creature from another world," he protested angrily. "None of us had a reason to kill Mr. Gird." O'Bryant emitted a sharp, equine laugh. "Don't go to tell me any ghost stories, Doctor Zoberg. We folks have heard a lot about the hocus-pocus you've pulled off here from time to time. Looks like it might have been to cover up some kind of rough stuff." "How could it be?" demanded Zoberg. "Look here, Constable, these handcuffs." He held out one pair of them. "We were all confined with them, fastened to chairs that were sealed to the floor. Mr. Gird was also chained, and his chair made fast out of our reach. Go into the next room and look for yourself." "Let me see them irons," grunted O'Bryant, snatching them. He turned them over and over in his hands, snapped them shut, tugged and pressed, then held out a hand for my keys. Unlocking the cuffs, he peered into the clamping mechanism. "These are regulation bracelets," he pronounced. "You were all chained up, then?" "We were," replied Zoberg, and both Susan and I nodded. Into the constable's blue eyes came a sudden shrewd light. "I guess you must have been, at that. But did you stay that way?" He whipped suddenly around, bending above my chair to fix his gaze upon me. "How about you, Mr. Wills?" "Of course we stayed that way," I replied. "Yeh? Look here, ain't you a professional magician?" "How did you know that?" I asked. He grinned widely and without warmth. "The whole town's been talking about you, Mr. Wills. A stranger can't be here all day without his whole record coming out." The grin vanished. "You're a magician, all right, and you can get out of handcuffs. Ain't that so?" "Of course it's so," Zoberg answered for me. "But why should that mean that my friend has killed Mr. Gird?" O'Bryant wagged his head in triumph. "That's what we'll find out later. Right now it adds up very simple. Gird was killed, in a room that was all sealed up. Three other folks was in with him, all handcuffed to their chairs. Which of them got loose without the others catching on?" He nodded brightly at me, as if in answer to his own question. Zoberg gave me a brief, penetrating glance, then seemed to shrivel up in his own chair. He looked almost as exhausted as Susan. I, too, was feeling near to collapse. "You want to own up, Mr. Wills?" invited O'Bryant. "I certainly do not," I snapped at him. "You've got the wrong man." "I thought," he made answer, as though catching me in a damaging admission, "that it was a devil, not a man, who killed Gird." I shook my head. "I don't know what killed him." "Maybe you'll remember after a while." He turned toward the door, "You come along with me. I'm going to lock you up."