"Yep, this clinches it, gents. These are Haskins' finger prints on the window. Good thing I brought this card along, huh?" It is hard for a man with a chubby face like Tish's to look grim, but his voice certainly was grim, as he added, "Haskins is wanted now for two murders. The job now is--find Haskins." Wiggly Price leaned closer, and he, too, observed that the finger prints were on the inside of the pane. "That means," he said, "that Haskins came in the window and closed it behind him. Those smudges at the top of the prints show that his fingers slipped a little on the glass, and that his pressure was downward. And, had he been raising the window, the finger prints would have been at the top of the sash rather than at the bottom." "That's true," Tish agreed absently, returning the Bertillon card to his pocket and turning away from the window. "Haskins must have climbed to the roof from the porch below. Guess we'll find evidence of that, too, on the porch pillars, although it's not particularly important how he got up; the thing that counts is that he did, that the man was in the house, in this very room." Ham Griggs realized that this new evidence, the incontrovertible proof of the finger prints, completely knocked the legs out from under his persistent theory of Sarbella's guilt, and for the moment he surrendered to a stunned and bewildered helplessness. Doctor Bushnell's eyes remained upon the windowpane, with an intent and fascinated interest. "Most remarkable!" he murmured. "How much can be proven by such a small thing as the touch of a man's finger! The one witness, I understand, that cannot lie. But what is the next move?" "Find Don Haskins," Tish answered promptly. "And that's a big order," sighed Wiggly Price. "The man's probably miles away from Greenacres by now. However there's nothing like being thorough, and, if Constable Griggs can get a posse together----" "Huh!" snorted the constable. "You don't think he'd still be hangin' anywhere around Ardmore?" "That depends on whether he got hold of any money," replied Sergeant Tish. "He was broke when he left New York, y'know." He took a step across the room and bent forward, as his foot crunched down upon a piece of the broken vase on the floor beside the table. He picked it up and held it in his fingers. "Haskins probably lurched against the table and knocked it off," said Wiggly, explaining what it was. Tish glanced with slight interest at the shattered bit of porcelain and tossed it down. It did, of course, seem too trivial a thing for any serious consideration. "We've put in a pretty good quarter of an hour here," grunted Tish, "and I guess we've done about all----Good Lord! What was that?" From out in the hallway there had come to the ears of the four men the sound of a choking, terrified cry, a jarring, dull thud, a rending crash of broken glass. And then--silence. CHAPTER XXII WHAT THE COOK SAW