Wiggly was closing the drawer when he noted for the first time the black smudge on his finger--a smallish streak which flecked free from the skin, as he rubbed at it with the ball of his thumb. "Hello!" he exclaimed under his breath. "What's that? Where did I get it?" With a curious and puzzled frown he stared at the dark spot on his finger, as he continued to fleck off the black, grainy particles. He lifted his hand to his nose and sniffed, and, as he caught the faint, but unmistakable, odor, his ears fairly did a dance at the sides of his head. "Great guns," he whispered. "It's powder--burned gunpowder! Where did I get that?" His bulging eyes swept the dressing table and the only articles that he had touched since coming into Helen Gilmore's room. And then he thought of the candle tallow and the black specks that had mocked him with their enigma. Slowly, through a fog of bewilderment and incredulity, there pierced a dawning light of understanding. He had solved the murder! CHAPTER XXIX "LET THE GUILTY MAN SPEAK!" The young assistant district attorney and Doctor Bushnell had indeed reduced the double inquest to a cut-and-dried formality, and the proceeding was heading swiftly toward its anticipated conclusion. Extra chairs had been brought into the library, and it was here that the hearing was in progress. In his capacity as deputy coroner, Bushnell presided at a small table, and near him, at his right, was the young attorney, blinking with official severity from behind his rimless glasses; at the doctor's left was the witness chair which faced the jury. The latter were an assorted lot of village types--Mr. Judson, the ordinarily genial grocer, with his fat, stubby fingers locked tightly in front of his ample middle; Henry Blackburn, a local fire-insurance agent, who was tall, lean and hatchet faced; Jim Striker, local manager of the telephone company; and so on down the list. There had been no move to bar any one from hearing the testimony of the other witnesses. Behind the jury chairs Joan Sheridan murmured soothingly in an effort to calm her mother's muffled, hysterical sobbing; a little apart sat Kirklan Gilmore, slumped deep into a chair, chin on his chest and his eyes half closed; but he was listening carefully; not a syllable was escaping him. Victor Sarbella was seated nearest the door; his dark eyes were roving restlessly about the room. Sergeant Tish had been the first witness, identifying the gun which had killed Helen Gilmore and recounting, for the benefit of the jury, how it had got to Greenacres. Doctor Bushnell previously had given an outline of the facts, as he had found them.