“Familiar—hell! No one’s familiar with any place in the pitch dark! And the other woman had gone home, hadn’t she?” “Miss Legaye had gone home, as it was generally supposed,” said Jim, feeling obliged to register conscientiously every passing suspicion of his. “But Miss Templeton thinks she saw her near the front of the theater just after the tragedy.” “Well, you’ve only got that woman’s word for _that_! Will she swear to it? No? I thought not! She’s just talking through her hat, either to queer the other, or to make herself interesting to you! Say, Barrison, you’re dippy on this thing! I always thought you were a pretty snappy detective for a young un! Now get rid of your theories, and your hunches and your intuitions and your suspicions, and check up! That’s what I’ve been doing all day, and, take it from me, while it may be old-fashioned, it’s the method that gets there nine times out of ten. Here goes!” He took a sheet of paper and made notes, as he talked. “Now that shot, according to the medical report, was fired at close range; very close range, indeed. The khaki of the man’s uniform was quite a bit burned by it. The bullet entered under the right arm, so he must have had his arms lifted, either to take hold of Miss Merivale, as she said, or for some other reason. It entered the body below the right armpit, and made a clean drill through the right lung at a slightly upward angle. Then it lodged in an upper rib just under the right breast. That explains the big splotch of blood on the breast. It could have been fired from either of two ways.” He drew a rough diagram on the page before him, representing an imaginary, cylindrical man, two crosses, and a couple of dotted lines. “So! If Miss Merivale did it,” he explained, pencil in hand, “he’d have to be standing facing toward the front of the house, with his arm slightly raised, and his right side exposed to her aim.” “Isn’t that an unlikely attitude, under the circumstances?” “It is unlikely, but it is perfectly possible. It’s only in songs that every little movement has a meaning all its own! Do you always have a good and logical reason for every motion you make? If you do, you’re a freak! The great difficulty with most detectives is that they try to get a reason and a sequence for everything, as though they were putting a puzzle together or writing a play. In real life, half the things we do we do for no reason at all, or from sheer natural human contrariness! However, never mind that. Now, if the other woman—the woman we believe was in the theater last night—fired the shot, she only had to stand in close at the foot of the four-step entrance, and reach up. Even if she were a small woman, she would be able to place her bullet just about where it was found. It’s a toss-up, Barrison. Either Miss Merivale fired that shot, or the unknown woman did.” “The unknown woman I don’t consider unknown any longer. She is Wrenn’s daughter, without a doubt.”