"So you see," he concluded, "we have established the identity of the body in the cab, and of the young man who disappeared after the cab was upset. But one of the most salient features of the case, from the start, was the fact that neither of these two men had derived much, if any, pecuniary profit from his crime. The bookkeeper, as we have seen, was a mere catspaw in the control of the accountant, and his posthumous confession has given us the explanation of the power exerted over him by his accomplice. It was not so easy to establish the motive which controlled the actions of the accountant, who was himself only a tool in the hands of a higher intelligence. The _deus ex machinâ_ of this crime is a man of genius who has hardly appeared upon the scene at all, but whose traces I have found at every turn. He was the brains of the whole scheme; the other men in his hands were mere puppets. Through the accountant, this master spirit managed the bookkeeper; and the accountant himself was controlled by him more directly, but no less surely. If he held the former through his fear of exposure and consequent ruin, he influenced the latter through even more potent motives. He is the father of a beautiful girl, whom he did not scruple to use as a decoy. The price agreed upon for the accountant's assistance was the hand of this daughter, for whom the young man had doubtless conceived a passionate love. Whether or not the leader would have had the power to carry out his part of the contract matters little; for it is highly probable that he never had the slightest intention of so doing. He evidently realized very early in the game that the bookkeeper could not long escape the clutches of the law. But as he had taken every precaution to prevent him from knowing anything of his very existence, the fate of the unfortunate bookkeeper would have mattered little to this heartless villain, had not the probability remained that, when brought to bay, the bookkeeper would denounce the accountant's connection with the crime. This would have been extremely awkward, since the accountant was very likely in possession of some dangerous secrets. The safest way out of the difficulty was to quietly suppress the now useless bookkeeper. This plan was decided upon, and would doubtless have been carried into execution, had not fate otherwise decreed. After the bookkeeper's death, under the circumstances which I have related, it became quite probable that the accountant's connection with the case would be discovered; for luck had been against him from the start, and he became more and more entangled in the chain of circumstantial evidence of whose existence his leader was soon fully aware. In the first place, the accountant was wounded; and thus not only partially disabled, but also,--what is far worse,--conspicuously marked. A man who carries his arm in a sling can hardly fail to attract attention, especially when this distinguishing