"It was, of course, difficult to reconstruct the assault just at present, the wounded man being still in a state of stupor and unable to give any account of himself, but the revolver was found lying at the bottom of the yard close to the end wall. "In the meanwhile the divisional surgeon had concluded his examination. He pronounced the wound to have been caused by one of the bullets that had lodged in the wall of the front room. It had been fired at very close range, as the flesh was singed all round the wound. The bullet had gone right through the left deltoid, front to back, and slightly upwards, just grazed the top of the shoulder, and then lodged in the wall. The surgeon was inclined to think that the wound was self-inflicted, but this theory was thought to be untenable, because if a man was such an obviously poor shot he would surely have chosen some other way of putting an end to himself, unless, indeed, he was a lunatic, which might account for any incongruity in the known facts, even to the noise--the shouting and the banging--that all the neighbours agreed had preceded the revolver shots. "But there certainly was one fact which discounted the attempted suicide theory, and that was the undoubted presence of another man upon the scene--the man with the ginger hair and the thick nose who had called for the key at Messrs. Whiskin and Sons, and whom several witnesses had actually seen entering the empty house, the man with the parcel. Now no one saw him come out again by the front door. He must have been in the house when the foreigner with the jet-black hair came and joined him, and he must have slipped out later on in the dark, under cover of the fog and rain, either by the front door when nobody happened to be passing by, or over the wall and then by the railway cutting. Now what had brought these two men together in an empty house, in one of the worst slums in London? One man was wounded; where was the other? Had the revolver been dropped by one of them in his flight or flung out of the window by a lunatic? Was it attempted suicide by a madman, or murder consequent on a quarrel, or blackmail? None of these questions was ever answered, nor was the man with the ginger-coloured hair ever found. There was absolutely no clue by which he might be traced; the earth just swallowed him up as if he had been a spook.