“It is the cleverest criminal,” he said, “who always makes the most striking blunder. The accomplished assassin of Lord William Russell carried away the knife with which his victim was supposed to have cut his own throat. When the human intelligence, set on murder, undertakes to falsify the order of events, the absurdity of its error increases with its cunning.” He shook the two handkerchiefs out and stretched them in his fingers. “They are here for everybody to see,” he echoed, “and if everybody will look, he will see that these two handkerchiefs were never tied around the faces of assassins; he will see—everybody—that, while these handkerchiefs have eye-holes cut in them, the corners of them are as smooth and uncreased as though they had been ironed; if they had been tied around the faces of assassins, they would show the strain and the fold of the knot!” He turned now toward the judge. “Your Honor,” he said, “the elaborate ingenuity of this whole criminal plan is utterly beyond the feeble intelligence of these prisoners. It is the work of some competent person; some person well known to the decedent; some person who knew a disguise to be useless; some one who had access to the house and was able to set up the evidence of a second theory after the first had failed—such an one was the assassin of Hiram Halloway.” There was absolute silence in the court room. The witness sat gripping the arms of his chair, his face distended as with some physical pressure. The big attorney, at the end of his significant pause, added a final sentence: “And now, that we have found the money, we can name the man!” The prosecuting attorney, utterly astonished, put the question, the answer to which the whole court room awaited: “Found the money! Where?” The big lawyer sat down in his chair; his huge body relaxed; his face assumed its vague placidity and his voice descended into its old, deep-seated, dwindling whine: “It’s sewed up in the lining of Mr. Barkman’s coat. Lyin’ Louie felt it when he posed him for the jury.” CHAPTER IX The “Mysterious Stranger” Defense “Now, Ellen,” said the attorney, “I want you to tell us precisely why you called to me when you ran out of the house—why you said, ‘Save me, Colonel.’” “I was scared,” replied the witness. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.” “You thought the same thing that had happened to the lawyer, Mr. Collander, might also happen to you.” “I don’t know, Colonel. I was scared.” It was the third day of the criminal trial. Colonel Armant had put the prisoner on the stand in her own defense. It seemed a desperate hazard. A woman remains an experiment as a witness. The old experts about the court room were pretty nearly a unit against the experiment in this case. The prisoner was too much of an enigma; one of those little, faded, blonde women, with a placid, inscrutable face—capable of everything or of nothing, as one chose to assume it.