“Now, Bobby,” he said, “you won’t mind if I say that I have always taken a great deal of interest in you. When you were first appointed I tried to give you the benefit of my experience. I pointed out what ought to be done when a crime was discovered. You are a capable man, Bobby; you saw what I meant and you have profited by it. You know what to do when you get on the scene of a crime. You know how important it is that every precaution shall be taken to preserve the scene of a criminal act, in every detail, precisely as it happened when the crime was discovered; isn’t that so, Bobby?” “Yes, it’s so. I don’t deny that you put me on to a lot of things and, also, I have learned some for myself. Anyhow, that’s right. The first thing to do is to see that everything stays just the way it is.” “Precisely!” replied the attorney. “Now, Bobby, isn’t it true that Collander was lying on the floor dead, that his pistol was lying on the floor beside him—two chambers in it empty—and all doors and windows were closed? There were bookcases around the room with glass doors; these were all closed. Now, the first thing you did, Bobby, was to take every precaution to see that all articles in the room should remain precisely as they were found; you put seals on all doors and windows, on all drawers of the tables, and on the doors of the bookcases, so that they would remain closed precisely as they were found. You also carefully chalked on the floor the position of the articles that had to be removed—such, for example, as the weapon and the decedent’s body; isn’t that precisely true?” “Yes, it’s true, Colonel, that’s what I did.” “Now,” said the lawyer, “from the appearance of the table in that room was it not evident that Collander was at work on a brief—there was a pad on the table before him, and the papers in the case of the Bridge Company against the Western Railroad? We know that he was at work on this brief because the case was coming on for a hearing, and because his notes on the pad were in ink and the ink was not dry; isn’t that true?” “Yes,” replied the chief of police, “that’s true.” “Every paragraph written on the pad,” the attorney continued, “was part of an opinion from a U. S. Report. It was half of a long syllabus of the opinion; he had it about half written out. As I say, the ink was not yet dry on it; it still blurred a little when one rubbed one’s finger on it. Now, we see what the man was doing. He was sitting at the table copying this syllabus when he was interrupted; isn’t that true, Bobby?” “It must have been that way,” said the chief of police. “Collander must have been sitting there when the thing began.” The Colonel continued. “Collander was killed by a bullet that entered the chest and ranged upward. It was found against the shoulder blade, so flattened that no one could say precisely the caliber of the bullet; isn’t that true?” The prosecuting attorney interrupted.