“As it was here the woman fell, this tub naturally received the closest examination.  A board projected from its further side, whither it had evidently been pushed by the weight of her falling body; and from its top hung a wet cloth, marking with its lugubrious drip on the boards beneath the first heavy moments of silence which is the natural accompaniment of so serious a survey.  On the floor to the right lay a half-used cake of soap just as it had slipped from her hand.  The window was closed, for the temperature was at the freezing-point, but it had been found up, and it was put up now to show the height at which it had then stood.  As we all took our look at the house wall opposite, a sound of shouting came up from below.  A dozen children were sliding on barrel staves down a slope of heaped-up snow.  They had been engaged in this sport all the afternoon and were our witnesses later that no one had made a hazardous escape by means of the ladder of the fire-escape, running, as I have said, at an almost unattainable distance towards the left.

“Of her own child, whose cries had roused the neighbours, nothing was to be seen.  The woman in the extreme rear had carried it off to her room; but when we came to see it later, no doubt was felt by any of us that this child was too young to talk connectedly, nor did I ever hear that it ever said anything which could in any way guide investigation.

“And that is as far as we ever got.  The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of death by means of a stab from some unknown weapon in the hand of a person also unknown, but no weapon was ever found, nor was it ever settled how the attack could have been made or the murderer escape under the conditions described.  The woman was poor, her friends few, and the case seemingly inexplicable.  So after creating some excitement by its peculiarities, it fell of its own weight.  But I remembered it, and in many a spare hour have tried to see my way through the no-thoroughfare it presented.  But quite in vain.  To-day, the road is as blind as ever, but—­” here Sweetwater’s face sharpened and his eyes burned as he leaned closer and closer to the older detective—­“but this second case, so unlike the first in non-essentials but so exactly like it in just those points which make the mystery, has dropped a thread from its tangled skein into my hand, which may yet lead us to the heart of both.  Can you guess—­have you guessed—­what this thread is?  But how could you without the one clew I have not given you?  Mr. Gryce, the tenement where this occurred is the same I visited the other night in search of Mr. Brotherson.  And the man characterised at that time by the janitor as the best, the quietest and most respectable tenant in the whole building, and the one you remember whose window opened directly opposite the spot where this woman lay dead, was Mr. Dunn himself, or, in other words, our late redoubtable witness, Mr. Orlando Brotherson.”