Baltimore, Oct. 19, 1861--
"A taunt and a joke which turned sour, 'my dear Watson'!" he exulted to
the parrot. "A joke I was not intended to live to laugh over!"
He closed the book and replaced it in the bookcase, careless of
fingerprints, for he was sure the murderer had been too clever to leave
any behind him in that room--or upon the gun and silencer either, for
that matter.
Interestedly, Dundee surveyed the scene of his attempted murder. If he
had unsuspectingly gone up to the high shelf to reach for the book he
would have stood so close to the register that there would have been
powder burns on his shirt front--just as there had been on Dexter
Sprague's. And he would have been shot so near an open window--no chance
for fingerprints there, either, since he had not closed the windows on
his departure for New York, not wishing to return to a stuffy
apartment--that the police would have been justified in thinking he had
been shot from outside. It was an old-fashioned house in more ways than
in the manner of its heating. Outside of one of his two unscreened
windows there was an iron grating--the topmost landing of a fire escape.
Dundee could imagine Captain Strawn's positiveness in placing the
murderer there--crouching in wait for his victim.
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