"The disorder in
the room?" thought Muller. "It'll be too late for that now. I
suppose they have rearranged the place. I can only go by what the
local detectives have seen, by the police reports. But I do not
understand this extreme disorder. There is no reason why there
should be a struggle when the robber was armed with a pistol. If
Siders was supposed to have been interrupted when writing a letter,
interrupted by a thief come with intent to steal, a thief armed
with a revolver, the sight of this weapon alone would be sufficient
to insure his not moving from his seat. I can understand the open
drawers and cupboard; that is explained by the thief's hasty search
for booty. But the torn window curtain and the overturned chairs
are peculiar.
"Of course there is always a possibility that the thief might have
entered one room while Siders was in the other; that the latter
might have surprised the robber in his search for money or valuables,
and that there might have been a hand-to-hand struggle before the
intruder could pull out his revolver. Oh, if I could only have seen
the body! This is working under terrific difficulties. The marks
of a hand-to-hand struggle would have been very plain on the clothes
and on the person of the murdered man. But this letter? I do not
understand this letter at all. It is the dead man's handwriting,
that we know, but why did not the friend to whom it was addressed
come forward and make himself known? As far as I can learn from the
police reports in G--, there was no personal interest shown, no
personal inquiries made about the dead man.
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