That’s the tip of the knife.
In yours the blade is hung better. There’s only the ring.”
I could hardly speak.
“And you’ve found such rings?”
“A dozen of them.
Maybe two dozen.
I’ve got them marked and covered, and tomorrow we’ll lift them.
I thought I’d better tell you.”
“Then Jim—”
“He was there, all right.
There are a half dozen of the things in the bridle path between the sewer and the foot of the hill; and there are others on the side of the hill.
What’s more, I think I have found what stunned Sarah Gittings before she died.”
It appears, then, that the examination of poor Sarah’s body had shown more than we had known.
The wound at the back of her head had been made with a blunt instrument, as we had been told; but the nature of that instrument was unknown.
However, inspection had shown in her hair and in the wound itself numerous small fragments of bark from a tree.
“Of course the body had been dragged, and that would account for some of it.
But there was bark deeply buried in the tissues.
And there was another thing: the blow had been struck from above.
The lower side of the wound was torn.
Either she had been struck by a very tall man, or she was sitting down. I had to argue like this; we’ll leave out the tall man for the minute, and say she was sitting down.
Now where does a woman like that sit, if she’s out in the open?
She’s a neat woman, very orderly, and she isn’t young.
She doesn’t sit on the ground.
She finds a tree stump, or a fallen tree or a stone, and she sits on that.”
But he had been some time in coming to that, and Florence’s death had interfered.
There had been rain, too, and sunlight.
Sunlight, it appeared, faded blood.
That night, however, he had started out, and he had found what he was looking for.
Near a fallen tree at the top of the hill, and perhaps forty feet from where the dogs had been tied, he had turned his flashlight on the broken branch of a tree, about four feet long, and both heavy and solid.
When he turned it over, on the side protected from rain and weather, he had found stains and one or two hairs.
He had wrapped it up carefully and sent it back to headquarters.
I felt sick.
“And you found the marks of the sword-stick there, too?”
“Well, no. But that’s not surprising.
A man doesn’t walk up to commit a murder swinging a stick.
He crept up behind her.
I doubt if she knew anything until it was all over.”
I was thinking desperately.
“This sword-stick in the museum, would the blade of such a stick have made the other wounds?”
“They would,” he said promptly.
“But we have to be careful there, Miss Bell.
All stab wounds look alike.
You can’t tell whether a blade has had two cutting edges or one.
You see, every knife has two cutting edges at the point.
Take this knife here.”
He drew a substantial one from his pocket.
“It cuts both ways for half an inch.
No. Taken by itself, the fact that Jim Blake carried that stick that night doesn’t prove that he used it, or that it’s the weapon that was used.
It’s the rest of the case—”
He had said what he came to say.