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“This is the one I picked out of the gutter,” Grant Fernie volunteered; “whether you knocked him there or not. I don’t suppose you got a good look at him. But this is he all right. ”

Steve frowned doubtfully. “I’d know him,” he said, “if he turned his face up and I got a good look at him. ”

“Take off some of his bandages so the witness can see him,” the coroner ordered. Fernie unwound the Austrian’s bandages, baring a bruised and swollen jaw.

Steve stared at the man. This fellow may have been one of his assailants, but he most certainly wasn’t the one he had knocked into the street. He hesitated. Could he have confused faces in the fight?

“Do you identify him?” the coroner asked impatiently.

Steve shook his head.

“I don’t remember ever seeing him. ”

“Look here, Threefall” — the giant marshal scowled down at Steve — “this is the man I hauled out of the gutter — one of the men you said jumped you and Kamp. Now what’s the game? What’s the idea of forgetting?”

Steve answered slowly, stubbornly:

“I don’t know. All I know is that this isn’t the first one I hit, the one I knocked out. He was an American — had an American face. He was about this fellow’s size, but this isn’t he. ”

The coroner exposed broken yellow teeth in a snarl, the marshal glowered at Steve, the jurors regarded him with frank suspicion. The marshal and the coroner withdrew to a far corner of the room, where they whispered together, casting frequent glances at Steve.

“All right,” the coroner told Steve when this conference was over; “that’s all. ”

From the inquest Steve walked slowly back to the hotel, his mind puzzled by this newest addition to Izzard’s mysteries. What was the explanation of the certain fact that the man the marshal had produced at the inquest was not the man he had taken from the gutter the previous night? Another thought: the marshal had arrived immediately after the fight with the men who had attacked him and Kamp, had arrived noisily, drowning the dying man’s last words. That opportune arrival and the accompanying noise — were they accidental? Steve didn’t know; and because he didn’t know he strode back to the hotel in frowning meditation.

At the hotel he found that his bag had arrived from Whitetufts. He took it up to his room and changed his clothes. Then he carried his perplexity to the window, where he sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into the alley below, his forehead knotted beneath his tawny hair. Was it possible that so many things should explode around one man in so short a time, in a small city of Izzard’s size, without there being a connection between them — and between them and him? And if he was being involved in a vicious maze of crime and intrigue, what was it all about? What had started it? What was the key to it? The girl?

Confused thoughts fell away from him. He sprang to his feet.

Down the other side of the alley a man was walking — a thick-set man in soiled blue — a man with bandaged throat and chin. What was visible of his face was the face Steve had seen turned skyward in the fight — the face of the man he had knocked out.

Steve sprang to the door, out of the room, down three flights of stairs, past the desk, and out of the hotel’s back door. He gained the alley in time to see a blue trouser-leg disappearing into a doorway in the block below. Thither he went.