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Carefully he went over the deserted and now half-wrecked house, for the authorities had spared nothing in their search for poison, even going over the garden and the lawns in the hope of finding some of the poisonous shrub, hemlock, which it was contended had been used to put an end to Mr. Godwin.

As yet nothing had been done to put the house in order again and, as we walked about, we noticed a pile of old tins in the yard which had not been removed.

Kennedy turned them over with his stick. Then he picked one up and examined it attentively.

“H-m–a blown can,” he remarked.

“Blown?” I repeated.

“Yes. When the contents of a tin begin to deteriorate they sometimes give off gases which press out the ends of the tin. You can see how these ends bulge.”

Our next visit was to the district attorney, a young man, Gordon Kilgore, who seemed not unwilling to discuss the case frankly.

“I want to make arrangements for disinterring the body,” explained Kennedy. “Would you fight such a move?”

“Not at all, not at all,” he answered brusquely. “Simply make the arrangements through Kahn. I shall interpose no objection. It is the strongest, most impregnable part of the case, the discovery of the poison. If you can break that down you will do more than any one else has dared to hope. But it can’t be done. The proof was too strong. Of course it is none of my business, but I’d advise some other point of attack.”

I must confess to a feeling of disappointment when Kennedy announced after leaving Kilgore that, for the present, there was nothing more to be done at East Point until Kahn had made the arrangements for reopening the grave.

We motored back to Ossining, and Kennedy tried to be reassuring to Mrs. Godwin.

“By the way,” he remarked, just before we left, “you used a good deal of canned goods at the Godwin house, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but not more than other people, I think,” she said.

“Do you recall using any that were–well, perhaps not exactly spoiled, but that had anything peculiar about them?”

“I remember once we thought we found some cans that seemed to have been attacked by mice–at least they smelt so, though how mice could get through a tin can we couldn’t see.”

“Mice?” queried Kennedy. “Had a mousey smell? That’s interesting. Well, Mrs. Godwin, keep up a good heart. Depend on me. What you have told me to-day has made me more than interested in your case. I shall waste no time in letting you know when anything encouraging develops.”

Craig had never had much patience with red tape that barred the way to the truth, yet there were times when law and legal procedure had to be respected, no matter how much they hampered, and this was one of them. The next day the order was obtained permitting the opening again of the grave of old Mr. Godwin. The body was exhumed, and Kennedy set about his examination of what secrets it might hide.

Meanwhile, it seemed to me that the suspense was terrible. Kennedy was moving slowly, I thought. Not even the courts themselves could have been more deliberate. Also, he was keeping much to himself.

Still, for another whole day, there was the slow, inevitable approach of the thing that now, I, too, had come to dread–the handing down of the final decision on the appeal.

Yet what could Craig do otherwise, I asked myself. I had become deeply interested in the case by this time and spent the time reading all the evidence, hundreds of pages of it. It was cold, hard, brutal, scientific fact, and as I read I felt that hope faded for the ashen-faced man and the pallid little woman. It seemed the last word in science. Was there any way of escape?

Impatient as I was, I often wondered what must have been the suspense of those to whom the case meant everything.