‘Witness (with considerable confusion): I do not know.

‘A Juryman: Did you see nothing which aroused your suspicions when you returned on hearing the cry, and found your father fatally injured?

‘Witness: Nothing definite.

‘The Coroner: What do you mean?

‘Witness: I was so disturbed and excited as I rushed out into the open, that I could think of nothing except my father. Yet I have a vague impression that as I ran forward something lay upon the ground to the left of me. It seemed to me to be something grey in colour, a coat of some sort, or a plaid perhaps. When I rose from my father I looked round for it, but it was gone.

‘Do you mean that it disappeared before you went for help?

‘Yes, it was gone.

‘You cannot say what it was?

‘No, I had a feeling something was there.

‘How far from the body?

‘A dozen yards or so.

‘And how far from the edge of the wood?

‘About the same.

‘Then if it was removed it was while you were within a dozen yards of it?

‘Yes, but with my back towards it.

‘This concluded the examination of the witness.’

‘I see,’ said I, as I glanced down the column, ‘that the coroner in his concluding remarks was rather severe upon young McCarthy. He calls attention, and with reason, to the discrepancy about his father having signalled to him before seeing him, also to his refusal to give details of his conversation with his father, and his singular account of his father’s dying words. They are all, as he remarks, very much against the son.’

Holmes laughed softly to himself, and stretched himself out upon the cushioned seat. ‘Both you and the coroner have been at some pains,’ said he, ‘to single out the very strongest points in the young man’s favour. Don’t you see that you alternately give him credit for having too much imagination and too little? Too little, if he could not invent a cause of quarrel which would give him the sympathy of the jury; too much, if he evolved from his own inner consciousness anything so outré as a dying reference to a rat, and the incident of the vanishing cloth. No, sir, I shall approach this case from the point of view that what this young man says is true, and we shall see whither that hypothesis will lead us. And now here is my pocket Petrarch, and not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the scene of action. We lunch at Swindon, and I see that we shall be there in twenty minutes.’

It was nearly four o’clock when we at last, after passing through the beautiful Stroud Valley and over the broad gleaming Severn, found ourselves at the pretty little country town of Ross. A lean, ferret-like man, furtive and sly-looking, was waiting for us upon the platform. In spite of the light brown dustcoat and leather leggings which he wore in deference to his rustic surroundings, I had no difficulty in recognizing