Kennedy, who in the meantime had stood apart from the rest of us,
was examining the telephone carefully.
"A clever crook," I heard him mutter between his teeth. "He must
have worn gloves. Not a finger print--at least here."
. . . . . . . .
Perhaps I can do no better than to reconstruct the crime as
Kennedy later pieced these startling events together.
Long after I had left and even after Bennett left, Dodge continued
working in his library, for he was known as a prodigious worker.
Had he taken the trouble, however, to pause and peer out into the
moonlight that flooded the back of his house, he might have seen
the figures of two stealthy crooks crouching in the half shadows
of one of the cellar windows.
One crook was masked by a handkerchief drawn tightly about his
lower face, leaving only his eyes visible beneath the cap with
visor pulled down over his forehead. He had a peculiar stoop of
the shoulders and wore his coat collar turned up. One hand, the
right, seemed almost deformed. It was that which gave him his name
in the underworld--the Clutching Hand.
The masked crook held carefully the ends of two wires attached to
an electric feed, and sending his pal to keep watch outside, he
entered the cellar of the Dodge house through a window whose pane
they had carefully removed.
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