aye HERE’S something down here,
PP taspectox

The speaker, burly Set.
John Scott of the Essex Constabulary,
dropped his shovel, and straightening
up in the muddy ditch, handed an
object up to Scotland Yard’s Inspector
John Bower.

The stockily-built inspector, pipe in
mouth, examined the find, a mud-
stained woman’s shoe. And as he
turned it over slowly in his hands, his
eyes suddenly narrowed. In the shoe
was part of a decomposed foot!

Giving the gruesome find quick,
final appraisal, he slipped his pipe in
his pocket and glanced along the
ditch at the six-man squad of police
excavators, now paused in their
digging.

“Alright men, we’ve found it,” he
rapped.

His eyes took in the farm buildings
across the yard; then he nodded to
two of the mud-smeared police
officers:

“Wilson and Jones get the door off
that chicken house over there!”

The two men dropped their shovels,
scrambled out of the ditch and started
across the farmyard.

Bower dropped to his haunches and
studied the ditch where the shoe had
been found.

“Alright, Sergeant,” he quietly
ordered; “go ahead, but take it easy.

TWENTY-THIRD EDITION

But for the scorn of the women he had cast aside
Herbert Dougal might have gotten away with
murder and forgery. A mud-stained woman's
shoe with a decomposed foot in tt formed the
last link in a chain of evidence which sent him
to the gallows.

“Whatever’s down there I want out—
in one piece!”

He watched intently as more soil
was carefully removed ‘and as the
minutes passed, the grisly secret was
revealed. The fully clothed, partially
decomposed body of a woman lay face
down in the mud.

The Yard man dropped into the
ditch and made a closer examination.
In the back of the skull was a bullet
hole.

Dusk was approaching as the re-
mains were removed on the chicken
house door to a nearby shed, and a
police guard posted on the locked
building for the night.

In the fading light Bower entered
a few details in his notebook and at
the top of the page he entered the
date; April 27, 1903.

He gave a few parting instructions
to his men, filled and lit his pipe,

climbed into his waiting trap and
drove slowly out of the farmyard.
But, although his manner was quiet
and matter-of-fact, he left the scene
with an inward feeling of keen per-
sonal triumph. And as he drove down
the lane from the farm his mind ran
quickly over the events of the past
few weeks.

It was just forty days ago, on
March 22, that Bower and his squad
of six County police officers had
descended on isolated, tenantless
Moat Farm, a gaunt two-storey, stone
building standing in a dozen acres of
swamp, undrained land, five miles
from the village of Clavering, in
Essex, forty miles from London.

On their arrival at the dreary, de-
serted farmhouse, Bowers and his men
had systematically explored every
corner of the rambling structure.
From attic to cellar, in cupboards

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