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 of 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