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hastily. “What’s his name?”
    “Velja Krosac.”
    “Hmm,” said the Coroner with a frown. “Foreign name, eh? Armenian ?” he shot at the brown-bearded little man.
    “There is no nation but Egypt,” said Harakht quietly.
    “Well!” Stapleton glared. “How do you spell that name?”
    Colonel Pickett said: “We’ve got all that, Mr. Stapleton. It’s V-e-l-j-a K-r-o-s-a-c-. We found it on some papers in this man’s caboose.”
    “Where is this Vel—Velja Krosac?” demanded the Coroner.
    Harakht shrugged. “He has gone away.” But Ellery saw the glint of panic in the staring little eyes.
    “When?”
    He shrugged again.
    Colonel Pickett stepped into the breach once more. “Maybe I’d better tell it, Mr. Stapleton, and expedite the business of the inquest. Krosac’s always kept himself under cover, as far as we could find out. Couple of years now that he’s been with this man. Mysterious sort of fellow. Acted as business manager and advertising agent, sort of, letting Harakht here take care of the hokum. Harakht picked him up out West somewhere. The last time Krosac was with Harakht was Christmas Eve. They’d been camped up near Holliday’s Cove”—a few miles from Weirton; Ellery remembered certain signposts. “Krosac went off around ten o’clock or so, and that’s the last What’s-His-Name claims to have seen of him. The times match, all right.”
    “You’ve found no trace of this Krosac?”
    The Colonel looked irritated. “Not yet,” he snapped. “Disappeared as if the earth swallowed him. But we’ll find him. He can’t get away. We’ve sent out descriptions of him and Kling.”
    “Harakht,” said the Coroner, “have you ever been in Arroyo?”
    “Arroyo? No.”
    “They never got that far north in West Virginia,” explained the Colonel.
    “What do you know about Krosac?”
    “He is a true believer,” asserted Harakht deliberately. “He worships at the altar with reverence. He partakes of kuphi and hears the holy writings with high spirit. He is the pride and the glory—”
    “Oh, all right,” said the Coroner wearily. “Take him away, Trooper.”
    The trooper grinned, rose, grasped Brown-Beard’s skinny arm, and hauled him off the stand. The Coroner heaved a sigh of relief as the two disappeared in the crowd.
    Ellery echoed the sigh. His father had been right. It looked very much as if he were due to return to New York, if not precisely with his tail between his legs, at least with a hangdog look about him. The entire proceeding was so insane, the affair so incomprehensible, so impervious to logic, that it hinged on farce. And yet—there was that brutally mutilated body, crucified to …
    Crucified! He started, almost with an audible gasp. Crucifixion—ancient Egypt. Where had he run across that odd fact?
    The inquest proceeded swiftly. Colonel Pickett produced a number of articles which he had found in Harakht’s wagon and which Harakht had said belonged to Krosac. They were inconsequential, of no value either intrinsically or as possible clues to the man’s background or identity. There had been no photograph of Krosac, as the Coroner pointed out to the jury—a fact which made the apprehension of the man even more difficult. To augment the difficulties, there were no samples available of the man’s handwriting.
    Other witnesses were called. Small points were brought out. No one could be found who had had Andrew Van’s house under observation on Christmas Eve, or who saw Krosac after Croker the garagemen left him at the crossroads. Van’s house was the only dwelling in the vicinity of the crossroads, and no one had passed by that night. … The spikes found in Van’s crucified body had come from his own tool box, usually kept in his kitchen-pantry. They had been purchased by Kling from storekeeper Bernheim long before, it was revealed; many of them having been used in the construction of a woodshed.
    Ellery came to a consciousness of his surroundings just as