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The doctor nodded again.

“He has been choked to death, and his neck was broken. Whoever did that has a grip that is stronger than anything I have ever known,” said the doctor. “He broke his neck with the pressure of his fingers.”

“Who?” came from my amazed lips.

The doctor looked at me frankly. “I don’t know that, any more than any of you seem to know. All I know is that he has been strangled, and his neck broken. It could not have taken more than a few seconds—in fact, it didn’t as we all saw. By the time he dropped down he was practically dead. Look!”

He bent down to the dead man and bared his neck.

On the neck were the marks of four fingers, red and angry on the bloodless skin, sunk deep into the flesh.

“That’s who,” he said, looking up at us.

We turned to each other as though our minds could not grasp what our eyes saw and our ears heard. Here was this man who, a moment or two before, had been full of life and vitality, in the height of his artistic powers, and before our eyes that life had been taken away from him by something we had not been able to see, something we could neither understand nor prevent. It was utterly unbelievable, in spite of the fact that the white, crumpled, and still form of the dead actor lay on the floor of the stage before us, head cruelly and curiously twisted to one side, eyes still open and protruding, and tongue hanging out of his