my brain with maddening persistence. If I had not killed Marks, who
had? How often had I asked myself that during the past three years,
and how often had I abandoned the problem in utter weariness!
Sometimes, indeed, I had been almost tempted to think the jury must
have been right--that I must have struck the brute on the back of the
head without realizing in my anger what I was doing. Then, when I
remembered how I had left him crouching against the wall, spitting out
curses at me through his cut and bleeding lips, I knew that the idea
was nonsense. The wound which they found in his head must have killed
him instantly. No man who had received a blow like that would ever
speak or move again.

The one thing I felt certain of was that in some mysterious way or
other George was mixed up in the business. It was incredible that
he could have acted as he did at the trial unless he had had some
stronger reason than mere dislike for me. That he did dislike me I
knew well, but my six years' association with him had taught me that
he would never allow any personal motive to interfere with a chance of
making money. By sending me to the gallows or into penal servitude
he was practically ruining himself, for with all his acuteness and
business knowledge he was quite deficient in any sort of inventive
power. And yet he had not hesitated to do it, and to do it by a piece
of lying sufficiently cold-blooded and deliberate to make Judas pale
with envy.

If there had been any apparent chance of his being able to rob me by
the proceeding, I could have understood it. But my business interests
as far as past inventions went were safe in the hands of my lawyers,
and although I had told him a certain amount about the new explosive
which I had been working at, it was quite impossible for him to turn