exactitude, he noted the height of the dead man, his supposed age, the
nature of his temperament, the color and length of his hair, and the
degree of development of his muscular system.

Then the doctors passed to an examination of the wound. Lecoq had judged
correctly. The medical men declared it to be a fracture of the base
of the skull. It could, they stated, only have been caused by some
instrument with a very broad surface, or by a violent knock of the head
against some hard substance of considerable magnitude.

But no weapon, other than the revolver, had been found; and it was
evidently not heavy enough to produce such a wound. There must, then,
necessarily, have been a hand-to-hand struggle between the pretended
soldier and the murderer; and the latter, seizing his adversary by the
throat, had dashed him violently against the wall. The presence of some
very tiny but very numerous spots of extravasated blood about the neck
made this theory extremely plausible.

No other wound, not even a bruise or a scratch, was to be found. Hence,
it became evident that this terrible struggle must have been exceedingly
short. The murder of the pretended soldier must have been consummated
between the moment when the squad of police heard the shrieks of despair
and the moment when Lecoq peered through the shutter and saw the victim
fall.

The examination of the other murdered man required different but
even greater precautions than those adopted by the doctors in their
inspection of the pseudo soldier. The position of these two victims
had been respected; they were still lying across the hearth as they had
fallen, and their attitude was a matter of great importance, since it