from the moment of our arrival two hours before. He had studied
them intently, ranging from one to another and back again, and I
could see that there was uncertainty in his mind, and bepuzzlement.

"Well?" I finally broke the silence.

He took the pipe from his mouth and said simply, "I do not
understand."

He smoked on again, and again removed the pipe, using it to point
at the POLICE GAZETTE illustration.

"That picture - what does it mean? I do not understand."

I looked at the picture. A man, with a preposterously wicked face,
his right hand pressed dramatically to his heart, was falling
backward to the floor. Confronting him, with a face that was a
composite of destroying angel and Adonis, was a man holding a
smoking revolver.

"One man is killing the other man," I said, aware of a distinct
bepuzzlement of my own and of failure to explain.

"Why?" asked Sitka Charley.

"I do not know," I confessed.

"That picture is all end," he said. "It has no beginning."

"It is life," I said.