To himself, he could give no reason for establishing the identity of the smoking-compartment informant.

He had acted from some sort of subconscious compulsion, without reasoning, without knowing why he had catalogued the information or of what possible use it could be to him.
But once in his berth, the picture continued to rise before him; of a big room in a hospital, of doctors gathered about, and of a man "killing" another with a mallet.

Had it been Worthington?
Worthington, the tired-eyed, determined, over-zealous district attorney, who, day after day, had struggled and fought to send him to the penitentiary for life?
Had it been Worthington, striving to reproduce the murder of Tom Langdon as he evidently had reconstructed it, experimenting with his experts in the safety of a different city, for points of evidence that would clinch the case against the accused man beyond all shadow of a doubt?
Instinctively Houston felt that he just had heard an unwritten, unmentioned phase of his own murder case.

Yet--if that had been Worthington, if those experts had found evidence against him, if the theories of the district attorney had been verified on that gruesome night in the "dead ward" of Bellstrand Hospital-- Why had this damning evidence been allowed to sink into oblivion?
Why had it not been used against him?
.