surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat—the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type—typical blond Englishmen.
“Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world—putting his old life behind him. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing.
“But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening. I met the miracles halfway, not turning a hair, accepting everything as a matter of course. I think the police smelled something wrong, but they couldn’t put their hands on it. There was the dead man on the floor, with a prowler’s outfit in his pockets, a pocketful of stolen jewelry, and the labels gone from his clothes—a burglar’s trick. And there I was—a well-to-do Englishman whom the hotel people recognized as the room’s rightful occupant.
“I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things—memorizing them—and practicing his signature. Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to be able to get them cashed in the morning.
“I stayed in Seattle for three days—as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled into something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his