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it, they probably were wiped off.”
    â€œWe’ll dust the room and knife for prints, anyway,” said the Chief. “Don’t any of you come any further than that doorway … Not that it’s going to do us any good, as you say, Ellery. You people—I take it you’ve all been in this bedroom in the last day or so at one time or another?” He shrugged at their nods.
    â€œBy the way,” Ellery said, “I haven’t seen one of these old-fashioned jackknives in years. Does anyone recognize it? Mrs. Caswell?”
    â€œIt’s Godfrey’s,” Mum said stiffly. “He kept it on the writing desk there. It was one of his prized possessions. He’d had it from childhood.”
    â€œHe never carried it around with him?”
    â€œI’ve never seen it anywhere but on his desk. He was very sentimental about it … He used it as a letter opener.”
    â€œI have a boyhood artifact or two myself that I’m inclined to treasure. Did everyone know this, Mrs. Caswell?”
    â€œEveryone in the household—” She stopped with a squeak of her breath—like, Ellery thought, a screech of brakes. But he pretended not to notice. Instead, he knelt to pick something up from the floor beside the body.
    â€œWhat’s that?” demanded Chief Newby.
    â€œIt’s a memo pad,” Dr. Farnham said unexpectedly. “It was kept on the night table at my suggestion for notations of temperature, time of medications, and so on. It apparently fell off the table when Mr. Mumford toppled from the bed; he must have jostled the table. When I got here the pad was lying on the body. I threw it aside in making my examination.”
    â€œThen it doesn’t mean anything,” the Chief began; but Ellery, back on his feet, staring at the top sheet of the pad, said, “I disagree. Unless … Conk, did Mr. Mumford regain any mobility since his stroke?”
    â€œQuite a bit,” replied Dr. Farnham. “He was making a far better and faster recovery than I expected.”
    â€œThen this pad explains why he fell out of bed in the first place, Newby—why, with that knife wound, he didn’t simply die where he lay after being struck.”
    â€œHow do you figure that? You know how they’ll thrash around sometimes when they’re dying. What does the pad have to do with it?”
    â€œThe pad,” said Ellery, “has this to do with it: after his murderer left him, thinking he was dead, Godfrey Mumford somehow found the strength to raise himself to a sitting position, reach over to the night table, pick up the pencil and pad—you’ll find the pencil under the bed, along with the top sheet of the pad containing the medical notations, where they must have fallen when he dropped them—and blockprinted a message. The dying message, Newby, on this pad.”
    â€œWhat dying message?” Newby pounced. “Let me see that! Had he recovered enough from the paralysis, Doc, to be able to write ?”
    â€œWith considerable effort, Chief, yes.”
    The dead man’s message consisted of one word, and Newby pronounced it again, like a contestant in a spelling bee.
    â€œMUM,” he read. “Capital M, capital U, capital M—MUM.”
    In the silence, fantasy crept. It made no sense of the normal sort at all.
    MUM.
    â€œWhat on earth could Godfrey have meant?” Wolcott Thorp exclaimed. “What a queer thing to write when he was dying!”
    â€œQueer, Mr. Thorp,” Ellery said, “is the exact word.”
    â€œI don’t think so,” said the Chief with a grin. “It won’t do, Ellery. I don’t say I always believe what’s in front of my nose, but if there’s a simple explanation, why duck it? Everybody in town knows that Mrs. Caswell here is called Mum, and has been for over twenty-five years. If Godfrey meant to name his killer, then it’s a cinch this thing on the