Here, I held up one finger. “Not precisely. As you may recall, I was able to identify five of the letters without difficulty. Four of them, however—or nearly half—were applied in such a slovenly manner as to be, at the very least, ambiguous, if not wholly indecipherable.”

Frowning, Captain Russell tugged on one end of his luxuriant moustache. “Do you mean to suggest,” he inquired after a momentary pause, “that the dying woman inscribed a different name on the wall?”

I fixed him with a look of the greatest intensity. “I mean to suggest something whose implications are even more startling.”

“And what exactly is that, Mr. Poe?”

“That the mysterious word—or, more precisely, graffito—was not written by Mrs. Macready at all!”

The look on Captain Russell’s face in response to my pronouncement resembled nothing so much as the stunned expression of a steer that, preliminary to its slaughter, has just been dealt a hammer-blow to the skull. His eyes gaped—his jaw dropped—and he appeared to have lost the power of speech. A long moment passed before he finally exclaimed, “And what is the basis for this extraordinary assertion?”

“As in all matters pertaining to deductive reasoning,” I replied with a smile, “my conclusion is based on a close observation of the physical evidence, coupled with a forceful exertion of the analytical faculties.”

As the captain continued to regard me with a look of awed incomprehension, I proceeded thusly: “Assume, for the sake of our discussion, that the dying landlady, in spite of the appalling severity of her wounds, had somehow managed to drag herself into an upright position and inscribe, with her blood-dabbled fingers, the identity of her slayer on the wall above her bed. Since no apparent injuries had been inflicted on either of her arms, it is only natural to assume that, in performing this act, she would have relied on the hand she customarily employed for writing.

“Now, following your departure from the boarding house in the company of Colonel Crockett, I continued to examine the sanguinary markings which I had detected on the wall. I observed that each of the letters slanted distinctly to the right—a circumstance that could only occur if the landlady herself were right-handed. Gazing more closely at her hands, I noticed the very remarkable fact that—though her palms, wrists, and forearms had been bedabbled with the gushings from her neck wound—her fingers themselves were entirely free of blood. This, in itself, strongly suggested that the landlady was not the source of the mysterious message, which had unmistakably been applied with the unknown author’s fingertips. To confirm my inference, I sought out a bystander intimately acquainted with Mrs. Macready. In response to my query, this young woman informed me that, in the exercise of every manipulative skill—from sewing and needlepoint to writing—Mrs. Macready was left-handed!”