"Oh, no! You mustn't take it like that, Mr. Boyne. This is nothing—as it stands. Just a single unrelated fact that I used with others to concentrate on. Wait. Do wait—till Worth comes back, anyhow."
"All right." I felt that our voices were getting loud, that we'd talked here too long. No use of flushing the game before I was loaded. "First thing to do is to verify this." I felt good all over.
"Yes, of course," she smiled faintly. "You would want to do that." And she climbed in beside me.
I drove so fast that Barbara had no chance to question me, though she did find openings for remonstrating at my speed. I dashed into the driveway of the Gilbert place and came to an abrupt stop at the doors of the garage. And right away I bumped up against my first check. I gripped the magnet, raced to the study door with it, she following more slowly to watch while I passed it along the wooden panel where the bolt ran on the other side; and nothing doing!
Again she followed as I ran around to the outside door, opened up and tried it on the bare bolt itself; no stir. While she sat in the desk chair at that central table, her elbows on its top, her hands lightly clasped, the chin dropped in interlaced fingers, following my movements with very little interest, I puffed and worked, opened a door and tried to move the bolt when it wasn't in the socket, and felt like cursing in disappointment.
"A little oil—" I grumbled, more to myself than to her, and hurried to the garage workbench for the can that would certainly be there. It was, but I didn't touch it. What I did lean over and clutch from where they lay tossed in carelessly among rubbish and old spare parts, were three more magnets exactly the same as the one we had brought from Capehart's. I sprinted back with them.
"Barbara," I called in an undertone. "Come here. Look."
Held side by side, the four, working as one, moved the bolts as well as fingers could have done, and through more than an inch of hard wood.
"Yes," she looked at it; "but that doesn't prove Eddie Hughes the murderer."
"No?" her opposition began to get on my nerves. "I'm afraid that'll be a matter for twelve good men and true to settle." She stood silent, and I added, "I know now whose shadow I saw on the broken panel of that door there, the first Sunday night."