In my heart I blessed Mrs. Carthew—poor soul—for having swooned so conveniently outside the door. By this time Leggat was clambering across the window sill. What sort of drop lay below it? I saw the black mass of his body framed there for a moment against a sky almost as black, and watched as he lowered himself, and disappeared. I listened for the thud of a fall; but none came, and running to see what had befallen him, I caught another glimpse of him as he stole past a lit skylight in a long flat roof scarcely six feet below.
Here was luck beyond my hoping. The crowd in the passage was still occupied with Mrs. Carthew, but at length someone tried the handle of the door. This was my cue. I clambered out after Leggat—who by this time had disappeared—drew down the window-sash cautiously and wriggled across the leads of the roof, pausing only at the skylight to peer down into an empty room, where a score of wooden-seated chairs stood in disarray by a long table—the deserted auction-room, doubtless. At the far end of this roof a chimney-stack rose gaunt against the night; and flattening myself against the side of it, I waited for the dull crash which told that the crowd had broken in the door.
I had made better speed, you understand, but for the risk of overtaking Leggat and being recognised. As it was, I had set the worst of all terrors barking at his heels, and by and by—it may have been after three minutes' wait—I chuckled at the sound of a horse's hoofs in the stable-yard below me. It was too dark for me to catch sight of the rider as he mounted; but he made for the lower gate of the yard and, once past it, broke into a gallop. As its echoes died away, I began my search for the ladder by which Leggat had descended; found it, as I had expected, in the form of a stout water-pipe; and having reached the ground without mishap, brushed and smoothed my clothes and sauntered up the stable-yard to the hotel archway.
At the foot of the stairs there, I was almost bowled over by the Boots, who came flying down three stairs at a stride. "The Doctor!" he shouted: "the Doctor!" He tore past me and out into the street.
I entered the coffee-room and rang the bell.
I suppose that I rang it at intervals for something like half-an-hour before the waitress found me yawning before the exhausted fire.
"Sale over yet?" I asked pleasantly.
"Sale over? Sale ov—?" She set down the lamp and gasped. "Do you tell me that you've slept through it all?"
"All what, my dear?"
Out it all came in a flood. "The Squire's shot himself! In the Blue Room over your very head—locked the door and shot himself clean through the brains! Poor gentleman, he felt his position, though he did drink so fierce. And now he's gone, and Mrs. Carthew no sooner out of one swoon than into another."