The other nodded.
“I’ll astonish you still further, Mervyn,” he said. “Before it got there it reposed under a roundish topped stone on the sluice path. You transhipped it while you had me locked up in the cellar yonder.”
“Wrong there, Varne,” said Mervyn, with something of a chuckle, “but not altogether though. I did transfer that one, but it wasn’t the one you found. That was kindly delivered here since, and it was the one I stowed away upstairs temporarily. By the way I take it you have some inkling of what those things represent?”
“Perhaps I have.”
“Well, then—they are charged with a most deadly, subtle, and hitherto unknown poison. The touch of a hidden spring in the centre releases this, and then the merest invisible pin-prick from any one of the points—good-night! Well just imagine my feelings when I looked out of the window to see Melian airily coming down the path with that infernal thing in her hand. I wonder I didn’t faint. Well, that was the one you found.”
The other started at the mention of Melian in this connexion, and his face took on something of the look of horror which had come over that of his host, evolved by the bare recollection.
“Yes, indeed. I can imagine them,” he said. “Then the man you pulled out of the water—and who incidentally was instrumental in setting up the great Heath Hover mystery, brought the first?”
“That’s right.”
“What have you done with these two infernal things up to date, Mervyn?” asked Helston Varne, not without some shade of anxiety.
“They’re both snug and safe till the Day of Judgment at the bottom of the deepest part of Plane Pond. Thickly rolled up, well weighted, and by this time under six feet of mud and twenty of water. If they drained the pond they’d never find them.”