"Darcy promised to fix the timepiece but neglected or forgot to do it, leaving it on his table. Then, remembering it early in the morning—perhaps feeling guilty at having spent part of the night working on his electric lathe—he got up to do as he had promised, and—"
"Finds his cousin dead!" interrupted Mr. Kettridge.
"So he says!" added Jack Young significantly.
"Well, we won't go into that," observed the colonel. "I was going to make another point. Leaving Darcy out of it, and assuming that he had left the watch on his table intending to get up in the morning and fix it, what is to have prevented Mrs. Darcy from coming down to her store—say, before midnight, after Darcy left her.
"She saw the watch on the table, and, picking it up, may have wound it. This set in motion the death-dealing mechanism, and her hand may have been punctured with the poison."
"But, even then," put in Young, as he puffed out another cloud of smoke, "if the poison from the watch killed her, why would any one strike her on the head and stab her?"
"That may have occurred just after her hand was punctured by the needle of the watch," said the detective, "and before the poison had time to work. It is not instantaneous."
"But who would have struck or stabbed her after that?" asked Mr. Kettridge. "I mean, of course, leaving Jimmie out, for I don't believe he did it."
"Could not Singa Phut have done it?" asked Colonel Ashley quietly.
"Singa Phut!" cried both his auditors.