“Please don’t trouble. My chest’s full of ’em.”
With a forced smile, she watched the “detective” produce one of his own regardlessly purchased cigars, light it and puff with manifest pleasure from its fragrance.
“This afternoon,” she proceeded, “Miss Lauderdale, my niece, returned from a visit to an old woman who had been her governess years ago when her father was—well, before he lost his money. She brought back a jeweled snuffbox of antique design which had belonged to her great-grandfather. In some way not yet explained to me it had came into possession of this upper servant. Although its intrinsic value is not great—the rubies set in its cover are small, not worth more than a thousand dollars, I should say—Miss Lauderdale seems to set great store by it. She asked me to lock it up in a secret safe built in my library wall until she should want it again.”
From his very light experience with operatives of the force—really none at all except with those of the printed page—Pape considered that he should begin asking questions if he was to sustain the part. He matched his finger-tips in pairs—in most “sleuth” stories they did that; cleared his throat—also inevitable; observed somewhat stupendously:
“I see. You opened the secret wall safe and within it installed the heirloom snuffbox. At what hour, Mrs. Sturgis, was this?”
“About five o’clock.”
“And you found the safe cracked, might I ask—its contents gone?”
“Not at all. You anticipate me. What jewelry I keep in the safe was all there. Some of it, at my daughter’s coaxing, I had withdrawn for her to wear to the opera. She is entirely too much of a child to be allowed such adornment, but you know our young ladies these days, Mr. Pape.”
He nodded, but none too assuredly in view of his fathomless ignorance of “our young ladies these days.”
“And after taking out this jewelry for Miss Sturgis, you are sure that you locked the safe—shut it securely and turned the dial?” he asked, quite as the professional he was trying to emulate would have pursued the case. “Sometimes you women folks——”