The playwright's audience was interested now, beyond all question of doubt. If Wingfield had suddenly hypnotised the three who saw this unexpected confirmation of his theory of treachery in the Sanderson tragedy, the awed silence that fell upon the little group around the table could not have been more profound. It was Bromley who broke the spell, prefacing his exclamation with a mirthless laugh.
"Your gifts of deduction are almost uncanny, Wingfield," he asserted. "How could you reason your way around to that?"—pointing at the clay bullet.
"I didn't," was the calm reply. "Imagination can double discount pure logic in the investigative field, nine times out of ten. And in this instance it wasn't my imagination: it was another man's. I once read a story in which the author made his villain kill a man with this same little trick of sham bullets. I merely remembered the story. Now let us see how many more there are to go with this."
There were four of the cartridges capped with the dummy bullets; the remaining seven being genuine. Wingfield did the sum arithmetical aloud. "Four and five are nine, and nine and seven are sixteen. Sanderson started out that day with a full magazine, we'll assume. He fired five of these dummies—with perfect immunity for Manuel—and here are the other four. If the woman had had a little more time, when she was pretending to hide the gun, she would have pumped out all of the good cartridges. Being somewhat hurried, she exchanged only nine, which, in an even game and shot for shot, gave Manuel ten chances to Sanderson's one. It was a cinch."
Ballard sat back in his chair handling the empty rifle. Bromley's pallid face turned gray. The tragedy had touched him very sharply at the time; and this new and unexpected evidence of gross treachery revived all the horror of the day when Sanderson had been carried in and laid upon the office couch to die.
"Poor Billy!" he said. "It was a cold-blooded murder, and he knew it. That was what he was trying to tell me—and couldn't."
"That was my hypothesis from the first," Wingfield asserted promptly. "But the motive seemed to be lacking; it still seems to be lacking. Have either of you two imagination enough to help me out?"
"The motive?" queried Bromley. "Why, that remains the same, doesn't it?—more's the pity."
The playwright had lighted the long-stemmed pipe, and was thoughtfully blowing smoke rings toward the new patch in the bungalow ceiling.