Chapter V.
The Evidence in the Case
When the doctor had completed his work and left the room, Sir Clinton pulled the tin box of darts from his pocket and went over to the window to examine it. The box itself suggested nothing in the way of a clue; it was of a common pattern. He turned from it to the darts themselves.
“That brown stuff on the feathering is evidently the poison, whatever it may be,” he reflected. “It doesn’t seem much of a dose to kill a man, especially if one assumes that it was a quick death. Even ordinary snake poison would hardly do the trick quick enough. And yet these fellows didn’t seem to have moved much after they were hit, to judge by the look of the ground.”
He took a Coddington lens from his pocket and scanned one of the darts carefully; then with a pin he probed a dark spot near the point of the projectile.
“So that’s it! He’s drilled a hole clean through the metal and filled up the hollow with poison. That would mean a fair quantity driven well home under the skin; and the blood would soon wash the stuff out of the cavity, since both ends are open. An ingenious devil, evidently.”
He thoughtfully replaced the dart in the box; but before putting the tin back into his pocket he counted the missiles carefully.
“Eleven of them here; and six more in the two bodies.”
He glanced at the open box again, trying to estimate its probable capacity.
“That must have been the lot.”
The doctor had extracted the six fatal darts from the bodies and left them lying on a piece of lint on the dressing-table. Sir Clinton rolled them up cautiously; took his cigarette-case from his pocket; emptied out the contents; and inserted the packet of darts instead.