Ashton-Kirk went to a window overlooking the stretch of green sod at the side of the house.
"I understand you found the candlestick just under this?"
"Yes. The window was a little open; and I guess, after he'd finished the job, the murderer wanted to get rid of the weapon. So he dropped it outside."
"Nothing to be had here," said Ashton-Kirk, after a few moments' study of the sitting-room. "At least not just now."
He threw up the window and stepped out, followed by Scanlon; standing upon the paved walk the investigator looked about. The Burton house, like the others on Duncan Street, sat fairly in the center of a plot of ground perhaps two hundred feet square. Along the division fence between that and the next house was a stretch of smooth sod, with grass, still green. At one place upon this was a sort of rose arbor, the browned, hardy shoots of a perennial twining thickly around it.
"There have been a half dozen policemen walking about here," said Ashton-Kirk, pointing to the soft earth under the window. "And that is fatal to any sort of close work, even had there been anything in the first place."
However, in spite of this, he went over every yard of the space about the house; at the rose arbor he paused.
"Directly in line with the sitting-room window," he said. "No doubt young Burton placed it with that in mind; the invalid sister would love to see the roses in early summer."
He walked behind the structure, and then Bat Scanlon saw him pause suddenly and bend over, rigid with eagerness.
"What is it?" asked the big man.