"I can't say, sir. They would be in a drawer, or, more likely, in the gun room."
"Where is this gun room?"
"Next to the harness room, sir—second door to the right in the courtyard."
"Speaking absolutely in confidence, have you formed a theory as to this murder?"
"No, sir. But if any sort of evidence is piled up against Mr. Robert I shall not credit it. No power on earth could make me believe that he would kill his father in cold blood. He respected his father, sir. He's a bit wild, as young men with too much money are apt to be, but he was good-hearted and genuine."
"Yet he did speak of blowing his own brains out, and his father's."
"That was his silly way of talking, sir. He would say, 'Tomlinson, if you tell the pater what time I came home last night I'll stab you to the heart.' When there was a bit of a family squabble he would threaten to mix a gallon of weed-killer and drink every drop. Everything was rotten, or beastly, or awfully ripping. He was not so well educated as he ought to have been—Mrs. Fenley's fault entirely; and he hadn't the—the words——"
"The vocabulary."
"That's it, sir. I see you understand."
"Tomlinson," interrupted Furneaux, "a famous American writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described adjectives of that class as the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy. You have hit on the same great thought."