It was quite dark, all the curtains down—Lamont kept his untenanted houses already furnished—and Claude had to strike a match.
“Jehu! what did sis mean, anyhow?” he exclaimed, as the light flickered up. “No one here.”
He held the lucifer above his head and took a survey of the parlor.
Everything seemed in place, and he looked everywhere as he moved about the room.
He noticed that the transom over the hall door was wide open, but he thought nothing of this.
The faintest odor of burned powder assailed his nostrils and he stood in the middle of the room a few seconds and sniffed the air.
“The girl’s mad!” he suddenly cried. “What is the fool’s errand she wanted me to attend to, I’d like to know? There’s nothing in this room, and yet she wanted me to look nowhere else but in this chamber. There’s the smell of powder here. What does it mean? She was here, she admitted. She can shoot like a professional. I’ve seen her at it in the gallery. I’ll have to go back and laugh at her foolery.”
Claude quitted the room, and, to make sure there was nothing out of the way in the house, went all over it.
“Sis is out of her head,” he again exclaimed, when he had inspected the last room. “She may have thought she trapped the detective, but she did nothing of the kind.”
When he left the Cedar Street house it was to go straight home.