“I’m inclined to think,” objected Markham, “that you’re attaching too much importance to the episode.”
“Oh, my dear fellow!” Vance stopped short and put both hands on the other’s shoulders. “You’re much too effete—that’s your great shortcomin’. You don’t feel—you are no child of nature. The poetry of your soul has run to prose. Now I, on the other hand, give my imagination full sway; and I tell you that the leaving of that bishop at Mrs. Drukker’s door was no Hallowe’en prank, but the desperate act of a desperate man. It was meant as a warning.”
“You think she knows something?”
“I think she saw Robin’s body placed on the range. And I think she saw something else—something she would give her life not to have seen.”
In silence we moved on. It was our intention to pass through the wall gate into 75th Street and present ourselves at the Dillards’ front door; but as we passed the archery-room the basement door opened, and Belle Dillard confronted us anxiously.
“I saw you coming down the range,” she said, with troubled eagerness, addressing her words to Markham. “For over an hour I’ve been waiting to get in touch with you—phoning your office. . . .” Her manner became agitated. “Something strange has happened. Oh, it may not mean anything . . . but when I came through the archery-room here this morning, intending to call on Lady Mae, some impulse made me go to the tool-chest again and look in the drawer,—it seemed so—so queer that the little revolver should have been stolen. . . . And there it lay—in plain sight—beside the other pistol!” She caught her breath. “Mr. Markham, some one returned it to the drawer last night!”
This information acted electrically on Heath.
“Did you touch it?” he asked excitedly.
“Why—no. . . .”
He brushed past her unceremoniously and, going to the tool-chest, yanked open the drawer. There, beside the larger automatic that we had seen the day before, lay a small pearl-handled .32. The Sergeant’s eyes glistened as he ran his pencil through the trigger-guard and lifted it gingerly. He held it to the light and sniffed at the end of the barrel.