“You give me too much credit,” she declared. “Come on; what have you found out?”
Doctor Aire gave a slight shrug, one shoulder lifting higher than the other. It was a mannerism I had observed before. “Miss Lib, you have all the brains necessary for this extremely simple point, which I have practically given away already.”
“Well, you’re a teaser. I’m not a little girl any more, you know. I don’t like being teased.”
“You must think it out for yourself,” insisted the Doctor, still smiling.
“Well, I won’t; so there! You’re perfectly horrid!”
“Perfection in any wise is seldom gained. I am honoured,” he murmured, but Lib, tossing her head and departing to the lawn, in affected dudgeon, probably did not hear the conclusion of his courtesy.
We laughed together while he replaced the weapons to their props and fastenings upon the wall.
I looked about the chamber, up the walls crowded with weapons to the very shadows of the ceiling. Save for the two full-armoured figures of sheet and mail, most of the equipment I supposed to be Elizabethan or later, although the Doctor was sure to be a better judge than I. One gigantic harquebuse à croc with its support attached dominated the broad wall between the armoury and the Hall of the Moth; all around it were muskets, calivers, petronels, dags and tacks, and a couple of blunderbusses, besides firearms whose names I did not know. The short wall opposite was full of cutting and crushing weapons; hence had come the two with which the Doctor had been experimenting. Between two sets of lances standing upright for a frame, the eye was mazed in an intricate pattern of partisans, maces, falchions, hangers, axes, poniards, and, one might believe, every other size and shape of sticker and slasher and pounder.
“I suppose you alluded to the heft of the axe we found last night out there? Its weight is certainly inconsiderable.”
“Yes,” agreed the Doctor with a drawl, “it appears to have been about the lightest object on the wall. Why did he take that—that hatchet? I’m inclined to think that it was made for a plaything, not a real working instrument. Odd, its selection, very odd.”