w to keep up the handsome place.

I left Eddie slipping eel-like through the big doors, and went into the
study to find Worth sitting before the blazing hearth. He looked up as I
entered to remark quietly,

"Bobs said she'd be over later, and I told her to come on down here."

CHAPTER XI

THE MISSING DIARY

My experience as a detective has convinced me that the evident is
usually true; that in a great majority of cases crime leaves a straight
trail, and ambiguities are more often due to the inability of the
trailer than to the cunning of the trailed. Such reputation as I have
established is due to acceptance of and earnest adherence to the
obvious.

In this affair of Thomas Gilbert's death, everything so far pointed one
way. The body had been found in a bolted room, revolver in hand; on the
wall over the mantel hung the empty holster; Worth assured me the gun
was kept always loaded; and there might be motive enough for suicide in
the quarrel last night between father and son.

Because of that flitting shadow I had seen, I knew this place was not
impervious. Some one person, at least, could enter and leave the room
easily, quickly, while its doors were locked. But that might be
Hughes--or even Worth--with some reason for doing so not willingly
explained, and some means not readily seen. It probably had nothing to
do with Thomas Gilbert's sudden death, could not offset in my mind the
conviction of Thomas Gilbert's stiffened fingers about the pistol's
butt. That I made a second thorough investigation of the study interior
was not because I questioned the manner of the death.

I began taking down books from the shelves at regular intervals,
sounding the thick dead-wall, in search of a secreted entrance. I came
on a row of volumes whose red morocco backs carried nothing but dates.

"Account books?" I asked.

Worth turned his head to look, and the bleakest thing that could be
called a smile twisted his lips a little, as he said,

"My father's diaries."

"Quite a lot of them."

"Yes. He'd kept diaries for thirty years."

"But he seems to have dropped the habit. There is no 1920 book."

"Oh, yes there is," very definitely. "He never gave up setting down the
sins of his family and neighbors while his eyes had sight to see them,
and his hand the cunning to write." He spoke with extraordinary
bitterness, finishing, "He would have had it on the desk there. The
current book was always kept convenient to hi