on
the run?"

"Because he couldn't hear it. Nobody'd hear it ten paces away. That's
what I was trying out this morning. You told me I'd fired once. Well, I
fired twice; once with the door shut, and neither you nor Chung heard
it; afterward, with the door open--the report you registered."

"The blotter--and it had been used on that last page--showed no words to
strengthen this theory of yours," said Barbara as confidently as though
the little blue square had been clear print, instead of broken blurring.
Perhaps it was clear to her. I was glad I'd given it a thorough
reexamination the night before.

"I think it does," I struggled against the tide, manfully, buoying
myself up with the tracing of the blotter. "Here's the word 'demanded,'
reasonably connected with the affair. The letters 'ller' may be the last
end of 'caller,' or possibly 'fuller'; I noticed Gilbert spoke in a
former entry of the bottle in the cabinet and Hughes snitching from it,
and used the word 'fuller.' Here's the word 'Avenue,' complete, and
Lizzie Watkins, Hughes' girl, lives on Myrtle Avenue."

The silence after that was fairly derisive. Worth broke it with an
impatient,

"And the fact of the bolted doors throws all that stuff out."

"Well," I grunted, "Barbara deduced the slipping of some bolts to please
you once--why can't she again?"

"Mr. Boyne," the girl spoke quickly, "it wouldn't help you a bit to be
assured that Eddie Hughes could enter the study and leave it bolted
behind him when he went out--help you to the truth, I mean. These facts
you've gathered are all wabbly; they'll never in the world fit in trim
and true. They're hardly facts at all. They're partial facts."

"Wouldn't help me?" I ejaculated. "It would cinch a case against him.
We've got to have some one in jail, and that shortly. We're forced to."

"Forced?" Worth had sat up a little and reached far forward for a stone
that lay among the weeds down there. He spoke to me sidewise with a
challenging flicker of the eye. Barbara kept her lips tight shut.

"I need a prisoner," trying to correct my error; then burst out, "My
Lord, children! An arrest isn't going to hurt a man like Hughes,--even
if he proves to be innocent. It's an old story to him. Barbara, you said
yourself that the man who stole the 1920 diary was the murderer."

"But I didn't say Eddie Hughes stole it." Her tone was significant, and
it checked me. I couldn't remember what the deuce she had said that
night