raced to the study door with it, she following more slowly
to watch while I passed it along the wooden panel where the bolt ran on
the other side; and nothing doing!

Again she followed as I ran around to the outside door, opened up and
tried it on the bare bolt itself; no stir. While she sat in the desk
chair at that central table, her elbows on its top, her hands lightly
clasped, the chin dropped in interlaced fingers, following my movements
with very little interest, I puffed and worked, opened a door and tried
to move the bolt when it wasn't in the socket, and felt like cursing in
disappointment.

"A little oil--" I grumbled, more to myself than to her, and hurried to
the garage workbench for the can that would certainly be there. It was,
but I didn't touch it. What I did lean over and clutch from where they
lay tossed in carelessly among rubbish and old spare parts, were three
more magnets exactly the same as the one we had brought from Capehart's.
I sprinted back with them.

"Barbara," I called in an undertone. "Come here. Look."

Held side by side, the four, working as one, moved the bolts as well as
fingers could have done, and through more than an inch of hard wood.

"Yes," she looked at it; "but that doesn't prove Eddie Hughes the
murderer."

"No?" her opposition began to get on my nerves. "I'm afraid that'll be a
matter for twelve good men and true to settle." She stood silent, and I
added, "I know now whose shadow I saw on the broken panel of that door
there, the first Sunday night."

"Oh, it was Eddie's," she agreed rather unexpectedly.

"And he came to steal the 1920 diary," I supplied.

"He came to get a drink from the cellaret, and a cigar from the case.
That's the use he made of his power to move these bolts."

"Until the Saturday night when he killed his employer, the man he hated,
and left things so the crime would pass as suicide. Barbara, are you
just plain perverse?"

Instead of answering, she went back to the table, got the contraption
Hughes had made for her, and started as if to leave me. On the
threshold, she hesitated.

"I don't suppose there's anything I can say or do to change your mind,"
her tone was inert, drained. "I know that Eddie is innocent of this. But
you don't want to listen to deductions."

"Later," I said to her, briskly. "It'll keep. I've something to do now."

"What? You promised Worth to make no move against Eddie Hughes until you
had his permission." She see