hide with impatience over the
delays, while he had his row with Worth, when Laura Bowman and Jim
Edwards came and braced him to let up on his persecution of them. Mrs.
Bowman finally left; he went with her toward the front. Now was my
chance; I dodged into the study, jerked his own pistol from its holster,
squeezed myself in behind the open door and waited. He came back; I let
him get into the room, past me a little, and when at some sound I made,
he turned, the muzzle of the gun was shoved against his chest and fired.

"I'd barely finished pressing Gilbert's fingers around the pistol butt
when I heard a cry outside, jumped to the door, shut and bolted it just
as my mother-in-law ran in across the lawns. I gathered that she'd been
there earlier to get those three leaves out of the diary that you were
so interested in, Boyne; had just read them and come back to have it out
with old Tom. She hung around for five minutes, I should say, beating on
the door, calling, asking if anything was wrong.

"My one big mistake in the study was that diary of 1920. It lay open on
the desk where he'd been writing. It did tell of his having identified
me as Clayte. I'd not expected it, and so I didn't handle it well. Time
pressed. I couldn't carry it with me; I tore out the leaf, stuck the
book into the drainpipe, and ran.

"And after all," he summed up, "my plans would have gone through on
schedule; you never could have touched me with your clumsy,
police-detective methods, if it hadn't been for the girl."

He dropped his head and stood brooding a moment, demanded another smoke,
got it, shrugged off some thought with a gesture, and finished,

"I was in too deep to turn. It was her life--or mine. Things went
contrary. We couldn't get her to come out to the masquerade, where it
would have been easy. With those two Mandarin costumes, Fong Ling in my
place, I had my time from the hour we put on the masks till midnight.
Another perfect alibi. Well--it didn't work. They say you have to shoot
a witch with a silver bullet. And she's more than human."

A siren's dry shriek as the Sheriff's gasoline buggy made its way
through the crowded street outside. Cummings raised his brows at me, got
my nod of permission, and shot his first question at the prisoner.

"Vandeman, where's the money?"

"Not within a hundred miles of here," instantly.

"You took it south with you--on your wedding trip?" Cummings would
persist. But our man, so expansive a