urned to its place
shows that it was ripped off very rapidly, however."

"Very good," said Lord Darcy. "Now the bullet, if you please."

"Yes, my lord. This will have to be a bit different." He took more
paraphernalia out of his large, symbol-decorated carpet bag. "The Law
of Contagion, gently-born sirs, is a tricky thing to work with. If a
man doesn't know how to handle it, he can get himself killed. We had
an apprentice o' the guild back in Cork who might have made a good
sorcerer in time. He had the talent--unfortunately, he didn't have the
good sense to go with it. According to the Law of Contagion any two
objects which have ever been in contact with each other have an
affinity for each other which is directly proportional to the product
of the degree of relevancy of the contact and the length of time they
were in contact and inversely proportional to the length of time since
they have ceased to be in contact." He gave a smiling glance to the
priest. "That doesn't apply strictly to relics of the saints, Reverend
Sir; there's another factor enters in there, as you know."

As he spoke, the sorcerer was carefully clamping the little handgun
into the padded vise so that its barrel was parallel to the surface of
the table.

"Anyhow," he went on, "this apprentice, all on his own, decided to get
rid of the cockroaches in his house--a simple thing, if one knows how
to go about it. So he collected dust from various cracks and crannies
about the house, dust which contained, of course, the droppings of the
pests. The dust, with the appropriate spells and ingredients, he
boiled. It worked fine. The roaches all came down with a raging fever
and died. Unfortunately, the clumsy lad had poor laboratory technique.
He allowed three drops of his own perspiration to fall into the
steaming pot over which he was working, and the resulting fever killed
him, too."

By this time, he had put the bullet which Dr. Pateley had removed from
the Count's body on a small pedestal so that it was exactly in line
with the muzzle of the gun. "There now," he said softly.

Then he repeated the incantation, and the powdering that he had used
on the button. As the last syllable was formed by his lips, the bullet
vanished with a _ping_! In its vise, the little gun vibrated.

"Ah!" said Master Sean. "No question there, eh? That's the death
weapon, all right, my lord. Yes. Time's almost exactly the same as
that of the removal of the button. Not more t