p, that piqued my curiosity. Rivers had in his shop a .36 Leech &
Rigdon revolver, and I had been informed that it was a revolver of that
type that Mr. Fleming had brought home the evening he was killed. I
thought at the time that it was curious that two Confederate arms of the
same type and make should show up this far north, but my main idea in
buying it was the possibility that I might use it, in some way as
circumstances would permit, to throw a scare into somebody. Rivers was
quite willing to let me have it until he found out that I would be
staying at this house, and then he tried to back out of the sale and
offered me seventy-five dollars' credit on anything else in the shop, if
I'd return it to him. Well, I'd known that Mr. Fleming had been about to
start suit against Rivers over a crooked deal Rivers had put over on him,
and I knew that if Mr. Fleming's death had been murder, there had been a
substitution of revolvers. So I showed the gun I'd bought from Rivers to
Philip Cabot, who had seen the revolver Mr. Fleming had bought, and he
recognized it. It hasn't been established just how Rivers got the Leech
& Rigdon, and never will be; the only people who knew were Rivers and
Dunmore, and both are in the proverbial class of non-talebearers. I
assume that Dunmore gave it to Rivers as a sort of down payment on
Rivers's silence, and to get rid of it.

"Well, you remember Dunmore's angry incredulity when I told him that
Rivers was offering twenty-five thousand instead of ten thousand. One
would have thought, on the face of it, that he would have been glad;
as Nelda's husband, he would share in the higher price being paid for the
collection. But when you realize that Rivers was buying the collection
out of Dunmore's pocket, his reaction becomes quite understandable. I
daresay I signed Arnold Rivers's death-warrant, right there."

"I'll bet your conscience bothers you about that," Gladys remarked.

"Oh, sure; it's been gnawing hell out of me, ever since," Rand told her
cheerfully. "But, right away, Dunmore decided to kill Rivers. He called
him on the phone as soon as he left the table--here I'm speaking by the
book; I walked in on him, in the gunroom, as he was completing the call,
though I didn't know it at the time--and arranged to see him that
evening. Probably to devise ways and means of dealing with the Jeff Rand
menace, for an ostensible reason.

"So that night, Dunmore killed Rivers, with a bayonet. And here we