Somebody else doesn't like the smell of that accident, Rand thought.

Aloud, he said:

"Mr. Goode lives nearby, then, I take it?"

"Oh, yes, sir. You can see his house from these windows. Over here, sir."

Rand looked out the window. The rain-soaked lawn of the Fleming residence ended about a hundred yards to the west; beyond it, an orchard was beginning to break into leaf, and beyond the orchard and another lawn stood a half-timbered Tudor-style house, somewhat smaller than the Fleming place. A path led down from it to the orchard, and another led from the orchard to the rear of the house from which Rand looked.

"Must be comforting to know your lawyer's so handy," he commented. "And what do you think, Walters? Are you satisfied, in your own mind, that Mr.

Fleming was killed accidentally?"

The servant looked at him seriously. "No, sir; I'm not," he replied.

"I've thought about it a great deal, since it happened, sir, and I just can't believe that Mr. Fleming would have that revolver, and start working on it, without knowing that it was loaded. That just isn't possible, if you'll pardon me, sir. And I can't understand how he would have shot himself while removing the charges. The fact is, when I came up here at quarter of seven, to call him for c.o.c.ktails, he had the whole thing apart and spread out in front of him." The butler thought for a moment. "I believe Mr. Dunmore had something like that in mind when he called Mr. Goode."

"Well, what happened?" Rand asked. "Did the coroner or the doctor choke on calling it an accident?"

"Oh no, sir; there was no trouble of any sort about that. You see, Dr.

Yardman called the coroner, as soon as he arrived, but Mr. Goode was here already. He'd come over by that path you saw, to the rear of the house, and in through the garage, which was open, since Mrs. Dunmore was out with the coupe. They all talked it over for a while, and the coroner decided that there would be no need for any inquest, and the doctor wrote out the certificate. That was all there was to it."

Rand looked at the section of pistol-rack devoted to Colts.

"Which one was it?" he asked.

"Oh it's not here, sir," Walters replied. "The coroner took it away with him."

"And hasn't returned it yet? Well, he has no business keeping it. It's part of the collection, and belongs to the estate."

"Yes, sir. If I may say so, I thought it was a bit high-handed of him, taking it away, myself, but it wasn't my place to say anything about it."

"Well, I'll make it mine. If that revolver's what I'm told it is, it's too valuable to let some d.a.m.ned county-seat politician walk off with." A thought occurred to him. "And if I find that he's disposed of it, this county's going to need a new coroner, at least till the present inc.u.mbent gets out of jail."

The buzzer of the extension phone went off like an annoyed rattlesnake.

Walters scooped it up, spoke into it, listened for a moment, and handed it to Rand.

"For you, sir; Mrs. Fleming."

"Colonel Rand, Carl Gwinnett, the commission-dealer I told you about is here," Gladys told him. "Do you want to talk to him?"

"Why, yes. Do I understand, now, that you and the other ladies want cash, and don't want the collection peddled off piecemeal?... All right, send him up. I'll talk to him."

A few minutes later, a short, compact-looking man of forty-odd entered the gunroom, shifting a brief case to his left hand and extending his right. Rand advanced to meet him and shook hands with him.

"You're Colonel Rand? Enjoyed your articles in the _Rifleman_," he said.

"Mrs. Fleming tells me you're handling the sale of the collection for the estate."

"That's right, Mr. Gwinnett. Mrs. Fleming tells me you're interested."

"Yes. Originally, I offered to sell the collection for her on a commission basis, but she didn't seem to care for the idea, and neither do the other ladies. They all want spot cash, in a lump sum."

"Yes. Mrs. Fleming herself might have been interested in your proposition, if she'd been sole owner. You could probably get more for the collection, even after deducting your commission, than I'll be able to, but the collection belongs to the estate, and has to be sold before any division can be made."

"Yes, I see that. Well, how much would the estate, or you, consider a reasonable offer?"

"Sit down, Mr. Gwinnett," Rand invited. "What would you consider a reasonable offer, yourself? We're not asking any specific price; we're just taking bids, as it were."

"Well, how much have you been offered, to date?"

"Well, we haven't heard from everybody. In fact, we haven't put out a list, or solicited offers, except locally, as yet. But one gentleman has expressed a willingness to pay up to twenty-five thousand dollars."

Gwinnett's face expressed polite skepticism. "Colonel Rand!" he protested. "You certainly don't take an offer like that seriously?"

"I think it was made seriously," Rand replied. "A respectable profit could be made on the collection, even at that price."

Gwinnett's eyes shifted over the rows of horizontal barrels on the walls.

He was almost visibly wrestling with mental arithmetic, and at the same time trying to keep any hint of his notion of the collection's real value out of his face.

"Well, I doubt if I could raise that much," he said. "Might I ask who's making this offer?"

"You might; I'm afraid I couldn't tell you. You wouldn't want me to publish your own offer broadcast, would you?"

"I think I can guess. If I'm right, don't hold your head in a tub of water till you get it," Gwinnett advised. "Making a big offer to scare away compet.i.tion is one thing, and paying off on it is another. I've seen that happen before, you know. Fact is, there's one dealer, not far from here, who makes a regular habit of it. He'll make some fantastic offer, and then, when everybody's been bluffed out, he'll start making objections and finding faults, and before long he'll be down to about a quarter of his original price."

"The practice isn't unknown," Rand admitted.

"I'll bet you don't have this twenty-five thousand dollar offer on paper, over a signature," Gwinnett pursued. "Well, here." He opened his brief case and extracted a sheet of paper, handing it to Rand. "You can file this; I'll stand back of it."

Rand looked at the typed and signed statement to the effect that Carl Gwinnett agreed to pay the sum of fifteen thousand dollars for the Lane Fleming pistol-collection, in its entirety, within thirty days of date.

That was an average of six dollars a pistol. There had been a time, not too long ago, when a pistol-collection with an average value of six dollars, particularly one as large as the Fleming collection, had been something unusual. For one thing, arms values had increased sharply in the meantime. For another, Lane Fleming had kept his collection clean of the two-dollar items which dragged down so many collectors' average values. Except for the two-dozen-odd mysterious interlopers, there wasn't a pistol in the Fleming collection that wasn't worth at least twenty dollars, and quite a few had values expressible in three figures.

"Well, your offer is duly received and filed, Mr. Gwinnett," Rand told him, folding the sheet and putting it in his pocket. "This is better than an unwitnessed verbal statement that somebody is willing to pay twenty-five thousand. I'll certainly bear you in mind."

"You can show that to Arnold Rivers, if you want to," Gwinnett said. "See how much he's willing to commit himself to, over his signature."

CHAPTER 8

Pre-dinner c.o.c.ktails in the library seemed to be a sort of household rite--a self-imposed Truce of Bacchus before the resumption of hostilities in the dining-room. It lasted from six forty-five to seven; everybody sipped Manhattans and kept quiet and listened to the radio newscast. The only new face, to Rand, was Fred Dunmore's.

It was a smooth, pinkly-shaven face, decorated with octagonal rimless gla.s.ses; an entirely unremarkable face; the face of the type that used to be labeled "Babbitt." The corner of Rand's mind that handled such data subconsciously filed his description: forty-five to fifty, one-eighty, five feet eight, hair brown and thinning, eyes blue. To this he added the Rotarian b.u.t.ton on the lapel, and the small gold globule on the watch chain that testified that, when his age and weight had been considerably less, Dunmore had played on somebody's basketball team. At that time he had probably belonged to the Y.M.C.A., and had thought that Mussolini was doing a splendid job in Italy, that H. L. Mencken ought to be deported to Russia, and that Prohibition was here to stay. At company sales meetings, he probably radiated an aura of synthetic good-fellowship.

As Rand followed Walters down the spiral from the gunroom, the radio commercial was just starting, and Geraldine was asking Dunmore where Anton was.

"Oh, you know," Dunmore told her, impatiently. "He had to go to Louisburg, to that Medical a.s.sociation meeting; he's reading a paper about the new diabetic ration."

He broke off as Rand approached and was introduced by Gladys, who handed both men their c.o.c.ktails. Then the news commentator greeted them out of the radio, and everybody absorbed the day's news along with their Manhattans. After the broadcast, they all crossed the hall to the dining-room, where hostilities began almost before the soup was cool enough to taste.