dge first extracted from the dead man's gun.
"There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play," he
added, when the bullet, a harmless pellet of white clay, carefully
moulded and neatly coated with lead foil, fell apart under the
knife-blade.

[Illustration: "There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican
fair play."]

The playwright's audience was interested now, beyond all question of
doubt. If Wingfield had suddenly hypnotised the three who saw this
unexpected confirmation of his theory of treachery in the Sanderson
tragedy, the awed silence that fell upon the little group around the
table could not have been more profound. It was Bromley who broke the
spell, prefacing his exclamation with a mirthless laugh.

"Your gifts of deduction are almost uncanny, Wingfield," he asserted.
"How could you reason your way around to that?"--pointing at the clay
bullet.

"I didn't," was the calm reply. "Imagination can double discount pure
logic in the investigative field, nine times out of ten. And in this
instance it wasn't my imagination: it was another man's. I once read a
story in which the author made his villain kill a man with this same
little trick of sham bullets. I merely remembered the story. Now let us
see how many more there are to go with this."

There were four of the cartridges capped with the dummy bullets; the
remaining seven being genuine. Wingfield did the sum arithmetical aloud.
"Four and five are nine, and nine and seven are sixteen. Sanderson
started out that day with a full magazine, we'll assume. He fired five
of these dummies--with perfect immunity for Manuel--and here are the
other four. If the woman had had a little more time, when she was
pretending to hide the gun, she would have pumped out all of the good
cartridges. Being somewhat hurried, she exchanged only nine, which, in
an even game and shot for shot, gave Manuel ten chances to Sanderson's
one. It was a cinch."

Ballard sat back in his chair handling the empty rifle. Bromley's pallid
face turned gray. The tragedy had touched him very sharply at the time;
and this new and unexpected evidence of gross treachery revived all the
horror of the day when Sanderson had been carried in and laid upon the
office couch to die.

"Poor Billy!" he said. "It was a cold-blooded murder, and he knew it.
That was what he was trying to tell me--and couldn't."

"That was my hypothesis from the first," Wingfield asserted promptly.
"But