rimed with
gunpowder. While he was doing this his other hand came in contact with
something slightly uneven in the smooth metal surface of the butt. He
turned the pistol over, and noticed a small inner circle in the flat
steel. It was a small hinged lid, which hid a pocket in the handle. He
raised the little lid with his finger-nail, and a shower of percussion
caps fell on the bagatelle table. This contrivance for holding caps was
not new to Colwyn. He had seen it in other old-fashioned muzzle-loaders.

Colwyn compared the caps which had dropped on the table with the one he
had found upstairs. They were the same size. He tried the solitary cap
on the nipple, and found that it fitted perfectly. As he did so, he saw
something resembling a thread of yellow wool caught in the twisted steel
of the hammer. It was a minute fragment, so small as to be hardly
noticeable. Colwyn was quite unable to determine what it was, but its
presence there puzzled him considerably, and he was at a loss to
understand how it had got caught in the hammer of the pistol. It struck
him that the thread might be khaki, and his mind reverted to his earlier
discovery of the patch of khaki in the wood outside the moat-house.

It was with the hope of finding out whether this pistol had been lately
used that Colwyn turned his attention to the velvet-lined interior of
the case. The inside was divided into a large compartment for the
pistols and several small lidded spaces. In one of these he found some
shot, a box of percussion caps, and a powder-flask half-full of common
gunpowder. Another space contained implements for cleaning the pistols.
The contents of the next compartment puzzled him. There were some odd
lengths of knotted string, and a coil of yellow tubular fabric, about
the thickness of his little finger, some inches in length. Colwyn
recognized it at once. It was the wick of a tinder-lighter, then being
sold by thousands by English tobacconists to replace a war-time scarcity
of matches, and greatly used by cigarette smokers.

The mystery of the presence of the wick in the pistol-case was not
lessened because it enabled Colwyn to identify the tiny yellow fragment
adhering to the cock of the pistol. He picked up the wick and observed
that one end was cut clean, but the other end was blackened and burnt.
At that discovery there entered his mind the first prescient warning of
the possibility of some deep plan in which the pistol and the wick
playe