ague, telling him that,
if he would come to his home that evening, and manage to leave the
bridge game while he was dummy, he would find the money he was
demanding--_in a drawer of the cabinet that stood between the two
windows in the trophy room_!"

Dundee exhibited the drawer he had taken from the basement tool room.
"This drawer! I took it away from the Miles home this afternoon while
everyone but a chambermaid was at the inquest. Miles did not have time
to go home before going to your office, Mr. Sanderson, with the rest of
the crowd you had summoned for questioning. If he had, he would have
killed himself as soon as he found the incriminating drawer was missing
from the cabinet."

"But--_how_----?" Sanderson began, frowning with bewilderment.

"Very simple!" Dundee answered. "When Sprague pulled open this drawer,
which was set in the cabinet at just the height of his stomach, he
received a bullet in his heart.... See these four little holes?... A
vise was screwed into the bottom of the drawer so that it gripped the
gun with its silencer, at an upward angle. A piece of string was tied to
the trigger and fastened somehow to the underside of the drawer, so that
when Sprague pulled the drawer open the string was drawn taut and the
trigger pulled. Practically the same mechanism by which he tried to
murder me.... The kick of the gun jerked the drawer shut. All Miles had
to do when he was pretending to look for Sprague was to turn off the
trophy room light by a button--one of a series on the outside wall of
the hall closet. Probably it had been agreed between them that Sprague
would not return to the bridge game, hence Sprague's telephoning for a
taxi to wait for him at the foot of the hill, and his taking his hat and
stick into the trophy room with him."

"Then Miles had from midnight till dawn to remove the gun!"

"Yes. Some time during the night, after Flora was asleep with a
sedative, which she badly needed because of the quarrel--a genuine
one--which she and Tracey had had over Sprague--Miles slipped down to
the trophy room and removed the gun and vise. But he could not remove
the holes the screws had made, although he did cover the bottom of the
usually empty drawer with old pamphlets on the care and feeding of
dogs.... By the way, the chambermaid told me that her master spent about
half an hour before dinner that Thursday night in the trophy room,
'going over his fishing tackle'.... His next concern was to mak