arms here, and he went straight and got it. He knows
this collection as well as your husband did, and I assume he knows values
almost as well.... And, of course, there was a musket, too; Mr. Fleming
didn't collect long-arms, or he'd have had one. It embodied the same
principle as the pistol. The legend is that this man Lindsay's brother
was a soldier; he was supposed to have been killed by Indians who drew
the fire of the detail he was with and then charged them when their
muskets were empty." Rand shrugged. "Actually, the superposed-load
principle is ancient; there's a sixteenth-century wheel lock pistol in
the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, firing two shots from the same
barrel."

Varcek and the butler, who had entered by the hall door, went across the
gunroom and down the spiral. Rand laid down the pistol and escorted
Gladys after them.

Dunmore and Geraldine were in the library when they went down. Geraldine,
mildly potted, was reclining in a chair, sipping her drink. Dunmore was
still radiating his synthetic cheerfulness.

"Get many of the pistols listed, Colonel?" he hailed Rand, with jovial
condescension.

"No." Rand poured two cocktails, handing one to Gladys. "I went to Arnold
Rivers's place this morning, on a little unfinished business, and damn
near tripped over Rivers's corpse. I spent the rest of the day getting
myself disinvolved from the ensuing uproar," he told Dunmore. "You heard
about it, of course."

"Yes, of course. Horrible business. I hope you didn't get mixed up in it
any more than you had to. After all, you're working for us, and if the
police knew that, we'd be bothered, too.... Look here, you don't think
some of these other people who were after the collection might have
killed Rivers, to keep him from outbidding them?"

Nelda, entering from the hallway, caught the last part of that.

"Good God, Fred!" she shrieked at him. "Don't say things like that! Maybe
they did, but wait till they've bought the collection and paid for it,
before you start accusing them!"

"I'm not accusing anybody," Dunmore growled back at her. "I don't know
enough about it to make any accusations. All I'm saying is--"

"Well, don't say it, then, if you don't know what you're talking about,"
his wife retorted.

In spite of this start, dinner passed in relative quiet. For the most
part, they talked about the remaining chances of selling the collection,
about which nobody was optimistic. Rand tried to build up