hole crowd of
you thinking in terms of accidental shooting.

"Well, from there out, everything would have been a wonderful success for
Dunmore, except for one thing. Arnold Rivers must have heard, somehow,
that Lane Fleming had been shot with a Confederate .36 that he'd bought
somewhere that day, and that the revolver was in the hands of this
coroner of yours. So Arnold, with his big chisel well ground, went to see
if he could manage to get it out of the coroner for a few dollars. And
when he saw it, lo! it was the .36 Colt that he'd sold to Dunmore about
a month before."

Gladys set down her glass. "So!" she said. "Things begin to explain
themselves!"

"You may say so, indeed," Rand told her. "And what do you suppose Rivers
did with this little item of information? Why, as nearly as I can
reconstruct it, he did a very foolish thing. He tried to blackmail a man
who had committed a murder. He told Fred Dunmore he'd keep his mouth shut
about the .36 Colt, if Dunmore would get him the Fleming collection. He
wanted that instead of cash, because he could get more out of it, in a
few years, than Dunmore could ever scrape, and in the meantime, the
prestige of handling that collection would go a long way toward repairing
his rather dilapidated reputation. Fred should have bumped him off, right
then; it would have been the cheapest and easiest way out, and he'd
probably be alive and uncaught today if he had. But he was willing to pay
ten thousand dollars to save himself the trouble, and that's what he told
you Rivers had offered for the collection. The ten thousand Dunmore told
you Rivers was willing to pay was really the ten thousand he was willing
to pay, himself, to keep Rivers quiet.

"Then I was introduced into the picture, and, as you know, one of my
first acts was to go to Rivers's shop and sneer scornfully at Rivers's
supposed offer of ten thousand. And, right away, Rivers upped it to
twenty-five thousand. You'll recall, no doubt, that Mr. Fleming had a
life-insurance policy, one of these partnership mutual policies, which
gave both Dunmore and Varcek exactly twenty-five thousand apiece. I
assume that Rivers had found out about that.

"I thought, at the time, that it was peculiar that Rivers would jump his
own offer up, without knowing what anybody else was offering for the
collection. I see, now, that it wasn't his own money he was being so
generous with. And there was another incident, while I was at Rivers's
sho