ry effort to avoid a noise.

No need now for caution, if his premonition wasn't worthless--if the
vengeful spirit of Mrs. Inche had not stopped short of embroiling son
with father, but had gone on to the end ominously shadowed forth by
the appearance of the gunman in those rooms....

What he saw from the threshold of the lighted room was Bayard Shaynon
still in death upon the floor, one temple shattered by a shot fired at
close range from a revolver that lay with butt close to his right
hand--carefully disposed with evident intent to indicate a case of
suicide rather than of murder.

XXI

THE SORTIE

At pains not to stir across the threshold, with quick glances P.
Sybarite reviewed scrupulously the scene of November's crime.

Eventually his nod indicated a contemptuous conclusion: that it should
not prove difficult to convict November on the evidence afforded by
the condition of the apartment alone. A most superficial inspection
ought to convince anybody, even one prone to precipitate conclusions,
that Bayard Shaynon had never died by his own hand.

If November, in depositing the instrument of his crime close to the
hand of its victim, had meant to mislead, to create an inference of
_felo de se_, he had ordered all his other actions with a carelessness
arguing one of three things: cynical indifference to the actual
outcome of his false clue; sublime faith in the stupidity of the
police; or a stupidity of his own as crass as that said to be
characteristic of the average criminal in all ages.

The rooms, in short, had been most thoroughly if hastily ransacked--in
search, P. Sybarite didn't for an instant doubt, of evidence as to the
relations between Shaynon and Mrs. Inche calculated to prove
incriminating at an inquest; though the little man entertained even
less doubt that lust for loot had likewise been a potent motive
influencing November.

He found proof enough of this in the turned-out pockets of the
murdered man; in the abstraction from the bosom of his shirt of pearl
studs which P. Sybarite had noticed there within the hour; in the
abraded knuckles of a finger from which a conspicuous solitaire
diamond in massive antique setting was missing; in a pigskin
bill-fold, empty, ripped, turned inside out, and thrown upon the floor
not far from the corpse.

Then, too, in one corner stood a fine old mahogany desk of quaint
design and many drawers and pigeonholes, one and all sacked, their
contents tur