"Another question, Cap'n--why did the unknown bother
to take my 'Who's Who' out of the bookcase, where I should normally have
looked for it, and put it on that particular shelf?"
Warily, for his scalp was prickling with a premonition of danger, Dundee
crossed the room to the shelf, but his hand did not reach out for the
red book, which might have been expected to solve one problem, at least.
"_Why the shelf?_" he asked himself again. Why not the desk top, or the
mantelpiece, or the smoking table beside the big armchair?
The shelf, with its drapery of rather fine old silk tapestry, offered no
answer in itself, for it held nothing except the red book, a Chinese
bowl, and a humidor of tobacco. And beneath the shelf was nothing but
the old-fashioned register, the opening covered with a screwed-on metal
screen which was a mass of big holes to permit the escape of hot air
when the furnace was going in the winter....
Suddenly Dundee stooped and stared with eyes that were widened with
excitement and a certain amount of horror. Then he rose, and, standing
far to one side, picked up the fat volume which lay on the shelf. As he
had expected, a bullet whizzed noiselessly across the room and buried
itself in the plaster of the wall opposite--a bullet which would have
ploughed through his own heart if he had obeyed his first impulse and
gone directly to the shelf to obey the instructions in the note.
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