Price
had drawn, to indicate the end of the path along which the bullet had
traveled, provided it had traveled so far. Nothing _here_ to aid in a
mechanical murder--
But in a flash Dundee changed his mind. For just slightly above the
pencil mark there was a small dent in the soft painted pine of the
window frame.
And before his mind could frame words and sentences he thought he saw
how Nita Leigh had been murdered.
Nothing here?... _Not now, because he himself had taken the lamp to the
courthouse for safe-keeping._
He saw it clearly in imagination--that bronze floor-lamp which Lydia
Carr had given to Nita Leigh, its big round bowl studded with great
jewels of colored glass. And in recalling every detail of the lamp he
saw what he had dismissed as of no importance at the time, in the
excitement of finding that the lamp's bulb had been shattered by the
"bang or bump" which Flora Miles had described. _One of the big glass
jewels had been missing, leaving an unsightly hole._
No wonder there had been a "bang or bump" hard enough to dent the frame
of the window! For if his hunch was correct, the gun, wedged into the
big bowl, with the silencer slightly protruding from the jewel-hole, had
"kicked," just as it had kicked an hour before, when it had dislodged
itself from the hole in the hot-air register and clattered down the big
pipe to the heat reservoir of the furnace.
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