Trust him to find out that the guard was removed from the
house Thursday!"
As he spoke, he was unscrewing the big, jewel-studded bowl of the bronze
lamp. Wedged, at a down-slanting angle inside the bowl, which was twelve
inches in diameter, was Judge Marshall's snub-nosed automatic, the
attached Maxim silencer projecting slightly from the hole whose jewel
was missing.
"Lydia told me last night over the telephone--and very much surprised
she was, too, when I swore her to secrecy--that the jewel had been lost
when the lamp was shipped from New York," Dundee explained. "There's a
blank cartridge in the gun now, of course, but Miles, in his panic, took
my words literally.... See the electro-magnet strapped to the gun butt?
He got it from the bell Sprague had installed in Lydia's bedroom, and he
returned it when he was 'cleaning up', so that the bell would ring
again. The magnet he connected with the electric wire in one of the two
lamp sockets, as you see it now, and the long cord of the lamp was
connected with the wire of the bell in the dining room--so connected
that when anyone stepped on the two little metal plates under the dining
room rug, the kitchen bell would ring and the gun would be fired
simultaneously. But if you will examine the jewel hole," he suggested,
"you will see that Miles had to enlarge it considerably, using a reamer,
which I found in the tool chest in the basement, along with all the
apparatus Sprague had bought for installing Nita's alarm bell.
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