Page:Miss Madelyn Mack Detective.pdf/73

disheveled men were staring at one another in tongue-tied bewilderment. Norris Endicott might have vanished into thin air, evaporated. The man who was to wed the Van Sutton heiress had been blotted out, eliminated.

As the group edged uneasily toward the door, a stray breeze, fragrant with the evening odors of the flower-lined lawn below, swept through the open window. A small object, half-buried in the curtain folds, fell with a soft thud to the floor. The nearest man stooped toward it almost unconsciously. It was a silver ball, perhaps three-quarters of an inch in diameter. With a shrug, he passed it to Adolph Van Sutton. The latter dropped it mechanically into his pocket.

The five o'clock sun was splashing its waning glow down on to the autumn-thinned trees when I pushed open the rustic gate of "The Rosary" the next afternoon to carry the somber problem that was beyond me to the wizard skill of Madelyn Mack.

I was frankly tired after the day's buffetings. And there was a soothing restfulness in the velvet green of the close-cropped lawn, with its fat box hedges and the scarlet splashes of its canna beds,