“Doing the spectacular, Terence?” Stone said, smiling a little.
“Just one grandstand play,” the boy confessed. As a matter of fact, he had located the pistol sometime earlier, but waited to make the discovery seem sensational.
Without hesitation, Burdon pronounced the revolver Mr. Wheeler’s. It had no initials on it, but from Wheeler’s minute description, Burdon recognized it beyond reasonable doubt. One bullet had been fired from it, and the calibre corresponded to the shot that had killed Samuel Appleby.
“Oh, it’s the right gun, all right,” Burdon said, “but I never thought of looking over that way for it. Must have been thrown by a left-handed man.”
“Oh, not necessarily,” said Stone. “But it was thrown with a conscious desire to hide it, and not flung away in a careless or preoccupied moment.”
“And what do you deduce from that?” asked Burdon, quite prepared to hear the description of the murderer’s physical appearance and mental attainments.
“Nothing very definite,” Stone mused. “We might say it looked more like the act of a strong-willed man such as Mr. Wheeler, than of a frightened and nervously agitated woman.”
“If either of those two women did it,” Burdon offered, “she wasn’t nervous or agitated. They’re not that sort. They may go to pieces afterward, but whatever Mrs. Wheeler or Maida undertake to do, they put it over all right. I’ve known ’em for years, and I never knew either of them to show the white feather.”
“Well, it was not much of an indication, anyway,” Stone admitted, “but it does prove a steady nerve and a planning brain that would realize the advisability of flinging the weapon where it would not be probably sought. Now, as this is Mr. Wheeler’s revolver, there’s no use asking the three suspects anything about it. For each has declared he or she used it and flung it away. That in itself is odd—I mean that they should all tell the same story. It suggests not collusion so much as the idea that whoever did the shooting was seen by one or both of the others.”
“Then you believe it was one of the three Wheelers?” asked Burdon.
“I don’t say that, yet,” returned Stone. “But they must be reckoned with. I want to eliminate the innocent two and put the guilt on the third—if that is where it belongs.”