OUR NEW SERIAL THE YOUNG ARCHDUCHESS

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 20 May 1922, Page 3

OUR NEW SERIAL THE YOUNG ARCHDUCHESS

(By WILLIAM LE QUEUX)

CHAPTER XVIII. (Continued). He saw Smeaton’s keen glance watching him, and he gave himself a little away. “ But I do not fancy there was need of that.” Smeaton pounced upon the admission at once. “Of course there is a mystery about Miss Torella—that much is known in the neighbourhood—and you know more than you care to tell. Well, I don’t want to force your confidence. You have always walked on independent lines, and with great success. But. anyway, you do not think he was apprehensive about her on that particular evening?”

He paused for a reply and Vincent boldly answered the challenge. “No, I am convinced that there was no special reason why he should carry a revolver that night.”

Smeaton dropped the subject. ‘‘l don’t think we can find out anything more in this room than has been already found, Vincent. Two shots have evidently been fired at Hugh Ashdown, the first bullet missed and went through the window, the second lodged in his brain. It doesn’t seem to me that your unfortunate friend, the Colonel, has got a dog’s chance.” Vincent had to agree with this inexorable logic. “It looks like it,” he admitted reluctantly. Geradine had been wandering through the house wh»le the two men were investigating and talking—the dear old house, so full of painful memories. She had now returned to the room.

“Have you found anything?” she asked eagerly. Vincent shook his head mournfully. “ Nothing, I am sorry to say. The men who were here before us seem to have done their work thoroughly. And yet when I set out here to-day, I had a sort of forlorn hope that our iourney might not have been in vain.” Smeaton smiled kindly at his young friend. He knew that, out of liking for the man, Vincent could not persuade himself that the Colonel had committed this apparently foul murder.

He turned towards the girl. “Will you examine the room yourself, Miss Torella, make a little investigation of it on your own? You, of course, know every nook and cranny of it. Some instinct might lead you to something we have ovei’looked.”

Geradine shrugged her shoulders. If these two men with their keen wits and trained intelligence had failed, what hope was there for her? However, she began to make her search. Vincent seemed to have a kind of intuition that something would be found. Patiently she went round the room, peering into every nook and corner that had already been explored by a dozen pairs of keen eyes. She came to a halt, standing with her back to the door that stood at right angles to the French windows leading into the grounds. Her keen young glance swept round the walls, then raised itself to the cornices that circled the room. Suddenly she gave a little cry and pointed with her finger. “Look at that hole, it is a bullet mark.”

Both men followed her gaze and simultaneously burst into exclamations of astonishment. It was a very tiny puncture and had escaped their notice and that of the others who had preceded them. Vincent, his wits awake at last, ran to the servants’ quarters and returned with a pair of long steps. He raced up them and widening the small aperture with his fingers, pulled out the bullet which had entered the cornice at a direct angle opposite the door.

He came down and. held it out to Smeaton. He spoke in a voice of great excitement. “ Three shots instead of_two. There is something behind all this. We haven’t got to the bottom of the mystery yet.” Smeaton agreed. He was also staggered 'by the fact of the three shots. Two were accounted for, but where had the third come from?

Geradine clasped her hands, and looked anxiously towards the two men. “ Will this discovery help my dear guardian? Is it important? ” Smeaton, the veteran who never allowed himself to be surprised, was, at the moment, more able to think dearly than. his younger colleague. “The discovery of this third shot certainly puts a different complexion

upon matters, Miss Torella. At the present moment I cannot see my way. Perhaps, instead of lightening our complexities, it rather adds to them.” He sighed a little wearily. The discovery of that third shot was certainly very baffling. The Colonel had admitted that he had shot his son, and given up the revolver out of which the two shots had been fired, leaving three out of the five chambers still loaded.

If the Colonel’s stfljy was true how had the third shot been fired?

Vincent, who had now recovered from his momentary excitement, took up the running. “Let us think all this over for a few minutes and try to reconstruct the scene as far as we can. We know of the two shots, we have now found a third one, a third, that is to say, as regards the period of discovery.” Smeaton with his trained intelligence, followed the trend of his young friend s reasoning. He gave a sagacious nod of his head. Poor Geradine could only feel and look utterly bewildered. “ I am afraid I cannot grasp it,” she said, in a piteous voice. Continued in Monday’s Advertiser.