“There’s the gunroom.”  Gladys pointed.  “And that’s your room, over there.”  As she spoke, Walters came out of the doorway she had indicated.

“Your bags are unpacked, sir,” he reported.  Then he told Rand where he would find his things, and where the bath was.

There was a brief discussion of drinks.  The butler received his instructions and went down the stairway; Rand broke up the feminine formation around him and ushered the ladies ahead of him into the gunroom.

It was much as he remembered it from his visit of two years before.  There was a desk in one corner, and back of it a short workbench and tool-cabinet.  There was a long table in the middle of the room, its top covered with green baize, upon which many flat rectangular boxes of hardwood rested—­some walnut, some rosewood, some quartered oak.  Each would contain a pistol or pair of pistols, with cleaning and loading tools.  In the corner farthest from the desk, he saw the head of the spiral stairway from the library below, mentioned by Gladys Fleming.  There were ashstands and a couple of cocktail-tables, and a number of chairs, and the old maple cobbler’s bench on which Lane Fleming had died.  The only books in the room were in a small case over the workbench; they were all arms-books.

Then he looked at the walls.  On both ends, and on the long inside wall, the pistols hung, hundreds and hundreds of them, the cream of a lifetime’s collecting.  Horizontal white-painted boards had been fixed to the walls about four feet from the floor, and similar boards had been placed five feet above them.  Between, narrow vertical strips, as wide as a lath but twice as thick, were set.  Rows of pistols were hung, the barrels horizontal, on pairs of these strips, with screwhooks at grip and muzzle.  There were about a hundred such vertical rows of pistols.

Rand was still looking at them when the butler brought in the drinks; when Gladys told the servant that that would be all, he went out, rather reluctantly, by the spiral stairs to the library.

“Well, what do you think of them, Colonel Rand?” Gladys asked.

Rand tasted his whiskey and looked around.  “It’s one of the finest collections in the country,” he said.  “I may even be able to find somebody who’ll top Rivers’s offer, but don’t be disappointed if I don’t....  By the way, did anybody help Mr. Fleming keep this stuff clean?  The room seems dry, but even so, they’d need an occasional wiping-off.”

“Oh, Walters was always in here, going over the pistols,” Nelda said.  “He’s been in here every day, lately.”

“I wonder if you could spare him to help me a little?  I’ll need somebody who knows his way around here, at first.”

“Why, of course,” Gladys agreed.  “He isn’t very busy in the mornings, or in the afternoons till close to dinner-time.  Are you going to start work today?”

“I’ll have to.  I’m going to see Stephen Gresham and his associates this evening, and I’ll want to know what I’m talking about.”