It was five and after when the superintendent, pale and shaking with excitement, came up the long drive from the Hall gates and found Cleek lounging in the doorway of the house, placidly smoking a cigarette and twirling a little ball of crumpled newspaper in his hand.

“Right was I, Mr. Narkom?” he queried smilingly.

“Good God, yes! Right as rain, old chap. Been carrying it for upward of a twelvemonth, and no doubt waiting for an opportunity to strike.”

“Good! And while you have been attending to your little part of the business I’ve been looking out for mine, dear friend. Look!” said Cleek, and opened up the little ball of paper sufficiently to show what looked like a cut-glass scent bottle belonging to a lady’s dressing-bag close stoppered with a metal plug sealed round with candle wax. “Woorali, my friend; and enough in it to kill an army. Come along—we’ve got to the bottom of the thing, let us go up and ‘report.’ The gentlemen will be getting anxious.”

They were; for on reaching the armoury they found young Drake and Lord Fallowfield showing strong traces of the mental strain under which they were labouring and talking agitatedly with Lady Marjorie Wynde, who had, in the interim, come up and joined them, and was herself apparently in need of something to sustain and to strengthen her; for Ojeebi was standing by with an extended salver, from which she had just lifted to her lips a glass of port.

“Good God! I never was so glad to see anybody in my life, gentlemen,” broke out young Drake as they appeared. “It’s beyond the hour you asked for—ages beyond—and my nerves are almost pricking their way through my skin. Mr. Cleek—Mr. Narkom—speak up, for heaven’s sake. Have you succeeded in finding out anything?”

“We’ve done better than that, Mr. Drake,” replied Cleek, “for we have succeeded in finding out everything. Look sharp there, Mr. Narkom, and shut that door. Lady Marjorie looks as if she were going to faint, and we don’t want a whole houseful of servants piling in here. That’s it. Back against the door, please; her ladyship seems on the point of crumpling up.”

“No, no, I’m not; indeed, I’m not!” protested Lady Marjorie with a forced smile and a feeble effort to hold her galloping nerves in check. “I am excited and very much upset, of course, but I am really much stronger than you would think. Still, if you would rather I should leave the room, Mr. Cleek——”

“Oh, by no means, your ladyship. I know how anxious you are to learn the result of my investigations. And, by that token, somebody else is anxious, too—the doctor. Call him in, will you, Mr. Drake? He is still with the others in the Stone Drum, I assume.”

He was; and he came out of it with them at young Drake’s call, and joined the party in the armoury.

“Doctor,” said Cleek, looking up as he came in, “we’ve got to the puzzle’s unpicking, and I thought you’d be interested to hear the result. I was right about the substance employed, for I’ve found the stuff and I’ve nailed the guilty party. It was woorali, and the reason why there was no trace of a weapon was because the blessed thing melted. It was an icicle, my friend, an icicle with its point steeped in woorali, and if you want to know how it did its work—why, it was shot in there from the cross-bow hanging on the wall immediately behind me, and the person who shot it in was so short that a chair was necessary to get up to the bowman’s slit when——No, you don’t, my beauty! There’s a gentleman with a noose waiting to pay his respects to all such beasts as you!”

Speaking, he sprang with a sharp, flashing movement that was like to nothing so much as the leap of a pouncing cat, and immediately there was a yap and a screech, a yell and a struggle, a click of clamping handcuffs, and a scuffle of writhing limbs, and a moment later they that were watching saw him rise with a laugh, and stand, with his hands on his hips, looking down at Ojeebi lying crumpled up in a heap, with gyves on his wrists and panic in his eyes, at the foot of the guarded door.

“Well, my pleasant-faced, agreeable little demon, it’ll be many a long day before the spirits of your ancestors welcome you back to Nippon!” Cleek said as the panic-stricken Jap, realizing what was before him, began to shriek and shriek until his brain and nerves sank into a collapse and he fainted where he lay. “I’ve got you and I’ve got the woorali. I went through your trunk and found it—as I knew I should from the moment I clapped eyes upon you. If the laws of the country are so lax that they make it possible for you to do what you have done, they also are stringent enough to make you pay the price of it with your yellow little neck!”

“In the name of heaven, Mr. Cleek,” spoke up young Drake, breaking silence suddenly, “what can the boy have done? You speak as if it were he that murdered my father; but, man, why should he? What had he to gain? What motive could a harmless little chap like this have for killing the man he served?”

“The strongest in the world, my friend—the greed of gain!” said Cleek. “What he could not do in your father’s land it is possible for him to do in this one, which foolishly allows its subjects to insure even the life of its ruler without his will, knowledge, or consent. For nearly a twelvemonth this little brute has been carrying a heavy insurance upon the life of Jefferson P. Drake; but, thank God, he’ll never live to collect it. What’s that, Doctor? How did I find that out? By the simplest means possible, my dear sir.

“For a reason which concerns nobody but myself, I dropped in at the Guildford office of the Royal British Life Assurance Society in the latter part of last May, and upon that occasion I marked the singular circumstance that a Japanese was then paying the premium of an already existing policy. Why I speak of it as a singular circumstance, and why I let myself be impressed by it, lie in the fact that, as the Japanese regard their dead ancestors with absolute veneration and the privilege of being united with them a boon which makes death glorious, life assurance is not popular with them, since it seems to be insulting their ancestors and makes joining them tainted with the odour of baser things. Consequently, I felt pretty certain that it was some other life than his own he was there to pay the regularly recurring premium upon. The chances are, Doctor, that in the ordinary run of things I should never have thought of that man or that circumstance again. But it so happens that I have a very good memory for faces and events, so when I came down here to investigate this case, and in the late Mr. Drake’s valet saw that Japanese man again—voila! I should have been an idiot not to put two and two together.

“The remainder, a telegram inquiring if an insurance upon the life of Jefferson P. Drake, the famous inventor, had been effected by anybody but the man himself, settled the thing beyond question. As for the rest, it is easy enough to explain. Your remark that the little puddle found upon the floor of the Stone Drum appeared to you to bear a distinct resemblance to the water resulting from melted snow, added to what I already knew regarding the refrigerating plant installed here, put me on the track of the ice; and as the small spot on the temple was of so minute a character, I knew that the weapon must have been pointed. A pointed weapon of ice leaves but one conclusion possible, Doctor. I have since learned from the man in charge of the refrigerating plant that this yellow blob of iniquity here was much taken by the icicles which the process of refrigeration caused to accumulate in the place and upon the machine itself during rotation, and that last night shortly after twelve o’clock he came down and broke off and carried away three of them. How I came to know what motive power he employed to launch the poisoned shaft can be explained in a word. Most of the weapons—indeed, all but one—hanging on the wall of this armoury are lightly coated with dust, showing that it must be a week or more since any housemaid’s work was attended to in this particular quarter. One of them is not dusty. Furthermore, when I took it down for the purpose of examining it I discovered that, although smeared with ink or paint to make it look as old as the others, the bowstring was of fresh catgut, and there was a suspicious dampness about the ‘catch,’ which suggested either wet hands or the partial melting, under the heat of living flesh, of the ‘shaft,’ which had been an icicle. That’s all, Doctor; that’s all, Mr. Drake; that’s quite all, Lord Fallowfield. A good, true-hearted young chap will get both the girl he wants and the inheritance which should be his by right; a good, true friend will get back the ancestral home he lost through misfortune and has regained through chance, and a patient and faithful lady will, in all probability, get the man she loves without now having to wait until he comes into a dead man’s shoes. Lady Marjorie, my compliments. Doctor, my best respects, and gentlemen all—good afternoon.”

And here with that weakness for the theatrical which was his besetting sin, he bowed to them with his hat laid over his heart, and walked out of the room.