you, but you had to take it, just as you have to deny it now, or tip us off that you were tied up with the Holy Grail mob, and that Fink had reasons for killing you.”

Fitzstephan said: “You say the most remarkable things. I’m glad he had reasons, though.”

“You engineered Riese’s murder. The others were your accomplices. When Joseph died the blame was put all on him, the supposed madman. That’s enough to let the others out, or ought to be. But here you are killing Collinson and planning God knows what else. Fink knows that if you keep it up you’re going to let the truth out about the Temple murder, and he’ll swing with you. So, scared panicky, he tries to stop you.”

Fitzstephan said: “Better and better. So I killed Collinson?”

“You had him killed⁠—hired Whidden and then didn’t pay him. He kidnapped the girl then, holding her for his money, knowing she was what you wanted. It was you his bullet came closest to when we cornered him.”

Fitzstephan said: “I’m running out of exclamatory phrases. So I was after her? I wondered about my motive.”

“You must have been pretty rotten with her. She’d had a bad time with Andrews, and even with Eric, but she didn’t mind talking about them. But when I tried to learn the details of your wooing she shuddered and shut up. I suppose she slammed you down so hard you bounced, and you’re the sort of egoist to be driven to anything by that.”

Fitzstephan said: “I suppose. You know, I’ve had more than half an idea at times that you were secretly nursing some exceptionally idiotic theory.”

“Well, why shouldn’t I? You were standing beside Mrs. Leggett when she suddenly got that gun. Where’d she get it? Chasing her out of the laboratory and down the stairs wasn’t in character⁠—not for you. Your hand was on her gun when that bullet hit her neck. Was I supposed to be deaf, dumb, and blind? There was, as you agreed, one mind behind all Gabrielle’s troubles. You’re the one person who has that sort of a mind, whose connection with each episode can be traced, and who has the necessary motive. The motive held me up: I couldn’t be sure of it till I’d had my first fair chance to pump Gabrielle⁠—after the explosion. And another thing that held me up was my not being able to tie you to the Temple crowd till Fink and Aaronia Haldorn did it for me.”

Fitzstephan said: “Ah, Aaronia helped tie me? What has she been up to?” He said it absentmindedly, and his one visible gray eye was small, as if he was busy with other thoughts behind it.

“She’s done her best to cover you up by gumming the works, creating confusion, setting us after Andrews, even trying to shoot me. I mentioned Collinson just after she’d learned that the Andrews false-trail was no good. She gave me a half-concealed gasp and sob, just on the off-chance that it’d lead me astray, overlooking no bets. I like her: she’s shifty.”

“She’s so headstrong,” Fitzstephan said lightly, not having listened to half I had said, busy with his own thoughts. He turned his head on the pillow so that his eye looked at the ceiling, narrow and brooding.

I said: “And so ends the Great Dain Curse.”

He laughed then, as well as he could with one eye and a fraction of a mouth, and said:

“Suppose, my boy, I were to tell you I’m a Dain?”

I said: “Huh?”

He said: “My mother and Gabrielle’s maternal grandfather were brother and sister.”

I said: “I’ll be damned.”

“You’ll have to go away and let me think,” he said. “I don’t know yet what I shall do. Understand, at present I admit nothing. But the chances are I shall insist on the curse, shall use it to save my dear neck. In that event, my son, you’re going to see a most remarkable defense, a circus that will send the nation’s newspapers into happy convulsions. I shall be a Dain, with the cursed Dain blood in me, and the crimes of Cousin Alice and Cousin Lily and Second-cousin Gabrielle and the Lord knows how many other criminal Dains shall be evidence in my behalf. The number of my own crimes will be to my advantage, on the theory that nobody but a lunatic could have committed so many. And won’t they be many? I’ll produce crimes and crimes, dating from the cradle.

“Even literature shall help me. Didn’t most reviewers agree that The Pale Egyptian was the work of a sub-Mongolian? And, as I remember, the consensus was that my Eighteen Inches bore all the better known indications of authorial degeneracy. Evidence, son, to save my sweet neck. And I shall wave my mangled body at them⁠—an arm gone, a leg gone, parts of my torso and face⁠—a ruin whose crimes and high Heaven have surely brought sufficient punishment upon him. And perhaps the bomb shocked me into sanity again, or, at least, out of criminal insanity. Perhaps I’ll even have become religious. It’ll be a splendid circus. It tempts me. But I must think before I commit myself.”

He panted through the uncovered half of his mouth, exhausted by his speech, looking at me with a gray eye that held triumphant mirth.

“You’ll probably make a go of it,” I said as I prepared to leave. “And I’m satisfied if you do. You’ve taken enough of a licking. And, legally, you’re entitled to beat the jump if ever anybody was.”

“Legally entitled?” he repeated, the mirth going out of his eye. He looked away, and then at me again, uneasily. “Tell me the truth. Am I?”

I nodded.

“But, damn it, that spoils it,” he complained, fighting to keep the uneasiness out of his eye, fighting to retain his usual lazily amused manner, and not making such a poor job of it. “It’s no fun if I’m really cracked.”

When I got back to the house in the cove, Mickey and MacMan

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