Hanaud sat down at the end of the table close to Jim and read the items and the questions very slowly with an occasional grunt, and a still more occasional “Aha!” but with a quite unchanging face. Jim was in two minds whether to snatch it from his hands and tear it up or dwell upon its recollected phrases with a good deal of pride. One thing was clear. Hanaud took it seriously.
He sat musing over it for a moment or two.
“Yes, here are questions, and dilemmas.” He looked at Frobisher with friendliness. “I shall make you an allegory. I have a friend who is a matador in Spain. He told me about the bull and how foolish those people are who think the bull not clever. Yes, but do not jump and look the offence with your eyes and tell me how very vulgar I am and how execrable my taste. All that I know very well. But listen to my friend the matador! He says all that the bull wants, to kill without fail all the bullfighters in Spain, is a little experience. And very little, he learns so quick. Look! Between the entrance of the bull into the arena and his death there are reckoned twenty minutes. And there should not be more, if the matador is wise. The bull—he learns so quick the warfare of the ring. Well, I am an old bull who has fought in the arena many times. This is your first corrida. But only ten minutes of the twenty have passed. Already you have learned much. Yes, here are some shrewd questions which I had not expected you to ask. When the twenty are gone, you will answer them all for yourself. Meanwhile”—he took up another pen and made a tiny addition to item one—“I carry this on one step farther. See!”
He replaced the memorandum under Jim’s eyes. Jim read:
“—subsequent developments, e.g., the disappearance of the Poison Arrow, the introduction into the case of the ill-famed Jean Cladel, Ann Upcott’s story of her visit to the treasure-room, and now the mystery of Mrs. Harlowe’s pearl necklace, and the finding of the arrow, make out a prima facie case for inquiry.”
Jim sprang to his feet in excitement.
“You have found the arrow, then?” he cried, glancing towards the door of Ann Upcott’s bedroom.
“Not I, my friend,” replied Hanaud with a grin.
“The Commissaire, then?”
“No, not the Commissaire.”
“His secretary, then?”
Jim sat down again in his chair.
“I am sorry. He wears cheap rings. I don’t like him.”
Hanaud broke into a laugh of delight.
“Console yourself! I, too, don’t like that young gentleman of whom they are all so proud. Maurice Thevenet has found nothing.”
Jim looked at Hanaud in a perplexity.
“Here is a riddle,” he said.
Hanaud rubbed his hands together.
“Prove to me that you have been ten minutes in the bullring,” he said.
“I think that I have only been five,” Jim replied with a smile. “Let me see! The arrow had not been discovered when we first entered these rooms?”
“No.”
“And it is discovered now?”
“Yes.”
“And it was not discovered by you?”
“No.”
“Nor the Commissaire?”
“No.”
“Nor Maurice Thevenet?”
“No.”
Jim stared and shook his head.
“I have not been one minute in the bullring. I don’t understand.”
Hanaud’s face was all alight with enjoyment.
“Then I take your memorandum and I write again.”
He hid the paper from Jim Frobisher’s eyes with the palm of his left hand, whilst he wrote with his right. Then with a triumphant gesture he laid it again before Jim. The last question of all had been answered in Hanaud’s neat, small handwriting.
Jim read:
(4) Why did Hanaud search every corner of the treasure-room for the missing Poison Arrow—except the interior of the Sedan chair?
Underneath the question Hanaud had written as if it was Jim Frobisher himself who answered the question:
“It was wrong of Hanaud to forget to examine the Sedan chair, but fortunately no harm has resulted from that lamentable omission. For Life, the incorrigible Dramatist, had arranged that the head of the arrow-shaft should be the pen-holder with which I have written this memorandum.”
Jim looked at the pen-holder and dropped it with a startled cry.
There it was—the slender, pencil-like shaft expanding into a slight bulb where the fingers held it, and the nib inserted into the tiny cleft made for the stem of the iron dart! Jim remembered that the nib had once or twice become loose and spluttered on the page, until he had jammed it in violently.
Then came a terrible thought. His jaw dropped; he stared at Hanaud in awe.
“I wonder if I sucked the end of it, whilst I was thinking out my sentences,” he stammered.
“O Lord!” cried Hanaud, and he snatched up the pen-holder and rubbed it hard with his pocket handkerchief. Then he spread out the handkerchief upon the table, and fetching a small magnifying glass from his pocket, examined it minutely. He looked up with relief.
“There is not the least little trace of that reddish-brown clay which made the poison paste. The arrow was scraped clean before it was put on that tray of pens. I am enchanted. I cannot now afford to lose my junior colleague.”
Frobisher drew a long breath and lit a cigarette, and gave another proof that he was a very novice of a bull.
“What a mad thing to put the head of that arrow-shaft, which a glance at the plates in the Treatise would enable a child to identify, into an open tray of pens without the slightest concealment!” he exclaimed.
It looked as if Ann Upcott was wilfully pushing her neck into the wooden ring of the guillotine.
Hanaud shook his head.
“Not so mad,
