"I'm not a revengeful man, Colonel Rand," he
said, "but if there's one thing I can't forgive, it's a disloyal
employee." His mouth closed sternly around his cigar. "He'll have to take
what's coming to him." He stood by the desk for a moment, looking down at
the recovered items and the pile of junk on the floor. "When did you
first suspect him?"
"Almost from the first moment I saw this collection." Rand explained the
reasoning which had led him to suspect Walters. "The real clincher, to my
mind, was the fact that he knew this collection almost as well as Lane
Fleming did, and wouldn't be likely to be deceived by these substitutions
any more than Fleming would. Yet he said nothing to anybody; neither to
Mrs. Fleming, nor Goode, nor myself. If he weren't guilty himself, I
wanted to know his reason for keeping silent. So I put the pressure on
him, and he cracked open."
"Well, I want you to know how grateful we all are," Dunmore said
feelingly. "I'm kicking hell out of myself, now, about the way I objected
when Gladys brought you in here. My God, suppose we'd tried to sell the
collection ourselves! Anybody who'd have been interested in buying would
have seen what you saw, and then they'd have claimed that we were trying
to hold out on them.
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