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48 defiance in his changed tone as though he anticipated the next question.

"Will you go and ask him for them, please?"

"But—but no one has entered that room since the funeral," Gene stammered. "I don't think father would like it, Sergeant; and nothing in there could have any possible bearing on your investigation."

"Mr. Chalmers, may I remind you that that is not for you to decide? Will you get those keys at once!" The last sentence was not a query but a command, and each word increased in emphatic dominance. Gene gave one fleeting, desperate glance toward his desk—in the lock of which the key still remained—and fled downstairs.

Unless the young man had temporarily lost his head and burned his papers without discrimination as they came to his hand, those already destroyed must have been the most important; and locking the door in his turn, Odell went quickly to the grate and pocketed every unburned scrap that remained.

Then he moved as swiftly to the desk and opened it. A disordered heap of letters met his eye; most of them evidently bills, from the tradesmen's names in the upper right hand comer. Odell had seized a handful at random and was about to shut the desk when he noticed that the small center drawer was not quite closed. Pulling it open hastily he discovered a small notebook and a few letters in an odd but unmistakably masculine hand.

He cleared the drawer at one sweep, closed the desk, and dropping his findings from it into the coat-pocket on his left side, he drew from the other two or three fragments of the paper which he had salvaged from the grate.