Page:Mary Rinehart - Man in Lower Ten.djvu/207

 "Therefore the telegram was his, not yours. I have pieces here, but some are missing. I am not discouraged, however." He spread out some bits of yellow paper, and we bent over them, curiously. It was something like this:

We spelled it out slowly.

"Now," Hotchkiss announced, "I make it something like this: The 'p—' is one of two things, pistol you remember the little pearl-handled affair belonging to the murdered man—or it is pocket-book. I am inclined to the latter view, as the pocket-book had been disturbed and the pistol had not."

I took the piece of paper from the table and scrawled four words on it.

"Now," I said, rearranging them, "it happens, Mr. Hotchkiss, that I found one of these pieces of the telegram on the train. I thought it had been dropped by some one else, you see, but that's immaterial. Arranged this way it