Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/296

264 grains at least, you see?" He reweighed them once more, carefully.

"That is certainly most interesting." Trant grimly looked up at the expert as though trying to deny a disappointment. "But it is quite worth having the five coins light, to witness the facility with which an expert like yourself can pick them out, unerringly, without fail—barely twenty grains difference in four hundred."

He looked up, still betraying only astonishment. But Findlay's face, after the first flush of his collector's absorption, had suddenly grown less cordial.

"I did not get your name, sir," he started; then turned, at the opening of the door behind him, to face Stephen Sheppard.

"Findlay!" the sportsman cried, scarcely waiting for the servant who had admitted him to vanish, and not appearing to notice Trant at all. "They've found Neal's body! In Bowton's mining shack—murdered, Enoch, murdered! We'll have young Jim Tyler up for it! Unless," he hesitated, and looked at Trant, and added, as though the compelling glance of the psychologist constrained him to it, "unless you know something that will help him, Enoch!"

"Hush, Steve! Hush!" the coin collector fell back upon the chair, beside his desk, with an anxious glance at the psychologist. "I have a man here." He gathered himself together. "And what is it possible that I could tell to save young Jim?"

"You might tell why, Mr. Findlay," Trant said sharply, nerving himself for the coming struggle, "for