"I say--I hope you haven't been talking too much about that?" (I knew his weaknesses, and a perfectly open candor was one of the gravest of them.) But "Lord, no!" he instantly reassured me. "Talking about it? Do you think I'm a----" the initials he used were those of the words "blind fiddler." "I'm glad of that," I murmured. And then it was that the full weight of what he had said began to sink into my mind. "Then why did he shoot him?" I asked presently, when I was a little more master of myself. This conversation, I ought to have said, took place on the top of a bus going eastward down Piccadilly. I was on my way to the office, and I had found Monty with a finished drawing which he also was taking to Fleet Street. He looked away over the Green Park. "Well, I'm not perfectly sure I'm right, of course," he replied, turning to me again. "In fact, I might be miles out--right off the map. But I _did_ see him on the roof that morning, you know, and I've been trying to piece it all together again, and I must say it fits in pretty well." "What fits in, and with what?" He dropped his voice. "Well, you see, this fellow Smith waved his hand the way I told you--like this----" On the bus top he made that same aimless and wavering movement of his hand that I had seen him make in Esdaile's studio, that I had seen Mr. Harry Westbury make in the Chelsea public-house. "I think now he wanted the pistol back again, but of course I didn't give it him." "What did he want it for?" "Might have wanted to shoot himself," Monty replied. I pondered deeply, my eyes on the passing façade of the Ritz. Certainly Monty, as the first on the scene that morning that now seemed such ages ago, had the right to collate his original observations with anything he might subsequently have learned, and the resulting conclusion would probably be a strong one. But that Chummy had possibly wished to shoot himself was no explanation of why he had shot Maxwell. Indeed, another explanation was far more probable. Having realized that he had in fact shot him he might merely have wished to take the shortest way out himself, and I drew Monty's attention to this. "I'm coming to that," Monty answered. "You see this fellow Wetherhead is a jolly interesting chap. You remember the July push on the Somme? Well, he was in that--Bristol Fighter--and then he went up the line to Wipers. He told me that one time when they were in Pop--Poperinghe that is, you know, and we'd a lot of heavy guns there----" (but I think I may safely omit the rather lengthy second-hand recital of Wetherhead's movements and experiences). "Extraordinary yarns he has to tell. Did you know that a first-class pilot can drive another one down with the wash of his propeller? He can, Wetherhead says. He gets above him, and maneuvers for position, and then--I forget exactly how Wetherhead put it, but he showed me with a couple of models they have there----" "Yes, yes, but you were going to say----"