“Oh, good Lord!” complained the voice. “Are you trying to drag somebody else into it?--when the character cast is already full and running over, and all the supernumeraries have been tagged and labelled? Turn the notion out of doors; tread on it; break its back with a stick! We caught Hartridge with the goods on him, didn’t we?” “Yes; but----” “But what?” “Nothing much: only now that I come to think of it, I seem to remember that the man I saw dropping things into the hole wasn’t wearing Hartridge’s kind of a hat.” “Oh, granny! Go on and do your little sentry go. Your head is muddled and you want to pass the muddle on to me. I’m asleep, I tell you--sound asleep! I don’t hear a word you are saying.” Tregarvon gave it up; not the lately developed notion, which grew rather more insistent the longer he thought about it, but the attempt to interest Carfax. During the lonely two-hour watch which followed he had time to go reflectively over the events of the night, to set them in orderly array, and to let the unconsidered minor happenings fit into their places and weigh as they would. The process straightened out a few of the tangles, or it seemed to. Richardia’s concern, expressed by her fear that violence might grow out of the antagonisms, was undoubtedly for her father. Also, it was plain that up to the moment of confidences she had not suspected Hartridge of being her father’s agent; it being a fair presumption that she would have spoken of the professor if she had. Having got that far, Tregarvon began to ask himself if Hartridge was the only one actively involved. In at least two instances the schoolmaster might fairly be held exempt. It was still incredible that the man who had come to the Coalville headquarters as a guest had deliberately plotted to have his host’s motor-car wrecked on its return from Highmount. By the same token, it was difficult to imagine the professor of mathematics in the rôle of the sardonic practical joker who had shocked Rucker with a resin-filled skull, dug, doubtless, out of the old burying-ground. On the other hand, the murderous attempt at wrecking the car and the grim joke on Rucker fitted the mountain-baron-henchman hypothesis most accurately; as did the fact, if it were a fact, that there were two persons concerned in the recent episode of the hardened steel cubes. There had been time, during the arousing of Carfax, for one man to disappear and for another to take his place; in which case it seemed evident that Hartridge had stood his ground merely to cover the retreat of the other man.