“That finished him, so far as I was concerned. But I took the trouble to go down to the Maze, just for my own satisfaction. I’d been there that morning; and I’d noticed gossamer all over the hedge at the loophole—some of it actually stretching across the hole in the hedge. When I went down, after interviewing friend Ernest, those gossamer threads were still there. No gun could possibly have been shoved into the hole without snapping them. I put my hand in, just to see; and of course I got it covered with spider’s web.” “So that was why you cleaned your hand on the hedge and made such a fuss about spiders!” Wendover exclaimed. “I thought you were simply fooling——” “I was certainly in high spirits,” Sir Clinton confessed blandly. “I think I’d every right to be. I’d got complete confirmation of my suspicion—though really I didn’t need the confirmatory evidence. Let’s get on with the story. We picked up friend Ernest’s cigar-case there; and I kept it. I had a notion that he hadn’t left it there without some ulterior purpose. And besides, I thought his finger-prints might come in useful some time. We didn’t need them, as it turned out. It was merely a precaution on my part. You see, there was very little to be done with finger-prints on these air-guns. It seems friend Ernest had carefully organised a grand air-gun shooting competition on the morning of the day he killed his brothers. He’d had the guns passed from hand to hand, so that the finger-marks of nearly everyone were printed on them in addition to his own. Of course, I had the tin box containing the spurious darts. He’d handled that. But I hardly troubled to examine it for finger-marks. I was sure he’d use gloves in touching it. “Then I found another thing which I half-expected. I’d dropped the hint about Ariadne’s clue and the possibility of an outsider having to resort to something of the kind. Well, Wendover and I found some yards of black thread carefully placed where we couldn’t help seeing it. No black thread was found when the Shandons were murdered. But after I’d dropped that hint in Ernest Shandon’s presence, behold! we get the clue which is meant to suggest an outside murderer. Wasn’t that evidence, on the whole, quite enough to raise some suspicions about him? “Wendover, I may tell you, thought I treated our friend Ernest rather brutally in our interview after the mythical attack on him. I certainly told Wendover afterwards that I thought Ernest had had a bad half-hour. What I meant, Squire, was the bad half-hour he had when he was laying off his tale to us and wasn’t sure what I thought about it. That was a stiff time for him. As a matter of fact, I took no pains to conceal from friend Ernest that I thought his yarn was a mere pack of lies. I wanted him to feel afraid of me, afraid of what I was getting at in the Whistlefield case. Then, I felt sure, he’d have a shy at knocking me out before I became really dangerous.