The last witness being examined, the lanky chief leaned back in his chair beating a tattoo on his teeth with the pencil he carried. Then he glanced at his notes and again at the inventory on the table before him. “I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that all you people have told me the truth. And I am inclined to believe the servants have done the same. Taking into consideration their flurry and scare, they told remarkably straight stories, and it seems clear that none of them were absent from their duties in the kitchen or in the dining room long enough to have run upstairs and robbed so many rooms and then to have gotten back unnoticed. It seems none of them had even gone up so early to arrange the bedrooms for the night. And there is positively no sign, outdoors or in, that any professional thief broke into the house. Of course, a closer search of the rooms and a search of the servants and of their quarters--and of yourselves, if you will permit--may throw new light on the case. But--” He paused. On these summer people and on others of their clan depended ninety per cent of Aura’s livelihood and importance. Quimby had tried, therefore, to handle this delicate matter in such a way as to avoid offense. And, thus far, he had not a ghost of a clue to go on. “Search away--as far as I’m concerned,” spoke up Willis Chase, in the short pause which followed. “Three times, on the Canadian border, I’ve had my car searched for bootleg booze. And every time I hit the New York Customs crowd, on my way back from Europe, they search my soiled collars and trunkbottoms with the most loving care. So this’ll be no novelty. Search.” “I have a horrible feeling that all the stolen things are going to be found on _me_,” supplemented Miss Gregg. “They would be, in a nightmare, you know. And if this isn’t a nightmare I don’t know what nightmare is. But search if you like. The sooner it’s over the sooner we’ll wake up.” “I speak for the good wife as well as for myself,” boomed Joshua Q. Mosely, “when I say we shall do all in our power to uphold the law. We are willing to be searched.” He gazed about him with the rarefied air of one who has just consented to part with life in the holy cause of duty. “_I_ am not going to be searched.” It was Thaxton Vail who said it. Every one turned with something akin to a jump and stared marvelingly at him.