"Bronze is the right color, Tish; naturally she uses bronze hairpins, as I verified by a look at her dressing table. And yet on the floor beside the chaise longue I found a black hairpin, and Miss Sheridan's hair is dark." Sergeant Tish puffed out his cheeks, looking up slowly. For a full minute he debated this information before he stirred. "Women are always dropping hairpins outta their heads; might have been a servant, or Miss Sheridan, for that matter, paying a perfectly innocent visit to the room." Yet the detective's tone was deliberate, thoughtful. "Remember the Hitchcock murder--solved by a black mourning pin?" Moving cautiously in an effort to keep any painful strain from his shoulder muscles, Tish stood to his feet. "Mind you," he warned, "I don't say that I think you're within a hundred miles of being right, but it'll do no harm to go upstairs and have another look around." In the light of Tish's previously derisive skepticism, Wiggly felt that he had achieved something of a victory. CHAPTER XXVI BITS OF TALLOW Presently Tish and Wiggly Price were once more within the room where Helen Gilmore had met death, again seeking from the mute furnishings some vital clew that previous examinations might have overlooked. The newspaper man was all eagerness, but the interest of the detective had already cooled. There was the window with Haskins' finger prints; he had the sort of mind that readily accepts the obvious, and his police experience had taught him that, nine chances to ten, the obvious is the true. It was a little hard to think of this cheerful bed-chamber as a place of dark deeds. The north windows looked out upon the wide and shimmering bosom of the Hudson; a sailboat clipped daintily over the water, and in its wake the sunlight made the ripples scintillate like diamonds. Across the Tappan Zee the stern ruggedness of the New Jersey Palisades was softened with a verdant touch and splash of summer greenness. "The answer to it all is here," said Wiggly. "There must be something more for us than just a woman's hairpin." "Sure," grunted Tish; "my gun and Haskins' finger prints on the glass." He had returned even more positively to the conviction that he had been right in the first place. "Ah, but what we're after now, Tish, is a clew that will outweigh the finger prints and the gun. There must be something more than that; there's got to be." "That stuff about there always being a clew is the bunk," said Tish. "I've seen dozens of cases where there wasn't a thing for us cops to go on. But this is different. All the evidence points straight at Haskins. What else have you got? A hairpin and an imagination!"