"I see; in that case there would have been no finger prints on the gun. Probably wouldn't have been, since the slayer deliberately left the gun behind. Only a very stupid person would have neglected to wipe away finger prints had there been any. Hello, what's this!" Wiggly's foot had crunched against a bit of porcelain, and he leaned forward swiftly, picking it up; it was a rough-surfaced piece of pottery, black in color and, as much as he could judge from the fragment, had belonged to some convex object of which it was a shattered part. "A broken piece of something--but what?" he murmured, holding it up for the doctor's inspection. "I'm sure I couldn't say," answered Doctor Bushnell, who was not greatly interested. He considered it a waste of time to speculate over such an insignificant trifle, when there was murder evidence to be looked for. "The Hitchcock murder last summer--remember that, doctor? It was solved by nothing more noticeable than a black pin, a mourning pin, and the widow of a man whom Hitchcock had ruined, confessed when she was faced with that pin. This is larger than a pin, doctor, but, to be frank, I doubt there's much value to it." He was near a small mahogany table by the room's north wall; the light was not very good, the chamber being lighted only by wall fixtures, and the incandescent rays were softened by parchment shades; but his eyes pierced the shadows and saw, on the floor beside the table, several other pieces like the one which he held in his hand. "Ah!" he exclaimed. "Here's the answer to it, doctor. It's a vase, a black pottery vase; yes, here's the neck of it." "That might be evidence of a struggle," suggested Doctor Bushnell. "The vase might have been knocked off the edge of the table, don't you think, when the woman tried to escape Sarbella's vengeance? She probably knew, the minute he got into the room, that his intention was to kill her." Price's ears wiggled briefly, as he considered the matter of the broken vase, and with a dismissing gesture tossed down the broken bit which he held in his fingers. "You may be right," he agreed, "it doesn't seem important enough to bother about, but----" His voice broke off sharply, as he stared toward the window directly in front of him; he had noticed the sagging curtain, where it had been ripped some two and a half hours earlier, when Don Haskins had made his surprise entrance into Helen's room. But, of course, Wiggly had no way of being aware of the fleeing crook's existence. "Take a look at this, Doctor Bushnell," said the reporter; "this torn curtain. Funny we didn't notice that before; it's mighty near jerked off the rod." "And what do you make of that?" Wiggly's eyes were meditatively half closed, and his ears as well as his mind were active.