“I think we’ve got something already,” observed Carroll.

“Oh, yes—­maybe—­and then—­again—­maybe not.  Come on!”

“Morning boys!  Nice crisp day—­if you say it quick!” cried the county physician, as he shook the rain from his coat and tossed his auto gloves on a shiny glass showcase.  “Second time this week you’ve got me out of bed before my time.  What’s the matter, if they’ve got to have a murder, with doing it in the afternoon?  I like my sleep!”

He was smiling and cheerful, was Dr. Warren.  Murders and autopsies were all in the day’s work with him.  He had been county physician for a number of years.

“Hum, yes! quite an old lady,” he mused as he took off his coat, which Carroll held for him.  The doctor rolled up his shirt sleeves and stooped down.  “Head’s badly cut—­let’s see what we have here.  Let’s have a light, it’s too dark to see.”

One of the clerks switched on more electric lights, and they glinted and sparkled on the silver and cut glass.  They flashed on the white, still face, and the gleams seemed to be swallowed up in that red blotch in the snowy hair.

“Um, yes!  Depressed fracture.  Bad place, too.  Shouldn’t wonder but what it had done the trick.  Might have been from a black-jack?” and he glanced questioningly at the detectives.

Carroll shook his head in negation.

“That’ll crack a skull, but it won’t draw blood—­not if it’s used right,” and he brought from his hip pocket one of the weapons in question—­a short, stout flexible reed, covered with leather, the end forming a pocket in which was a chunk of lead.

“I’ll gamble it wasn’t one of them,” said Carroll.

“Maybe not,” assented the doctor.  “Let’s look a bit further.”

He glanced at the floor about the body, peered around the edge of a showcase, underneath which there was a space for refuse—­odds and ends, discarded wrapping paper and the like—­a place into which neither of the detectives had, as yet, glanced.  Dr. Warren uttered an exclamation, and drew out a metal statue, about two feet high.

It was that of a hunter, standing as though he had just delivered a shot, and was peering to see the effect.  The butt of his gun projected behind him, and as Dr. Warren moved the statue into the light of the jewelry store chandeliers, they all saw, clinging to the stock of the gun, some straggling, white hairs.

“That’s what did it!” exclaimed the county physician.  “I’ll wager, when I try, I can fit that gun butt into the depression of the fracture.  The burglar—­or whoever it was—­swung this statue as a club.  It would make a deadly one, using the foot end for a handle,” and Dr. Warren waved the ornament in the air over the dead woman’s head to illustrate what he meant.

“Don’t!” muttered Darcy in a strained voice.

“Don’t what?” asked the physician sharply.

“Use the statue that way.”