“I’d advise you not to talk about it, at that,” Rand said.  “The situation here seems to be very delicate, and rather explosive....  Oh, as you go out, I’d be obliged to you for sending Walters up here.  I still have this work here, and I’ll need his help.”

After Varcek had left him, Rand looked in the desk drawer, verifying his assumption that the .38 he had seen there was gone.  He wondered where his own was, at the moment.

When the butler arrived, he was put to work bringing pistols to the desk, carrying them back to the racks, taking measurements, and the like.  All the while, Rand kept his eye on the head of the spiral stairway.

Finally he caught a movement, and saw what looked like the top of a peak-crowned gray felt hat between the spindles of the railing.  He eased the Detective Special out of its holster and got to his feet.

“All right!” he sang out.  “Come on up!”

Walters looked, obviously startled, at the revolver that had materialized in Rand’s hand, and at the two men who were emerging from the spiral.  He was even more startled, it seemed, when he realized that they wore the uniform of the State Police.

“What....  What’s the meaning of this, sir?” he demanded of Rand.

“You’re being arrested,” Rand told him.  “Just stand still, now.”

He stepped around the desk and frisked the butler quickly, wondering if he were going to find a .25 Webley & Scott automatic or his own .38-Special.  When he found neither, he holstered his temporary weapon.

“If this is your idea of a joke, sir, permit me to say that it isn’t....”

“It’s no joke, son,” Sergeant McKenna told him.  “In this country, a police-officer doesn’t have to recite any incantation before he makes an arrest, any more than he needs to read any Riot Act before he can start shooting, but it won’t hurt to warn you that anything you say can be used against you.”

“At least, I must insist upon knowing why I am being arrested,” Walters said icily.

“Oh!  Don’t you know?” McKenna asked.  “Why, you’re being arrested for the murder of Arnold Rivers.”

For a moment the butler retained his professional glacial disdain, and then the bottom seemed to drop suddenly out of him.  Rand suppressed a smile at this minor verification of his theory.  Walters had been expecting to be accused of larceny, and was prepared to treat the charge with contempt.  Then he had realized, after a second or so, what the State Police sergeant had really said.

“Good God, gentlemen!” He looked from Mick McKenna to Corporal Kavaalen to Rand and back again in bewilderment.  “You surely can’t mean that!”

“We can and we do,” Rand told him.  “You stole about twenty-five pistols from this collection, after Mr. Fleming died, and sold them to Arnold Rivers.  Then, when I came here and started checking up on the collection, you knew the game was up.  So, last evening, you took out the station-wagon and went to see Rivers, and you killed him to keep him from turning state’s evidence and incriminating you.  Or maybe you killed him in a quarrel over the division of the loot.  I hope, for your sake, that it was the latter; if it was, you may get off with second degree murder.  But if you can’t prove that there was no premeditation, you’re tagged for the electric chair.”