“Now,” she began.  “Just what sort of skulduggery has been going on?  As of Friday, the top offer for the collection was twenty-five thousand five hundred, from some dealer up in Massachusetts.  And then, on Saturday, you came bounding in with Stephen Gresham’s certified check for twenty-six thousand.  And I seem to recall that the late unlamented Rivers’s offer of twenty-five thousand straight had them stopped.  Not that I’m inclined to look askance at an extra five hundred—­I can buy a new hat with my share of that, even after taxes—­but I would like to know what happened.  And I might add, that’s only one of many things I’d like to know.”

“The client is entitled to a full report,” Rand said, tasting his cocktail.  It was a vodka Martini, and very good.  “You know, none of that crowd are millionaires.  Adam Trehearne, who’s the plutocrat of the bunch, isn’t so filthy rich he doesn’t know what to do with all his money—­what the tax-collectors leave of it—­and the rest of them have to figure pretty closely.  The most they could possibly scratch together was twenty-two thousand.  So I put four thousand into the pot, myself, bringing the total to five hundred over the Kendall offer, and hastily declared the collection sold.  Of course, my getting into it meant that much less for everybody else, but five-sixths of a collection is better than no pistols at all.  I imagine Colin MacBride is honing up his sgian-dhu for me because I got that big Whitneyville Walker Colt, but what the hell; he got the cased pair of Paterson .34’s, and the Texas .40 with the ramming-lever.”

“Why, I think the division was fair enough,” Gladys said.  “They’d agreed to take your valuation, hadn’t they?  And all that slide-rule and comptometer business....  But Jeff—­four thousand dollars?” she queried.  “You only got five from me, and you can’t run a detective agency on old pistols.”

Rand grinned as he set down his empty glass.  Gladys refilled it from the shaker.

“My dear lady, that five thousand I unblushingly accepted from you was only part of it,” he confessed.

“There was also a fee of three thousand from Stephen Gresham, for pulling the bloodhounds of the D.A.’s office off his back in the matter of Arnold Rivers, and there was five thousand from Humphrey Goode, which I suppose he’ll get the Premix Company to repay him, for engineering the suppression of a lot of facts he wanted suppressed.  And, finally, my connection with this business brought that merger to my attention, and I picked up a hundred shares of Premix at 73-1/4, and now I have two hundred shares of Mill-Pack, worth about twenty-nine thousand, which I can report for my income tax as capital gains.  I’d say I could afford to treat myself to a few old pistols for my collection.”

“Well!” She raised both eyebrows over that.  “Don’t anybody tell me crime doesn’t pay.”

“Yes.  In my ghoulish way, I generally manage to bear myself in mind, on an operation like this.  I make no secret of my affection for money.”  He lifted his glass and sipped slowly.  “Look here, Gladys; are you satisfied with the way this was handled?”