Varcek and the butler, who had entered by the hall door, went across the gunroom and down the spiral.  Rand laid down the pistol and escorted Gladys after them.

Dunmore and Geraldine were in the library when they went down.  Geraldine, mildly potted, was reclining in a chair, sipping her drink.  Dunmore was still radiating his synthetic cheerfulness.

“Get many of the pistols listed, Colonel?” he hailed Rand, with jovial condescension.

“No.”  Rand poured two cocktails, handing one to Gladys.  “I went to Arnold Rivers’s place this morning, on a little unfinished business, and damn near tripped over Rivers’s corpse.  I spent the rest of the day getting myself disinvolved from the ensuing uproar,” he told Dunmore.  “You heard about it, of course.”

“Yes, of course.  Horrible business.  I hope you didn’t get mixed up in it any more than you had to.  After all, you’re working for us, and if the police knew that, we’d be bothered, too....  Look here, you don’t think some of these other people who were after the collection might have killed Rivers, to keep him from outbidding them?”

Nelda, entering from the hallway, caught the last part of that.

“Good God, Fred!” she shrieked at him.  “Don’t say things like that!  Maybe they did, but wait till they’ve bought the collection and paid for it, before you start accusing them!”

“I’m not accusing anybody,” Dunmore growled back at her.  “I don’t know enough about it to make any accusations.  All I’m saying is—­”

“Well, don’t say it, then, if you don’t know what you’re talking about,” his wife retorted.

In spite of this start, dinner passed in relative quiet.  For the most part, they talked about the remaining chances of selling the collection, about which nobody was optimistic.  Rand tried to build up morale with pictures of large museums and important dealers, all fairly slavering to get their fangs into the Fleming collection, but to little avail.  A pall of gloom had settled, and he was forced to concede that he had at last found somebody who had a valid reason to mourn the sudden and violent end of Arnold Rivers.

Dinner finished, he went up to the gunroom and began compiling his list.  He found a yardstick, and thumbtacked it to the edge of the desk to get over-all and barrel lengths, and used a pair of inside calipers and a decimal-inch rule from the workbench to get calibers.  Sticking a sheet of paper into the portable, he began on the wheel locks, leaving spaces to insert the description of the stolen pistols, when recovered.  When he had finished the wheel locks, he began on the snaphaunces, then did the miguelet-locks.  He had begun on the true flintlocks when Walters, who had finished his own dinner, came up to help him.  Rand put the butler to work fetching pistols from the racks, and replacing those he had already listed.  After a while, Dunmore strolled in.

“You say you found Rivers’s body yourself, Colonel Rand?” he asked.