Anderson gave an involuntary start, then his eyes lit up with grim mirth.

“Would you mind putting that away?” he said suavely.  “I like to get in the papers as much as anybody, but I don’t want to have them say—­omit flowers.”

Miss Cornelia gave him a glare of offended pride, but he endured it with such quiet equanimity that she merely replaced the revolver in the drawer, with a hurt expression, and waited for him to open the next topic of conversation.

He finished his preliminary survey of the room and returned to her.

“Now you say you don’t think anybody has got upstairs yet?” he queried.

Miss Cornelia regarded the alcove stairs.

“I think not.  I’m a very light sleeper, especially since the papers have been so full of the exploits of this criminal they call the Bat.  He’s in them again tonight.”  She nodded toward the evening paper.

The detective smiled faintly.

“Yes, he’s contrived to surround himself with such an air of mystery that it verges on the supernatural—­or seems that way to newspapermen.”

“I confess,” admitted Miss Cornelia, “I’ve thought of him in this connection.”  She looked at Anderson to see how he would take the suggestion but the latter merely smiled again, this time more broadly.

“That’s going rather a long way for a theory,” he said.  “And the Bat is not in the habit of giving warnings.”

“Nevertheless,” she insisted, “somebody has been trying to get into this house, night after night.”

Anderson seemed to be revolving a theory in his mind.

“Any liquor stored here?” he asked.

Miss Cornelia nodded.  “Yes.”

“What?”

Miss Cornelia beamed at him maliciously.  “Eleven bottles of home-made elderberry wine.”

“You’re safe.”  The detective smiled ruefully.  He picked up the evening paper, glanced at it, shook his head.  “I’d forget the Bat in all this.  You can always tell when the Bat has had anything to do with a crime.  When he’s through, he signs his name to it.”

Miss Cornelia sat bolt upright.  “His name?  I thought nobody knew his name?”

The detective made a little gesture of apology.  “That was a figure of speech.  The newspapers named him the Bat because he moved with incredible rapidity, always at night, and by signing his name I mean he leaves the symbol of his identity—­the Bat, which can see in the dark.”

“I wish I could,” said Miss Cornelia, striving to seem unimpressed.  “These country lights are always going out.”

Anderson’s face grew stern.  “Sometimes he draws the outline of a bat at the scene of the crime.  Once, in some way, he got hold of a real bat, and nailed it to the wall.”

Dale, listening, could not repress a shudder at the gruesome picture —­and Miss Cornelia’s hands gave an involuntary twitch as her knitting needles clicked together.  Anderson seemed by no means unconscious of the effect he had created.