“Tony!” she gasped. “Is he—is he hurt?”

“It’s not Tony, Maud,” I called. “It’s Evans. He’s all right. He fell in the playhouse and hurt his head. He’s gone to the hospital. It isn’t serious.”

“What are the police doing here?” she inquired, her color slowly coming back.

“I suppose I got excited. I called them.”

She seemed satisfied with that. She went back to her room to call the hospital, and I took the men to the playhouse. Jim was highly interested, especially when I told him about Evans’s trousers.

“His trousers?” he said incredulously. “You mean they were gone?”

“They were.”

“Carry anything in them?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t know, unless it was keys. He had a lot of them, to the house and all the buildings on the place.”

“You didn’t see them when you found him?”

“I don’t remember them.”

“How did he carry them?”

“On a chain.”

“He might have had the chain fastened to him somewhere. They were pretty important. This house must have a million dollars’ worth of loot in it. Did he have a gun?”

“I suppose he did. I never saw it.”

“You didn’t see it tonight?”

“No. But listen, Jim. There has been someone around. I saw him looking in the playhouse window the night of the party in June, and last Monday Margery Stoddard told me there had been someone lurking around the Farm.”

But he was unimpressed.

“Somebody after Stoddard’s chickens,” he said, and went to the pool, hot on the trail of Evans’s gun. It was not there, and they found nothing else of importance in the playhouse that night; only the bloodstains on the tile, and Evans’s old soft hat still in the water. Jim said it had probably saved his skull if not his life, and with the aid of a golf club managed to fish it out. But before he went that night he had examined every inch of the place: game room, living room, guest bedrooms, and the tennis court.

He came back to the house before he left. “Nothing there,” he said. “But the playhouse is something, isn’t it? Never realized before how big it is. Funny what money will do. I’ll bet you had more fun out of that two-by-four you used to have in the back yard than the Wainwrights ever get out of this.”

I was instantly on the defensive. “They don’t use it much, but their friends do.”

He gave me a quick look. “Like that, is it?” he said. “Well, I say it’s a show-off place, and to hell with it.”

Before he left he said he was putting a police officer in Evans’s place to guard the house, and that tomorrow he would drain the pool. The gun might still be in it. But it was to be a long time before Evans’s gun was found.

I told Maud some of the truth that night before I went to bed. She looked worried, so I did not tell her about the keys and the missing gun. Although she knew now that Evans had been attacked, the news she had had was reassuring. He had a bad concussion but no fracture, and Tony was on the way home. Roger had gone into her room with me, and I was relieved to see that someone had washed off the stains. She asked me to leave the dog in her room when I left, and for the first time I realized that she was uneasy.