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His .38-special, in its shoulder-holster, was lying on the dresser; he had not bothered putting it on when he had gone to see Rivers the morning before, and it had lain there all the previous day. He distinctly remembered having moved it, shortly after dinner, when he had gone to his room for some notes he had made on the collection.
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.
Jerking out the changeling .38-special, he whirled and ran around the left side of the house, arriving at the rear in time to see Gwinnett standing on a boardwalk between the house and the stable-garage behind, with his hands raised. There was a fresh bullet-scar on the boardwalk at his feet. Ritter was covering him from the corner of the house with the .380 Beretta.
"Well, I have a Colt .38-special," he said, "but you know, I belong to this Auxiliary Police outfit. If I were called out for duty, this evening, I'd need it. How soon could you bring it back?" Something clicked in Allan Hartley's mind. He remembered, now, what that incident had been. He knew, too, what he had to do. "Dad, aren't there some cartridges left for the Luger?" he asked.
"Not till Umholtz made one," Gresham replied. "Rivers sold it to," he named a moving-picture bigshot "for twenty-five hundred dollars. His story was that he picked it up in Mexico, in 1938; traded a .38-special to some halfbreed goat-herder for it." "This fellow who bought it, now; did he see Belden and Haven's Colt book, when it came out in 1940?"
He handloaded for his .38-special, and like all advanced cases of handloading-fever, he was religiously fanatical about uniformity of bullet weights and dimensions. Unlike most handloaders, he had available the instruments to secure such uniformity. "Those bullets are as nearly alike as different objects can be," Kato said.
MacLeod hung up and straightened, feeling under his packet for his .38-special. "That's it, boys," he said. "Lowiewski. Come on." "Hah!" Alex Unpronounceable had his gun out and was checking the cylinder. He spoke briefly in description of the Polish mathematician's ancestry, physical characteristics, and probable post-mortem destination.
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