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Canby chauffeur, a wiry, muscular-looking man in livery, had also leaped to the ground. They were joined by the bus driver. All seemed to be staring intently at something just around the short curve in front of us. I could see Thomas Canby craning his long thin neck from the back seat of the limousine. I suppose they expected me to have no natural curiosity. At any rate Chet Keith gave me an impatient glance when I crawled out of the bus and walked toward them.
    “You might as well go back,” he said curtly. “It’s just a rock in the road.”
    “I can see that for myself,” I retorted in a tart voice.
    There was a large boulder lying on the inside of the curve. It seemed to have fallen from the side of the mountain just above, where there was a gaping hole of loosened earth and gravel.
    “We’ll have it out of the way in a jiffy,” murmured the chauffeur, “if you’ll lend me a hand, brother.”
    He glanced at the bus driver, who was scratching his head.
    “Funny what made that rock fall,” he muttered.
    Chet Keith again shrugged his shoulders. “Wouldn’t have been so funny if either of us had hit it going round that curve,” he said.
    I shuddered and glanced away from the sheer drop at the edge of the precipice to our left.
    “You’d think on such a road they’d take precautions against things like this,” I remarked.
    The bus driver was still scratching his head. “That’s what makes it funny,” he said. “They do.”
    The utility magnate spoke for the first time. “Can’t you clear that rock away, Jay?” he asked in a testy voice.
    The chauffeur touched his cap. “Watch me,” he said.
    He and the driver fell to and with considerable heaving and panting shifted the boulder off to the side of the road. Chet Keith did not lend a hand. Instead he climbed up the side of the mountain and stood looking down with a frown at the hole from which the rock had fallen. He was still there when the maroon car went on its way. The bus driver had gone back to his own machine, where he tooted his horn several times to attract our attention. I had not returned to the bus either. I was watching Chet Keith. He gave a start when he saw me staring up at him.
    “Wind must have blown it over,” he said, giving me what I regarded as a distinctly shifty glance.
    “Except that there has been no wind all afternoon,” I replied.
    He frowned and tried to slip something into his pocket which he had picked up from a clump of withered grass at his feet.
    “Accidents will happen,” he murmured.
    “I wouldn’t call it an accident if a cold chisel had been employed to dig a rock loose,” I said with a sniff.
    He looked at me as if he would have enjoyed wringing my neck, but he produced the object which he had attempted to secrete in his pocket without my seeing it. It was a cold chisel. Bits of gravel and clay still clung to its side.
    “It’s probably been lying here for weeks,” he observed in a defiant manner.
    “That’s why it’s all rusty,” I commented with elaborate sarcasm.
    The cold chisel was not rusted. It looked bright and new.
    “You don’t miss much, do you?” inquired Chet Keith.
    This time it was I who reached up and plucked something from a clump of withered grass clinging to the side of the mountain.
    “Not a great deal,” I said and would have pocketed my discovery without another word, but he caught my wrist and held it.
    “A woman!” he exclaimed.
    I nodded. “Looks as if.”
    The object which I was holding was a hairpin, an amber-coloured hairpin made of cheap celluloid.
    “Jees,” he said softly and then grinned. “Any reason why somebody at Lebeau Inn should crave to see you reach a sudden end?”
    I thought of Ella and shook my head. “If I should have been taken down with a mild case of poison ivy it might not have been unwelcome, but” – I took another shuddering glance at the bluff on our other side – “nothing like this.”
    “I wasn’t expecting to be met with a