Stalemate

Front matter

Stalemate

By Robert Welles Ritchie Author of “The Saxons,” “Wings of the Wind," Etc.

SAPPHIRES are the primordial stones. They hold in their depths the glint of a glacier’s heart, a thousand feet from sunlight; theirs the abysmal blue of that first sea which was before a Fabricator said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.” The chill of their birth in the dark laboratories of earth stays with them after they have been fashioned for the eye of woman.

Chapter II

On the Monday set as the time limit for its completion, Henri, the little artificer of jewels, set the finished collar side by side with the model furnished by Mrs; Miles. Studiously he compared the two glittering wonders, detail by detail, then nodded his head. His craftsman’s soul was satisfied.

But not that other sly and predatory instinct which dwelt in the same soul chamber, and which, by its activities,had commended Henri, to membership in the select circle of the Incomparables, back in Paris, five years before. A very irregular detail of artificing had yet to be accomplished before Henri should turn over the completed collar and the model. So irregular it was, in fact, that his squinting eyes peered like a weasel's around the corner of his office workroom and assured him there were no observers before he undertook it. A half hour later, he trotted into Mr. Sutton's office with two jewel cases—the Russia-leather one, marked “J. C. M." and a plain pigskin casket,-such as the firm supplied for outgoing purchases of value.

“A cracking job," was the vehement approval voiced a few hours afterward by Edgerton Miles, when he opened the two cases in Sutton’s office and compared the radiant twin jewels. “Comes high, of course, but got to be done.” The senior partner, privy to the Wall Street pirate’s secret motive for so expensive a deceit, and mildly thrilled in sympathy with his customer’s stratagem, received a check for fifty thousand dollars with the air of a fellow conspirator. Edgerton Miles dropped down in the elevator to his limousine, with the two jewel cases, one in each capacious pocket of his greatcoat.

Before he went to his home to deliver to the official lady of his heart her sapphire collar, Edgerton Miles directed his chauffeur to take him elsewhere. In the discreet privacy of soft lamplight, he opened the pigskin case and revealed to a cooing and platonic Helen the fulfillment of a promise more extravagant than any made by perfidious Paris.

Mrs. Edgerton Miles’ dinner that evening was the perfection of an astute hostess’ entertainment. Six guests sat down to a wonderland of fern, blossoms, damask, and silver, wherein the succession of courses was but incidental magic and the procession of the vintage a lure to visioning. Color there was on the table, but still more brilliant color made an aura of changing lights above the napery; this from jewels about white necks and on slim fingers. Dazzling the diamond luster, and glowing hot the heart of rubies, but from the head of the table, where sat the hostess, the cold blue flames of sapphires outshone them all. Strand on strand about Mrs. Miles’ round, firm neck, lay the sapphires of the famous collar, diamonds glinting in thin pin points among the interstices of the supporting chains.

Gaspard Detournelles, Viscount Allaire, who had the place at the hostess’ right, and whose attention was frantically bid for by a fluffy-headed near-débutante and title worshiper at the plate beyond, counted that opportunity precious which gave his eyes a feast on the blue glory of the gems just beyond his shoulder. Diplomatically he stood off the débutante with clever verbal fencing, in order the better to bring to bear upon Mrs. Miles the light batteries of his table talk. Detournelles outdid his own clever self in the matter of airy banter and insidious flattery. With consummate grace, he managed to cut out for his own the almost undivided attentions of the lady with the sapphires. Edgerton Miles, from the opposite end of the table, observed with a sardonic eye the success of the graceful Frenchman, and wished him luck.

When it came time to adjourn to the opera, Detournelles was the one to hand Mrs. Miles into her limousine, and was graciously invited to fill the seat beside her. A few minutes later, they were seated, with the rest of the party, in the Miles section of that glittering half circle of puissance, most coveted display space in America—the horseshoe of the Metropolitan. Musky darkness about them and on the great stage; far down in the well of blackness, hot love of Egypt swept to tragedy under nodding palms.

Detournelles had a seat directly behind his hostess. Back of him, the curtains. So close the great stones of the collar that, under fugitive tendrils of hair, he could see their squared surfaces, now blue-black in the dusk of the box.

The opera came to the final intermission before the last act plumbs the depths of tragic dissonances. With Miles and the other gentlemen of the party, Detournelles left the box for the herding place of the Metropolitan’s bored masculine contingent—the lounge. As he was passing the foyer, the Frenchman’s quick eye leaped for an instant to a face in the crowd and then away. A most unusual and striking face it was: Dead white, under a high, white pompadour of hair, and with a thin white goatee, wire-waited, shooting out from the heel of the chin; hollowed below the jaw sockets, and with cavernous shadows marking the position of the eyes. With all the evidences of premature age, and even decrepitude, about the features, there was indomitable spirit in the carriage of head and shoulders and the cold, searching gaze from the sunken eyes. A button of the Legion of Honor in the lapel of the black evening coat confirmed the sharp impression of the man's foreign birth.

His eyes met those of Detournelles, as they passed in the foyer; perhaps there was just an instant’s swift communication in that sharp glance, but none would have been aware of it save the one for whom the glance was meant. A short smoke, and the gentlemen of the Miles party returned to the box.

When the curtain went up, Detournelles was in his chair behind Mrs. Miles, one arm thrown over the back of the hostess’ chair. He had removed the white glove from his right hand.

The sweep of tragedy, with its terrible interpretation by the snarling brasses and wailing flutes, had even the blasé spectators of the horseshoe spellbound—all save Gaspard Detournelles. His eyes were not for the stage, but for the complex trickery of a jeweled collar’s hasp. In the light touch of his trained fingers lay art as high as that of Massenet. The burnished surfaces of jewels, now blue, now black, winked invitation.

The final curtain dropped to the noise of a great sigh over all the house. Lights went up. There was the rustle and silken sweep of wraps gathered from near;by chairs. Detournelles, quick to serve, lifted Mrs. Miles’ cloak of silk and lace from the back of her chair and threw it over her shoulders. He boggled the job, and murmured apology for his clumsiness; for he had the delicate confection of draper’s art turned wrong side out; and, while Mrs. Miles laughed ripplingly at a man's ignorance, the gallant rectified his mistake. Then he stepped out of the box ahead of the others.

The gentleman with the white hair and Legion of Honor button, whom Detournelles had seen in the foyer during the final intermission, stumbled lightly against the latter’s shoulder in missing a step to the level behind the boxes. For the fraction of an instant his weight was on the younger man's shoulder; then the white-haired gentleman begged pardon and passed swiftly down the alley toward the grand staircase. Detournelles turned to take Mrs. Miles’ arm. He was murmuring bits of criticism and commendation of the performance just over.

All the gold and jewels of the horseshoe were flowing in a broad stream down the staircase to the foyer, and the bedlam of the carriage starters on the curb beyond, when Mrs. Miles put a gloved hand to her throat and gave a startled cry, half-strangled gasp. The women of her party crowded close about her, questioning. Mutely she pointed to her throat, white, and unadorned.

A little swirl in the foyer, sharp questions passed over heads, hurried exit from the office of the management, press agent, and head detective. Mrs. Miles tried to hurry on to the sidewalk, shaking her head mutely at the interrogations of women crowding about her. But Edgerton Miles would not let her dodge publicity. He seized her arm and brought her up sharply.

“Look-a-here, Juliana! You can’t duck home this way!” he chided. “If you’ve been robbed, you got to stick around a while, and give the house detectives here a description of the thing.”

“No, no, Edgerton! It's nothing—nothing, I tell you!” Mrs. Miles’ voice shook with nascent hysteria. “I’ll explain to you when we get home. Come! The motors are waiting.”

“Nothing! A fifty-thousand-dollar collar nothing? You’re talking nonsense, Juliana!"

A reporter began to worm his way through the crowd. He put a question, and Mrs. Miles fled for refuge to the dressing room. The feminine contingent of her box party, all at sea, and knowing not what to do in the painful circumstances, followed her into retirement. Miles, his first surprise giving way to hot anger, began, in a loud voice, to give the opera management an appraisement both of the stolen jewels and of the double-riveted son of Sheol who had lifted them. While attendants hurried to search every inch of the Miles box with electric torches, the manager of the house, desirous of soft-pedaling so painful an incident, gently insinuated Miles and his male guests into the office. There they ranged themselves in a fidgety group, each man casting dubious glances at his neighbor, all save Miles suffering acute mortification. As for the evening’s host, he raged without let.

The office door opened, and Mrs. Miles, in full possession_of her chilling calm, stood there.

“Edgerton, if you'll calm yourself, and conduct our guests out to the motors, I think we need stay here no longer. I have something to say to you which will2”

“There’s nothing for you to say at this time, Juliana,” the husband snapped. “Take the women home, if you like, but we stay here for a while.”

Mrs. Edgerton Miles was not one to make a scene to carry a point—not in public, at least. She turned to Detournelles:

“Viscount, will you be so good as to escort me to my motor?" Detournelles bowed, and stepped toward the door.

“No, you don’t!” Miles jumped nimbly between his wife and his guest, facing the man with a nasty snarl on his lips. “No, you don't, Viscount Allaire! Your place is in this room with the rest of us until we clean up this little matter of the robbery.”

Mrs. Miles withered her husband with a glance, and closed the door. Detournelles bowed punctiliously toward his host and stepped back to his place. A sense of strain in the green-lit office gripped every man there. It was increased when the attendants returned to report that there was no trace of the missing collar in the box, nor in the alley leading to the stairs.

“Well,” Miles began, glowering from face to face of his three guests, “well, maybe it's not the proper thing in society, and it may look sort of rough, but there's only one thing to do in a case like this, and that2"

Detournelles was the first to anticipate his meaning. With a quiet smile, he shook himself out of his evening coat, passed it to the head detective, then stood in his waistcoat, arms up, to be searched.

“M’sieur Miles is admirably direct—though quite correct,” he murmured. “In this America, fifty thousand dollars excuses—all.”

The detective, at a nod from Miles, perfunctorily patted Detournelles’ pockets, explored the evening coat and returned it to him. The other two men were similarly treated. When the operation was finished, Miles, vaguely sensing the weight of insult he had forced upon his guests, essayed apology:

“Of course, gentlemen, I may have acted hastily, but you won’t hold it against me, I hope.”

“My dear M'sieur Miles,” Detournelles was quick to take him up, “it is my regret that you did not find the valuable jewel on my person, and so have an end to your very natural distress.”

Chapter III

Falling barometer, with violent winds increasing to tornado velocity, would have been a conservative forecast of Edgerton Miles’ mental weather the day following the theft of the sapphire collar. The clerks of his office staff, the pert stenographer, and even the juvenile buccaneer who held down the post of office Mercury, all sought their cyclone cellars with perfect unanimity of impulse. Miles, teetering in his swivel chair, before an accumulation of business in his letter basket which he could not bring himself to attack, reviewed a gloomy situation.

First, a fifty-thousand-dollar collar was gone—the major gear of the whole Miles machine of social flash missing. Secondly, he was in very bad with Mrs. Miles—a more or less constantly recurring situation, but this time aggravated because he knew he had invited punishment by his boorish conduct in the Metropolitan office. His lady wife had not spoken to him since the incident, and there was every promise of an indefinite taboo on conversation between them. The capstone of woe—to throw a crumb of credit to a discreditable citizen—was the reflection that only the day before he had sent the mate to the stolen sapphire collar to a greedy bit of fluff who had made a monkey of him. The fluff had a sapphire collar and Edgerton Miles’ wife had none.

The office boy tiptoed into Miles’ private growling place and shoved a card under his employer’s eye. Miles read the name, and grunted, “Show him in.” The boy ushered into the presence Roger Boylan, of Boylan’s Confidential Agency.

Now Roger Boylan was known to certain lawyers of high clientele as a detective without any frills. He had no doctor to trail him on cases and ask fool questions, nor did he carry concealed about his person a five-foot instrument for recording the blood pressure of suspects under a “third degree.” He always refused to be all that hero detectives are, possibly because he wanted to succeed in his business, which was detecting. No piercing eye nor gaunt, nervous frame was Boylan’s. He was well upholstered, had an apple-dumpling face, with no strong points to it whatever, dressed and looked the part of, say, the owner of a hardware store in a town of ten thousand. What he did possess unqualifiedly was a reputation for shrewd work, a reputation established with lawyers who had hired him on delicate tasks. One of these, Miles’ own counsel, had recommended Roger Boylan to Miles over the phone and arranged this meeting.

The grouchy stock manipulator acknowledged Boylan’s greeting with scant courtesy and indicated a chair. He plunged to the core of the interview without preliminaries:

“Last night my wife was robbed of a sapphire dewdab worth fifty thousand dollars, between the first act and final curtain, at the Metropolitan. Can you get it back for me?"

“I never make promises,” the detective answered, the wrinkles of a smile clustering about the corners of his blue eyes. “Why not tell me the circumstances, then I may be able to judge of the case.”

“Well, I haven’t told the police, because they'll make a brass-band parade about it,” Miles grunted, “and I don’t want you to raise a hullabaloo, either—no pictures of yourself or of Mrs. Miles in the papers, and all that sort of stuff. Huh?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Miles,” Boylan cut him off. “I may not take the case at all. It depends upon whether I think I can earn my fee. Now. if you don't mind, describe this valuable jewel. Tell me the circumstances of your visit to the Metropolitan, and just when Mrs. Miles missed her sapphires.”

Miles, his bluster blunted by the other’s hint of indifference, came down to essentials. He gave a description of the collar, glaringly masculine in its inadequacies, enumerated the names and social position of the box guests of the night before, so far as he was able—he knew next to nothing about his wife's friends, as a matter of fact-and recited the incident of the search in the office of the Metropolitan management.

“You saw the collar about Mrs. Miles’ throat after you had taken your seat in the box?" the detective inquired.

“Sure!” Miles assented gustily.

“Did any of your guests leave the box before the end of the opera?”

“Huh? Oh, yes, the men and I went down to the lounge for a smoke before the last act.”

“When you returned to the box, did you notice whether Mrs. Miles still had her collar?"

“I don't know. I guess the curtain was up when we got back, and I couldn't see.”

“Who sat nearest to your wife, if you remember?”

“Why, that French viscount fellow who'd been playing poodle dog to her all evening.” Miles made no attempt to hide his dislike for Detournelles, Viscount Allaire. It was the inherent dislike of a social blunderer for a polished squire of dames.

“Tell me something more about this Detournelles," Boylan was saying, when interruption, violent as it was unexpected, burst upon them. First, confusion sounding from the main office beyond the partition, a woman’s shrill voice crackling with anger; then the door opened with a catapult suddenness, and a woman—a handsome and furious creature, swathed in furs-flounced into Miles’ private office. The evil genius of that office nearly tipped over with his chair at the sight. With a long stride, the invader was at his desk. She slammed down upon it a pigskin jewel case with such violence that the cover jarred open, and indigo lights leaped from a sapphire collar reposing inside.

“I might have known you'd play the cheap skate, Edgerton Miles! I ought to have expected nothing better from a four-flusher like you!” Her voice rasped like a dull saw, and the look in her eyes was deadly.

“Say, look-a-here!" Miles pulled himself back to stability with hands clawing at the edge of his desk. “Who let you in? Didn’t I tell you—never to come down here? What’s all this2"

“Do you want to know what this is?" The flushed vixen swept a scornful finger toward the sheaf of blue lights in the jewel case. “Well, I’ll tell you, because, of course, you don’t know: This is a neat bundle of paste junk—a fancy package of near-sapphires, worth just five hundred and twenty-five dollars in any department store—sign on them, ‘Take me home for five hundred and twenty—five dollars.’ This is Edgerton Miles’ gift to a lady!”

Roger Boylan, who took a vivid interest in this little colloquy, unheeded by both, tried hard to keep his face ironed out to a neutral pattern. Developments in the Miles sapphire robbery were interesting him mightily, however. He saw a purple flush mount to Miles’ neck and heavy cheeks, saw him reach out to the jewel case and lift a blue glory therefrom.

“Who told you these were phony stones?" he snapped.

“Oh, the expert up to Tiffany’s; but, of course, he don’t know anything about sapphires!” This with scorching scorn.

“So you went to get the acid test put on ’em, eh?” Miles’ face was a thundercloud now.

“Considering the giver, who wouldn't?" A pretty nose was uptilted to an outrageous angle; one slim, booted foot tapped the floor in a menacing tattoo.

“Ya-ah, consider the giver!” Miles mocked, his lips trembling with rage. “Consider the duffer who separated himself from fifty thousand bucks to get a smile from a fancy yellow dandelion with a heart about as big as a two-spot in a cold deck. I guess you and I just about separate on this corner, paste sapphires or no paste sapphires! On your way!”

The vivid blond head under the fur toque wavered on a stiff neck, drooped a little. Swiftly the light of battle sped from round blue eyes, and a languishing softness filled them. Red lips trembled.

“Edgerton, I’m sorry. Perhaps you did get stung, and didn’t know it. I was so wrought up2”

“Stung is right!" The man’s voice was bitter. “There’s a sign over that ‘This way out’!”

Now complete surrender came, with precipitation on the side. The invader cried copiously into a tiny square of lace. Miles, unheeding, stepped to the door and held it open. One tear-splashed appeal was shot at him through wet lashes, but he was adamant. Suddenly the drooping head snapped back, and a jeweled hand shot out to the pig-skin jewel box on the desk.

“I’ll take these along, anyway,” the lady said, with decision.

“Mistake number two!” Miles snatched up the sapphire collar before she could reach it, and grinned malevolently. “First mistake, bawling me out; second, thinking you can get away with the goods.”

“Give me my property!” She stamped her foot, and made a futile snatch at the jeweled collar.

“Your property—~huh! You just returned this paste junk to me.”

Again tears—genuine article, and backed by whirlwind rage.

“I’ll have my lawyer file suit for my property! You’ll hear from this! You’l1 have to tell a court why you robbed me of my property! I—I2”

“File away, little Bright Eyes. Remember I’ve got a witness—this gentleman here. And good day!”

She was gone in a flurry of fox heads and trailing silk. Miles shut the door and turned to the detective.

“That brings up another point connected with this robbery business,” he said, with a weak smile. “I guess I didn’t quite explain all the details. We’ll now go over and put the screws on that hound Sutton for selling me a phony sapphire collar.”

Fifteen minutes later, the door of the private office of Sutton & Sutton, jewelers, closed on the senior partner, Miles, and Boylan. Miles wasted no preliminaries.

“I've come to get back that check for fifty thousand dollars I gave you yesterday,” he said, cocking a cigar like a threatening bomb at the jeweler.

“Why—Mr. Miles! Nothing unsatisfactory about the collar, I hope?” Sutton’s thin hands fluttered nervously.

“Nothing ’cept the sapphires are paste. Otherwise, it’s a pretty little toy.”

Sutton fell against the side of his desk, white as the alabastine ceiling.

“Impossible, Mr. Miles! Why, I chose every one of the fifty stones in that collar myself! 1’d take my oath on it they’re genuine!”

“Take another look at ’em,” the broker snorted, tossing the woven chains of gems on the jeweler’s desk. With a trembling hand, Sutton fumbled in a drawer for his glass, screwed it in his eye, and picked up the collar. He stepped to the window, where light was strongest, and began turning the ornament slowly under the glass. Boylan, watching him keenly, saw little beads of sweat start above the eyebrows, noted the increased trepidation of the hands.

“Paste!” The admission came with a groan. “Paris paste, every one of them—even the diamond chips!”

“Case of substitution, then?” Boylan put the question tentatively.

“Why, it must be! No other explanation!” the distraught senior partner retorted.

“Look—a-here, Sutton! Did you sell these stones to me for real, or did you know they were paste? No monkey business, now! Straight talk!” Miles launched the question truculently. Flushing to the eyes, Sutton turned upon him.

“You’re insulting!” he managed to ejaculate. “I do not run a pawnshop here!”

The detective, seeing the snarl Miles’ bullheadedness was likely to entail, took a hand:

“Mr. Miles has not told me when he purchased this jeweled collar, Mr. Sutton.”

“It left the shop yesterday, after it had been constructed in duplicate2” Sutton paused, eying Miles. The latter nodded his head glumly. “After it had been constructed in duplicate of one in the possession of Mrs. Miles.”

“Which was stolen at the Metropolitan last night,” Miles cut in. The senior partner sat down hard, his jaw falling. “Stolen?” he murmured.

“Who did the work on this duplicate collar?” Boylan continued.

“The best workman in my shop—a Flemish diamond setter I know only as Henri.”

“And he had Mrs. Miles’ collar to work from all the time?”

“Yes; except, of course, I kept both in the safe at night.”

“Could he have had time to make fifty paste sapphires—of this Paris paste, as you call it—and set them in the duplicate collar?”

“I don't see how he could,” Sutton answered the detective. “He had only six days in which to do the whole job, and he had to work at top speed to finish in that time.”

“Well, couldn’t he have picked up these paste stones somewhere among the trade in New York?” the detective insisted. “They're common enough.”

“No, he could not have done any such thing," Sutton answered, with a slight touch of asperity. “The stones that went into the duplicate collar were matched, stone for stone, with those in Mrs. Miles’ original, or as near matched as I could get them. Some were of uncommon size. Anyway, French paste is not at all common in the trade on this side of the water. Jewelers here all go in for ‘reconstructed’ stones, which are quite different things.”

“That lets your little lady of the furs out,” Boylan said to the stock juggler. The latter, who had followed with difficulty the trend of the detective’s questioning, started with an inquiring “Huh?”

“Why, if an expert diamond setter, familiar with the trade, could not duplicate the stones in Mrs. Miles’ collar by paste ones in six days, Miss—er—Dandelion couldn’t have taken good stones out of her sapphire collar and substituted false ones overnight.” Miles slowly turned this over in his mind and nodded assent. That possibility had not occurred to him.

“I think we will have a talk with this Henri, if you please, Mr. Sutton,” Boylan addressed the senior partner. The latter quickly stepped to a house telephone and spoke a few words into the transmitter. A knock sounded at the door a few minutes later. Sutton admitted the round-shouldered artisan, who stood in his ticking work apron, squinting curiously from face to face. The detective looked up at him out of his bland little eyes and addressed him softly.

“Henri, Mr. Sutton says you’re a good judge of stones. We want your opinion on the value of some sapphires. Look at these”—he handed Henri the collar—“and give us.your opinion on their value.”

With precise movements, Henri stepped to the window, picked up the jeweler’s glass, and, with it in his eye, passed the collar in review, stone by stone. After five minutes he looked up.

“Well, what is your opinion, Henri?” Boylan asked.

“Paste,” the diamond setter answered succinctly.

“What kind of paste would you say?”

“Paris paste.”

“You recognize this sapphire collar, do you not, Henri?”

“Yes.”

“It is one you made just this week, on a rush order.”

“No.”

just that monosyllable, but it straightened the backs of three men. Boylan, perilously near losing his poise, batted his cherubic eyes and bored in again:

“You tell us you didn’t make this sapphire collar here in Sutton & Sutton’s factory?”

“I said that,” was Henri’s grudging answer.

“Well, who do you suppose made it, then?”

“I don’t suppose. I know!” Henri answered, squinting hard at the detective. “Franchon Fréres, of Paris, made this collar, and the number is 9001.”

“How do you know that?” Boylan wanted to know.

“Here is the name and number, engraved very fine on the back of the clasp,” the jewel fashioner returned. “See for yourself.” He passed glass and collar to the detective, who found the inscription, as Henri directed, after considerable search. Sutton was on his feet now, and must needs read the manufacturers name, too. Miles, too bewildered for words, sat fanning himself with a ruler, looking helplessly from Boylan’s face to Sutton’s. The detective hesitated a minute, then put the question:

“If this isn’t the sapphire collar you made, then?”

“It is the one given me to copy from,” the stolid Henri finished.

“My wife wear paste sapphires! You say my wife wears phony jewels?”

Miles was on his feet with a bound, his face purpling with outrage.

“I don’t know you—I don’t know your wife,” Henri retorted, without heat. “I say this is the paste-jewel collar Mr. Sutton give me to make from it a duplicate of genuine stones.”

Chapter IV

For a long minute there was no further word. The sudden twist to the mystery given by Henri’s declaration that the collar given him as a model—Mrs. Miles’ collar—contained paste jewels left the inquisitors temporarily groping. The nimbler wits of the detective were the first to draw significant deduction from the new fact. That Mrs. Miles should be robbed of a sapphire collar on the very night of its return from the jeweler’s was an interesting coincidence; that if substitution of genuine for imitation had not previously been made, the thief would have got paste jewels worth half a thousand dollars instead of real stones valued at fifty thousand, was a still more striking coincidence. Granting as true the jewel setter’s assertion that the collar put into his hands to model from was the false one there on Sutton’s desk, substitution could have been made in no other place than Sutton & Sutton’s factory, unless2

“Mr. Miles”—he turned to the broker, who was still growling to himself over Henri’s revelation—“do I understand that you took both collars away from this office at the same time, and delivered them both the same afternoon—yesterday?"