It stopped him. It also enraged him; his crest rose higher, and the crimson felt seemed to spread and engulf his furious face. He didn’t back as she advanced with the stick; he dropped into a flanking position. Sarah moved the stick accordingly, turned her body slightly, shot the stream of the flashlight across the flooring of the pen.
At once, the light picked up a shiny point in the litter. Sarah bent for it unguardedly and felt lightning strike the outer end of her right eyebrow and flame down in an arc that was an outline of pain to come. It came, stinging savagely from the rake of a claw that had aimed for her eye, but in her hand she held the thing she had reached for.
A child’s toy, one of a set of jacks.
“Those Elwell children,” Bess had said about Long John’s increasing viciousness. “They’re absolute devils.”
A child might have poked a long stick through the mesh in search of the jack, and excited the Silver’s wrath. But—the flashlight enveloped the cock fully now—a child would not have been up late enough, nor been marksman enough, to open the wound just above the Silver’s spur. Blood still flowed from it, cloaking one rosy leg in a fresh vivid red. It explained the Silver’s excitability when he should have been roosting, and his instant attack upon Sarah.
It had been done—the knowledge was queerly slow in seeping through—not very long ago, to judge by all that bleeding. Unless it was a tremendously deep cut, or this was a haemophiliac pheasant, the wound had been inflicted quite recently. Not above a few minutes ago.
How long had she herself stood in the doorway of the barn, knowing that her committal would be complete; how long had it taken her to progress cautiously through the other two pens?
There was someone in the stable with her, as certainly as there had been someone in the room with her on the night of her arrival here. Breath held, body flattened into shadow, attention pinpointed. Brain groping after hers—no, jumping ahead of hers to this ultimate point.
A weight in her chest told Sarah that she had stopped breathing herself. She could not move naturally under this new and certain awareness; she straightened and stared uselessly into the blackness beyond the lip of light. She had been observed all the way—that was what had drummed the atmosphere of the barn into every pore—and her very presence in this pen was damning.
A great deal seemed to depend on pretending not to know she was watched. Her face hot with effort, her body stiff with it, Sarah held the stick mechanically in front of Long John and conducted the search she knew would be unavailing.
She found the open space toward the back of the pen, where the partition met the floor. It had begun as a rat-hole evidently, and in order to stop the tunnel at the source a foot-long strip of planking had been cut and lifted. The plank was not quite back in place. A line of shadow showed its tilt, and there was a sprinkle of decayed wood where the litter had been displaced.
There was no sound at all in the stable. The Silver cock had stopped his menacing grunts and stood at the opposite side of the pen, head thrust watchfully forward, ready to attack at the first opening. Not a feather stirred anywhere, nor a wisp of hay. It was an abnormal silence, as though the fierce concentration of someone standing—where? in the far corner near the medicine chest?—controlled even the two hundred year-old timbers of the barn.
Sarah’s terror was baseless, she knew it even then. She could not be explained away like Nina Trafton, or Peck, or Charles, and as she wasn’t going to find anything at all under the loose plank she didn’t represent any real threat to whoever had killed them. But it was cold comfort. It did nothing to slow the alarming pace of her heart, the rapid thumpings that threatened to run together into one destroying thunderclap thump.
To stand so close to the hands that had pushed Nina’s head against the faucet, thrust Charles through a high window, sent Peck over the bridge and into the brook, battered at Miss Braceway’s dead face—
Sanity as well as safety lay in playing out the rest of this useless game. She could not pretend that she was not suspicious, but she could appear balked and baffled. Sarah knew enough not to bend again before the Silver’s eager amber-eyed stare. With the end of the stick and then the toe of her slipper, she tilted the loose section of plank out of place and shone the flashlight into the space beneath.
Something had lain here very recently, something edible, like leather-bound paper: the crumbled wood and soil wore a surface of blind white questing heads. Sarah saw them without a shudder; she had gone well past the stage of being horrified by worms. She nudged the plank back into position again, and it settled with a dull woody echo that sent the Silver cock flashing forward. Sarah was not quick enough with the stick; his beak stabbed into the calf of her left leg.
Queerly, she didn’t dare to speak or even gasp at the surprising pain. It was as if any sound at all from her would disturb the infinitely delicate balance of the waiting darkness outside the pen. She had to go carefully toward the mesh door, because the Silver, triumphant at having put her to flight, grew bolder at every step. Her calf burned above a crawling trickle of blood, and at a sudden brand-new awareness of something she hadn’t realized before, the deep curving scratch on her face began to blaze.
If the Silver’s wound was as recent as she thought, if her presence with a flashlight had trapped X here, then
