“As you said just now,” said Vandam grimly, “there’s no shot from down there could hit him, even if there was a shot in the gun. But even if he was hit with a bullet he wouldn’t have just burst like a bubble.”
The secretary, who was paler than ever, glanced irritably at the bilious visage of the millionaire.
“What’s got you started on those morbid notions? Who’s talking about bullets and bubbles? Why shouldn’t he be alive?”
“Why not indeed?” replied Vandam smoothly. “If you’ll tell me where he is, I’ll tell you how he got there.”
After a pause the secretary muttered, rather sulkily, “I suppose you’re right. We’re right up against the very thing we were talking about. It’d be a queer thing if you or I ever came to think there was anything in cursing. But who could have harmed Wynd shut up in here?”
Mr. Alboin, of Oklahoma, had been standing rather astraddle in the middle of the room, his white, hairy halo as well as his round eyes seeming to radiate astonishment. At this point he said, abstractedly, with something of the irrelevant impudence of an enfant terrible:
“You didn’t cotton to him much, did you, Mr. Vandam?”
Mr. Vandam’s long yellow face seemed to grow longer as it grew more sinister, while he smiled and answered quietly:
“If it comes to these coincidences, it was you, I think, who said that a wind from the West would blow away our big men like thistledown.”
“I know I said it would,” said the Westerner, with candour; “but all the same, how the devil could it?”
The silence was broken by Fenner saying with an abruptness amounting to violence:
“There’s only one thing to say about this affair. It simply hasn’t happened. It can’t have happened.”
“Oh, yes,” said Father Brown out of the corner; “it has happened all right.”
They all jumped; for the truth was they had all forgotten the insignificant little man who had originally induced them to open the door. And the recovery of memory went with a sharp reversal of mood; it came back to them with a rush that they had all dismissed him as a superstitious dreamer for even hinting at the very thing that had since happened before their eyes.
“Snakes!” cried the impetuous Westerner, like one speaking before he could stop himself. “Suppose there were something in it, after all!”
“I must confess,” said Fenner, frowning at the table, “that his reverence’s anticipations were apparently well founded. I don’t know whether he has anything else to tell us.”
“He might possibly tell us,” said Vandam, sardonically, “what the devil we are to do now.”
The little priest seemed to accept the position in a modest, but matter-of-fact manner. “The only thing I can think of,” he said, “is first to tell the authorities of this place, and then to see if there were any more traces of my man who let off the pistol. He vanished round the other end of the Crescent where the little garden is. There are seats there, and it’s a favourite place for tramps.”
Direct consultations with the headquarters of the hotel, leading to indirect consultations with the authorities of the police, occupied them for a considerable time; and it was already nightfall when they went out under the long, classical curve of the colonnade. The crescent looked as cold and hollow as the moon after which it was named, and the moon itself was rising luminous but spectral, behind the black treetops when they turned the corner by the little public garden. Night veiled much of what was merely urban and artificial about the place; and as they melted into the shadows of the trees they had a strange feeling of having suddenly travelled many hundred miles from their homes. When they had walked in silence for a little, Alboin, who had something elemental about him, suddenly exploded.
“I give up,” he cried; “I hand in my checks. I never thought I should come to such things; but what happens when the things come to you? I beg your pardon, Father Brown; I reckon I’ll just come across, so far as you and your fairytales are concerned. After this, it’s me for the fairytales. Why, you said yourself, Mr. Vandam, that you’re an atheist and only believe what you see. Well, what was it you did see? Or rather, what was it you didn’t see?”
“I know,” said Vandam and nodded in a gloomy fashion.
“Oh, it’s partly all this moon and trees that get on one’s nerves,” said Fenner obstinately. “Trees always look queer by moonlight, with their branches crawling about. Look at that—”
“Yes,” said Father Brown, standing still and peering at the moon through a tangle of trees. “That’s a very queer branch up there.”
When he spoke again he only said:
“I thought it was a broken branch.”
But this time there was a catch in his voice that
