“Whew! This is a suffocating job! If it’s like this now it’ll be fairly stifling on the lee side in half an hour.”
Stenness said nothing. Wendover, who was not in the secret of the secretary’s love affairs, could not understand why Stenness looked almost as grim as Sir Clinton. The Squire woke up all at once to the fact that he ought to be elsewhere; and he made his way to his appointed post.
As he reached it, the report of the sporting rifle came from the clump of rhododendrons.
“It’s all right,” he heard Arthur’s voice raised in a shouted explanation. “I saw him at the gate, trying to climb over; so I let him have it above his head. That scared him. He’s gone away now, back into the Maze. He’s got a pistol in his hand.”
Almost at once they heard Sir Clinton’s shotgun fired.
“Trying the entrances one by one to see if he can slip out,” commented Arthur, with a certain malicious glee in his tone.
Some minutes passed, then, to Wendover’s astonishment, he heard the crack of the automatic pistol, and a bullet sang past him.
“Not much sign of surrender about that,” he admitted, as he got hurriedly under cover. “The beggar must have marked me down and tried a long shot through the hedge.”
Time flowed slowly on. Occasionally, with a slight change in the faint wind, some of the sulphur fumes drifted down to Wendover and caught his lungs.
“It must be pretty thick in the Maze, if a mere whiff of it gives one gyp like that,” he reflected. “The beggar must be half-dead with the fumes by this time, for he gets the full blast of it.”
Another interval of quietness gave Wendover time to think over the situation. Up to that point, he had gone through the business almost without trying to bring the morning’s work into touch with normal life. The whole affair had had an impersonal quality; for from start to finish he had not set eyes on the man they were hunting. But that peculiarity had enhanced the rather unreal character of the adventure, lending it a touch of the fantastic in his mind. And the extraordinarily methodical procedure which had governed the transactions helped in some way to accentuate his feelings. It had all been as logical as a nightmare seems to be while one lives through it.
Yet another shotgun report—from the sulphur station this time—showed that the murderer was still making attempts to slip away. After that, another period elapsed without any further alarms. The sulphur fumes were now so dense that Wendover, though out of the main line of drift, was becoming seriously troubled by them. He could hear Arthur coughing continuously in the rhododendron clump; but the muzzle of the rifle was never lowered even in the worst paroxysm. Quite obviously Arthur meant to miss no chance of squaring the account for Sylvia.
As that thought crossed his mind, Wendover seemed to see the whole Whistlefield case in a fresh light. Instead of the mysterious murderer lurking behind green walls of the Maze, his mental vision threw up a picture of the real personality, Ernest Shandon. He could see him with his mind’s eye wandering along the paths of the Maze, choking, desperate, seeking for some outlet to safety and beaten back each time by the warning of the guns. And minute by minute the poison-cloud was growing denser over his place of refuge, bringing nearer the inevitable end of the drama.
And as this picture forced itself upon Wendover, he began to feel the nightmare growing more intense. It seemed almost incredible that Ernest Shandon, a creature despised by everyone for his shiftlessness and futility, could have planned and carried through this murderous work. Wendover, since he had been brought into intimate contact with Ernest, had felt nothing but boredom and derision. The man’s dullness, his cowardice, his selfishness, had all impressed themselves strongly on the Squire; and had produced a definite feeling of repulsion and contempt. Now he had to readjust his ideas. The dullness must have been merely an exaggeration; the cowardice had been a sham, since the murderer had no reason to fear anything for his own skin; and the selfishness—why, that was only a manifestation of callousness without which no planned murder could be carried through. Instead of the insignificant figure which he had hitherto encountered, Wendover began to see instead a fresh personality hidden behind the mask: something going coldly to its deadly work, unrestrained by any normal feelings of humanity or even kinship, a modern Minotaur in the labyrinth of the Maze.
Almost appalled by the vividness of the portrait which his mind had conjured up, Wendover stared across the grass at the wall of greenery which concealed from his gaze the actual form of the murderer. Then, as he gazed, there came once more the report of the automatic pistol—a single shot.
And once more the waiting recommenced, unbroken by any incident.
At last Sir Clinton appeared, with his gun at the trail, round the corner of the Maze. He signalled to Wendover and Arthur to rejoin him.
“I think that’s the end of the business,” he said with stern satisfaction, as they came up. “If I’m not much mistaken, that last shot was for himself. The game was up; and he must have been half-dead with the fumes by now.”
He turned to Arthur.
“Do you see now why I wouldn’t let you touch him? If you had, then we’d have had all the bother of a trial for manslaughter at the least; and I don’t guarantee that things would have gone smoothly in it. As it is, he’s suicided; and no one’s to blame but himself. And if you wanted to put the screw on him, could you have given it a harder turn than this?”
He pointed towards the sulphur station.
Arthur saw the point.
“I expect you’re right,” he admitted, coughing as a fresh cloud of fumes drifted down upon them.
