“Sincerity and earnestness,” he showed his teeth in a sardonic smile as we got to our feet, “are very praiseworthy traits.”
“So I hear,” I growled shortly. “Now let’s take a look at Mr. Exon’s room.”
Gallaway’s wife and the nurse were with the invalid, but I examined the room before I asked the occupants any questions.
It was a large room, with three wide windows, opening over the porch; and two doors, one of which gave to the hall, and the other to the adjoining room, occupied by the nurse. This door stood open, with a green Japanese screen across it; and, I was told, was left that way at night, so that the nurse could hear readily if her patient was restless or if he wanted attention.
A man standing on the slate roof of the porch, I found, could have easily leaned across one of the windowsills (if he did not care to step over it into the room) and fired at the man in the bed. To get from the ground to the porch roof would have required but little effort; and the descent would be still easier—he could slide down the roof, let himself go feet-first over the edge, checking his speed with hands and arms spread out on the slate, and drop down to the gravel drive. No trick at all, either coming or going. The windows were unscreened.
The sick man’s bed stood just beside the connecting doorway between his room and the nurse’s, which, when he was lying down, placed him between the doorway and the window from which the shot had been fired. Outside, within long rifle range, there was no building, tree, or eminence of any character from which the bullet that had been dug out of the doorframe could have been fired.
I turned from the room to the occupants, questioning the invalid first. He had been a rawboned man of considerable size in his health, but now he was wasted and stringy and dead-white. His face was thin and hollow; small beady eyes crowded together against the thin bridge of his nose; his mouth was a colorless gash above a bony projecting chin.
His statement was a marvel of petulant conciseness.
“The shot woke me. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything. I’ve got a million enemies, most of whose names I can’t remember. That’s all I can tell you.”
He jerked this out crossly, turned his face away, closed his eyes, and refused to speak again.
Mrs. Gallaway and the nurse followed me into the latter’s room, where I questioned them. They were of as opposite type as you could find anywhere; and between them there was a certain coolness, an unmistakable hostility which I was able to account for later in the day.
Mrs. Gallaway was perhaps five years older than her husband; dark, strikingly beautiful in a statuesque way, with a worried look in her dark eyes that was particularly noticeable when those eyes rested on her husband. There was no doubt that she was very much in love with him, and the anxiety that showed in her eyes at times—the pains she took to please him in each slight thing during my stay at the Exon house—convinced me that she struggled always with a fear that she would not be able to hold him, that she was about to lose him.
Mrs. Gallaway could add nothing to what her husband had told me. She had been awakened by the shot, had run to her father’s room, had seen nothing—knew nothing—suspected nothing.
The nurse—Barbra Caywood was her name—told the same story, in almost the same words. She had jumped out of bed when awakened by the shot, pushed the screen away from the connecting doorway, and rushed into her patient’s room. She was the first one to arrive there, and she had seen nothing but the old man sitting up in bed, roaring and shaking his feeble fists at the window.
This Barbra Caywood was a girl of twenty-one or two, and just the sort that a man would pick to help him get well. A girl of a little under the average height, with an erect figure wherein slimness and roundness got an even break under the stiff white of her uniform; with soft golden hair above a face that was certainly made to be looked at. But she was businesslike and had an air of efficiency, for all her prettiness.
From the nurse’s room, Gallaway led me to the kitchen, where I questioned the Chinese cook. Gong Lim was a sad-faced Oriental whose ever-present smile somehow made him look more gloomy than ever; and he bowed and smiled and yes-yes’d me from start to finish, and told me nothing.
Adam and Emma Figg—thin and stout, respectively, and both rheumatic—entertained a wide variety of suspicions, directed at the cook and the farm hands, individually and collectively, flitting momentarily from one to the other. They had nothing upon which to base these suspicions, however, except their firm belief that nearly all crimes of violence were committed by foreigners; which, while enough for them, didn’t satisfy me.
The farm hands—two smiling middle-aged and heavily mustached Italians, and a soft-eyed Mexican youth—I found in one of the fields. I talked to them for nearly two hours, and I left with a reasonable amount of assurance that neither of the three had had any part in the shooting.
II
Dr. Rench had just come down from a visit to his patient when Gallaway and I returned from the fields. He was a little wizened old man with mild manners and eyes, and a wonderful growth of hair on head, brows, cheeks, lips, chin, and nostrils.
The excitement, he said, had retarded Exon’s recovery somewhat, but he did not think the setback would be serious. The invalid’s temperature had gone up a little, but he seemed to be improving now.
I followed Dr. Rench out to his machine after he left the others, for a few questions I wanted to put to him in privacy;
