Returning from my talk with the doctor, I came upon Hilary Gallaway and the nurse in the hall, near the foot of the stairs. His arm was resting lightly across her shoulders, and he was smiling down at her. Just as I came through the door, she twisted away, so that his arm slid off, laughed elfishly up into his face, and went on up the stairs.
I did not know whether she had seen me approaching before she eluded the encircling arm or not; nor did I know how long the arm had been there; and both of those questions would make a difference in how their positions were to be construed.
Hilary Gallaway was certainly not a man to allow a girl as pretty as the nurse to lack attention, and he was just as certainly attractive enough in himself to make his advances not too unflattering. Nor did Barbra Caywood impress me as being a girl who would dislike his admiration. But, at that, it was more than likely that there was nothing very serious between them; nothing more than a playful sort of flirtation.
But, no matter what the situation might be in that quarter, it didn’t have any direct bearing upon the shooting—none that I could see, anyway. But I understood now the strained relations between the nurse and Gallaway’s wife.
Gallaway was grinning quizzically at me while I was chasing these thoughts around in my head.
“Nobody’s safe with a detective around,” he complained.
I grinned back at him. That was the only sort of an answer you could give this bird.
After dinner, Gallaway drove me to Knownburg in his roadster, and set me down on the doorstep of the deputy sheriff’s house. He offered to drive me back to the Exon house when I had finished my investigations in town, but I did not know how long those investigations would take, so I told him I would hire a car when I was ready to return.
Shand, the deputy sheriff, was a big, slow-spoken, slow-thinking, blond man of thirty or so—just the type best fitted for a deputy sheriff job in a San Joaquin County town—and he balanced a fat blond child on each knee while he talked to me.
“I went out to Exon’s as soon as Gallaway called me up,” he said. “About four-thirty in the morning, I reckon it was when I got there. I didn’t find nothing. There weren’t no marks on the porch roof, but that don’t mean nothing. I tried climbing up and down it myself, and I didn’t leave no marks neither. The ground around the house is too firm for footprints to be followed. I found a few, but they didn’t lead nowhere; and everybody had run all over the place before I got there, so I couldn’t tell who they belonged to.
“Far’s I can learn, there ain’t been no suspicious characters in the neighborhood lately. The only folks around here who have got any grudge against the old man are the Deemses—Exon beat ’em in a lawsuit a couple years back—but all of them—the father and both the boys—were at home when the shooting was done.”
“How long has Exon been living here?”
“Four—five years, I reckon. Came in 1918 or ’19.”
“Nothing at all to work on, then?”
He shifted one of the kids around to keep from having an eye jabbed by a stubby finger, and shook his head.
“Nothing I know about.”
“What do you know about the Exon family?” I asked.
Shand scratched his head thoughtfully and frowned.
“I reckon it’s Hilary Gallaway you’re meaning,” he said slowly. “I thought of that. The Gallaways showed up here a couple of years after her father had bought the place, and Hilary seems to spend most of his evenings up in Ady’s back room, teaching the boys how to play poker. I hear he’s fitted to teach them a lot. I don’t know, myself. Ady runs a quiet game, so I let ’em alone. But naturally I don’t never set in, myself. I just stay away so I won’t see nothing.
“Outside of being a card-hound, and drinking pretty heavy, and making a lot of trips to the city, where he’s supposed to have a girl on the string, I don’t know nothing much about Hilary. But it’s no secret that him and the old man don’t hit it off together very well. And then Hilary’s room is just across the hall from Exon’s, and their windows open out on the porch roof just a little apart. But I don’t know—”
Shand confirmed what Gallaway had told about the bullet being .38-caliber; about the absence of any pistol of that caliber on the premises; and about the lack of any reason for suspecting the farm hands or servants.
I put in the next couple hours talking to whomever I could find to talk to in Knownburg; and I learned nothing worth putting down on paper. Then I got a car and driver from the garage, and was driven out to Exon’s.
Gallaway had not yet returned from town. His wife and Barbra Caywood were just about to sit down to a light luncheon before retiring, so I joined them. Exon, the nurse, said, was asleep, and had spent a quiet evening. We talked for a while—until about half-past twelve—and then went to our rooms.
My room was next to the nurse’s, on the same side of the hall that divided the second story in half. I sat down and wrote my report for the day, smoked a cigar, and then—the house being quiet by this time—put a gun and a flashlight in my pockets,
