The moon was just coming up, lighting the grounds vaguely, except for the shadows cast by house, outbuildings, and the several clumps of shrubbery. Keeping in these shadows as much as possible, I explored the grounds, finding everything as it should be.
The lack of any evidence to the contrary pointed to last night’s shot having been fired—either accidentally, or in fright at some fancied move of Exon’s—by a burglar, who had been entering the sick man’s room through a window. If that were so, then there wasn’t one chance in a thousand of anything happening tonight. But I felt restless and ill at ease, nevertheless—possibly a result of my failure to learn the least thing of importance all day.
Gallaway’s roadster was not in the garage. He had not returned from Knownburg. Beneath the farm hands’ window I paused until snores in three distinct keys told me that they were all safely abed.
After an hour of this snooping around, I returned to the house. The luminous dial of my watch registered 2:35 as I stopped outside the Chinese cook’s door to listen to his regular breathing.
Upstairs, I paused at the door of the Figgs’ room, until my ear told me that they were sleeping. At Mrs. Gallaway’s door I had to wait several minutes before she sighed and turned in bed. Barbra Caywood was breathing deeply and strongly, with the regularity of a young animal whose sleep is without disturbing dreams. The invalid’s breath came to me with the evenness of slumber and the rasping of the pneumonia convalescent.
This listening tour completed, I returned to my room.
Still feeling wide-awake and restless, I pulled a chair up to a window, and sat looking at the moonlight on the river—which twisted just below the house so as to be visible from this side—smoking another cigar, and turning things over in my mind—to no great advantage.
Outside there was no sound.
Suddenly down the hall came the heavy explosion of a gun being fired indoors!
I threw myself across the room, out into the hall.
A woman’s voice filled the house with its shriek—high, frenzied.
Barbra Caywood’s door was unlocked when I reached it. I slammed it open. By the light of the moonbeams that slanted past her window, I saw her sitting upright in the center of her bed. She wasn’t beautiful now. Her face was distorted, twisted with terror. The scream was just dying in her throat.
All this I got in the flash of time that it took me to put a running foot across her sill.
Then another shot crashed out—in Exon’s room.
The girl’s face jerked up—so abruptly that it seemed her neck must snap—she clutched both hands to her breast—and fell face-down among the bedclothes.
I don’t know whether I went through, over, or around the screen that stood in the connecting doorway. I was circling Exon’s bed. He lay on the floor on his side, facing a window. I jumped over him—leaned out the window.
In the yard that was bright now under the moon, nothing moved. There was no sound of flight.
Presently, while my eyes still searched the surrounding country, the farm hands, in their underwear, came running barefooted from the direction of their quarters. I called down to them, stationing them at points of vantage.
Meanwhile, behind me, Gong Lim and Adam Figg had put Exon back in his bed, while Mrs. Gallaway and Emma Figg tried to check the blood that spurted from a hole in Barbra Caywood’s side.
I sent Adam Figg to the telephone, to wake the doctor and the deputy sheriff, and then I hurried down to the grounds.
Stepping out of the door, I came face to face with Hilary Gallaway, coming from the direction of the garage. His face was flushed, and his breath was eloquent of the refreshments that had accompanied the game in Ady’s back room; but his step was steady enough, and his smile was as lazy as ever. He had apparently arrived while I was sending Figg to the phone and running downstairs—otherwise I would have heard his car.
“What’s the excitement?” he asked.
“Same as last night! Meet anybody on the road? Or see anybody leaving here?”
“No.”
“All right. Get in that bus of yours, and burn up the road in the other direction. Stop anybody you meet going away from here or who looks wrong! Got a gun?”
He spun on his heel with nothing of indolence.
“One in my car,” he called over his shoulder, as he broke into a run.
The farm hands still at their posts, I combed the grounds from east to west and from north to south. I realized that I was spoiling my chance of finding footprints when it would be light enough to see them; but I was banking on the man I wanted still being close at hand. And then Shand had told me that the ground was unfavorable for tracing prints, anyway.
On the gravel drive in front of the house I found the pistol from which the shots had been fired—a cheap .38-caliber revolver, slightly rusty, smelling freshly of burnt powder, with three empty shells and three that had not been fired in it.
Besides that I found nothing. The murderer—from what I had seen of the hole in the girl’s side, I called him that—had vanished completely.
Shand and Dr. Rench arrived together, just as I was finishing my fruitless search. A little later, Hilary Gallaway came back—empty-handed.
III
Breakfast that morning was a melancholy meal, except to Hilary Gallaway. He refrained from jesting openly about the night’s excitement; but his eyes twinkled whenever they met mine, and I knew he thought it a tremendously good joke for the shooting to have taken place right under my nose. During his wife’s presence at the table, however, he was almost grave, as if not to offend her.
Mrs. Gallaway left the table shortly, and Dr. Rench joined us. He said that both of his patients were in as good shape as could be expected, and
