The bullet had barely grazed the girl’s ribs and breast bone, going through the flesh and muscles of her chest, in on the right side and out again on the left. Except for the shock and the loss of blood, she was not in danger, although she was still unconscious.
Exon was sleeping, the doctor said; so Shand and I crept up into his room to examine it. The first bullet had gone into the doorframe, about four inches above the one that had been fired the night before. The second bullet had pierced the Japanese screen, and, after passing through the girl, had lodged in the plaster of the wall. We dug out both bullets—they were of .38-caliber. Both had been apparently fired from the vicinity of one of the windows—either just inside or just outside.
Shand and I grilled the Chinese cook, the farmhands, and the Figgs, unmercifully that day. Detectives are only human—or at least this one is—and I don’t mind confessing that some of my humiliation and chagrin was worked of on these people. But they came through it standing-up—there was nothing to fix the shooting on any of them.
And all day long that damned Hilary Gallaway followed me from pillar to post, with a mocking glint in his eyes that said plainer than words, “I’m the logical suspect. Why don’t you put me through your little third degree?” But I grinned back, and asked him nothing.
Shand had to go to town that afternoon. He called me up on the telephone later, and told me that Gallaway had left Knownburg early enough that morning to have arrived home fully half an hour before the shooting, if he had driven at his usual fast pace.
The day passed—too rapidly—and I found myself dreading the coming of night. Two nights in succession Exon’s life had been attempted—and now the third night was coming.
At dinner Hilary Gallaway announced that he was going to stay home this evening. Knownburg, he said, was tame in comparison; and he grinned at me.
Dr. Rench left after the meal, saying that he would return as soon as possible, but that he had two patients on the other side of town whom he must visit. Barbra Caywood had returned to consciousness, but had been extremely hysterical, and the doctor had given her an opiate. She was asleep now. Exon was resting easily except for a high temperature.
I went up to Exon’s room for a few minutes after the meal, and tried him out with a gentle question or two. But he refused to answer them, and he was too sick for me to press him.
He asked how the girl was.
“The doc says she’s in no particular danger. Just loss of blood and shock. If she doesn’t rip her bandages off and bleed to death in one of her hysterical spells, he says, he’ll have her on her feet in a couple weeks.”
Mrs. Gallaway came in then, and I went downstairs again, where I was seized by Gallaway, who insisted with bantering gravity that I tell him about some of the mysteries I had solved. He was enjoying my discomfort to the limit. He kidded me for about an hour, and had me burning up inside; but I managed to grin back with a fair pretense of indifference.
When his wife joined us presently—saying that both of the invalids were sleeping—I made my escape from her tormenting husband, saying that I had some writing to do. But I didn’t go to my room.
Instead, I crept stealthily into the girl’s room, crossed to a clothespress that I had noted earlier in the day, and planted myself in it. By leaving the door open the least fraction of an inch, I could see through the connecting doorway—from which the screen had been removed—across Exon’s bed, and out of the window from which three bullets had already come, and the Lord only knew what else might come.
Time passed, and I was stiff from standing still. But I had expected that—had felt it before on somewhat similar occasions—and I knew it would pass. But whether it did or not, I meant to stay here until something happened—if it was only the rising of the sun. Nothing else was going to be pulled off in this corner of the house without my being in on it!
Twice Mrs. Gallaway came up to look at her father and the nurse. Each time I shut my closet door entirely as soon as I heard her tiptoeing steps in the hall, I was hiding from everybody.
She had just gone from her second visit, when, before I had time to open my door again, I heard a faint rustling, and a soft padding on the floor. Not knowing what it was or where it was, I was afraid to push the door open.
In my narrow hiding-place I stood still and waited.
The padding was recognizable now—quiet footsteps, coming nearer. They passed not far from my clothespress door.
I waited.
An almost inaudible rustling. A pause. The softest and faintest of tearing sounds.
I came out of the closet—my gun in my hand.
Standing beside the girl’s bed, leaning over her unconscious form, was old Talbert Exon, his face flushed with fever, his night shirt hanging limply around his wasted legs. One of his hands still rested upon the bedclothes he had turned down from her body. The other hand held a narrow strip of adhesive tape, with which her bandages had been fixed in place, and which he had just torn off.
He snarled at me, and both his hands went toward the girl’s bandages.
The crazy, feverish glare of his eyes told me that the threat of the gun in my hand meant nothing to him. I jumped to his side, plucked his hands aside, picked him up in my arms, and carried him—kicking, clawing and swearing—back to his bed.
Then I called the others.
IV
Hilary Gallaway, Shand—who had come out from town again—and I sat over coffee and cigarettes
