On the gravel drive in front of the house I found the pistol from which the shots had been fired – a cheap.38-calibre revolver, slightly rusty, smelling freshly of burned powder, with three empty shells and three that had not been fired in it.
Besides that I found nothing. The murdere r- from what I had seen of the hole in the girl’s side, I called him that – had vanished.
Shand and Dr. Rench arrived together, just as I was finishing my fruitless search. A little later, Hilary Gallaway came back – empty-handed.
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 he thought both would recover.
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 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 calibre. Both had apparently been fired from the vicinity of one of the windows – either just inside or just outside.
Shand and I grilled the Chinese cook, the farm hands, and the Figgs unmercifully that day. 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 of 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 pretence 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.
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 recognisable 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 nightshirt 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.
Hilary Gallaway, Shand – who had come out from town again – and I sat over coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen, while the rest of the household helped Dr. Rench battle for Exon’s life. The old man had gone through enough excitement in the last three days to kill a healthy man, let alone a pneumonia convalescent.
“But why should the old devil want to kill her?” Gallaway asked me.
“Search me,” I confessed, a little testily perhaps. “I don’t know why he wanted to kill her, but it’s a cinch that he did. The gun was found just about where he could have thrown it when he heard me coming. I was in the girl’s room when she was shot, and I got to Exon’s window without wasting much time, and I saw nothing. You, yourself, driving home from Knownburg, and arriving here right after the shooting, didn’t see anybody leave by the road; and I’ll take an oath that nobody could have left in any other direction without either one of the farm hands or me seeing them.
“And then, tonight, I told Exon that the girl would recover if she didn’t tear off her bandages, which, while true enough, gave him the idea that she had been trying to tear them off. And from that he built up a plan of tearing them off himself – knowing that she had been given an opiate, perhaps – and thinking that everybody would believe she had torn them off herself. And he was putting that plan into execution – had torn off one piece of tape – when I stopped him. He shot her intentionally, and that’s flat. Maybe I couldn’t prove it in court without knowing why, but I know he did. But the doc says he’ll hardly live to be tried; he killed himself trying to kill the girl.”
“Maybe you’re right” – Gallaway’s mocking grin flashed at me – “but you’re a hell of a detective. Why didn’t you suspect me?”