Louie and the two German workers went out again in a few minutes. Quade sat himself on the floor near the fireplace. It was going to be a long night, he knew. Charlie Boston sat down on the other side of the fireplace. In the middle of the room, Gustave Lund, Olga Larsen and Slade began a mild argument. Olga was bemoaning her fate, and Lund was berating Slade for their predicament. He insisted that Slade had no business booking them for a small city like Duluth in the first place.
After a while Bill Morgan and Mona Lane came across the room and stood before the fireplace.
“What do you think of it, Mr. Quade?” asked Morgan respectfully.
Quade shrugged. “We’ll stay here until morning and then they’ll go off. We’ll get to a town without any trouble.”
Morgan nodded. “They’ll be looking for the plane, of course, by morning. It should have been in Duluth by now, and when it’s late, they’ll start looking for it. I know we weren’t off our course much, and they ought to be able to locate it in a few hours. We’ll probably have a plane here before noon.”
“And until then, we might as well make ourselves comfortable,” said Mona.
Quade chuckled, and then the floor lamp flared brightly and went out, plunging the room into total darkness. Quade gasped and began raising himself from the floor. Before he regained his feet, someone in the room yelped sharply. There was a rushing movement and the sharp, terrific explosion of a gun.
Willie Scharnhorst’s voice cut the darkness: “Stand where you are, everyone! I’m at the door, and the first one comes close gets plugged!”
A woman screamed, hysterically. Quade knew it wasn’t Mona Lane. He was on his feet now, crouched and moving forward in the darkness, hands outstretched. He knew the location of the door, and if the darkness held for another thirty seconds, he knew also that he would be in complete command of the situation. A floor board creaked, and someone near the door, Scharnhorst no doubt, fired his gun into the ceiling.
“Stand still, I said!” Willie’s voice grated harshly.
Quade’s outstretched hand collided with a body. His fingers clawed it, and he was rewarded with a snarl and a sudden swish of air. He ducked instinctively. Something heavy and hard grazed the side of his face and thudded on his left shoulder. He almost went to his knees, but gritted his teeth and plunged forward. His hands encountered only darkness. There was a crashing of glass, and then a match sputtered into flame. It threw a ghostly half-light upon the scene.
“You, Quade,” snarled Scharnhorst. “Stand where you are, or I’ll plug you!”
Quade stood. At the other side of the room another match lit up a little spot, and then Hugo, Becker’s helper, came out of the kitchen with a kerosene lamp. It flooded the room with light.
Scharnhorst was standing just inside the door, his feet wide apart, his own gun and McGregor’s held before him, menacingly. McGregor himself was poised on his toes at the window facing Scharnhorst. He looked like a tiger about to spring upon his prey. Becker was lying flat on the floor near the kitchen. Near the fireplace Bill Morgan stood with his arm around Mona Lane. Charlie Boston was behind Quade.
The two skaters and their manager were sitting on the couch. Olga Larsen was blubbering hysterically. Ben Slade’s face was almost as white as the snow outside. Lund sat between him and Olga, his head hanging forward on his chest. Quade looked at him and inhaled softly.
“Lund,” he said.
Lund did not move. Ben Slade looked at the man beside him and bounded to his feet.
“He’s shot!” he cried. “He’s been shot!”
Cold air blew into the room from outside. One entire window pane was broken. Quade looked at it and shook his head. Scharnhorst came away from the door in a rush. He grasped his guns securely, and Quade knew that this was not the moment to attack him. The gunman looked into the face of Gustave Lund and Quade heard his teeth click together.
“Who did this?” he snapped. “You, Quade?”
“No, not me,” replied Quade. “I was sitting down beside the fireplace. I couldn’t have put out the light.”
Scharnhorst’s eyes rolled toward the fireplace, then dropped to the floor.
“The hell you couldn’t. The wire from the lamp runs along there.”
“That’s so,” Quade conceded, “but it isn’t broken there. The circuit could have been shorted almost anywhere — outside the house, in the kitchen, or you, Willie, you could have pulled the cord from the socket there just two feet from your chair.”
“Why the devil would I want to do that?” demanded Scharnhorst. “If I had wanted to bump him off, I’d have just done it without dousing the lights.”
There was truth in what Willie said. Quade felt sure that Scharnhorst hadn’t killed Lund. Besides, there was the matter of the broken window. Throughout the turmoil in the dark, Scharnhorst had advertised his exact position. He could not have thrown the gun out of the window without coming forward at least eight feet and then retreating back to the door. Quade knew he hadn’t done that. He knew too that Boston had been behind him and Charlie was not the sort of man who shot people in the dark. Besides, he was Quade’s friend.
Bill Morgan and Mona? They’d been at the fireplace, but had had a chance to move around. Conceivably, they could have reached the wire, but Quade didn’t think so. Alan McGregor? Yes, he was the logical suspect. He was near the window. But Scharnhorst had frisked him, had taken away his gun. Had the man had another gun concealed on his person or somewhere in the room? He was a member of the party who had been on the airplane. He could have been the one who had killed the pilot.
On the other hand, the skaters and their manager had ignored McGregor completely. If any of them had known McGregor, and they must have for him to want to kill one of them, they had concealed it well. Ben Slade? He was Lund’s manager, received a share of his earnings. Managers don’t kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Quade looked hard at Olga Larsen. She was a national figure, the world’s greatest skating star. He recalled something Lund had said earlier. The dead skater had been bitter toward Olga and Slade for some reason.
The door slammed open, and Louie came running in, gun held ready.
“Jeez!” he cried. “What’s all the shooting about?”
“Just a little rub-out, Louie,” Scharnhorst said. “That’s all.”
Louie did not seem greatly disconcerted. “Why did you knock him off?”
“I didn’t. Somebody else here did it.”
“Who?”
Scharnhorst shook his head. “Search me. You can see the electric light ain’t working. All of a sudden the light goes out, the window busts, and someone shoots this bozo.”
“No,” cut in Quade. “He was shot before the window was broken which means that someone in this room killed him. I’m willing to bet eight copies of The Compendium of Human Knowledge against a nickel that you’ll find a gun outside there in the snow.”
Scharnhorst’s eyes slid toward his pal. “O.K., Louie, get it.”
Louie shot an angry look at Oliver Quade and left the room. Quade stepped easily across the room to the window and peered out into the rectangle of light that shone through the window on the snow. He saw Louie come into the rectangle, move around, and then pick up something from the snow. A moment later he came into the room, wiping snow from an automatic.
“This is it!” he said. “Two shots fired!”
“Oh,” said Quade, “a .38. One shot for the pilot and one for Lund.”
“And someone had the gun all the time!” exclaimed Scharnhorst, looking blackly around the room.
When he had first entered with Louie and taken command of the lodge, he had been a good-natured gunman. The events of the past half-hour had changed his disposition. He looked sullen and mean. Quade didn’t like the change. He had read about The Mad Dutchman in the newspapers, knew that when Scharnhorst was enraged, he was a mad dog who would stop at nothing.