“Hold on,” I snapped. “I think I can charge you with a serious blunder; I hope you didn’t neglect to do it wilfully. If you were so sure Horne was acting as a member of the troupe, why didn’t you line ’em up and give ’em the once-over — eh?”
“Reasonable question,” agreed Ellery. “But the answer is also reasonable. I didn’t line up the troupe and attempt to uncover the impostor because it was evident that Horne was playing some sort of game. It isn’t often that you’ll find a murderer willing to hang about the scene of his crime. Why was Horne doing it? Why, if he wanted to commit murder, did he choose this complicated and perilous method? A dark street, a shot, a quick getaway — it would have been very easy for him to have killed his victim in the usual way. But he chose the hard way: why? I meant to find out. I wanted to give him enough rope to hang himself. Actually, he had to wait. There was something he still had to do, which was to kill Woody. I’ll explain that in a moment.
“In addition,” continued Ellery with a little frown, “there were a number of factors which challenged my curiosity and, I suppose, my intellect. Aside from motive, which was a complete mystery to me — what the devil had happened to the automatic? That was a real poser. And then, too, without a complete case — if I unmasked Horne and he stubbornly refused to talk — we should probably not have been able to secure a conviction.
“So I delayed exposing Horne, never anticipating — having no earthly reason for anticipating — another murder.” He sighed. “I spent some uncomfortable moments over that, J. J. At the same time, in the most innocent way I could contrive, I began to hang around the troupe — trying to spot Horne without arousing his suspicions. Well, I was unsuccessful. They were a clannish group, and I could get nothing out of them. The man’s personality was submerged in the larger personality of the troupe. I cultivated Kit Horne socially in the vain hope that Horne might communicate with her.
“But after the murder of Woody — immediately after, the next day — one of the troupe disappeared. A man who had called himself Benjy Miller. A man moreover who had been given employment on the eye of the original performance a month before on the written recommendation of Horne himself! A man who superficially, at least, if you discarded the color of his hair and his scar, might have been Horne. A man who — and this proved to be the clincher, as I shall demonstrate in a moment — had been ‘authorized’ by Horne in the letter of introduction to ride Horne’s own favorite horse, Injun; despite the fact that there was no really sound reason for ‘Horne’ not to have ridden his favorite mount himself on the opening night. From these facts I could not doubt that the vanished Miller was in reality Buck Horne; and therefore Buck Horne satisfied the first qualification of my murderer: he was in the arena on horseback in the case of both crimes.” I sighed.
“The second qualification of the criminal was deducible from the fifth and sixth of my major half-dozen clues. The fifth was something I was conscious of as a spectator, and it was confirmed by the newsreel sound pictures taken by Major Kirby’s unit, and by Lieutenant Knowles’s report. After Grant signaled the beginning of the ride I recalled but one volley of shots from the guns of the charging horsemen behind the supposed Horne. Only a few seconds elapsed between the riders’ volley and the fall of the dead man to the tanbark — so few that there was not time for more than that single very slightly ragged fusillade, and then the horses and men became a milling mob, preventing further shooting. There could be no question about the fact that only one volley had been fired: in proof we found that each of the revolvers of the troupe proper had been shot off just once.
“Now the sixth and last fact was that each of these revolvers, as well as Horne’s and Grant’s and that mad chap Ted Lyons’s, could not have fired the fatal shot; Lieutenant Knowles said undeniably that only a .25 calibre automatic pistol could have fired the fatal shot, and all but one of the weapons collected from the troupe were of .38 calibre and over. And ballistics tests proved that the exception, Lyons’s .25, could not have been the murder weapon.
“What did these two facts, juxtaposed, signify? Well, fundamentally enough, if the murderer was one of the troupe and yet the examined guns of the troupe couldn’t have fired the fatal shot, then the murderer had used a weapon which we had not examined. But how is this possible? you ask. You say: These people were thoroughly searched and the murder weapon not found. I answer: The murderer hid the weapon somewhere. Let me leave that for a moment; the immediate point is that use a .25 automatic he did, and since there was only one fusillade, he must have used it at the time the guns of the troupe went off. In other words, the murderer carried a second weapon, loaded with lethal bullets, and had discharged it at the same time he fired the blank-filled revolver. Used, then, both hands in shooting. Was this, I asked, an indication that the murderer was ambidextrous?”
“I’m not quite sure,” I objected, “that you were justified in assuming the murderer shot both weapons off at the same time. It was a ragged fusillade, didn’t you say?”
“Yes. But remember that the hands of the troupe were raised — they were shooting their blanks at the roof. I reasoned that the murderer would have been constrained not to make himself conspicuous; he would have had to shoot his blank at the roof with the others, as we know he did. But since after the single fusillade there were no other shots, I was justified in assuming that his other hand had held the lethal weapon and fired it at approximately the same time.
“But to return to this very curious little question of ambidexterity. Was it possible? Certainly, although not necessarily. But since it was possible, the trail again led back to Buck Horne, who for years had used twin guns. A two-gun man is, as far as shooting is concerned, ambidextrous. Buck was not only the logical suspect on other counts, then, but satisfied the qualifications of the murderer on two new counts. Not only was he a two-gun man, but he was a remarkable marksman also — testimony. The man who fired the fatal shots was a remarkable marksman — had disdained to fire more than once when, in fact, it would have been simple for him to have fired the entire magazine of the automatic before the echoes of the fusillade had died away. Check again.
“But how had he rid himself of that second weapon so cleverly that the most minute search failed to turn it up? The disappearance of the weapon was the most baffling feature of both crimes.” He paused. “I was to penetrate to the secret only after the one-armed braggart, Woody, died.”
“That’s certainly been puzzling me,” I said eagerly. “Far as I know, not one word of explanation has been written in the newspaper accounts. How the deuce did he do it? Or didn’t you discover it before the end?”