Short crops. Stock hit by blackleg because of poor vaccine. Squirrels that ate off the barley... all bad enough in the telling, but probably much worse in reality. Walsh wondered how much the wife knew. He pitied Muller’s embarrassment and mendaciously invented similar misfortunes of his own.
“If you’ve been a farmer, you understand,” said Muller, reassured. “You know bad luck runs in streaks sometimes — nobody’s fault, it just does. The note’s due again pretty soon and yesterday after the funeral Matt said he wouldn’t renew. We’d had a row. I’d told him overwork had put Nancy in her grave and called him a damned wife killer, so he got mean. I ain’t got the money, I’m strapped. Matter of fact, there’s another note at the bank.”
He had worried through a sleepless night, had even thought of selling out and trying elsewhere.
“Only it’s our home, we got a feeling for it. I thought about leasing but right now it’s hard to find renters. Come dawn, I decided to try making a deal with Matt — let him use some of the pasture for free, or something like that. Only he was already dead.”
“There’s the son.”
“He won’t give no trouble, I know him. Listen, hustle this up, will you? I got work—”
“Get along with it, then. I want to visit with the neighbors.”
The sheriff called at farmhouses and talked to the farm women. Everywhere he asked the same questions, and always in the back of his mind were thoughts of a blood-stained leaf and of a suffering cow that had raked her flank against barbed wire. At the fifth house a breezy woman confessed without shame to eavesdropping on the party line and told him what he needed to know.
The sun was high when he returned to the Kershaw farm. Here he found one of his deputies shoveling a portion of the yard into a cardboard box.
“Photographer just left,” reported the deputy. “You’re in luck. The ground’s just right — not too hard, not too soft. I got it out all in one chunk.”
He fastened the box with gummed paper and handed it to Walsh who scribbled his initials on the brown strip. The deputy added his own, then carried the shovel and box to his car and departed. Walsh followed him with his eyes until the car disappeared around a bend in the driveway. Then he crossed the stubble field, crawled through the six-wire fence that marked the boundary of Muller’s pasture, and climbed the hill.
Halfway up the slope a cow path meandered across the face of the hill. Walsh stopped on the trail and turned to look back across brittle yellow stubble to where barn and oak tree shut off all view of the yard. He shifted his eyes to the ugly, boxlike house some hundred feet to the right of the barn, then followed the length of curving driveway down to the heavy wooden gate. Doc had had trouble with that gate when the wind sprang up.
He looked back at the house. He had been through it that morning before locking up, and in the front hall he had seen the nails and patch of faded wallpaper that marked where Kershaw’s gun had hung. How long would it take a man to get from the cow path to the front hall, grab the gun, and sneak back to the yard? There’d be a stop for the fence, and probably another to peek cautiously around the corner of the barn. Say three minutes altogether, give or take a little either way.
Three minutes, thought Walsh; now I know who shot Kershaw.
He drove back to the county seat and telephoned the coroner for an appointment.
“After dinner,” suggested Hans-low. “Belle’s going to some shindig but I’ll beg off. It’ll be a relief — I’m sick of shindigs.”
Several hours later, in the doctor’s comfortable study, the host was glaring indignantly at his guest. Between them a log fire crackled cheerfully.
“Utter nonsense,” snorted the doctor. “Ed hated Matt, sure — but he wouldn’t kill him! I know, I know, you haven’t said he did, but you might just as well have. Motive and opportunity, you say. What opportunity? Because he rode past with his cows? Matt’s phone call at six thirty knocks opportunity into a cocked hat, but you say anyone could have imitated his squawky voice. You make the preposterous statement that Matt didn’t telephone because he was already dead. Of all the idiotic — Ed phoned himself, I suppose? Anyhow, where’s your evidence?”
“You didn’t give me time to tell it,” said the sheriff mildly. “A let of things point to Matt’s being already dead by then. The cow, for one. She wasn’t just a few hours overdue, she was full to bursting. She hadn’t been milked for twenty-four hours. Why? Horses, hogs, and one cow — that’s all the chores there were — and he was already at the horses when you saw him. If he was alive at six thirty, why hadn’t he milled the cow?”
Hanslow stared. “You call that evidence?” He swung out of his chair, walked across to the bar, and mixed two highballs. He handed one to Walsh.
“Doctor’s prescription. You’re tired and can’t think straight or you’d realize that almost anything could have interfered. Maybe the cow had wandered off. Or the horses had broken loose. Or Matt had a dizzy spell. I don’t know — I just know you can’t make a timetable on the evidence of one unmilked cow.”
Walsh sipped his drink gratefully. He wasn’t really tired, just depressed. A while back, up there on the hill, he’d felt pretty pleased with himself. He’d forgotten about all the mess that had to follow—
“It wasn’t just the cow. There’s something else that I’ll explain later. I’m telling this bit by bit the way it worked out. At first I thought Muller’d made up that phone call, but he didn’t. I found a woman who’d listened in. She’d recognized Matt’s voice — or thought she had — and what it said was just about what Ed had told me. But there’s an extension between Muller’s house and the barn, so he could have made the call himself. For an alibi it would have been better if he picked somebody besides his own wife, but he mightn’t have thought of that. He and his wife are pretty close, most likely she’d come to his mind first. But I do know that Matt didn’t call because he was already dead. So I know when he was killed, and how.”
“How is easy — he was shot. But when?” Hanslow smiled ironically. “Don’t strain my credulity. Did you read it in the cards, or was it the Lord Almighty who told you?”
“I never thought of that,” said Walsh slowly. “The last, I mean. Maybe that’s it. When a dumb cluck like me doesn’t know what to do, maybe God does speak out to point the way to truth. Not in words. But through things. Like a leaking udder. Or a bullet hole in a barn. Or dead leaves. Or a body in the wrong place.”
“It can’t be the highball,” mused the doctor. “It wasn’t that strong. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about footmarks under the leaves that show where two men had stood, one against the barn, the other some yards in front. They stood for maybe five minutes. I’m talking about a murder that was like an execution. This morning the sun shone full on the barn, but in late evening there’d be shade. A man wouldn’t stand against a shadowed wall, not on a bitter evening when the sun was low. But if somebody with a rifle forced him to — somebody with murder in his heart but with a crazy idea of justice in his mind — then he’d stand there, watching the trigger finger, dying ten deaths while his sins were told over and over and sentence finally passed.”
“You mean Ed had some fantastic notion of avenging his sister? That’s impossible — Ed isn’t the melodramatic type. Anyhow, I maintain Matt was killed later.”