Case held the door wide for her, shut it behind him, and left us staring at the bullet hole in the door frame.
One morning of the following spring Case was driving me townward from Shelby Manor, when, not a hundred feet in front of us, Mary Kenton's buggy entered the pike from a cross-road. As it turned, mare, vehicle and all went over sideways with a terrific crash. Mary must have fallen clear for the next instant she was at the mare's head.
Case did succeed in holding his fiery colts and in pulling them to a stand-still alongside the wreck, but it was all even he could do. I jumped out, meaning to take the colts' bits and let Case help Mary. But she greeted me imperiously.
“Cousin Jack, please come sit on Bonnie's head.” I took charge of Bonnie in my own fashion and she stood up entirely unhurt.
“How on earth did you come to do it, Mary?”
Colonel Case wondered, for she was a perfect horsewoman.
“Accidents will happen,” she answered lightly, “and I am glad of this one. You have really spoken to me, and that is worth a hundred smashes.”
“But I wrote to you,” he protested. “I wrote to you and explained.”
“One letter,” she sniffed contemptuously. “You should have kept on, you silly man, I might have answered the fifth or sixth or even the second.”
He stared at her and no wonder for she was fascinatingly coquettish.
“I don't mind Jack a bit, you know,” she went on. “Jack is my loyal knight and unfailing partisan. He keeps my secrets and does everything I ask of him. For instance, he will not demur an atom now when I ask him to throw Bonnie's harness into the buggy and ride her to town for me.
“You see,” she smiled at him dazzlingly, “another advantage of my upset is that the buggy is so smashed that you cannot decently refuse to drive me home.”
“But Mary,” he protested, “I explained fully to you.”
“You didn't really expect me to believe all that fol-de-rol?” she cried. “Suppose I did, I don't see any dwergs around, and if all Malebolge were in plain sight I'd make you take me anyhow.”
Inevitably he did, but that afternoon their daily ceremony of hand-wave from the portico and hat-wave from horseback was resumed and was continued as their sole intercourse.
It was full midsummer when a circus came to Brexington. Case and I started for a ride together on the afternoon of its arrival, passed the tents already raised and met the procession on its way through town from the freight yard of the railroad. We pulled our horses to one side of the street and sat watching the show.
There were Cossacks and cowboys, Mexican vaqueros and Indians on mustangs. There were two elephants, a giraffe, and then some camels which set our mounts snorting and swerving about. Then came the cages, one of monkeys, another of parrots, cockatoos and macaws, others with wolves, bears, hyenas, a lion, a lioness, a tiger, and a beautiful leopard.
Case made a movement and I heard a click. I looked round and beheld him with his revolver cocked and pointed at the leopard's cage. He did not fire but kept the pistol aimed at the cage until it was out of range. Then he thrust it back into its holster and watched the fag-end of the procession go by. All he said was:
“You will have to excuse me, Radford, I have urgent business at home.”
Towards dusk Cato came to me in great agitation.
“Mahs'r Cash done gone off'n he haid,” he declared. “He shuah done loss he sainsus.” I told him to return home and I would stroll up there casually.
I found Case in the woodshed, uncle Rastus with him. Hung by the hind legs like new- slaughtered hogs were a dozen of the biggest dogs of which Rastus had had charge. Their throats were cut and each dripped into a tin pail. Rastus, his ebony face paled to a sort of mud-gray, held a large tin pail and a new white-washer's brush.
Case greeted me as usual, as if my presence there were a matter of course and he were engaged upon nothing out of the common.
“Uncle,” he said, “I judge those are about dripped out. Pour it all into the big pail.” He took the brush from Rastus, who followed him to the gate.
There Case dipped the brush into the blood and painted a broad band across the gravel of the drive and the flagstones of the footpath. He proceeded as if he were using lime white-wash to mark off a lawn-tennis court in the early days of the game, when wet markers were not yet invented and dry markers were still undreamed of. He continued the stripe of blood all round his place, just inside the hedge. He made it about three inches wide and took great pains to make it plain and heavy.
When he had come round to the entrance again he went over the stripe on the path and drive a second time. Then he straightened up and handed the brush to Rastus.
“Just enough,” he remarked. “I calculated nicely.”
I had so far held my tongue. But his air of self-approval, as if in some feat of logic led me to blurt out:
“What is it for?”
“The Chinese,” said Case, “esteem dogs' blood a defense against sorcery. I doubt its efficacy, but I know of no better fortification.”
No reply seemed expected and I made none.
That evening I was at Case's, with some six or seven others. We sat indoors, for the cloudy day had led up to a rainy evening. Nothing unusual occurred.
Next day the town was plastered with posters of the circus company offering five hundred dollars reward for the capture of an escaped leopard.
Cato came to my office just as I was going out to lunch.
“Mahs'r Cash done gone cunjuhin' agin,” he announced. I found out that a second batch of dogs had been brought in by uncle Rastus in his covered wagon behind his unfailing mules, had been butchered like the former convoy and the band of blood gone over a second time. Case had not gone outside that line since he first made it, no drive to Shelby Manor that morning.
The day was perfect after the rain of the day before, and the bright sunlight dried everything. The evening was clear and windless with a nearly full moon intensely bright and very high. Practically the whole population went to the circus.
Beverly and I dined at Case's. He had no other guests, but such was his skill as a host that our dinner was delightfully genial. After dinner the three of us sat on the veranda.
The brilliance of the moonlight on and through the unstirred trees made a glorious spectacle and the mild, cool atmosphere put us in just the humor to enjoy it and each other. Case talked quietly, mostly of art galleries in Europe, and his talk was quite as charming and entertaining as usual. He seemed a man entirely sane and altogether at his ease.
We had been on the veranda about half an hour and in that time neither team nor pedestrian had passed. Then we saw the figure of a woman approaching down the middle of the roadway from the direction of the country. Beverly and I caught sight of her at about the same instant and I saw him watching her as I did, for she had the carriage and bearing of a lady and it seemed strange that she should be walking, stranger that she should be alone, and strangest that she should choose the road instead of the footpath which was broad and good for half a mile.
Case, who had been describing a carved set of ivory chessmen he had seen in Egypt, stopped speaking and stared as we did. I began to feel as if I ought to recognize the advancing figure, it seemed unfamiliar and yet familiar too in outline and carriage, when Beverly exclaimed:
“By Jove, that is Mary Kenton.”
“No,” said Colonel Case in a combative, resonant tone like the slow boom of a big bell. “No, it is not Mary Kenton.”
I was astonished at the animus of his contradiction and we intensified our scrutiny. The nearing girl really suggested Mary Kenton and yet, I felt sure, was not she. Her bearing made me certain that she was young, and she had that indefinable something about her which leads a man to expect that a woman will turn out to be good looking. She walked with a sort of insolent, high- stepping swing.