A couple of the women servants began sobbing and two or three of the men on the island cleared their throats.
“He knows,” said the schizophrenic to himself. “He knows I’m the killer. The man’s smart. If this thing works he must stay here… dead!”
Twang!
The spear was catapulted out again. It seemed to those around that it left the slot with increased force. Quade knew it had. He watched the flight of the spear with a prayer on his lips and his jaws crunched.
The spear began falling…
It disappeared into the woods on the far side of the wide river and the wire suddenly stopped playing out.
“It made it!” cried Lynn Crosby.
Quade gripped the wire. “Now, let’s hope that it landed true.”
He pulled up the slack of the wire, tugged hard. It refused to give.
“I think it’s stuck,” he said grimly. “Here, help me pull, Crosby.”
Crosby stepped up beside Quade and pulled with him. The two of them could not pull the wire more than a couple of inches.
Perspiration broke out on Quade’s forehead. “We’re safe!” he exclaimed.
Cheers and sobs of joy went up.
The breeches buoy was fixed on to the wire and the wire securely lashed around a telephone pole some distance behind the catapult.
“The women will go first,” Quade said.
Lynn Crosby stepped up behind Sheriff Starkey and jerked the sheriff’s gun out of his holster. “No,” he said. “I’m going first!”
“Lynn!” That was Martha Olcott. Her face showed terrible anguish. Quade, looking at her, knew that she’d been guessing the truth, but hadn’t wanted to believe it before.
He cursed himself silently. He should have been alert at the critical moment for just some such move on Crosby’s part. He’d known since the night before that Lynn Crosby was the schizophrenic, the killer who had brutally murdered Martha’s uncle and set fire to the big house and put them all in this predicament. But Quade’s mind had been too filled with the bigger problem. Even if they had subdued the murderer, they would still have to face the problem of getting off the island. Now Crosby had suddenly revealed himself.
“Stand back, everyone!” he commanded, steadying the gun on them.
Deputy Lou Higginbotham, who until then had been a nonentity, reached for a piece of glory. He went for his gun. He got his hand on it, had it half out of the holster and then Lynn Crosby shot him through the face. Higginbotham pitched to the ground.
“I’ll kill every one of you if you try to stop me,” Crosby snarled. His face revealed the soul behind it. He had a split personality no longer. He was absolutely and completely insane now. No more moments of sanity, no more fighting between the two personalities. Lynn Crosby was completely mad.
“Do as he says,” Quade ordered, knowing what Crosby would do if someone crossed him.
Crosby scooped up Higginbotham’s gun and stuck it into the waistband of his trousers. He brandished the sheriff’s gun and his face broke into a huge grin as the group of men and women retreated before him. He laughed raucously. “The flood! Ha-ha! The flood got all of you poor people. All except me. My story will be you wanted me to go over first to test the wire and I did. Then it broke. Too bad. Too bad.” He laughed again, uproariously.
“Lynn!” said Ferdinand Olcott, “you’re insane!”
Lynn Crosby cursed in sudden frenzy. “You — you’re the cause of all this! You thought I wasn’t good enough for your daughter. You told me to get a job and make a name for myself and then you’d think about letting me marry her. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? Well, ask Martha — did we wait for you?”
Ferdinand Olcott staggered back. “Martha — did you—”
Martha could hardly raise her head. “We — were married two weeks ago.”
“Secretly,” sneered Lynn Crosby. “You forced us to get married secretly.”
“But we never lived together,” said Martha Olcott. “That — I am glad of that, anyway.”
Crosby showed his fangs. “You get satisfaction out of that, do you? Well, then think over this: I never loved you at all. I married you for your money, your uncle’s money. He told me he was leaving everything to you. That’s why I killed him. To get his money, through you. And now, as your husband, I’ll get your father’s too.”
Crosby turned toward Quade. “How did you know it was me?”
“The salt,” said Quade. “You went down into the cellar and started that oil fire. You’d heard somewhere that salt killed the odor of oil so you washed your hands with it after setting the fire. I didn’t smell oil on your hands, but you got salt over your clothes. That’s how I knew.”
Crosby nodded. “You’re a smart guy, Quade. Much too smart to stay alive. You might figure out some other way of getting across. So—”
The gun in his hand thundered. Almost at the instant Crosby squeezed the trigger Quade started to throw himself to one side. The bullet went through his left shoulder. He fell limply to the ground. He was fully conscious but to show that he wasn’t mortally hit would only invite another bullet. His face fell into three inches of water and he kept it there.
He held his breath as long as he could, then slowly turned his head sidewise and brought his mouth out of the water. He drew in air sharply and looked toward the catapult.
Lynn Crosby was already in the crude breeches buoy, working his way out over the water, hand over hand.
Quade watched him for a moment, then rose to his knees.
“Mr. Quade!” cried Martha Olcott. “You’re not—” then she saw the blood mixing with the water on his shoulder and sprang to his side.
“It’s all right,” Quade cried out grimly.
The others gathered around. “He’ll cut the wire when he gets almost there,” said Clarence Olcott. “He can pull himself to the other side with what’s left but we — the wire’ll be too short then.”
Quade said to Martha Olcott, “Take the women back a way and don’t look. We’ve got only one chance, but it won’t be pretty to see.”
She understood him immediately. Her face tightened but she quickly herded the maids to the rear.
Quade picked up the spear. Lynn Crosby was out two hundred feet and moving at the rate of fifty feet a minute, out of revolver range. There was only one spear — it had to kill — to save twelve lives.
Quade placed the spear in the slot of the catapult and then the others understood. “You’re going to kill him!” gasped Clarence.
Quade did not reply. He adjusted the catapult quickly, depressing it in front. He dropped down beside the slot, sighted through it, then made some more adjustments.
“All right,” he said then. “He’s three hundred feet out. We’ve got one shot. If it misses, we stay here.”
He kicked the trigger.
Twang!
The spear whanged out of the slot, shot out through space in a low arc — and landed in flesh.
The schizophrenic lived two seconds. In those two seconds the part of him that had been suppressed since the day before screamed: “You were wrong! Wrong!”
And then it, too, died. Finally and definitely.
Death on Eagle’s Crag
Mrs. Mattie Egan, proprietor of Eagle’s Crag, was the toughest prospect Oliver Quade had worked on in many months. For ten minutes he had extolled the merits of the set of encyclopedias. He had painted glorious pictures for Mrs. Egan, had told her of marvelous benefits she would derive from owning the books. He had told her all those things in a voice that could be heard half-way down the mountain.
But Mrs. Egan was unmoved by it all. Her resistance was summed up in the stubborn, unyielding statement: “I’m fifty-six years old, come next January, and I ain’t never owned no books of my own and I don’t intend to start buying none now.”