“At any rate, I had to find that automatic. I did find it — by accident, you say? Perhaps not quite by accident. Look at it this way. Why had Miller disappeared at all? Well, his crimes were committed, he was through, he now had to look out for his future safety. But Miller was not Miller; Miller was really Buck Horne; Miller was a name and an identity manufactured for a temporary and specific purpose. Poor dad — he wondered why he could find no trace of this Benjy gentleman’s past! There wasn’t any. So I put myself in Horne’s place. If Miller disappeared, for whom would the police search? Obviously, for Miller. The thing to do, then, was to disappear as Miller, and immediately discard the Miller disguise and identity forever. The police would then look for Miller forever without the slightest success. But if he was going to put the police on an eternally false trail in an eternal search for a nonexistent person, it would not hurt — would help, in fact — to have the police believe that the vanished Miller was the murderer of Buck Horne and Woody. The weapon plus the disappearance would be enough for the police. So I figured that Miller, or Horne, had left that weapon somewhere to be found by the police after his disappearance. Where could he leave it? In one of two places: his hotel room, or the dressing room he had occupied in the Colosseum. I chose the dressing room first and, sure enough, there was the automatic.
“Having found it, that very night I myself — don’t look at me that way, stranger! — I myself planted the automatic in Grant’s room, first making sure that he would be out for the evening. You know the rest. I steered the Inspector there, we found the weapon, Grant was arrested, the papers obligingly broadcast the news for me — and Horne showed up, per schedule, to keep his friend, as he thought, from being convicted of the crimes. Showed up, incidentally, with the Miller disguise on, I suppose, to prove that he had been Miller. And that,” said Ellery with a wry smile, “spells finis. Pretty, eh?”
Djuna refilled the coffee cups, and we drank in silence for some time. “Very pretty,” I said after a while. “Very pretty indeed. But not complete. You still haven’t solved the mystery of how Horne secreted the weapon so beautifully in the first place.”
Ellery started from a reverie. “Oh, that!” he said with a little deprecatory wave of his hand. “After putting it off to the last, I quite forgot to clear it up. Interesting, of course. But again mere child’s play.” I grunted. “Oh, yes, J.J., it was very simple — once you knew. It’s always the simplest mystery that appears to be the deepest. Our old friend Chesterton employs the psychology of the simple mystery so very cleverly! It seems a shame — Father Brown couldn’t have been here” He laughed, and wriggled in his chair. “Well, what was the problem? The problem was: Where had that automatic been all the time after the first murder, and second murder, too? What had Miller, or Horne, done with it to have made it apparently vanish so that not even an exhaustive search by scores of detectives turned it up?
“In Major Kirby’s projection room the second time — after the Woody affair, you know — I discovered that the first newsreel scenes of the Horne murder did not constitute all the film shot at the Colosseum that night, but was a shortened version for theatre distribution.
“When the Major ran the deleted scenes for me, we saw things we could not have seen except on the night of the murder, and then of course we were incapable physically and emotionally of panoramic observation. In one scene after the murder the camera caught that bibulous little cowboy, Boone, leading the string of riderless horses to water, at one end of the arena. One horse was balky, refused to drink. Boone, rather drunker than usual, committed the unforgivable sin of lashing the animal; and lo! into the field of the lens rushed a cowboy, snatched the whip from Boone, and at once soothed the balky horse. I learned from Boone that this angry, horse-calming gentleman from the wide open spaces was none other than our friend Miller! And the horse? The horse was a canny chunk of precious old meat named Injun. And who was Injun? Injun was Buck Horne’s animal! Do you get the implications? Well, for one thing Miller’s ability to quiet an irate beast who belonged to Horne confirmed the theory that Miller was Horne. For another, the odd reaction of the horse, his refusal to drink when all the other animals quite eagerly lapped up the water, gave me an equally odd thought, which was fed by the fact that ‘Miller’ had leaped across the arena and prevented Boone from — what, J.J.?”
“From lashing the horse,” I said.
“No. From forcing the horse to drink.” Ellery chuckled as I gaped. “The automatic, remember, had not been found anywhere in the bowl. The premises from roof to cellar had been ransacked, all the humans searched to the point of nausea. Even the horses’ rigging had been scrupulously gone over. Yet there was one thing, strange as it sounds, which had not been searched.” He paused. “The horses themselves.” He paused again.
I tortured my brain. “I’m afraid,” I confessed at last, “I don’t get you.”
He waved a cheerful hand. “Because it’s ridiculous, eh? Yet examine it. Was it possible that the automatic had been hidden, not on a horse, but in a horse?”
I stared incredulously.
“Yes,” he said with a broad grin, “you’ve guessed it. I remembered that Injun was not an ordinary animal. Oh, no. Boone — and Kit, too — had said that Injun was Buck’s old trick movie horse. And there it was. Injun, by refusing to drink, as well as told me that at that very moment he had the pestiferously elusive automatic — a small weapon only four and a half inches long, mind, and flat to the bargain — in his mouth.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I gasped.
“You may well be,” murmured Ellery. “From that conclusion a reconstruction of events was simple. Horne, after shooting his double, had merely leaned forward and slipped the automatic into Injun’s mouth. Oh, Injun knew who was on his back! — a little paint on the cheek, and dyed hair, wouldn’t fool an old detective with such sharp senses as a horse. All Horne had to do, then, was wait until all the searching was over, knowing that Injun would keep the gun in his mouth and keep his mouth shut; and then, after the string of horses had been taken to the Tenth Avenue stables to be bedded down for the night, he retrieved the pistol from Injun’s mouth. The ruse had been so successful that Horne had no hesitation in repeating the procedure in the second crime, using, of course, the same weapon.”
“But wasn’t there a fearful danger that Injun would get tired of keeping the gun in his mouth,” I said, “and would drop it right on the scene of the crime? What a debacle that would have been!”
“I fancy not. If Horne had decided on that method of disposing of his weapon, he must have been certain there wouldn’t be a slip-up. Which automatically makes you conclude that Injun, trained in tricks by Horne from colt-hood, must also have been taught to keep his mouth closed over whatever Horne slipped into it until Horne himself ordered him to open it. You can do it with dogs, you know; and horses are certainly just as intelligent, if not more so... Incidentally, I now knew why Horne had, against all habit, employed a .25 calibre automatic as the murder weapon. He needed the tiniest weapon which would be fatal; a weapon which was least bulky, least weighty, considering its depository.”