A horseshoe dangled from a rafter. It was swinging on a string that looped over several nails and down to the shotgun’s triggers. Opening the door had bumped the horseshoe off a nail. Its weight had fetched up the slack in the string and jerked the triggers, firing both barrels simultaneously.
Big Pete Straub lay on his back on the bunkhouse floor. His right foot was bare. Flies were darting in and out of a ragged three-inch hole in the top of his head. With one shoe off and one shoe on, the refinery police chief had killed himself by putting his rifle barrel in his mouth and pushing the trigger with his toe.
“So much for your assistance pattern, Isaac,” said Hatfield. “The man went out alone with a bang.”
“Almost took us with him,” said Archie.
“About that ‘almost,’ Archie?” said Hatfield, cocking an eyebrow that demanded an answer.
“Thank you, Walt. Thank you, Isaac.”
“You can thank us by remembering that criminals do the damnedest things.”
Bell was already kneeling by Straub’s gun. “Savage 99.”
Hatfield snapped a spent shell off the floor. “Another wildcat.”
The sleek, hammerless Savage felt remarkably light in Bell’s hands. He noticed an extension on the fore end of the chamber, as if a quarter-inch piece of metal had been added to it. A metal slide under the wooden end released it, revealing the underside of the barrel. A square stud projected from it. The wood had a corresponding hole. Bell fitted the wood to the barrel, held the chamber in the other hand, and twisted firmly. The barrel, which he expected to be compression-screwed into the chamber, rotated an easy quarter turn and pulled loose. He was suddenly holding two separate parts, each barely twenty inches long, short enough to conceal in a satchel, a sample case, or an innocent-looking carpetbag.
“Walt, did you ever see a breakdown Savage 99?”
“Ah don’t believe the company makes one.”
“Someone made this one with an interrupted screw.”
Bell put it back together by inserting the barrel into the chamber and turning a quarter turn. A metal slide underneath fit into a corresponding slot, locking the barrel in place. Thanks to the interrupted threads — an invention that had made possible the quick-sealing cannon breech — the rifle could be broken down or reassembled in two seconds.
But the question remained why such a light weapon for a man as big as Straub?
“No telescope.”
“Holes tapped for mounting one?” asked Walt.
Bell inspected the top of the frame. “Mounting holes tapped… You should have seen his shot in Kansas. Archie saw it.”
“Better part of a half a mile,” said Archie.
Walt said, “Mr. Straub must have had hawk eyes.”
The Springfield ’03 that the sheriff had found under the dead man in a Humble alley was fed ammunition by a removable straight magazine. The Savage had a rotary magazine. The indicator on the side of the chamber read “4.” Bell extracted one of the rounds. Instead of factory-made round noses, the bottleneck cartridges had been specially loaded with pointed, aerodynamic “spitzer” bullets.
Something about the weapon felt wrong to Bell. He unscrewed the barrel again, rethreaded it in a second, slid the wooden fore end back in place, locking the entire assembly. Then he carried the gun outside. The sorrel had wandered close. He tied its reins to the veranda railing in case shots spooked the animal, took a bead on a fence post a quarter mile away, and fired until the magazine was empty.
He rode the horse to the target and rode back.
“Hit anything?” Walt asked.
“Dead center twice, grazed it twice. It’s a good gun… But it’s hard to believe it’s the gun that killed Spike Hopewell.”
“Unless,” Hatfield grinned, “Mr. Straub was a better shot.”
“Doubt it.”
Archie said, “But we found a custom-made Savage shell.”
Texas Walt said, “Listen close, Archie. Isaac did not say that Spike Hopewell wasn’t killed by a Savage 99. All he’s saying is he don’t reckon this particular Savage 99 did the deed.”
“Telegram, Mr. Bell.”
Bell tipped the boy two bits and read the urgent wire he had been hoping for. Joseph Van Dorn had outdone himself in his constant effort to minimize expenses by reducing his message to a single word:
NOW
Bell told Archie Abbott to follow him when he was done helping Hatfield and sprinted to the station. He barely made the Sunset Express to New Orleans, where he transferred to the New York Limited.
He settled into a writing desk in the club car and was composing a report from his notebook when women’s voices chorused like music in his ear: “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Bell.”
Edna and Nellie Matters were headed to Washington, where Nellie was to address a suffragist delegation petitioning Congress. Her balloon was folded up in the express car. When the sisters said they were sleeping in upper and lower Pullman berths, Bell gave them his stateroom.
Edna protested. Nellie thanked him warmly. “How can we repay you?”
“Join me this evening in the dining car.”
At dinner, Nellie entertained him, and the surrounding tables, with tales of runaway balloons. Edna, who had clearly heard it all before, listened politely as Nellie rattled on. “Sideways, the wind blows you into trees and telegraph wires. Low on gas, you fall from the sky. Emergency! Quick! Emergency gas!—”
“Excuse me, young lady,” a clergyman interrupted from the table across the aisle. “I could not help but overhear. Where do you find emergency gas when you’re already flying in the air?”
“I have special steel containers installed in my basket,” Nellie answered. “Lots of balloons do. It’s very handy having extra hydrogen.”
“They must be heavy.”
“They beat falling,” she dismissed him and turned her green eyes back on Bell. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Too quick, too much emergency gas, you soar too high and suffocate. The air gets so thin, you run out of oxygen…”
Over the Neapolitan ice cream dessert, Bell echoed Archie’s earlier comment. “Strange how the three of us keep turning up together where crimes have occurred.”
Edna replied, “I’m beginning to suspect you, Mr. Bell.”
Nellie laughed. “I suspected him from the start.”
“May I ask you something?”
Nellie grinned at Edna. “Doesn’t he look suddenly serious?”
“Like a detective,” said Edna. “Go on, we shouldn’t be teasing you.”
“At least until he’s paid the dinner check,” said Nellie. “Actually, you really do look solemn. What is it?”
“Spike Hopewell told me that your brother ran off and you never heard from him. Is that true?”
Their mood changed in an instant. Nellie looked away. Edna nodded. “Yes. Actually, he was a Yale man, like you.”
“Really? What class?”
“You were probably several years ahead of him.”
“He didn’t go back after his freshman year,” said Nellie.
“Perhaps you knew him?” said Edna.
“I don’t recall anyone named Matters.”
“His name was Billy Hock.”
“Billy Hock?” Bell looked at her curiously.
“Yes,” said Edna. “He was my older brother.”
“And my older half brother,” said Nellie.
Isaac Bell said, “I never made the connection.”
“We did,” said Edna. “Or we wondered. Do you remember now?”
Bell nodded, recalling a slender, eager-to-please youngster, more a boy than a man. “Well, yes, I knew him, slightly…”
Billy Hock had big, bright gray-green eyes as bright as Edna’s and Nellie’s. “He enrolled as a freshman my senior year. He was very young, youngest of the boys entering.”