This listening tour completed, I returned to my room.
Still feeling wide-awake and restless, I pulled a chair up to a window, and sat looking at the moonlight on the river which twisted just below the house so as to be visible from this side, smoking another cigar, and turning things over in my mind — to no great advantage.
Outside there was no sound.
Suddenly down the hall came the heavy explosion of a gun being fired indoors! I threw myself across the room, out into the hall.
A woman’s voice filled the house with its shriek — high, frenzied.
Barbra Caywood’s door was unlocked when I reached it. I slammed it open. By the light of the moonbeams that slanted past her window, I saw her sitting upright in the center of her bed. She wasn’t beautiful now. Her face was twisted with terror. The scream was just dying in her throat.
All this I got in the flash of time that it took me to put a running foot across her sill.
Then another shot crashed out — in Exon’s room.
The girl’s face jerked up — so abruptly that it seemed her neck must snap — she clutched both hands to her breast — and fell face-down among the bedclothes.
I don’t know whether I went through, over, or around the screen that stood in the connecting doorway. I was circling Exon’s bed. He lay on the floor on his side, facing a window. I jumped over him — leaned out the window.
In the yard that was bright now under the moon, nothing moved. There was no sound of flight. Presently, while my eyes still searched the surrounding country, the farm hands, in their underwear, came running barefooted from the direction of their quarters. I called down to them, stationing them at points of vantage.
Meanwhile, behind me, Gong Lim and Adam Figg had put Exon back in his bed, while Mrs. Gallaway and Emma Figg tried to check the blood that spurted from a hole in Barbra Caywood’s side.
I sent Adam Figg to the telephone, to wake the doctor and the deputy sheriff, and then I hurried down to the grounds.
Stepping out of the door, I came face to face with Hilary Gallaway coming from the direction of the garage. His face was flushed, and his breath was eloquent of the refreshments that had accompanied the game in Ady’s back room, but his step was steady enough, and his smile was as lazy as ever.
“What’s the excitement?” he asked.
“Same as last night! Meet anybody on the road? Or see anybody leaving here?”
“No.”
“All right. Get in that bus of yours, and bum up the road in the other direction. Stop anybody you meet going away from here or who looks wrong! Got a gun?”
He spun on his heel with nothing of indolence.
“One in my car,” he called as he broke into a run.
The farm hands still at their posts, I combed the grounds from east to west and from north to south. I realized that I was spoiling my chance of finding footprints when it would be light enough to see them, but I was banking on the man I wanted still being close at hand. And then Shand had told me that the ground was unfavorable for tracing prints, anyway.
On the gravel drive in front of the house I found the pistol from which the shots had been fired — a cheap .38-caliber revolver, slightly rusty, smelling freshly of burned powder, with three empty shells and three that had not been fired in it.
Besides that I found nothing. The murderer — from what I had seen of the hole in the girl’s side, I called him that — had vanished.
Shand and Dr. Rench arrived together, just as I was finishing my fruitless search. A little later, Hilary Gallaway came back — empty-handed.
Breakfast that morning was a melancholy meal, except to Hilary Gallaway. He refrained from jesting openly about the night’s excitement, but his eyes twinkled whenever they met mine, and I knew he thought it a tremendously good joke for the shooting to have taken place right under my nose. During his wife’s presence at the table, however, he was almost grave, as if not to offend her.
Mrs. Gallaway left the table shortly, and Dr. Rench joined us. He said that both of his patients were in as good shape as could be expected, and he thought both would recover.
The bullet had barely grazed the girl’s ribs and breast-bone, going through the flesh and muscles of her chest, in on the right side and out again, on the left. Except for the shock and the loss of blood, she was not in danger, although unconscious.
Exon was sleeping, the doctor said, so Shand and I crept up into his room to examine it. The first bullet had gone into the doorframe, about four inches above the one that had been fired the night before. The second bullet had pierced the Japanese screen, and, after passing through the girl, had lodged in the plaster of the wall. We dug out both bullets — they were of .38 caliber. Both had apparently been fired from the vicinity of one of the windows — either just inside or just outside.
Shand and I grilled the Chinese cook, the farm hands, and the Figgs unmercifully that day. But they came through it standing up — there was nothing to fix the shooting on any of them.
And all day long that damned Hilary Gallaway followed me from pillar to post, with a mocking glint in his eyes that said plainer than words, “I’m the logical suspect. Why don’t you put me through your little third degree?” But I grinned back, and asked him nothing.
Shand had to go to town that afternoon. He called me up on the telephone later, and told me that Gallaway had left Knownburg early enough that morning to have arrived home fully half an hour before the shooting, if he had driven at his usual fast pace.
The day passed — too rapidly — and I found myself dreading the coming of night. Two nights in succession Exon’s life had been attempted — and now the third night was coming.
At dinner Hilary Gallaway announced that he was going to stay home this evening. Knownburg, he said, was tame in comparison; and he grinned at me.
Dr. Rench left after the meal, saying that he would return as soon as possible, but that he had two patients on the other side of town whom he must visit. Barbra Caywood had returned to consciousness, but had been extremely hysterical, and the doctor had given her an opiate. She was asleep now. Exon was resting easily except for a high temperature.
I went up to Exon’s room for a few minutes after the meal and tried him out with a gentle question or two, but he refused to answer them, and he was too sick for me to press him.
He asked how the girl was.
“The doc says she’s in no particular danger. Just loss of blood and shock. If she doesn’t rip her bandages off and bleed to death in one of her hysterical spells, he says, he’ll have her on her feet in a couple of weeks.”
Mrs. Gallaway came in then, and I went downstairs again, where I was seized by Gallaway, who insisted with bantering gravity that I tell him about some of the mysteries I had solved. He was enjoying my discomfort to the limit. He kidded me for about an hour, and had me burning up inside; but I managed to grin back with a fair pretence of indifference.
When his wife joined us presently — saying that both of the invalids were sleeping — I made my escape from her tormenting husband, saying that I had some writing to do. But I didn’t go to my room.
Instead, I crept stealthily into the girl’s room, crossed to a clothespress that I had noted earlier in the day, and planted myself in it. By leaving the door open the least fraction of an inch, I could see through the connecting doorway — from which the screen had been removed — across Exon’s bed, and out of the window from which three bullets had already come, and the Lord only knew what else might come.
Time passed, and I was stiff from standing still. But I had expected that.
Twice Mrs. Gallaway came up to look at her father and the nurse. Each time I shut my closet door entirely as soon as I heard her tiptoeing steps in the hall. I was hiding from everybody.