Vi kicked Gargantua’s vast sides but, turning his massive head in mild inquiry, he continued his lumbering trot. “Come on, you! Shift into high!”
Gargantua stopped altogether, his big ears twitching.
Somewhere ahead there had been a cry, a crash.
“Kerrie!” shrieked Vi. She began to belabor the stallion’s ribs so violently that he bounded forward.
She thundered round the turn and there, a hundred yards ahead, made out two figures, one moving, the other still. The white mare’s body sprawled on the bridle-path; she was thrashing about, kicking with three legs. The fourth, her right foreleg, was crumpled under her like a snapped twig.
Kerrie lay beside the path in a heap.
Gargantua drummed up and began to nose Panjandrum as Vi scrambled off his back and flung herself on Kerrie.
“Kerrie! Open your eyes! Oh, Kerrie, please—”
Kerrie moaned. She sat up, dazed.
“Are you all right, Kerrie? You don’t feel — as if — anything’s bro...”
“I’m all right,” and Kerrie in a sick voice. “I think I am, anyway.”
“What happened, Kerrie? Tell me!”
“Panjandrum threw me. It wasn’t her fault. She was galloping, and stumbled suddenly. I flew right over her head. Vi, it was a miracle. I mean, ordinarily I’d have broken my neck. But I happened to land in this heap of leaves, and they softened my fall. How is she?... Vi!”
She saw the mare, writhing in pain on the path.
“Vi! She’s broken her leg!”
Kerrie ran over to the mare, sank to her knees, stroked the rigid neck, forced herself to look at the snapped foreleg. The steel shoe dangled from the motionless hoof.
“Vi,” said Kerrie in a horrified voice. “Look... at... this.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The shoe on her broken leg. It’s... But it can’t be. I watched Jeff Crombie in the smithy only this morning. He shod her fresh — all four — a few hours ago!”
“I don’t get you,” said Vi slowly.
On hands and knees Kerrie began a feverish examination of the path, pushing leaves aside, flipping twigs away.
“Four of the nails are missing!”
“You mean some one—”
“Here!” Kerrie sat cross-legged on the path, fiercely examining two horseshoe nails. They were bent and scratched.
“Somebody,” said Kerrie grimly, “loosened these nails and pried them partly out of Panjandrum’s hoof with a pair of pliers.” And she sat very still, staring at the nails.
“You mean some one loosened the shoe,” said Vi, aghast, “so that it would flop free in a gallop and make Panjandrum stumble?”
“Except for the miracle of those leaves, Vi, I’d be lying over there with a broken neck this minute, and it would have been put down as an — accident.”
Kerrie smoothed the corded, silken neck with her palm. The mare lay more quietly now, her big eyes on Kerrie’s face.
Then Kerrie said in a hard voice: “Ride back to the stables and tell them to come for Panjandrum, Vi. I’ll stay here with her.”
“But, Kerrie, you can’t! Suppose some one — I won’t leave you alone here!”
“Please, Vi. And don’t say anything about the nails.”
There was something so coldly final in Kerrie’s tone that Vi gulped and mounted Gargantua and lumbered off.
After dinner that evening Kerrie, on the plea of feeling ill after her accident, excused herself and glanced pointedly at her friend.
Vi followed several minutes later; and Kerrie locked all the doors of her rooms.
“Well, Kerrie? What do you think?”
Kerrie was pale. “I’m the only one who rides Panjandrum, and the horseshoe nails were loosened deliberately. Somebody tried to kill me today. The same one who tried to kill me the other night.”
“Kerrie. Why don’t you call the — police?”
“There’d be no way to prove our suspicions. We’ve got to prove... some one did it — the one who did.”
“Or Ellery Queen. He’s a detective. He—”
“No! He’s... I just couldn’t. I won’t crawl to him for help, Vi.” Kerrie sat down on her bed and smoothed the spread. “There’s only one person in this world who would benefit from my death, Vi.” Her voice trembled. “And that’s Margo! She’s so terribly extravagant. Her weekly checks are mortgaged for months ahead; Mr. Goossens told me yesterday when I... I asked. She wants my share, and if I died, she’d get it. And then — she hates me because of... him. It’s Margo, Vi — Margo who climbed into my room the other night, Margo who loosened those nails this morning!”
“Let’s get out of here,” whispered her friend. “Give it up, Kerrie. You haven’t been happy here, anyway, with all that money. Kerrie, let’s go — go back to Hollywood.”
Kerrie’s mouth set stubbornly. “I won’t be chased away.”
“It’s not the money!” cried Vi. “It’s this big he-man of a chippy-chaser who looks like Bob Taylor! Don’t tell me!”
Kerrie looked away.
“You’re in love with him! And because you are, you’re proposing to keep living in the same house with a... a blonde swivel-hips who’s tried twice to kill you and won’t stop till she has!”
“She won’t drive me away,” said Kerrie in a low voice.
VII. Encounter on a Siding
Before Vi awoke the next morning, Kerrie stole out of the house and hurried down to the stables.
Jeff Crombie, Tarrytown blacksmith, was just getting out of his runabout.
“Oh, Miss Shawn.” He removed his hat, twisting it in his permanently blackened fingers. “I was just comin’ up to see you. I hear you had a fall yesterday.”
“It was nothing, Jeff,” smiled Kerrie.
“I sorta feel responsible, Miss Shawn,” said the smith. “Your groom told me on the phone the right foreshoe come almost off. I just shod the mare yesterday mornin’ with my own hands, and I can’t see how—”
“Now, Jeff, it wasn’t your fault. Forget it.”
“But I’d like to have a look at that shoe, Miss Shawn.”
“Such a bother about a little accident! Panjandrum must have caught her right forefoot in the cleft of a buried rock, and at the speed she was making the shoe was wrenched almost completely away from the hoof.”
“Oh,” said the smith. “I didn’t want you thinkin’ it was any carelessness o’ mine, Miss Shawn. You feeling all right?”
“Right as rain, Jeff.”
“Sorry about the mare. She was a daisy—”
“Is, Jeff.”
The blacksmith was astonished. “Ain’t you shot her yet? I’d be thinkin’ she’d be better off, poor thing, out of her misery—”
“Dr. Pickens told me about a certain veterinary in Canada who’s supposed to be able to mend horses’ broken legs. Some new method that gets them over the bad period and makes them good as new. So I’m shipping Panjandrum North today.”
The smith touched his eyebrow with two soiled fingers and drove off, shaking his head.
Kerrie went into the stable. The mare lay in soft straw, a temporary splint holding her broken foreleg stiff. Dr. Pickens, the local veterinary, had also padded and swathed her other legs from hoof and pastern to above the knees. Panjandrum’s great moist eyes looked dull and unhappy.