“The tractor!” Quinlan exclaimed.
“Now you’re gettin’ it, Son. She’d been hiding from the man on the tractor, but now, all of a sudden, she wanted to be near him mighty bad. She was running for the tractor — and something made her swerve.”
“How do you know she swerved? Maybe she just didn’t get there.”
“Nope. The body was found on the plowed ground. That means she got to the furrow the tractor was plowing, and swerved. Now what would make her detour away from safety like that just when she was getting close?”
Quinlan shook his head. Then after a moment he said, “The trouble with all this is it leaves the murderer in here. How could he have got out if there were no tracks?”
“He left tracks, George.”
“He couldn’t have, Bill. He didn’t.”
“Oh bosh!” the sheriff said. “Sure he left tracks. He left the sort of tracks that nobody bothered to look at. That’s the angle I’m working on now, the way the fellow got out of here.”
“You mean he went out on Sam Beckett’s tractor? You mean that...?”
The sheriff suddenly slid from the end of the table. “Come on, son,” he said to Quinlan. “We’ve got a job to do — and we’ve got to do it fast.”
Lights blazed in the office of Rush Medford. Edward Lyons sat near the telephone where he could rush in reports to his newspaper. Martin Walworth, his bushy eyebrows drawn to ominous lines, gave Roy Jasper and Beryl Quinlan the benefit of his accusing gaze. The court reporter, his pen moving smoothly over a shorthand notebook, took down the questions and answers.
Rush Medford looked up as Bill Eldon and the undersheriff entered the room. There was exasperation on his face. For more than an hour and a half now they had been grilling the suspects and they knew just as much as they had known before, no more, no less.
Sheriff Eldon’s slow drawl came as a sharp change from the staccato bark of questions which had been fired by the criminologist. The sheriff pulled off his big sombrero, grinned at the district attorney, turned to Walworth and said, “Well, I guess I have to admit some of these rule-of-thumb methods aren’t as good as these modern scientific methods.”
Walworth said angrily, “If these two would consent to a lie-detector test I’d very soon tell you what’s...”
“You mean they won’t?” the sheriff interrupted.
Beryl Quinlan said, “As long as you are antagonistic to my father we aren’t going to cooperate. We’ll answer questions, and that’s all.”
“Come, come,” the sheriff said soothingly. “Why don’t you take a lie-detector test, Beryl? It might help things along.”
“We will if you say so.”
Walworth heaved an audible sigh of relief. “I’d want them to step in this room one at a time,” he said.
“Sure, sure,” the sheriff announced. “Go ahead, Beryl.”
The district attorney glanced suspiciously at the sheriff, but his suspicions seemed allayed by the guileless expression on the veteran’s grizzled countenance.
Walworth had his apparatus all set up and it took him only a few minutes to take Beryl Quinlan into another office where he spent some twelve minutes with her on the lie-detector. Then he called for Roy Jasper, strapped the electrodes and controls to him, and again propounded his questions.
At the end of that time, Walworth rejoined the others.
“They’re telling the truth,” he announced glumly.
“I thought so,” the sheriff said. “You know, I don’t know much about these new-fangled things, so us old timers have to rely on human nature and character, and figuring what a person would do under certain circumstances and...”
“That,” Walworth announced harshly, “is all bosh. The man doesn’t live who can judge guilt or innocence by physiognomy or by trusting to the perceptions of his auditory nerves. It’s merely a means by which the old-fashioned officer gave free rein to his prejudices. It’s no more reliable than locating a well by a forked willow stick.”
“Well, well, well,” the sheriff said, “now I’d always put a lot of store by all that, and I’ve seen some mighty good wells...”
Medford interrupted to ask pointedly, “Did you have any reason for this visit, Sheriff?”
“Sure,” the sheriff said. “I just come to ask Walworth a question. I’ve been reading somewhere about the identification of hairs. Seems to me like I read you can identify hair — not only what kind of a hair it is, but you can tell a lot about the age and condition of the person or animal it came from.”
“Yes,” Walworth said shortly. He was definitely not encouraging this cordiality on the part of the sheriff.
“Well, now,” the sheriff went on, “that’s fine, because it occurs to me that you might be able to help me solve this case.”
“I’ll solve it myself,” Walworth said.
“Now, now,” the sheriff cautioned. “No need to get on your high horse like that. I just thought we might sort of work together, since you’re here.”
“I’ve been retained by the district attorney to solve this case,” Walworth said.
“Well, now, that’s fine,” the sheriff beamed, “because I’m employed by the County to do the same thing, so we might as well sort of work along together.”
“I have my methods, and you have yours.”
“Sure, sure. Now take your methods, for instance. How do you think the murderer got out of that Higbee place without leaving tracks on the plowed ground?”
“I think tracks were there, but they were obliterated by slipshod methods. I think that Sam Beckett must have walked in the tracks of the murderer, and when you subsequently walked in the tracks of Sam Beckett you managed to obliterate the murderer’s tracks. That’s the only logical explanation.”
The sheriff grinned. “And suppose his tracks were obliterated — the tracks he made going up to the body? Then what? How’d he get out of the place? He was in the middle of a field and soft plowed ground was all around him — just like a man who’s painted himself into the middle of a floor by beginning at the outer edge of the room.”
The sheriff ceased speaking and grinned at Walworth’s evident discomfiture.
“Well, now,” the sheriff went on, at length, “suppose this girl had found a paper that was sort of incriminating to some people, and someone wanted to get that paper, someone that was snooping around the house watching her. She started to run. Well, she was young and trim, and maybe this man felt he couldn’t catch her, running after her, but just suppose he’d already arranged for a means of quick escape — something that required the use of a silk rope with tassels on it — the twisted silk rope that held the drapes over that door, for instance.”
Walworth looked at the sheriff as though doubting the officer’s sanity. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“A horse,” the sheriff said. “That cord was about eight feet long, long enough to tie around a horse’s neck, make a half hitch over his nose — and when the girl ran out of the house with whatever it was the man wanted, he ran out and got on his horse.
“It was dark and he couldn’t see her, but he knew she’d run for the tractor, so he galloped his horse straight for the tractor. The girl could see him ’cause she was looking up, and a man on a horse shows up against the sky, even when it’s cloudy, while a man on a horse, looking down, has a hard time seeing something on the ground at night. But by galloping toward the tractor, the man made the girl think he could see her, and she swerved and screamed, and then the man on the horse did see her.”
“And all this time the man on the tractor didn’t see or hear anything?” Walworth asked skeptically.