"My notion is that he didn"t have the slightest chance in the wide world," was Wingfield"s comment. "Let us prove or disprove it if we can," and he opened a blade of his penknife and dug the point of it into the bullet of the cartridge first extracted from the dead man"s gun.
"There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play," he added, when the bullet, a harmless pellet of white clay, carefully moulded and neatly coated with lead foil, fell apart under the knife-blade.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "There is my notion--and a striking example of Mexican fair play."]
The playwright"s audience was interested now, beyond all question of doubt. If Wingfield had suddenly hypnotised the three who saw this unexpected confirmation of his theory of treachery in the Sanderson tragedy, the awed silence that fell upon the little group around the table could not have been more profound. It was Bromley who broke the spell, prefacing his exclamation with a mirthless laugh.
"Your gifts of deduction are almost uncanny, Wingfield," he a.s.serted.
"How could you reason your way around to that?"--pointing at the clay bullet.
"I didn"t," was the calm reply. "Imagination can double discount pure logic in the investigative field, nine times out of ten. And in this instance it wasn"t my imagination: it was another man"s. I once read a story in which the author made his villain kill a man with this same little trick of sham bullets. I merely remembered the story. Now let us see how many more there are to go with this."
There were four of the cartridges capped with the dummy bullets; the remaining seven being genuine. Wingfield did the sum arithmetical aloud.
"Four and five are nine, and nine and seven are sixteen. Sanderson started out that day with a full magazine, we"ll a.s.sume. He fired five of these dummies--with perfect immunity for Manuel--and here are the other four. If the woman had had a little more time, when she was pretending to hide the gun, she would have pumped out all of the good cartridges. Being somewhat hurried, she exchanged only nine, which, in an even game and shot for shot, gave Manuel ten chances to Sanderson"s one. It was a cinch."
Ballard sat back in his chair handling the empty rifle. Bromley"s pallid face turned gray. The tragedy had touched him very sharply at the time; and this new and unexpected evidence of gross treachery revived all the horror of the day when Sanderson had been carried in and laid upon the office couch to die.
"Poor Billy!" he said. "It was a cold-blooded murder, and he knew it.
That was what he was trying to tell me--and couldn"t."
"That was my hypothesis from the first," Wingfield a.s.serted promptly.
"But the motive seemed to be lacking; it still seems to be lacking. Have either of you two imagination enough to help me out?"
"The motive?" queried Bromley. "Why, that remains the same, doesn"t it?--more"s the pity."
The playwright had lighted the long-stemmed pipe, and was thoughtfully blowing smoke rings toward the new patch in the bungalow ceiling.
"Not if my theory is to stand, Mr. Bromley. You see, I am proceeding confidently upon the supposition that Sanderson wasn"t messing in Manuel"s domestic affairs. I can"t believe for a moment that it was a quarrel over the woman, with Manuel"s jealousy to account for the killing. It"s too absurdly preposterous. Settling that fact to my own complete satisfaction, I began to search for the real motive, and it is for you to say whether I am right or wrong. Tell me: was Sanderson more than casually interested in the details of Braithwaite"s drowning? That story must have been pretty fresh and raw in everybody"s recollection at that time."
Bromley"s rejoinder was promptly affirmative. "It was; and Sanderson _was_ interested. As Braithwaite"s successor, and with the fight between the company and the colonel transferred to him, he couldn"t shirk his responsibility. Now that you recall it, I remember very well that he had notions of his own about Braithwaite"s taking off. He was a quiet sort; didn"t talk much; but what little he did say gave me to understand that he suspected foul play of some kind. And here"s your theory again, Mr.
Wingfield: if a hint of what he suspected ever got wind in the camp, it would account for the superst.i.tious twist given to the drowning by Hoskins and the others, wouldn"t it?"
Wingfield smote the table with his fist.
"There is your connecting link!" he exclaimed. "We have just proved beyond doubt that Sanderson wasn"t killed in a fair fight: he was murdered, and the murder was carefully planned beforehand. By the same token, Braithwaite was murdered, too! Recall the circ.u.mstances as they have been related by the eye-witnesses: when they found the Government man and took him out of the river, his skull was crushed and both arms were broken ... see here!" he threw himself quickly into the att.i.tude of one fishing from a riverbank. "Suppose somebody creeps up behind me with a club raised to brain me: I get a glimpse of him or his shadow, dodge, fling up my arms, so--and one good, smashing blow does the business.
That"s all; or all but one little item. Manuel"s woman knows who struck that blow, and Sanderson was trying to bribe her to tell."
If the announcement had been an explosion to rock the bungalow on its foundations, the effect could scarcely have been more striking. Ballard flung the empty gun aside and sprang to his feet. The collegian sat down weakly and stared. Bromley"s jaw dropped, and he glared across at Wingfield as if the clever deduction were a mortal affront to be crammed down the throat of its originator.
The playwright"s smile was the eye-wrinkling of one who prides himself upon the ability to keep his head when others are panic-stricken.
"Seems to knock you fellows all in a heap," he remarked, calmly. "What have you been doing all these months that you haven"t dug it out for yourselves?"
Bromley was moistening his lips.
"Go on, Mr. Wingfield, if you please. Tell us all you know--or think you know."
"There is more; a good bit more," was the cool reply. "Three months ago you had a train wreck on the railroad--two men killed. "Rough track,"
was the cause a.s.signed, Mr. Bromley; but that was one time when your cautious chief, Macpherson, fell down. The two surviving trainmen, questioned separately by me within the past week, both say that there were at least inferential proofs of pulled spikes and a loosened rail. A little later one man was killed and two were crippled by the premature explosion of a charge of dynamite in the quarry. Carelessness, this time, on the part of the men involved; and _you_ said it, Mr. Bromley.
It was nothing of the kind. Some one had subst.i.tuted a coil of quick-firing fuse for the ordinary slow-match the men had been using, and the thing went off before the cry of "fire" could be given. How do I know?"
"Yes; how _do_ you know?" demanded Bromley.
"By a mere fluke, and not by any process of deduction, in this instance, as it happens. One of the survivors was crafty enough to steal the coil of subst.i.tuted fuse, having some vague notion of suing the company for damages for supplying poor material. Like other men of his cla.s.s, he gave up the notion when he got well of his injuries; but it was revived again the other day when one of his comrades told him I was a lawyer. He made a date with me, told me his tale, and showed me the carefully preserved coil of bad fuse. I cut off a bit of it and did a little experimenting. Look at this." He took a piece of fuse from his pocket, uncoiled it upon the table, and applied a match. It went off like a flash of dry gunpowder, burning through from end to end in a fraction of a second.
"Go on," said Ballard, speaking for the first time since the playwright had begun his unravelling of the tangled threads of disaster.
"We dismiss the quarry catastrophe and come to the fall of a great boulder from the hill-crags on the farther side of the river some two weeks later. This heaven-sent projectile smashed into the dam structure, broke out a chunk of the completed masonry, killed two men outright and injured half a dozen others--correct me if I distort the details, Mr.
Bromley. This time there was no investigation worthy of the name, if I have gathered my information carefully enough. Other rocks had fallen from the same slope; and after Fitzpatrick had a.s.sured himself that there were no more likely to fall, the matter was charged off to the accident account. If you and Michael Fitzpatrick had been the typical coroner"s jury, Mr. Bromley, you couldn"t have been more easily satisfied with purely inferential evidence. I wasn"t satisfied until I had climbed painfully to the almost inaccessible ledge from which the boulder had fallen. Once there, however, the "act of G.o.d" became very plainly the act of man. The "heel" used as a fulcrum in levering the rock from the ledge was still in place; and the man in the case, in his haste or in his indifference to discovery, had left the iron crowbar with which he had pried the stone from its bed. The crowbar is still there."
"Is that all?" asked Bromley, wetting his lips again.
"By no manner of means," was the equable rejoinder. "I could go on indefinitely. The falling derrick may or may not have been aimed specially at Macpherson; but it committed premeditated murder, just the same--the broken guy cable was rotted in two with acid. Again you will demand to know how I know. I satisfied myself by making a few simple tests on the broken ends with chemicals filched out of Colonel Craigmiles"s laboratory up yonder in the second story of his electric plant. No; I"m no chemist. But you will find, when you come to write stories and plays, that a smattering knowledge of every man"s trade comes in handy. Otherwise you"ll be writing yourself down as a blundering a.s.s in every second paragraph."
Wingfield paused, but it was only to relight his pipe. When the tobacco was burning again he went on, in the same even tone.
"The falling derrick brings us down to your _regime_, Mr. Ballard. I pa.s.s by the incident of the hurled stone that made that awkward patch necessary in your ceiling: you yourself have admitted that the stone could not have come from the blasting in the quarry. But there was another railroad accident which deserves mention. No doubt Hoskins has told you what he saw almost on the very spot where Braithwaite"s snuffing-out occurred. He thought it was Braithwaite"s ghost--he still thinks so. But we are less credulous; or, at least, I was. Like Sanderson, I have been making friends--or enemies--at the Craigmiles cattle ranch. In fact, I was down there the day following Hoskins"s misfortune. Curiously enough, there was another man who saw the Braithwaite ghost--one "Scotty," a cow-boy. He was night-herding on the ranch bunch of beef cattle on the night of the accident, and he saw the ghost, leather leggings, Norfolk shooting-jacket, and double-visored British cap all complete, riding a horse down to the river a little while before the train came around the curve. And after the hullabaloo, he saw it again, riding quietly back to the ranch."
Bromley was gripping the edge of the table and exchanging glances with Ballard. It was the Kentuckian who broke the silence which fell upon the group around the table when the playwright made an end.
"Summing it all up, what is your conclusion, Wingfield? You have reached one long before this, I take it."
The amateur Vidocq made a slow sign of a.s.sent.
"As I have told you, I went into this thing out of sheer curiosity, and partly because there were obstructions put in my way. That"s human nature. But afterward it laid hold of me and held me by its own grip.
I"m not sure that there have been any simon-pure accidents at all. So far as I have gone, everything that has happened has been made to happen; has been carefully planned and prepared for in advance by some one of more than ordinary intelligence--and vindictiveness. And, unhappily, the motive is only too painfully apparent. The work on this irrigation project of yours is to be hampered and delayed by all possible means, even to the sacrificing of human life."
Again there was a silence in the thick-walled office room; a silence so strained that the clickings of the stone hammers in the yard and the rasping cacophonies of the hoisting engines at the dam seemed far removed. It was Bromley who spoke first, and his question was pointedly suggestive.
"You haven"t stopped with the broad generalisation, Mr. Wingfield?"
"Meaning that I have found the man who is responsible for all these desperate and deadly doings? I am afraid I have. There would seem to be only one man in the world whose personal interests are at stake.
Naturally, I haven"t gone very deeply into that part of it. But didn"t somebody tell me there is a fight on in the courts between the Arcadia Company and Colonel Craigmiles?--a fight in which delay is the one thing needful for the colonel?"
Ballard came back to the table and stood within arm"s-reach of the speaker. His square jaw had taken on the fighting angle, and his eyes were cold and hard.
"What are you going to do about it, Mr. Wingfield? Have you arrived at that conclusion, also?"
Wingfield"s doubtful glance was in young Blacklock"s direction, and his reply was evasive.
"That is a very natural question; but doesn"t it strike you, Mr.
Ballard, that this is hardly the time or place to go into it?"
"No."
"Very well.... Jerry, what we are talking about now is strictly between gentlemen: do you understand?"
"Sure thing," said the collegian.
"You ask me what I am going to do, Mr. Ballard; and in return I"ll ask you to put yourself in my place. Clearly, it is a law-abiding citizen"s plain duty to go and lay the bald facts before the nearest prosecuting attorney and let the law take its course. On the other hand, I"m only a man like other men, and----"