It was full midsummer when a circus came to Brexington. Case and I
started for a ride together on the afternoon of its arrival, passed the
tents already raised and met the procession on its way through town
from the freight yard of the railroad. We pulled our horses to one side
of the street and sat watching the show.
There were Cossacks and cowboys, Mexican vaqueros and Indians on
mustangs. There were two elephants, a giraffe, and then some camels
which set our mounts snorting and swerving about. Then came the cages,
one of monkeys, another of parrots, cockatoos and macaws, others with
wolves, bears, hyenas, a lion, a lioness, a tiger, and a beautiful
leopard.
Case made a movement and I heard a click. I looked round and beheld him
with his revolver cocked and pointed at the leopard’s cage. He did not
fire but kept the pistol aimed at the cage until it was out of range.
Then he thrust it back into its holster and watched the fag-end of the
procession go by. All he said was:
“You will have to excuse me, Radford, I have urgent business at home.”
Towards dusk Cato came to me in great agitation.
“Mahs’r Cash done gone off’n he haid,” he declared. “He shuah done loss
he sainsus.” I told him to return home and I would stroll up there
casually.
I found Case in the wood-shed, uncle Rastus with him. Hung by the hind
legs like new-slaughtered hogs were a dozen of the biggest dogs of
which Rastus had had charge. Their throats were cut and each dripped
into a tin pail. Rastus, his ebony face paled to a sort of mud-gray,
held a large tin pail and a new white-washer’s brush.
Case greeted me as usual, as if my presence there were a matter of
course and he were engaged upon nothing out of the common.
“Uncle,” he said, “I judge those are about dripped out. Pour it all
into the big pail.”
He took the brush from Rastus, who followed him to the gate.
There Case dipped the brush into the blood and painted a broad band
across the gravel of the drive and the flagstones of the footpath. He
proceeded as if he were using lime white-wash to mark off a lawn-tennis
court in the early days of the game, when wet markers were not yet
invented and dry markers were still undreamed of. He continued the
stripe of blood all round his place, just inside the hedge. He made it
about three inches wide and took great pains to make it plain and heavy.
When he had come round to the entrance again he went over the stripe on
the path and drive a second time. Then he straightened up and handed
the brush to Rastus.
“Just enough,” he remarked. “I calculated nicely.”
I had so far held my tongue. But his air of self-approval, as if in
some feat of logic led me to blurt out:
“What is it for?”
“The Chinese,” said Case, “esteem dogs’ blood a defense against
sorcery. I doubt its efficacy, but I know of no better fortification.”
No reply seemed expected and I made none.
That evening I was at Case’s, with some six or seven others. We sat
indoors, for the cloudy day had led up to a rainy evening. Nothing
unusual occurred.
Next day the town was plastered with posters of the circus company
offering five hundred dollars reward for the capture of an escaped
leopard.
Cato came to my office just as I was going out to lunch.
“Mahs’r Cash done gone cunjuhin’ agin,” he announced.
I found out that a second batch of dogs had been brought in by uncle
Rastus in his covered wagon behind his unfailing mules, had been
butchered like the former convoy and the band of blood gone over a
second time. Case had not gone outside that line since he first made
it, no drive to Shelby Manor that morning.
The day was perfect after the rain of the day before, and the bright
sunlight dried everything. The evening was clear and windless with a
nearly full moon intensely bright and very high. Practically the whole
population went to the circus.
Beverly and I dined at Case’s. He had no other guests, but such was his
skill as a host that our dinner was delightfully genial. After dinner
the three of us sat on the veranda.
The brilliance of the moonlight on and through the unstirred trees
made a glorious spectacle and the mild, cool atmosphere put us in
just the humor to enjoy it and each other. Case talked quietly, mostly
of art galleries in Europe, and his talk was quite as charming and
entertaining as usual. He seemed a man entirely sane and altogether at
his ease.
We had been on the veranda about half an hour and in that time neither
team nor pedestrian had passed. Then we saw the figure of a woman
approaching down the middle of the roadway from the direction of the
country. Beverly and I caught sight of her at about the same instant
and I saw him watching her as I did, for she had the carriage and
bearing of a lady and it seemed strange that she should be walking,
stranger that she should be alone, and strangest that she should choose
the road instead of the footpath which was broad and good for half a
mile.
Case, who had been describing a carved set of ivory chessmen he had
seen in Egypt, stopped speaking and stared as we did. I began to feel
as if I ought to recognize the advancing figure, it seemed unfamiliar
and yet familiar too in outline and carriage, when Beverly exclaimed:
“By Jove, that is Mary Kenton.”
“No,” said Colonel Case in a combative, resonant tone like the slow
boom of a big bell. “No, it is not Mary Kenton.”
I was astonished at the animus of his contradiction and we intensified
our scrutiny. The nearing girl really suggested Mary Kenton and yet, I
felt sure, was not she. Her bearing made me certain that she was young,
and she had that indefinable something about her which leads a man to
expect that a woman will turn out to be good looking. She walked with
a sort of insolent, high-stepping swing.
When she was nearly opposite us Case exclaimed in a sort of
chopped-off, guttural bark:
“Nay, not even in that shape, foul fiend, not even in that.”
The tall, shapely young woman turned just in front of the gateway and
walked towards us.
“I think,” said Beverly, “the lady is coming in.”
“No,” said Colonel Case, again with that deep, baying reverberation
behind his voice. “No, not coming in.”
The young woman laid her hand on the pathway gate and pushed it open.
She stepped inside and then stopped, stopped suddenly, abruptly, with
an awkward half-stride, as if she had run into an obstacle in the path,
a low obstruction like a wheelbarrow. She stood an instant, looked
irresolutely right and left, and then stepped back and shut the gate.
She turned and started across the street, fairly striding in a sort of
incensed, wrathful haste.
My eyes, like Beverly’s, were on the figure in the road. It was only
with a sort of sidelong vision that I felt rather than saw Case whip a
rifle from the door jamb to his shoulder and fire. Almost before the
explosion rent my ear drums I saw the figure in the roadway crumple
and collapse vertically. Petrified with amazement I was frozen with my
stare upon the huddle on the macadam. Beverly had not moved and was as
dazed as I. My gaze still fixed as Case threw up a second cartridge
from the magazine and fired again, I saw the wretched heap on the
piking leap under the impact of the bullet with the yielding quiver
of totally dead flesh and bone. A third time he fired and we saw the
like. Then the spell of our horror broke and we leapt up, roaring at
the murderer.
With a single incredibly rapid movement the madman disembarrassed
himself of his rifle and held us off, a revolver at each of our heads.
“Do you know what you have done?” we yelled together.
“I am quite sure of what I have done,” Case replied in a big calm
voice, the barrels of his pistols steady as the pillars of the veranda.
“But I am not quite so clear whether I have earned five hundred dollars
reward. Will you gentlemen be kind enough to step out into the street
and examine that carcass?”
Woodenly, at the muzzles of those unwavering revolvers, we went down
the flagged walk side by side, moving in a nightmare dream.
I had never seen a woman killed before and this woman was presumably
a lady, young and handsome. I felt the piking of the roadway under my
feet, and looked everywhere, except downward in front of me.