“Be quiet, Fergus. I am sure you are right. No one is blaming you. Be
quiet, I say.”
A fleshly gray-haired man, his smooth, round face a daze of terror,
waited at the door. He owned the garage where my parents’ car had
stayed while they dined with friends, while Fergus supped, while the
rain fell. The man was named Dukes. He drove me silent to the place of
the deaths.
The open road was washed fresh with the rain. Clouds still hung black,
and the air blasted like wet words, clean and ominous, against the
drought of my face. We crossed railroad tracks, and stopped.
“That last bump done it, sir,” said Mr. Dukes. “Shook the bolts out.
The nuts was gone already.”
The car was ditched rubbish against a telegraph post, a shut and
mangled wreck. Fifty yards beyond, also in the ditch, we found intact
the tire and rim of the left wheel, where they had rolled together.
We returned to the garage. Death was there in the open mouths of the
men, in their blanched eyes, in the heavy hanging shadows.
“I’m an honest man, sir,” said Mr. Dukes to me. “If this here was
murder and has to do with any o’ mine, I’ll see this here place which
is all I has in the world a heap of ashes before I’ll spare myself.”
“What motive,” said I, “could any of your men have had in such a thing?”
“None,” growled Dukes. The men’s murmur wreathed about me, an assent
that was ready to rage into flame at the kindle of any doubt of mine.
“Any boys about? Mischief-makers? Rowdies?”
“None.”
“Any strangers?”
A man came forward: a lean, cave-jawed fellow with the eyes of a
starved poet.
“There was that stranger that come askin’ fer work.”
He spoke not to me, but to Dukes. The men wreathed closer to him. They
felt that his words were a healing truth. They were one, sustaining
him in what he was ready to say.
“’Bout 8.30 it was or 9.00. While that car was here.”
The man was eloquent: quietly sure of himself, as if the assent of his
fellows transfigured his words.
“He come to the floor and he says: ‘Lookin’ fer a mechanic?’ The car
was the last in, and was goin’ out first. It was right there, next that
oil-tank. I says: ‘No chance’. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘won’t you go and ask
the boss? Won’t cost you nothin’.’ I looks at him. ‘No chance,’ I says,
an’ then, sudden, surprisin’ myself, I gives in: I says: ‘But if you
wants, why--I’ll go.’ So I leaves him.”
“Alone?”
His eyes burst at me. Then he remembered who I was. Pity controlled his
eyes.
“I couldn’t tell, mister. Jesus!--how could I tell? The man looked all
right. What we got to fear, usual, ’cept somethin’ lyin’ loose gets
swiped? I wasn’t gone a minute.”