Walking to a little distance among the trees, Colby found a fallen
trunk, and on this he seated himself comfortably. He was supposed to be
hunting, and he wanted to kill a suitable amount of time, so he sat
there for two hours and smoked the better part of a pack of cigarettes,
going over and over his plans. He could find no flaw in them anywhere.
Before he emerged from the woods he dug a tiny hole and buried the
cigarette butts, just as an added precaution. The white paper would be
conspicuous, and a dozen of them lying in one spot would tell that a man
had been waiting there. Buried, and with pine needles strewn over the
spot, even that incitement to idle curiosity was removed.
He came out on the concrete road at a moment when there were no cars in
sight, and he marched sedately on toward town with his gun over his
shoulder. Within fifteen minutes he was passed by at least a dozen cars
going in both directions. He found it possible to smile comfortably at
the perfection with which things were going.
About a mile from the spot where he came out on the road, he overtook
two colored boys dawdling toward Culpeper, with a single antiquated gun
between them. They gazed at him fearfully and tried to hide the rabbit
that one of them was carrying. Colby passed them with a negligent nod.
They dropped behind, and were out of sight before he had gone a mile
farther.
Colby had gone over his plans so thoroughly that he felt entirely
secure. He felt so secure, in fact, that he began to puzzle a little
over his moment of terror immediately after firing the shot.
He had known all about Detective Sergeant Nesbit before he planned this
coup. He knew Nesbit personally, as he knew nearly everybody in
Culpeper. The man had a reputation altogether out of proportion to the
size of his territory. People considered him the equivalent of Nemesis.
For instance, when Jud Harris’s wife was found with her head beaten in,
and there was every indication that she had been killed by a casual
tramp, Nesbit had gone through the usual motions of investigation and
had turned up nothing at all; but a full two years later he got a new
story and convicting evidence from Jud Harris’s second wife. He had been
working on a bootleg case, and had terrified her into revealing the
secret of the nearly forgotten murder. That case was typical of the way
he worked.
Nesbit’s reputation, in Colby’s opinion, came from the fact that he
never forgot an unsolved case. He might not work out a solution at once.
Indeed, it seemed to Colby that he rarely did; but if any evidence
turned up, however belatedly, Nesbit was sure to fit it into its place
among the innumerable half solved puzzles that he always carried in his
brain. His results were slow but dramatic, and his reputation was
secure.
Hiking along with his gun over his shoulder, Colby congratulated himself
upon his own system. Nesbit would have no chance to come in this time.
There would be no mystery for him to mull over in his painful, patient
way. Grahame had come to town as Colby’s guest. Nobody knew him. He and
Colby had gone out hunting. A car had picked Grahame up and carried him
back to Richmond. That was all, absolutely all, except the little wad of
currency in Colby’s pocket.
The rattling rumble of an old Ford sounded behind him and came thudding
solemnly in his wake. It came roaring alongside, and its brakes
squealed.
“H’llo, Mistuh Colby!” said Nesbit heavily. “I’m goin’ in to town. Can
I give ye a lift?”
Colby swallowed something. He felt his forehead beading; but Nesbit was
bending down in the driver’s seat, critically adjusting the carbureter
ferrule and watching the radiator absently.
“Th-thanks,” stammered Colby.
He got in. Nesbit shoved in the clutch to first speed and took off his
foot, and the car jerked into high. It went quivering and rumbling along
the road to town.
Colby wiped the sweat from his face again. In the back seat, silent and
awed, and perhaps a trifle fearful, sat the two colored boys whom he had
passed twenty minutes before. They gazed at him with the amazing blank
woodenness of colored boys in a white man’s car. Colby felt his heart
racing.
“Get any shootin’?” asked Nesbit presently, never taking his eyes from
the road ahead. “I saw ye goin’ out with yer friend.”
“We bagged a few,” said Colby. He was fighting off a panic that he knew
to be unreasonable, so he added: “We started back to town, but a car
came along with one of Grahame’s friends in it. He was going on to
Richmond, so Grahame got in with him. Saved him a train trip. I gave him
the whole bag.”
“Yeah,” said Nesbit heavily. He drove in silence for a space. “I don’t
reckon we realize how much city people like birds. We can get ’em when
we want ’em. They can’t.”
“Grahame seemed to enjoy himself,” said Colby.
He forced himself to be calm. Nothing was wrong. Nesbit’s presence was a
pure accident. Those colored boys, with their rabbit--they must have been
near by when he shot Grahame; but Nesbit did not look suspicious. He
couldn’t know anything.
“He’s a good fellow,” said Colby rather breathlessly, “though he’s one
of the worst shots in the world.”
Nesbit nodded. He was coarse and unlovely, and seemed almost embarrassed
by Colby’s presence. He had offered a lift purely as a matter of the
courtesy of the road--nothing more than that. Colby gradually convinced
himself that the thing was pure coincidence. It couldn’t be anything
else.
He drew out his cigarette case and offered it to Nesbit. Nesbit took one
with a mumble of thanks. Colby shielded a match with his hands, lighted
his own, and offered to light Nesbit’s. Too late, he saw a tiny smear of
dried blood on one of the fingers. His cupped hands trembled like tuning
forks.
“Car shakes a lot,” said Nesbit heavily.
He took the match and puffed at it himself. Then he tossed it over the
side of the car and drove on, frowning over something in his mind.
“I got to get a new car somehow,” he observed presently. “This heah
one’s goin’ to fall apart.”
He jammed on the brakes and turned in his seat. The two colored boys
rose and tumbled out, headed for a small negro cabin set back from the
road. The older of the two mumbled his thanks. The car took up its
rattling way again.
“I sent their father to jail,” said Nesbit heavily. “Runnin’ a still.
He’ll be out in a couple o’ months.”
Colby felt a throb of satisfaction. The colored boys wouldn’t have been
willing to talk to Nesbit, anyhow. As a law officer, they would have
avoided him instinctively; but with a personalized family terror of him
they would have sat dumb behind him, no matter what they had seen or
suspected. Probably they had seen nothing at all. Probably, if Nesbit
had noticed the blood, he would credit it to a partridge. Colby could
ignore the little speck, now wiped off inconspicuously on the cracked
leatherette cushion.
The rather absurd confidence about the colored boys relieved his mind so
thoroughly that he was chatting amiably as the car chugged into town and
Nesbit obligingly turned off and set him down at his own door. It was
almost bravado that led him to say, with the wad of money that he had
taken from Grahame’s body pressing delightfully against his chest:
“I wish I’d thought of it before, Mr. Nesbit. I hear you’re a mighty
good shot. I’d have asked you to make a third with Grahame and myself.”
Nesbit managed to mumble something politely, without looking at Colby.
He would never shine in society, would Nesbit. Then he said heavily:
“Maybe nex’ time. I’d like to talk to Mistuh Grahame. I--uh--I think I
know him.”
His tone seemed peculiar to Colby; and as the sergeant drove off, Colby
found his heart pounding in a sudden paralyzing suspicion.