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  . . . That was safer: a smile before it had twisted itself into view could be buried beneath another kiss. And she did kiss well; she was undeniably delectable in spite of her gestures, her dramatics, and her italicized fervors. After all, the difference between her acting and his was only one of degree. But that made the flaw a matter of crudity, which was bad. Still—

  . . . Funny—the similarity of women’s faces remembered in dim lights on nights like this: the same leanness of cheek, the same shininess of eye, the same deepened lines spreading from between the eyes down and out around the mouth. It was as if something—some same thing behind all of them—was looking out through their faces: some aboriginal—but that was fantastic!

  . . . If only for a little while she would put away that posturing. This wasn’t a mass. If only—But it was possible that he was being hypercritical; it was possible that she wasn’t exaggerating so much as he thought. She was an impulsive, high-keyed little thing: she might be nearly in earnest—or even quite. Sincere or affected, she was devilishly fascinating, nevertheless.

  . . . If only she—

  . . . By Jove, she was glorious!

  NIGHT SHOTS

  The house was of red brick, large and square, with a green slate roof whose wide overhang gave the building an appearance of being too squat for its two stories; and it stood on a grassy hill, well away from the country road upon which it turned its back to look down on the Mokelumne River.

  The Ford that I had hired to bring me out from Knownburg carried me into the grounds through a high steel−meshed gate, followed the circling gravel drive, and set me down within a foot of the screened porch that ran all the way around the house’s first floor.

  “There’s Exon’s son−in−law now,” the driver told me as he pocketed the bill I had given him and prepared to drive away.

  I turned to see a tall, loose−jointed man of thirty or so coming across the porch toward me—a carelessly dressed man with a mop of rumpled brown hair over a handsome sunburned face. There was a hint of cruelty in the lips that were smiling lazily just now, and more than a hint of recklessness in his narrow gray eyes.

  “Mr. Gallaway?” I asked as he came down the steps.

  “Yes.” His voice was a drawling baritone. “You are—”

  “From the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch,” I finished for him.

  He nodded, and held the screen door open for me.

  “Just leave your bag there. I’ll have it taken up to your room.”

  He guided me into the house and—after I had assured him that I had already eaten luncheon—gave me a soft chair and an excellent cigar. He sprawled on his spine in an armchair opposite me—all loose−jointed angles sticking out of it in every direction—and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “First off,” he began presently, his words coming out languidly, “I may as well tell you that I don’t expect very much in the way of results. I sent for you more for the soothing effect of your presence on the household than because I expect you to do anything. I don’t believe there’s anything to do. However, I’m not a detective. I may be wrong. You may find out all sorts of more or less important things. If you do—fine! But I don’t insist upon it.”

  I didn’t say anything, though this beginning wasn’t much to my taste. He smoked in silence for a moment, and then went on, “My father−in−law, Talbert Exon, is a man of fifty−seven, and ordinarily a tough, hard, active, and fiery old devil. But just now he’s recovering from a rather serious attack of pneumonia, which has taken most of the starch out of him. He hasn’t been able to leave his bed yet, and Dr. Rench hopes to keep him on his back for at least another week.

  “The old man has a room on the second floor—the front, right−hand corner room—just over where we are sitting. His nurse, Miss Caywood, occupies the next room, and there is a connecting door between. My room is the other front one, just across the hall from the old man’s; and my wife’s bedroom is next to mine—across the hall from the nurse’s. I’ll show you around later. I just want to make the situation clear.

  “Last night, or rather this morning at about half−past one, somebody shot at Exon while he was sleeping—and missed. The bullet went into the frame of the door that leads to the nurse’s room, about six inches above his body as he lay in bed. The course the bullet took in the woodwork would indicate that it had been fired from one of the windows—either through it or from just inside.

  “Exon woke up, of course, but he saw nobody. The rest of us—my wife, Miss Caywood, the Figgs, and myself—were also awakened by the shot. We all rushed into his room, and we saw nothing either. There’s no doubt that whoever fired it left by the window. Otherwise some of us would have seen him—we came from every other direction. However, we found nobody on the grounds, and no traces of anybody.”

  “Who are the Figgs, and who else is there on the place besides you and your wife, Mr. Exon, and his nurse?”

  “The Figgs are Adam and Emma—she is the housekeeper and he is a sort of handy man about the place.

  Their room is in the extreme rear, on the second floor. Besides them, there is Gong Lim, the cook, who sleeps in a little room near the kitchen, and the three farm hands. Joe Natara and Felipe Fadelia are Italians, and have been here for more than two years; Jesus Mesa, a Mexican, has been here a year or longer. The farm hands sleep in a little house near the barns. I think—if my opinion is of any value—that none of these people had anything to do with the shooting.”

  “Did you dig the bullet out of the doorframe?”

  “Yes. Shand, the deputy sheriff at Knownburg, dug it out. He says it is a thirty−eight−caliber bullet.”

  “Any guns of that caliber in the house?”

  “No. A twenty−two and my forty−four—which I keep in the car—are the only pistols on the place. Then there are two shotguns and a thirty−thirty rifle. Shand made a thorough search, and found nothing else in the way of firearms.”

  “What does Mr. Exon say?”

  “Not much of anything, except that if we’ll put a gun in bed with him he’ll manage to take care of himself without bothering any policemen or detectives. I don’t know whether he knows who shot at him or not—he’s a close−mouthed old devil. From what I know of him, I imagine there are quite a few men who would think themselves justified in killing him. He was, I understand, far from being a lily in his youth—or in his mature years either, for that matter.”

  “Anything definite you know, or are you guessing?”

  Gallaway grinned at me—a mocking grin that I was to see often before I was through with this Exon affair.

  “Both,” he drawled. “I know that his life has been rather more than sprinkled with swindled partners and betrayed friends, and that he saved himself from prison at least once by turning state’s evidence and sending his associates there. And I know that his wife died under rather peculiar circumstances while heavily insured, and that he was for some time held on suspicion of having murdered “her, but was finally released because of a lack of evidence against him. Those, I understand, are fair samples of the old boy’s normal behavior, so there may be any number of people gunning for him.”

  “Suppose you give me a list of all the names you know of enemies he’s made, and I’ll have them checked up.”

  “The names I could give you would be only a few of many, and it might take you months to check up those few. It isn’t my intention to go to all that trouble and expense. As I told you, I’m not insisting upon results. My wife is very nervous, and for some peculiar reason she seems to like the old man. So, to soothe her, I agreed to employ a private detective when she asked me to. My idea is that you hang around for a couple of days, until things quiet down and she feels safe again. Meanwhile, if you should stumble upon anything—go to it! If you don’t—well and good.”

  My face must have shown something of what I was thinking, for his eyes twinkled and he chuckled.

  “Don’t, please,” he drawled, “get the i
dea that you aren’t to find my father−in−law’s would−be assassin if you wish to. You’re to have a free hand. Go as far as you like, except that I want you to be around the place as much as possible, so my wife will see you and feel that we are being adequately protected. Beyond that, I don’t care what you do. You can apprehend criminals by the carload. As you may have gathered by now, I’m not exactly in love with my wife’s father, and he’s no more fond of me. To be frank, if hating weren’t such an effort—I think I should hate the old devil. But if you want to, and can, catch the man who shot at him, I’d be glad to have you do it. But−”

  “All right,” I said. “I don’t like this job much, but since I’m up here I’ll take it on. But, remember, I’m trying all the time.”

  “Sincerity and earnestness”—he showed his teeth in a sardonic smile as we got to our feet—“are very praiseworthy traits.”

  “So I hear,” I growled shortly. “Now let’s take a look at Mr. Exon’s room.”

  Gallaway’s wife and the nurse were with the invalid, but I examined the room before I asked the occupants any questions.

  It was a large room, with three wide windows opening over the porch, and two doors, one of which gave to the hall and the other to the adjoining room occupied by the nurse. This door stood open, with a green Japanese screen across it, and, I was told, was left that way at night, so that the nurse could hear readily if her patient was restless or if he wanted attention.

  A man standing on the slate roof of the porch, I found, could have easily leaned across one of the window−sills (if he did not care to step over it into the room) and fired at the man in his bed. To get from the ground to the porch roof would have required but little effort, and the descent would be still easier—he could slide down the roof, let himself go feet−first over the edge, checking his speed with hands and arms spread out on the slate, and drop down to the gravel drive. No trick at all, either coming or going. The windows were unscreened.

  The sick man’s bed stood just beside the connecting doorway between his room and the nurse’s, which, when he was lying down, placed him between the doorway and the window from which the shot had been fired.

  Outside, within long rifle range, there was no building, tree, or eminence of any character from which the bullet that had been dug out of the doorframe could have been fired.

  I turned from the room to the occupants, questioning the invalid first. He had been a raw−boned man of considerable size in his health, but now he was wasted and stringy and dead−white. His face was thin and hollow; small beady eyes crowded together against the thin bridge of his nose; his mouth was a colorless gash above a bony projecting chin.

  His statement was a marvel of petulant conciseness.

  “The shot woke me. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything. I’ve got a million enemies, most of whose names I can’t remember.”

  He jerked this out crossly, turned his face away, closed his eyes, and refused to speak again.

  Mrs. Gallaway and the nurse followed me into the latter’s room, where I questioned them. They were of as opposite types as you could find anywhere, and between them there was a certain coolness, an unmistakable hostility which I was able to account for later in the day.

  Mrs. Gallaway was perhaps five years older than her husband; dark, strikingly beautiful in a statuesque way, with a worried look in her dark eyes that was particularly noticeable when those eyes rested on her husband.

  There was no doubt that she was very much in love with him, and the anxiety that showed in her eyes at times—the pains she took to please him in each slight thing during my stay at the Exon house—convinced me that she struggled always with a fear that she was about to lose him.

  Mrs. Gallaway could add nothing to what her husband had told me. She had been awakened by the shot, had run to her father’s room, had seen nothing—knew nothing—suspected nothing.

  The nurse—Barbra Caywood was her name—told the same story, in almost the same words. She had jumped out of bed when awakened by the shot, pushed the screen away from the connecting doorway, and rushed into her patient’s room. She was the first one to arrive there, and she had seen nothing but the old man sitting up in bed, shaking his feeble fists at the window.

  This Barbra Caywood was a girl of twenty−one or—two, and just the sort that a man would pick to help him get well—a girl of little under the average height, with an erect figure wherein slimness and roundness got an even break under the stiff white of her uniform; with soft golden hair above a face that was certainly made to be looked at. But she was businesslike and had an air of efficiency, for all her prettiness.From the nurse’s room, Gallaway led me to the kitchen, where I questioned the Chinese cook. Gong Lim was a sad−faced Oriental whose ever−present smile somehow made him look more gloomy than ever; and he bowed and smiled and yes−yes’d me from start to finish, and told me nothing.

  Adam and Emma Figg—thin and stout, respectively, and both rheumatic—entertained a wide variety of suspicions, directed at the cook and the farm hands, individually and collectively, flitting momentarily from one to the other. They had nothing upon which to base these suspicions, however, except their firm belief that nearly all crimes of violence were committed by foreigners.

  The farm hands—two smiling, middle−aged, and heavily moustached Italians, and a soft−eyed Mexican youth—I found in one of the fields. I talked to them for nearly two hours, and I left with a reasonable amount of assurance that none of the three had had any part in the shooting.

  Dr. Rench had just come down from a visit to his patient when Gallaway and I returned from the fields. He was a little, wizened old man with mild manners and eyes, and a wonderful growth of hair on head, brows, cheeks, lips, chin, and nostrils.

  The excitement, he said, had retarded Exon’s recovery somewhat, but he did not think the setback would be serious. The invalid’s temperature had gone up a little, but he seemed to be improving now.

  I followed Dr. Rench out to his car after he left the others, for a few questions I wanted to put to him in privacy, but the questions might as well have gone unasked for all the good they did me. He could tell me nothing of any value. The nurse, Barbra Caywood, had been secured, he said, from San Francisco, through the usual channels, which made it seem unlikely that she had worked her way into the Exon house for any hidden purpose which might have some connection with the attempt upon Exon’s life.

  Returning from my talk with the doctor, I came upon Hilary Gallaway and the nurse in the hall, near the foot of the stairs. His arm was resting lightly across her shoulders, and he was smiling down at her. Just as I came through the door, she twisted away so that his arm slid off, laughed elfishly up into his face, and went on up the stairs.

  I did not know whether she had seen me approaching before she eluded the encircling arm or not, nor did I know how long the arm had been there; and both of those questions would make a difference in how their positions were to be construed.

  Hilary Gallaway was certainly not a man to allow a girl as pretty as the nurse to lack attention, and he was just as certainly attractive enough in himself to make his advances not too unflattering. Nor did Barbra Caywood impress me as being a girl who would dislike his admiration. But, at that, it was more than likely that there was nothing very serious between them, nothing more than a playful sort of flirtation.

  But, no matter what the situation might be in that quarter, it didn’t have any direct bearing upon the shooting—none that I could see, anyway. But I understood now the strained relations between the nurse and Gallaway’s wife.

  Gallaway was grinning quizzically at me while I was chasing these thoughts around in my head.

  “Nobody’s safe with a detective around,” he complained.

  I grinned back at him. That was the only sort of answer you could give this bird.

  After dinner, Gallaway drove me to Knownburg in his roadster, and set me down on the doorstep of the deputy sheriff’s house. He offered to
drive me back to the Exon house when I had finished my investigations in town, but I did not know how long those investigations would take, so I told him I would hire a car when I was ready to return.

  Shand, the deputy sheriff, was a big, slow−spoken, slow−thinking, blond man of thirty or so—just the type best fitted for a deputy sheriff job in a San Joaquin County town.

  “I went out to Exon’s as soon as Gallaway called me up,” he said. “About four−thirty in the morning, I reckon it was when I got there. I didn’t find nothing. There weren’t no marks on the porch roof, but that don’t mean nothing. I tried climbing up and down it myself, and I didn’t leave no marks neither. The ground around the house is too firm for footprints to be followed. I found a few, but they didn’t lead nowhere; and everybody had run all over the place before I got there, so I couldn’t tell who they belonged to.

  “Far’s I can learn, there ain’t been no suspicious characters in the neighborhood lately. The only folks around here who have got any grudge against the old man are the Deemses—Exon beat ‘em in a law suit a couple years back—but all of them—the father and both the boys—were at home when the shooting was done.”

  “How long has Exon been living here?”

  “Four−five years, I reckon.”

  “Nothing at all to work on, then?”

  “Nothing I know about.”

  “What do you know about the Exon Family?” I asked.

  Shand scratched his head thoughtfully and frowned.