II
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.