“Hark!” he exclaims and bends his head toward the open window. “Wasn’t that a shot downstairs?”
“Probably,” assents one of the group. “The boys in the bank have been plugging water rats in the river all the afternoon.”
“But it’s too dark to shoot rats.”
“Oh, one can aim pretty straight by electric light. Go ahead with your fiddling, George. Get away from that piano, Knapp, and let the professor give us the cavatina. That’s my favorite, and your accompaniment would ruin it. Let ’er go, professor.”
As the strains of the Raff cavatina die away, a man comes out of the entrance of the Raymond National Bank. He glances swiftly up, then down the street. Then he crosses the road in the shadow of a tall building and hurries toward the station.
“There is no train, north or south, before 11:50,” says the telegraph operator, in response to a query at the window. He is clicking off a message and does not turn his head. His questioner vanishes.
“Jim, Mr. Felton wants to see you,” the clerk of the Raymond Hotel informs the sheriff of Mansfield County, who is playing cards in a room off the office. Sheriff Wilson is a man with a game leg, a war record, and a wild mania for the diversion of sancho pedro. When he sits in for an evening of that fascinating pastime he dislikes to be disturbed.
“What’s he want?” he asks absent-mindedly, for he has only two more points to make to win the game.
“Dunno. He seems to be worked up about something.”