“Yes, but whose window?”
“That I do not know. But as he was found by our door, it could not have been far from us.”
“Charlotte could guess better, perhaps, than you.”
“Maybe, women are so quick.”
“Did he have a gun?”
“Firmin? Yes, it laid at his side.”
“Was it loaded, do you know?”
“Yes, two cartridges.”
“Well, then it could not have been Firmin who killed the gamekeeper,” said Andoche.
At the same moment Monsieur Banastre, after interrogating the wounded man, the bearers of the stretcher and Madame Cremailly, came to the same conclusion. Some seven or eight inhabitants of Trinquelin who had just arrived gave the same evidence as the mill owner. If the valet’s limb was fractured at eleven o’clock in the evening, he certainly could not have fired the bullet which killed Barrau at four o’clock on the succeeding morning.