A quarter of an hour before, Colin had arrived at the Repstow lodge with a puncture in his hind tyre. Luck was kind to him as usual; the puncture had occurred only a few yards down the road, and he could leave his machine with the lodge-keeper, and send a mechanic from the garage to repair it and bring it back to the house. For himself, he would take the short cut through the top of the Old Park back home; that reduced the distance by at least a half, and on this hot morning the soft-turfed shade would be pleasant.
Then a sudden thought struck him, and he asked whether the escaped madman had been captured; the walk home would be less exciting but perhaps pleasanter if they had caught him. And again it appeared that Colin’s affairs were being well looked after; the man had been found on the other side of the park half an hour ago; cleverly taken, so the keeper said. He must have been in the woods all night, and they came upon him as he dozed, seizing the gun he had possessed himself of before he woke and getting a noose round his arms.
So that was all right, and Colin, with a smile for the keeper’s wife and a sixpenny piece for the small child who regarded him with wide, wondering eyes, set off for the mile walk to the house. He took his revolver out of his pocket with the intention of giving it to the keeper, and having it brought up to the house with the bicycle; but then thought better of it, and, emptying the cartridges out, replaced it. It made a rather weighty bulge in his coat, but on general principles it was wise not to leave fire-arms about.
The thought of Raymond at his pigeon-shooting occurred to him as he walked, but no sound of firing came from the direction of the Old Park, which now lay close in front of him, and he supposed that his brother would have gone home by this time. What a sullen, awkward fellow he was; how he winced under Colin’s light artillery; how impotently Raymond hated him.... Colin could not imagine hating any one like that and not devising something deadly. But Raymond devised nothing; he just continued hating and doing nothing.
Colin had come to the beginning of the Old Park; the path lying along the top of it wound in and out of the great oaks; below to the right lay the road with the low stone wall running beside it. The road had been out of sight hitherto, forming a wider circuit, but just below him now there was a sharp corner and it came into view.
But what was that bright line of light on the top of the wall just at that point? Something caught the sun, vividly gleaming. For some reason he was imperatively curious to know what gleamed there, just as if it intimately concerned him, and half-closing his eyes to focus it and detach it from that baffling background of dappled light and shadow, he saw. Simultaneously and unbidden the idea of Raymond out shooting pigeons occurred to him. But what was he doing—if it were Raymond—hidden behind that dark-leaved rhododendron-bush with his gun resting on the wall and pointing at the road? That was a singular way of shooting pigeons, very singular.
Colin’s face broke into one great smile, and he slipped behind one of the oaks. Looking out he saw that another tree lower down the slope hid the rhododendron bush from him, and keeping behind the broad trunk he advanced down the hill in its direction. Twice again, in similar cover, he approached, and, peering round the tree, he could now see Raymond close at hand. Raymond’s back was towards him; he held his gun, with the end of the barrels resting on the top of the wall, looking at the angle of the road round which, but for that puncture in his bicycle, he himself would already have come.
There was now but one big tree between him and his brother, and on tiptoe, as noiselessly as a hunting tiger, he crept up to it, and, drawing his revolver from his pocket, he came within ten paces of him. Then some faint sound of his advance—a twig, perhaps, snapping beneath his step—or some sense of another’s presence reached Raymond, and he turned his head quickly in Colin’s direction. He found himself looking straight down the barrel of his revolver.
“Raymond, if you stir except to do precisely what I tell you, I shall shoot,” said Colin quietly. “If you take your eyes off me I shall shoot.”
Colin’s finger was on the trigger, his revolver as steady as if a man of stone held it.