"I believe so. But haven't you ever had a shave of being shot? I'll bet you didn't give it a thought half an hour afterward."
"I know; but it's more cold-blooded indoors, happening the way it did. And coming on the top of your ice-house affair yesterday!"
"It's the Luck!" cried Harry; "that's the explanation of it, and it's proved to the hilt. Fire and frost: they are done; scratch them out; and now there remains the rain. I'm afraid we shall not get the rain to-day, though. If one has to go through a thing—and I certainly have—it is better to get it over quick, as I, to do me justice, am getting it over. And, O Geoff, there's a good time coming!"
Harry had to see the foreman who was in charge of the electric light, as well as the keeper, when he got in, and Geoffrey, after seeing him go upstairs, went quickly through the baize door at the end of the passage from the hall, and down to the gun room. He wanted to find out what had caused Harry to give a jerk to the gun when he took it up. He had consciously seen him, the moment before it went off, put his hand to lift it out of the stand, then give an additional effort, as if it had stuck. All the morning he had been wondering about that. The obstacle, whatever it was, must, he felt certain, have been in connection with the trigger, for it was that jerk which had caused the gun to go off.
The men had already been at work over the damage, but they had gone to their dinner, and the room was empty. He went to the rack where the gun had stood, and next moment he gave a sudden little gasp, though not of surprise, for he had found only what he expected he should find, or something like it. Round the post at the corner of the rack was tied a piece of cotton. Two ends, each some six inches long, came out from it; the extremities were ragged, as if the piece had been broken.
Another gun with hammers stood in a glazed cupboard at one side of the room; Geoffrey took it out, and leaned it in the rack as nearly as possible in the position in which he remembered Harry's gun to have stood. Then kneeling down, he stretched the two broken ends of cotton in its direction. They just went round the right trigger.
He had a momentary impulse to call Harry and show him this, but decided not to. Harry, as he had said, was going to investigate the mysterious presence of a cartridge in a cleaned gun, and if he could trace how it got there, then would be the time to throw on this fresh evidence. Till then it was far better that he should not know, for at present he was inclined to treat the affair as an accident, due no doubt to some gross negligence, but nothing worse. This matter of the looped cotton, however, gave a far more sinister aspect to the affair, and the knowledge that there was foul work here was a burden that could be spared him at any rate till further light was cast. So, very carefully he unknotted the cotton from the post of the rack and put it in his pocket. The knot, he noticed, was the ordinary reef so familiar to the fly-fisher.
Somehow the certainty of what he had feared and suspected, even though the worst of his suspicions was confirmed, served to steady him. He knew now exactly what was to be faced—a deliberate and very cunningly devised attempt on Harry's life. Look at it which way you would, this could not conceivably be an accident. Taken alone, the presence of a cartridge in a cleaned gun had been a difficult mouthful even for an imagination in favour of accident to swallow; taken in conjunction with the piece of looped cotton, it could not be tackled.
He went over all the circumstances slowly and carefully, as he put the piece of cotton in his cigarette case. There had been two guns on the table—his, and, as it turned out, not Harry's, but Mr. Francis's. Harry's gun, loaded, a trap of nearly certain death to any one who took it up, was leaning in the gun rack. Here were the thoughts of the brain which had contrived these things.
The bell for lunch made him hurry out of the room, and in the hall he found Harry.