He had been fingering the recovered weapon in his pocket, almost fondling it, though with mingled feelings, as the Prodigal Son of his small possessions; suddenly it leapt out like a live thing in his hand, and clattered on the table between the girl and boy. It was a wonder neither of them was shot dead in his excitement. His whole face was altered; but so was his whole life. She could not understand his incoherent outburst; she only knew that he was twisting the chambers round and round under her nose, and that there appeared to be live cartridges in all six.
“Don’t you see?” the words came pouring. “Not one of them’s been fired—it’s as I loaded it myself the other night! It can’t have been this revolver at all!”
“But you must have known whether you fired or not?”
“I tell you I was walking in my sleep till the row woke me. I’d only heard it once before, in a room. It sounded loud enough for the open air, though I do remember wondering I hadn’t felt any kick. But I was so dazed, and there was this beastly thing in my hand; and he took it from me in such a rage that of course I believed I’d let it off. But now I can see I can’t have done. It wasn’t my revolver and it wasn’t me!”
“Yet you say yourself my uncle didn’t carry one?”
“I’ll swear he didn’t; but there’s another man in all this! There was the man they arrested on Saturday—the man I was so keen to set free!”
The boy’s laugh grated; he was beside himself with righteous joy. What was it to him that his innocence implied another’s complicity? Only too characteristically, he saw simply the central fact from his own point of view; but was it such an undoubted fact as he hot-headedly supposed? There was the broken negative to confirm a certain suspicion, but that was not enough for Phillida.
She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he said he had a few loose in his waistcoat pocket; he had thrown away the box. “Then my uncle might have put in a fresh one while you were asleep.”
“Why should he?”
“I don’t know, but it sounds quite as possible as the other.”