Bromley nodded. "I guess it is. It hasn't been out of its case or that cupboard since the day of the killing."
The playwright worked the lever cautiously, and an empty cartridge shell flipped out and fell to the floor. "William Sanderson's last shot," he remarked reflectively, and went on slowly pumping the lever until eleven loaded cartridges lay in an orderly row on the table. "You were wrong in your count of the number of shots fired, or else the magazine was not full when Sanderson began," he commented. Then, as Blacklock was about to pick up one of the cartridges: "Hold on, Jerry; don't disturb them, if you please."
Blacklock laughed nervously. "Mr. Wingfield's got a notion," he said. "He's always getting 'em."
"I have," was the quiet reply. "But first let me ask you, Bromley: What sort of a rifle marksman was Sanderson?"
"One of the best I ever knew. I have seen him drill a silver dollar three times out of five at a hundred yards when he was feeling well. There is your element of mystery again: I could never understand how he missed the Mexican three or four times in succession at less than seventy-five yards—unless Manuel's first shot was the one that hit him. That might have been it. Billy was all sand; the kind of man to go on shooting after he was killed."
"My notion is that he didn't have the slightest chance in the wide world," was Wingfield's comment. "Let us prove or disprove it if we can," and he opened a blade of his penknife and dug the point of it into the bullet of the cartridge first extracted from the dead man's gun. "There is my notion—and a striking example of Mexican fair play," he added, when the bullet, a harmless pellet of white clay, carefully moulded and neatly coated with lead foil, fell apart under the knife-blade.
