Off in the tangle of oak and poplar and pine a ruffed grouse drummed and a “cock of the woods” rapped its tattoo on a sycamore top.
Once he fancied he heard a stirring in the rhododendron where its large waxen leaves banked themselves thickly a hundred yards distant, and his eyes turned that way seeking to pierce the impenetrable screen—but unavailingly. Perhaps some small, wild thing had moved there.
Then, as had happened before that afternoon, the stillness broke to a rifle shot—this time clean and sharp, unclogged by echoes.
Spurrier stood for an instant while a surprised expression showed in his out-staring eyes, then he swayed on his feet. His hands came up and clutched spasmodically at his left breast, and with a sudden collapse he dropped heavily backward, and lay full length, swallowed in the darkness that hung beyond the door.
Over the rhododendron thicket quiet settled drowsily again, but through the toughness of interlaced branches stole upward and outward an acrid powder smell and a barely perceptible trickle of smoke.
Crouched there, his neutral-hued clothing merging into the earth tones about him, a man peered out, but he did not rise to go forward and inspect his work. 94 Instead, he opened the breech block of his piece and with unhurried care blew through the barrel—cleansing it of its vapors.
“I reckon thar ain’t no needcessity to go over thar an’ look at him,” he reflected. “When they draps down thet-away, they don’t git up no more—an’ some person from afar mout spy me crossin’ ther dooryard.”
So he edged backward into the tangle, moving like a crawfish and noiselessly took up his homeward journey.
When the slow plodding ox team came at last to the dooryard and Uncle Billy stood shouting outside the house, Sim Colby, holding to tangles where he would meet no chance wayfarer, was already miles away and hurrying to establish his alibi against suspicion, in his own neighborhood—where no one knew he had been absent.
Though it be an evil thing and shameful to confess, ex-private Bud Grant, alias Sim Colby, traveled light-heartedly, roweled by no tortures of conscience, but blithe in the assurance of a ghost laid, and a peril averted.