When he entered the room again the blind man had risen from his seat and moved across to the hearth. On the threshold the householder halted and stood keenly eyeing him while he groped along the mantel shelf as if searching with wavering fingers for something that his eyes could not discover—and the thought of the papers which he had left exposed caused an uneasy suspicion to dart into Spurrier’s mind. Any eye that fell on that list would have gained the key to his whole strategy and intent, but, of course, this man could not see. Still Spurrier cursed himself for a careless fool.
“I was jest seekin’ fer a match,” said Joe Givins as a slight sound from the other attracted his attention. “I aimed ter smoke for a leetle spell.”
The host struck a match and held it while the broken guest kindled his pipe, then he hurriedly glanced through his papers to assure himself that nothing had been disturbed—and though each sheet seemed as he had left it, the uneasiness in Spurrier’s mind refused to be stilled.
Presumably this bat-blind ragamuffin was no greater menace to the secrecy of his plans than a bat itself would have been, yet a glimpse of this letter would 125 have been so fatal that he asked himself anxiously, “How do I know he’s not faking?” The far-fetched apprehension gathered weight like a snowslide until suddenly out of it was born a grim determination.
He would make a test.
Noiselessly, while the ugly face that had been mutilated by a blasting charge gazed straight and sightlessly at him, Spurrier opened the table drawer and took from it a heavy calibered automatic pistol. It was a deadly looking thing and it needed no cocking; only the silent slipping forward of a safety catch. In this experiment Spurrier must not startle his guest by any ominous sound, but he must satisfy himself that his sight was genuinely dead.
“I thought,” said the host in a matter-of-fact voice as he searchingly studied the other face through narrowed lids, “that when sight went, the enjoyment of tobacco went with it.” As he spoke he raised and leveled the cocked pistol until its muzzle was pointed full into the staring face. Deliberately he set his own features into the baleful stamp of deadly threat, until his expression was as wicked and ugly as a gargoyle of hatred.
If the man were by any possibility shamming it would take cold nerve to sit there without any hint of confession as this unwarned demonstration was made against him—a demonstration that seemed genuine and murderous. For an instant Spurrier fancied that he heard the breath rasp in the other’s throat, but that, he realized, must have been fancy. The face itself altered no line of expression, flickered no eyelid. It remained as it had been, stolid and 126 blank, so that the man with the pistol felt ashamed of his suspicion.
But Spurrier rose and leaned across the table slowly advancing the muzzle until it almost touched the bridge of the nose, just between the eyes he was so severely testing. Still no hint of realization came from the threatened guest. Then the voice of the blind man sounded phlegmatically:
“That’s what folks say erbout terbaccy an’ blind men—but, by crickety, hit ain’t so.”