“It’s all right,” he heard Arthur’s voice raised in a shouted explanation. “I saw him at the gate, trying to climb over; so I let him have it above his head. That scared him. He’s gone away now, back into the Maze. He’s got a pistol in his hand.”
Almost at once they heard Sir Clinton’s shot-gun fired.
“Trying the entrances one by one to see if he can slip out,” commented Arthur, with a certain malicious glee in his tone.
Some minutes passed, then, to Wendover’s astonishment, he heard the crack of the automatic pistol, and a bullet sang past him.
“Not much sign of surrender about that,” he admitted, as he got hurriedly under cover. “The beggar must have marked me down and tried a long shot through the hedge.”
Time flowed slowly on. Occasionally, with a slight change in the faint wind, some of the sulphur fumes drifted down to Wendover and caught his lungs.
“It must be pretty thick in the Maze, if a mere whiff of it gives one gyp like that,” he reflected. “The beggar must be half-dead with the fumes by this time, for he gets the full blast of it.”
Another interval of quietness gave Wendover time to think over the situation. Up to that point, he had gone through the business almost without trying to bring the morning’s work into touch with normal life. The whole affair had had an impersonal quality; for from start to finish he had not set eyes on the man they were hunting. But that peculiarity had enhanced the rather unreal character of the adventure, lending it a touch of the fantastic in his mind. And the extraordinarily methodical procedure which had governed the transactions helped in some way to accentuate his feelings. It had all been as logical as a nightmare seems to be while one lives through it.
Yet another shot-gun report—from the sulphur station this time—showed that the murderer was still making attempts to slip away. After that, another period elapsed without any further alarms. The sulphur fumes were now so dense that Wendover, though out of the main line of drift, was becoming seriously troubled by them. He could hear Arthur coughing continuously in the rhododendron clump; but the muzzle of the rifle was never lowered even in the worst paroxysm. Quite obviously Arthur meant to miss no chance of squaring the account for Sylvia.
As that thought crossed his mind, Wendover seemed to see the whole Whistlefield case in a fresh light. Instead of the mysterious murderer lurking behind green walls of the Maze, his mental vision threw up a picture of the real personality, Ernest Shandon. He could see him with his mind’s eye wandering along the paths of the Maze, choking, desperate, seeking for some outlet to safety and beaten back each time by the warning of the guns. And minute by minute the poison-cloud was growing denser over his place of refuge, bringing nearer the inevitable end of the drama.