The Lost Valley

by J. M. Walsh

I turned back to my book, but had scarcely found my place when I caught the tinkle of breaking glass on woodwork, and practically at the same instant there was a sharp "pop," as if someone had drawn a cork from a bottle of some gaseous liquid. On the heels of that had come the single whip-like crack of a revolver. I swung to my feet in an instant, and the book dropped unheeded to the floor. During the last few days I had got out of the habit of carrying my revolver, but for all that I made straight for the study, and without the slightest ceremony turned the handle. The door was not locked; it opened at my touch. I doubt if it was even latched.

If my long years of training in the hard school of experience have brought me nothing else, they at least taught me to keep my head in just such an emergency as this present one. It was well for me that I had my nerves under complete control, for the sight that faced me was one that I could not have pictured in even my wildest flights of fancy. Bryce was slumped forward in his chair, his big head sunk on his chest. All the color had fled from his face, leaving it ashen pale. The kind eyes that used to sparkle so were glazed now in death, and squinted up at me through the tangled mat of his eyebrows. The whiteness of his immaculate shirt-front was defiled for the first and last time by the big blood stain that showed how his life had ebbed away. But it was Moira most of all who caught and held my attention. She was standing just a little to the left of Bryce, her deep eyes wide with horror and a smoking revolver still held in her white clenched hand. She was staring at Bryce and the blood-stain on his shirt as if what she saw was too monstrous for belief.

"Moira Drummond," I said, in a hard, cold, emotionless voice that I hardly recognised as mine, "put down that thing instantly."

She turned her head at my words and regarded me dazedly for just the fraction of a second. Then in an instant the revolver dropped from her nerveless fingers and clattered to the floor, she swayed like a willow-wand in the wind, and would have fallen had I not sprung to catch her. She went limp in my arms. I did not need a second glance to tell me that Bryce was dead, and that no one in this world could do anything for him now. So, recognising that my first duty was to the living, I turned my attention to Moira. She had merely fainted, and one or two simple remedies brought her round very quickly. She opened her golden-brown eyes and looked up into mine. The unaccustomed horror of what she had just gone through had not yet died out of them; they held a plaintive, pleading look that somehow went straight to my heart.

"I didn't do it," she quavered.

"Who said you did?" I asked.

"The way you looked and spoke to me, Jim——"

I stopped her with a gesture. "That's all right," I said consolingly. "I wouldn't have thought so for a moment. But tell me just what happened."

"That's more than I can," she said. "I was standing by him, talking, and suddenly I heard the window glass smash and something went 'pop.' And the next I knew uncle gave a little cry and his head fell forward on his chest. The blood was welling up out of his wound, and I saw that he was killed. His revolver was on the table, so I seized it and fired at the window. I don't know whether I hit whoever fired, but I hope I did," she concluded, with the faintest touch of forgivable viciousness in her voice.

It was only when she drew my attention to it that I remembered having heard the glass break. The window had a great big star in the centre of it with a myriad little cracks radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel.