She regarded my casual remark as an inquiry.
“I—I’ve been with Sonny,” she said. Her voice was unsteady.
“Poor boy, he is having a hard time,” I murmured and went on. It was not until I was standing beside Eleven watching him drink the beef tea that I recalled with a little start that she had not been with Sonny, that I had seen her with my own eyes coming into the corridor from the porch.
Beef tea and Eleven did not go well together; in fact, a few moments after drinking it he was violently sick and for about a quarter of an hour I was fully occupied with him. I had closed the door into the corridor at first symptoms of his unhappy reaction, so that the disturbance should not arouse patients in near-by rooms. I stayed with him until he was back on his pillows again, quiet and exhausted, then I turned out the light, opened the door into the corridor, and left him. The hall was silent and dark and not a signal light gleamed in the whole length.
I felt a little ill myself from the heat and stifling air, and judging it to be a good time, I slipped quietly to the south door and let myself out onto the little colonial porch. The air was a shade less fetid there and I remember standing for a moment or two at the curved railing. The dim light coming from the door back of me made a little circle on the porch, faintly lighter than the surrounding night, and beyond that stretched thick blackness. Far below me toward the west twinkled vaguely the lights of the city and above on the hillside I caught the barest glimpse of green light through the trees; it was shining from Dr. Letheny’s study. All else was impenetrable darkness.
I could not have stood there for more than five minutes when without any warning an inexplicable thing occurred.
There was a sudden, sharp little whisper of motion from somewhere back of me, something flew past my shoulder, caught for a fleeting second the reflection of a light from the corridor back of me, and was gone into the dense shadows of the shrubbery, beyond the railing.
The thing was gone before I could realize that it had actually happened.
I started, drew in my breath sharply, and stifled the exclamation that rose to my lips. I stared in the direction the thing, whatever it was, had taken and strained my eyes to see into the thick black void that surrounded the porch. It was exactly as if an arrow, small and sharp and gleaming, had been shot from somewhere behind me into the shrubbery. But no one shoots arrows from hospitals in the dead of night.
I rubbed my eyes angrily and, but for the sharp little whisper of sound the thing made as it passed me, would have doubted their evidence. But that sound, coupled with the flash of light, was conclusive. Someone had deliberately thrown some small article with all the force at his command across the porch and into the shrubbery that extends downward into the orchard. It had come from one of the windows at either side of the door or from the door itself. Hastily in my thoughts I ran over the patients then in the wing. Not one of them was able to walk. Maida was the only person in the wing who could have been about, and what on earth was Maida throwing out into the night!