“No, your Honor, we couldn’t find it. It’s a mystery what became of that other bullet. The person who shot at Collander must have missed him the first time because only one bullet hit him and there were two shots fired. I heard ’em, and there were two empty cartridges in the pistol. Whoever killed him must have shot at him and missed him. But if they did, that bullet had to hit something in the room; and it never hit anything in the room!”
“Ah!” The attorney’s voice returned to its normal volume. “You couldn’t be mistaken about that, Bobby?”
“No,” the chief of police answered, “there can’t be any mistake about it. I went over it too carefully, too many times; there’s no bullet mark in that room.”
He said it with an energy of final decision that dismissed the question conclusively.
The court room was now awake. The packed audience leaned forward. It had now a deep, new interest; the interest of a doubt; the interest of a mystery.
Colonel Armant closed his case at this point.
He had, now, the two elements for which every attorney labors in a desperate criminal defense; a doubt and an involving mystery. The doubt he would build up in his argument, and for the mystery he had the solution ready.
But he was too wise, too greatly a master of effect, to disclose that solution before the proper dramatic moment. He had no intention to permit the attorney for the State to discount his explanation in the opening speech to the jury.
It was after that, when in his argument he had prepared the way, when his defense had been carefully built up, and the state of feeling in the court room—tense and expectant as before a closed door, that he uncovered the solution, like one who, with a magnificent gesture, flings that closed door open.
McNagel could find no bullet mark in the room, because there had been no shot in the room.