He stood with his handkerchief held rather absurdly before him, listening to the stillness. Then he moved to put the handkerchief away. His gun interfered irritatingly. Somehow his hands fumbled. Eventually he shifted the gun to his left hand and stuffed the thing into his coat pocket.
The silence continued. All the world seemed full of a vast immobility, a vast quietude, which was only emphasized by the faint whispering of dry branches and drier leaves overhead. The stillness was reassuring. Nesbit would never know of this! Colby’s plan was too well worked out for him ever to find out anything.
The murderer bent over the huddled mass at his feet. Grahame would have ten thousand dollars on him. Colby searched for it industriously; but it is a curiously unhandy business to go through another man’s clothes. One’s hand catches, the linings follow one’s fingers out of the pockets, one spills things messily—especially if the other man happens to be dead.
Colby went into one pocket after another. A little trace of panic came over him. He found a cigarette case, a lighter, a handkerchief, a notebook, twenty or thirty dollars loose in a vest pocket. Then he remembered—it would be in a money belt, of course.
He unbuttoned Grahame’s vest clumsily and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. It was unpleasant to have to search like this. Colby felt hideously ashamed—not of the murder, of course, or even of the fact that he was a thief; but searching like this, searching a dead man’s clothing, made him feel unclean.
No, there was no money belt. Colby swore, a trifle shaken. Grahame must have the money on him! He was a free-lance bootleg operator. He had come down to make a deal for two thousand gallons of corn whisky. Colby told him that he had been running a still for three months, and wanted to sell all his product in a lump, avoiding constant dealings and mysterious trucks and cars, and so eliminating the probability of suspicion. Grahame must surely have brought the money; but where was it?
Colby felt sick with disappointment before he had finished hunting. Every pocket contained its appropriate objects—a knife, a watch, a luck piece, scraps of paper with undecipherable notations on them, a newspaper clipping in an envelope.
Pure despair filled him the instant before he thrust his hand into Grahame’s inside breast pocket. But the wallet was there, and the shock of finding it brought back confidence. He should have known! Dealing as Grahame did, the man knew all the tricks of the trade. An inside breast pocket is the one place that a dip will never touch. It is the safest possible receptacle for any valuable.
Colby opened the wallet. Four twenties, six hundreds, and ten, twelve, thirteen other bills—thousand-dollar bills. Colby’s breath whistled in his nostrils. Much better than he had expected! He had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before.
He folded them and thrust them into his own breast pocket with a strong sense of satisfaction. He felt a sort of professional gratification at remembering why one should use a breast pocket. Now there remained only the business of getting rid of Grahame and going back to town and making his proper report. He had everything worked out. Nesbit would never even hear of this affair. He was safe!