He forced himself to be calm. Nothing was wrong. Nesbit’s presence was a pure accident. Those colored boys, with their rabbit—they must have been near by when he shot Grahame; but Nesbit did not look suspicious. He couldn’t know anything.
“He’s a good fellow,” said Colby rather breathlessly, “though he’s one of the worst shots in the world.”
Nesbit nodded. He was coarse and unlovely, and seemed almost embarrassed by Colby’s presence. He had offered a lift purely as a matter of the courtesy of the road—nothing more than that. Colby gradually convinced himself that the thing was pure coincidence. It couldn’t be anything else.
He drew out his cigarette case and offered it to Nesbit. Nesbit took one with a mumble of thanks. Colby shielded a match with his hands, lighted his own, and offered to light Nesbit’s. Too late, he saw a tiny smear of dried blood on one of the fingers. His cupped hands trembled like tuning forks.
“Car shakes a lot,” said Nesbit heavily.
He took the match and puffed at it himself. Then he tossed it over the side of the car and drove on, frowning over something in his mind.
“I got to get a new car somehow,” he observed presently. “This heah one’s goin’ to fall apart.”
He jammed on the brakes and turned in his seat. The two colored boys rose and tumbled out, headed for a small negro cabin set back from the road. The older of the two mumbled his thanks. The car took up its rattling way again.
“I sent their father to jail,” said Nesbit heavily. “Runnin’ a still. He’ll be out in a couple o’ months.”
Colby felt a throb of satisfaction. The colored boys wouldn’t have been willing to talk to Nesbit, anyhow. As a law officer, they would have avoided him instinctively; but with a personalized family terror of him they would have sat dumb behind him, no matter what they had seen or suspected. Probably they had seen nothing at all. Probably, if Nesbit had noticed the blood, he would credit it to a partridge. Colby could ignore the little speck, now wiped off inconspicuously on the cracked leatherette cushion.