He lay awake at night, staring at the moonlit rectangle of his window, going over and over his plan in search of a flaw in it; but he found none. There was no flaw in his plan.
Then he remembered Nesbit’s heavy, dull-witted patience, and how he had hanged Jud Harris two years after his first wife’s murder. It had taken him two years to solve that crime, but he had done it. If he believed Colby had murdered Grahame, he would keep on working until he had an air-tight case, if it took him ten years.
In the meantime all that Colby could do was to behave in a perfectly natural fashion. Nesbit might know nothing. He had said that he thought he knew Grahame. He might have meant just that. It might have been pure coincidence. He was acting exactly as any man would act who had known a fellow townsman vaguely for years, and one day had picked him up in a car and talked to him for half an hour or so. His nod of recognition would change to a wave of the hand thereafter. That was all. That was how Nesbit was acting; but that was also how he would act if he were suspicious.
Colby watched the moonlight wax nightly to full brightness and begin to wane again, lying awake in the darkness while the curtains at his window flapped idly in and out of the window sill according to the vagaries of the chilly night breezes.
He would have given one of—no, he would give half of the thousand-dollar bills set in behind the horrible chromo above his washstand, if he could find out what Nesbit meant by saying that he thought he knew Grahame when he saw him with Colby.
That one thing made Colby’s nerves grow taut and jangling. For seven nights he lay awake and stared at the idiotically garnished rectangle that let in the moonlight. For seven nights that one phrase fretted at his nerves. During the day he went about his business under the horrible, the overwhelming strain of acting exactly as usual, and at night the problem banished sleep.
If Nesbit had known Grahame as a bootleg operator, he would have watched the man closely. Going hunting with Colby, it would have occurred to him that something else was in the wind. He might have cranked up his car to find out. He might have thought of Grahame as intending to make a cache of liquor near Culpeper. He might have gone out on the concrete road just to look about, to see if there were signs of heavy trucks turning off on the dirt side roads.
If he was out scouting around on Grahame’s account, he would know that Grahame did not leave Culpeper in the car of an acquaintance. He might have known from the beginning that Colby lied. That possibility put dark circles under Colby’s eyes, and hollowed his cheeks a little, and after a few days made his hands the least bit clumsy. One of his customers—a motherly, meddling person—commented sympathetically that he did not look well. Colby cursed her frantically in his heart, while he was beaming at her and assuring her that there was nothing wrong except too much Sunday dinner.
But he looked carefully in his mirror that night, and told himself to stop worrying. There was no sign of anything wrong. Nesbit had shown no suspicion. Colby and Grahame together had probably faded entirely from his mind.
That same night, however, Colby lay awake despairingly in his bed with the cold night air in his nostrils, watching the weaker rays of the waning moon strike through his window upon the elaborately figured wall paper, move slowly across to the washstand, reflect upward from the china basin, and make wavy lines of feeble light upon the atrocious chromo behind which he had hidden his booty. He had taken off the paper backing of that picture and had gummed the bank notes beneath it.