Fyles’ search was over. It had been thorough. And it had not gone unrewarded. Now he was considering the sprawled body and telling himself many things which the sight of it suggested.
He knew that that shattered life represented the simple logic of events. To him it was the natural sequence of them consequent upon those last moments in the courthouse at Calford, when Superintendent Croisette had passed him his hastily written note.
Yes. It was the result of the breaking down of Annette’s evidence by the man, John Danson, that had flung Pideau into headlong panic. That was the hoisting of the red light of danger. With the conflict of testimony before the Court, with Annette and the Wolf confounding each other, Nemesis had arisen before the haunted mind of the half-breed. The suspicious, nimble Pideau, had needed no more. There could be only one development from that. The truth! The plain deadly truth! And he knew, he very surely knew, what that meant. The Wolf would be set free.
It was the Wolf’s freedom wherein lay the real answer to Pideau’s death. Fyles negatived the idea that any fear of the processes of the law could have driven the man to his desperate act. No. A creature of his type, who loaded his murderous gun with explosive bullets, was not the man to blow his own head to pieces out of fear of any process of the law. It was some far greater fear that appalled him. It was something infinitely more devastating than that; something vital, more personal. Something, the contemplation of which robbed him of the last shred of his brutish manhood.
With the Wolf certain to be set free Pideau had fled from Calford, headlong, pursued by all the hounds of hellish fear. And Fyles knew that that fear was well enough founded. With the Wolf free, and baying the trail, God help the man who had sought to do him injury.
At last the policeman removed his pipe and knocked it out on the stove, and his gaze at once lifted to an ill-scrawled envelope propped against the oily stand of the lamp. He gazed at it thoughtfully. It was addressed to the Wolf.
He was just a little curious. Had the letter been addressed by the dead man to Annette, Fyles would unquestionably have opened it. But with the superscription of the Wolf’s name he had refrained.
Now he speculated. What did it contain? Would it contain a clue to the queer association of these men? Would it tell him the answer to those many questions with regard to the Wolf which had puzzled his mind since his first contact with these people? Or, on the other hand, would it contain merely the cowardly defiance of a man, who, in his panic and despair could still find pleasure in the fact of having robbed the other of his vengeance?
Well, it was of no very great consequence now. And, anyway, he would be present when the Wolf opened it.
He dismissed the matter, and turned to the chair at the desk. He drew it up and set it near the stove so that the dead body of the half-breed was almost hidden from him. Then he sat himself down. And as he did so the door at the front end of the store crashed to.