He went back to relate the original discovery of the two rounds that fitted Dick's 7.9 Mauser, and how they had lain in its magazine till the day of the eland.
'I was making the chief's dinner,' said Changalilo, 'on the fire. I heard from the hills not far off, first the boom'—he imitated the sound—'of Bwana Ar-i-shy's gun for elephant. Then not a moment later the crack'—again an imitation—'of the little gun.'
Soon after the Mama brought him the little gun with only one cartridge in the magazine and he had cleaned the barrel. Now she had forgotten that she had fired at the eland and missed. So he was blamed.
'Yes, indeed,' said the sukambali, 'the chief forgets and the slave is beaten.'
'First the boom of the elephant gun; then the crack of Dick's gun.' I could guess what had happened.
Archie had shot Dick through the heart. As he fell, his contracting fingers closed on the trigger of his 7.9 and the bullet went into the air, into the ground. Archie, deafened by the explosion from his heavy weapon and dizzy with fever, had not heard that posthumous, as one might call it, shot. When Norah had first told me her story, she related how she had picked up Dick's rifle and automatically had opened the breech. Some fresh point had crossed her brain, and she had not told me she had noticed the empty cartridge case. Memory of that detail had burst on her when she retold the story, and saw how it could be manipulated by a wife who was brave enough to shoulder the weight of her husband's crime."
Ross stopped speaking.
After a long silence broken only by the throbbing of the engines, "Is that the end?" I asked.
"The worst of you writers," said Ross, "is that you expect a story to have a beginning and an end. Life isn't so tidy. Death itself doesn't end the story, except possibly for the dead man....
Who is the platitude-monger who talks about the ever-widening circle of ripples started by any stone you care to fling into the duck-pond of life? Well, the wash started by that ill-timed kiss of Dick's came near, as I have shown you, to swamping the Sinclairs' boat. It may still swamp it."