“Quite so. You traded an arrow for a loaded gun. Not so bad.”
“I still have hope of recovering my arrow. The flesh of a man’s arm is a thin target. I put all I had into that shot.”
They found some footprints ground into the cinders where the man had stood. They discovered several breaks in the rusting sides of the shed, where he might have escaped. And yes, true to Johnny’s expectations, they found the arrow where it had spent its force and dropped a hundred or more feet from the spot from which it had been fired.
“See!” exclaimed Johnny as he picked it up. “I got him. Blood on the feathers.”
“I never doubted that for a moment,” Drew said impressively. “As you suggested, the arrow must have gone through the fleshy part of his arm.
“He’s a marked man!” he exclaimed. “You must keep that arrow. Some day, perhaps to-morrow, perhaps ten years from now, it may be needed as evidence.”
“Why, I—”
“That arrow mark will leave a scar that matches the width of your arrow blade. It will have other peculiarities that will tell straight and plain that the wound was made, not only by an arrow, but by one arrow—this one. I’ve seen things far more technical than that, far more difficult to prove, sway a jury and win a hanging verdict.”
So, in the end, the arrow was laid across two nails close to the revolver above Drew’s bed.
And, just by way of providing an easy means of escape if escape were necessary, the spider ran a line from the thug’s revolver to Johnny’s blood-dyed arrow.