“You would gain nothing by it. If one of us is killed the other will finish the task. You know what I am here for, Mr. Blair. I purpose to open that coffin and then go.”
“No,” said the master of Hedgerow House; and it was twenty years since his “no” had been overborne.
“Yes,” returned Chester Kent quietly.
Mr. Blair’s arm rose, steady and slow, with the inevitable motion of machinery.
“If you shoot,” pointed out Kent, “you will rouse the house. Is there no one there from whom you wish to conceal that coffin?”
The arm rose higher until the muzzle of the pistol glared, like a baleful lusterless eye, into Kent’s face. Instead of making any counter-motion with the sheriff’s revolver, the scientist turned on his heel, walked to Sedgwick, and handed him the weapon. “I’m going to open the coffin, Frank,” he announced. “That pistol of Mr. Blair’s is a target arm. It has only one shot.”
“True,” put in its owner, “but I can score one hundred and twenty with it at a hundred yards’ range.”
“If he should fire, Frank, wing him. And then, whatever happens, get that casket open. That is the one thing you must do—for me and yourself.”
“But he may kill you,” cried Sedgwick in an agony of apprehension.
“He may; but I think he won’t.”