He did not wait for the door to shut. He shouted:
“It was no accident! It was foul play, I tell you! Murder!”
I pressed him back on his pillow. He struggled. So I let him half rise, knowing his need for spiritual quenchment more dangerous than his wounds.
“It must have been done at the garage. The six nuts of the left front wheel. Kill me this instant, if it ain’t the truth. While I was havin’ supper. Foul play it was. They left the bolts in. Devilish. As soon as I speeded up, on the curve, after the tracks.... It was someone hellish. Kill me if it wasn’t. Oh—kill me at any rate.” He plunged his face in the pillows. He moaned. Then his pain sobered him.
I wanted to soothe him with my hand. I could not touch him.
“Be quiet, Fergus. I am sure you are right. No one is blaming you. Be quiet, I say.”
A fleshly gray-haired man, his smooth, round face a daze of terror, waited at the door. He owned the garage where my parents’ car had stayed while they dined with friends, while Fergus supped, while the rain fell. The man was named Dukes. He drove me silent to the place of the deaths.
The open road was washed fresh with the rain. Clouds still hung black, and the air blasted like wet words, clean and ominous, against the drought of my face. We crossed railroad tracks, and stopped.
“That last bump done it, sir,” said Mr. Dukes. “Shook the bolts out. The nuts was gone already.”
The car was ditched rubbish against a telegraph post, a shut and mangled wreck. Fifty yards beyond, also in the ditch, we found intact the tire and rim of the left wheel, where they had rolled together.