The door had opened slowly. It remained ajar for the few seconds during which that singularly complex vocal effort was made by the woman, and then it closed quickly. But Sarah’s eyes continued glaring at the roughly-planed boards that constituted the panels of the door. She glared, then gave a gasp – such a glare and such a gasp would have made her fortune on the boards of those theatres in England which make a speciality of those potent elements of histrionic art, the glare and the gasp. Then she staggered back a step or two, and in another instant she had snatched the covering from the face of the corpse. She bent her face down to that face – the Inspector could not at that moment have said which of the two was the more ghastly – scrutinising it eagerly. Still keeping her eyes fixed upon the eyes that stared glassily up from the bench to the rough beams of the roof, she put out her arm and felt along the wall until she had grasped the tin lantern with the guttering candle inside it – the sole illumination of the place. She swung it down to the dead face, so that a wave of sickly light swept over the pallid, rigid features.
A crash, and then darkness followed.
She had let the lantern fall, and she herself had dropped upon the end of the bench, without a cry.
‘What the blazes!’ shouted the Inspector, leaping to his feet and striking a match, which he sheltered from the many draughts of the ‘shanty’ with his capacious hands, while the Doctor groped for the lantern and endeavoured to set up the candle once more. ‘What the blazes do you mean by dropping the glim?’
‘Isn’t it something like contempt of Court, my lass?’ said the facetious physician, replacing the freshly-lighted lantern.
The Barkeeper said nothing. He shifted a foot or two in the direction of the door.
‘Heavens above!’ muttered the woman. ‘Oh, heavens above! What does this mean?’
‘That’s just what we want to know, my fine lady,’ said the Inspector. ‘What did you see at the door?’
The three men had been so seated that the door had opened upon them, thus preventing them from seeing through the entrance. The woman alone had been in a position to see by whom the door had been opened.
‘Come, madam,’ said the Doctor; ‘Remember the important official position you occupy – remember what’s due to the honourable Court. What the Lord Chancellor did you see at the door?’
Sarah looked at the speaker, then at the Inspector, and lastly at Raynham.
‘What did I see? – what did I see? Is that what you ask me?’ she said.
‘That was the inquiry of the Court, madam,’ said the Doctor, with a very humorous bow.
‘I’ll tell you what I saw, though you’ll call me a liar,’ said she.
‘Very probably,’ remarked the Inspector dryly.
‘Oh, no, no; couldn’t think of such unpoliteness,’ said the Doctor.
The Barkeeper said nothing; only he got a foot nearer to the door.
‘The door opened – you saw it; though, being on the off side, you couldn’t see out,’ said she.
‘That’s true, any way,’ acquiesced the Inspector.
‘Inspector Mark couldn’t inspect or mark anything,’ said the facetious physician.
‘What did you see?’ cried the Inspector.
‘Him!’ cried the woman, starting to her feet and pointing to the corpse. ‘I saw him at the door.’
‘The dead man? I reckon that’s a whopper,’ said the Inspector. ‘He didn’t budge.’
‘I saw him – him!’ cried the woman. ‘He opened the door and stood there for a moment – long enough! – the light shone upon his face. He gave me a look – a look that I understood well – too well – a look that said, “Denounce my murderer! Denounce my murderer!” I obey that voice. Dick Raynham, I denounce you in the presence of witnesses as the murderer of this man!’
She swept round and pointed a melodramatic finger at the Barkeeper.
In a second he was pointing something at her – not a finger, but the barrel of a revolver. The flash of the light on the steel, the sound of the shot, the shriek of the woman, and the crash of the bullet into the centre of the tin lantern, occupied but one second. The next, the Inspector and the Doctor had fired their revolvers on chance in the direction of the door.
The bullets went into the open air.
The door was open and Dick Raynham had escaped.
‘Follow him – follow him, if you are men!’ yelled the woman. ‘You cowards! give me a shootin’ iron and I’ll follow him myself.’
‘Keep your back hair on,’ said the Inspector. ‘The troopers will have heard the shootin’, and if we don’t have our hands on him in half-an-hour they’ll do for him. Come along, Doc. He’s sure to make for the gulch.’
The two men hurried out into the starlit night, the Inspector mounting his horse, which he had hitched outside, and the Doctor getting astride his wiry little mare.
They galloped across the cleared scrub in the direction of the notorious Choke-neck Gulch – a wild gully just above Black Rock Creek, which had for years constituted a place of refuge for such members of the criminal population of the neighbourhood as had overstepped the boundary of discretion in some moment of excitement.
The entrance to the gulch was by a narrow path, and on this path the two horsemen pulled up.
‘We’re here a bit ahead of him,’ remarked the Inspector. ‘There’s no way that he could reach here sooner, unless he flew, and that’s not Dick’s form.’
‘No; he’s a good liar but a bad flyer,’ said the humorous medico.
‘He’ll have to fly if he wants to escape our revolvers,’ said the Inspector. ‘He’ll walk into our arms. Eh, what’s that? Listen. By the Lord Harry, he has got a horse and is coming straight for us! Keep well in cover, Doc, and we’ll cry “Bail up!” before he can whip out his iron.’
This programme was rigidly carried out. The horses were backed among the rocks, and each of the men cocked his revolver and waited silently, while the sound of galloping hoofs became more distinct. In a few minutes the horseman was within twenty yards of the entrance, and then the Inspector and the Doctor forced their horses out, shouting ‘Bail up! my lad!’ as they covered the newcomer with their revolvers.
He threw his horse on its haunches.
‘Hallo, Inspector; what’s all this?’ he cried.
The man was one of the Inspector’s troopers.
‘What, Stanley? Good!’ said the Inspector. ‘Man, we took you for the fellow we’re in search of.’
‘I heard the shots,’ said the trooper, ‘and I guessed that there was something bright going on. I looked in at the saloon and saw Raynham.’
‘Saw whom?’ the Inspector shouted.
‘Raynham. Was it a murder do you think?’
‘You mean to say that you saw Raynham in the shanty?’
‘Of course I did.’
Without another word the Inspector sent his horse forward with a bound. He galloped back to the shanty that passed by the name of the saloon, the other two following him. They all dismounted at the open door, the Inspector entering with his revolver in his hand.
A candle was burning, stuck in the neck of a bottle, and its light showed that the place was empty; only along the bench the body was lying.
‘Now where’s the man you said you left here?’ the Inspector asked of the trooper.
‘Where? Why there, to be sure; where else would he be?’ said the trooper.
He jerked his thumb in the direction of the body on the bench.
‘You’re a fool,’ said the Inspector. ‘That’s Great Lord Harry! What’s this, anyway?’
He snatched up the bottle and held the light close to the dead man’s face.
‘Great Lord! great Lord!’ he said.
It was the Barkeeper, Dick Raynham, who was lying dead on the bench in the very place that had been occupied by the man whom he had robbed and murdered.