‘Sure I’ll run. You do all your worrying about me now, because in a minute you won’t have any worries. I’ll run all right, after I’ve said a word to smart guys that come sticking their noses where they’ll wish to hell they hadn’t—’
Now he’s going to shoot, Stevens thought, and he sprang. For an instant he had the illusion of watching himself springing, reflected somehow by the faint light from the river, that luminousness which water gives back to the dark, in the air above Boyd Ballenbaugh’s head. Then he knew it was not himself he saw, it had not been wind he heard, as the creature, the shape which had no tongue and needed none, which had been waiting nine days now for Lonnie Grinnup to come home, dropped toward the murderer’s back with its hands already extended and its body curved and rigid with silent and deadly purpose.
He was in the tree, Stevens thought. The pistol glared. He saw the flash, but he heard no sound.
IV
He was sitting on the veranda with his neat surgeon’s bandage after supper when the sheriff of the county came up the walk — a big man, too, pleasant, affable, with eyes even paler and colder and more expressionless than Tyler Ballenbaugh’s. ‘It won’t take but a minute,’ he said, ‘or I wouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘How bothered me?’ Stevens said.
The sheriff lowered one thigh to the veranda rail. ‘Head feel all right?’
‘Feels all right,’ Stevens said.
‘That’s good, I reckon you heard where we found Boyd.’ Stevens looked back at him just as blankly. ‘I may have,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Haven’t remembered much today but a headache.’
‘You told us where to look. You were conscious when I got there. You were trying to give Tyler water. You told us to look on that trotline.’
‘Did I? Well, well, what won’t a man say, drunk or out of his head? Sometimes he’s right too.’
‘You were. We looked on the line, and there was Boyd hung on one of the hooks, dead, just like Lonnie Grinnup was. And Tyler Ballenbaugh with a broken leg and another bullet in his shoulder, and you with a crease in your skull you could hide a cigar in. How did he get on that trotline, Gavin?’
‘I don’t know,’ Stevens said.
‘All right. I’m not sheriff now. How did Boyd get on that trotline?’
‘I don’t know.’
The sheriff looked at him; they looked at each other. ‘Is that what you answer any friend that asks?’
‘Yes. Because I was shot, you see. I don’t know.’
The sheriff took a cigar from his pocket and looked at it for a time. ‘Joe — that deaf-and-dumb boy Lonnie raised — seems to have gone away at last. He was still around there last Sunday, but nobody has seen him since. He could have stayed. Nobody would have bothered him.’
‘Maybe he missed Lonnie too much to stay,’ Stevens said. ‘Maybe he missed Lonnie.’ The sheriff rose. He bit the end from the cigar and lit it. ‘Did that bullet cause you to forget this too? Just what made you suspect something was wrong? What was it the rest of us seem to have missed?’
‘It was that paddle,’ Stevens said.
‘Paddle?’
‘Didn’t you ever run a trotline, a trotline right at your camp? You don’t paddle, you pull the boat hand over hand along the line itself from one hook to the next. Lonnie never did use his paddle; he even kept the skiff tied to the same tree his trotline was fastened to, and the paddle stayed in his house.
If you had ever been there, you would have seen it. But the paddle was in the skiff when that boy found it.’
The End
