“‘Thank you, Enoch,’ he says. ‘Now I’ll kill you, of course; but while I’m doing it, maybe you’ll hit me—no knowing; and I don’t care to have a soft-nose bullet mushroom inside of me. Besides, wouldn’t you rather have a clean hole—you’ve seen what the soft-noses do to the deer!’ ‘It’s all we’ve got,’ says I; but I guess he had me on that then. For I had seen the game hit by soft-nose bullets; and if I had to have him around with a bullet hole in him after I’d killed him, I wanted a clean bullet hole anyway—not the other kind. ‘Have you got the other kind?’ I said. ‘I’ll go to camp and get some,’ he answered. I don’t know what was in me; I had my nerve that day—for the first and only time in my life. I guess it was that, Steve, and it was a new feeling and I wanted to enjoy it. I knew there was some devilment in what he said; but I wanted to give him every chance—yes, I enjoyed giving the chance for more crookedness to him before I finished him; for I knew I was going to finish him then.
“‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll wait for you in the clearing by Bowton’s mining shack’; for I saw in his eyes that he was afraid not to come back to me; and I watched him go, and went over to Bowton’s and sat down with my back against the shanty, so he couldn’t come up and shoot me from behind, and waited. It was dark and cloudy; he was gone four hours, and before he got back it began to snow. It got so that you couldn’t see ten feet in that blizzard; but I sat outside in the snow till Neal came back; then we went into the shack together and agreed to wait till it was over—no man on earth could have done any shooting in that storm then, and we knew we couldn’t get back to camp till it was over. We sat there in the shack, and looked at each other. Night came, and we were still looking; only now we couldn’t see each other any longer, but sat waiting to hear the other moving—only neither of us moved. Then we did—slowly and carefully. Sometimes I sat in one place, sometimes in another, for I didn’t want him to know just where I was for fear he’d shoot. But he was afraid to shoot first; for if he missed, I’d see him by the flash and get him, sure. It kept on snowing. Once Neal said, ‘We’ll settle this thing in the morning.’ ‘All right,’ says I—but moved again, for I thought he would surely shoot then.
“I kept wondering when my nerve would go, but it stayed by me, and I tell you I enjoyed it; he moved more often than I did. For the first time in my life I wasn’t afraid of Neal Sheppard; and he was afraid of me. He laid down in one of the bunks and I could hear him turning from side to side; but he didn’t dare to sleep any, and I didn’t either. Then he said, ‘This is hell, ain’t it!’ ‘If it is,’ I said, ‘it’s a taste of what you’re going to get after!’ After I’d shot him, I meant. Then he said, ‘I want to sleep, and I can’t sleep while you’re living; let’s settle this thing now!’
“‘In the dark?’ I asked. ‘Not if I can find a light,’ he says, and I promised not to shoot him while he lit a match—I had none. He lit one and looked for a piece of candle, but couldn’t find any. Then I said, ‘If you want to do it in the dark, I’m agreeable’; for I’d been thinking that maybe it was only because of the dark, now, that I had my nerve, and maybe when daylight came and I could see him, I might be afraid of him. So we agreed to it.
“He felt for me in the dark, and held out five shells. We’d agreed in the afternoon to fight at fifty paces with five shells each—steel-patched bullets—and shoot till one killed. So he counted out five in his hand and offered them to me, keeping the other five for himself. I felt the five he gave me. They were full metal-patched, all right; the kind for men to fight with; they’d either kill or make a clean wound. But something about him—and I knew I had to be looking for devilment—made me suspicious of him. ‘What are your five,’ I said at a venture; ‘soft-nose? Are you going to use sporting lead on me?’ ‘They’re the same as yours,’ he said; but I got more suspicious. ‘Let’s trade, then,’ I said. ‘Feel the steel on them, then,’ he handed me one. I felt; and it was metal-patched, all right; but then I knew what was the bottom of his whole objection to the bullets; his shell was heavier than mine. Mine were lighter; they were unloaded; I mean they had no powder. He knew the powder we use was so little compared to the weight of the case and bullet it could easily pass all right; no one could spot the difference—no one, except one trained like me; and I was sure he never thought I could. It all flashed across me ten times quicker than that as soon as I felt his cartridges; but I said nothing. I told you I had my nerve that night. For the same second my plan flashed to me, too; my plan to turn his own trick against him and not let him know! So I gave him back his shell; let him think it was all right; but I knocked all ten, his and mine, on the floor.
“Then we had to get down and look for them on the floor. I knew I could pick out the good from the bad easy; but he—well, whenever I found a light one, I left it; but when I found a heavy one, I kept it. I got four good ones so easy and quick that he never guessed I was picking them; he was fumbling—I could almost feel him sweat—trying to be sure he was getting good shells. He got one, by accident, before I found it; so I had to take one bad one; but I knew he had four bad, though he himself couldn’t know anything about that. Then we loaded the guns, and went out into the big room of the cabin, and backed away from each other.
“I backed as quick as I could, but he went slower. I did that so I could hear his footsteps, and I listened and knew just about where he was. We didn’t either one of us want to fire first, for the other one would see his flash and fire at it. But after I had waited as long as I could and knew that he hadn’t moved because I heard no footsteps, I fired twice—as fast as I could pull the trigger—where I heard him last; and from just the opposite corner from where I last heard him, I heard the click of his rifle—the hammer falling on one of his bad shells, or it might have been the last for me. I didn’t see how he could have got there without my knowing it; but I didn’t stop to think of that. I just swung and gave it to him quick—two shots again, but not so quick but that—between them his hammer struck his good shell and the bullet banged through the wall behind me. But then I gave him my fourth shot—straight; for his hammer didn’t even click again. Besides, I heard him fall. I waited a long time to see if he moved; but he didn’t. I threw the bad cartridge out of my gun, and went over and felt for him. I got the matchbox and lit matches and saw he was dead; and I saw, too, how he had got in that corner without me hearing. He was in his stockings; he had taken off his shoes and sneaked from the corner where I first shot for him, so he would have killed me if I hadn’t seen to it that he had the bad shells he fixed for me. It struck a sort of a shiver to me to see that—to see him tricky and fighting foul to the end. But that was like Neal, wasn’t it, Steve? That was like him, clear to the last, looking for any unfair advantage he could take? That’s how and why I killed Neal, Steve—and this time it was justice, Steve! For Neal had it coming! Steve, Steve! didn’t Neal have it coming?”
He stretched out his hands to his old friend, the brother of the man he had killed, in pitiable appeal; and as the other rose, with his face working with indecision and emotion, Trant saw that the question he had asked and the answer that was to be given were for those two alone, and he went out and left them. The psychologist waited at the top of the high stone entrance steps for several minutes before Sheppard joined him and stood drinking in great breaths of the cold December air as though by its freshness to restore his nervous balance.
“I do not know what your decision is, Mr. Sheppard,” said the younger man finally, “as to what will be done in the matter. I may tell you that the case had already given me independent confirmation of Mr. Findlay’s remarkable statement in the important last particulars. So it will be no surprise to me, and I shall not mention it, if I am never called on by you to bear witness to the very full confession we have just heard.”
“Confession?” Sheppard started. “Findlay does not regard it a confession, Mr. Trant, but as his defense; and I—I rather think that during the last few minutes I have bee
n looking at it in that light.” He led the way toward the automobile, and as they stepped into it, he continued: “You have proved completely, Mr. Trant, all the assertions you made at my house this morning, but I am still guessing how the means you used could have made you think of Findlay as the man who killed Neal—the one whom I would have least suspected.”
“You know already,” Trant answered, “what led me to the conclusion that your brother was killed in the dark; and that it was certainly not a murder, but a duel, or, at least, some sort of a formal fight between two men, had occurred to me with compelling suggestiveness as soon as the Indian showed to me the intact shells—all with full metal-patched bullets, though these were not carried by you for game and no other such shells were found in your brother’s belt. And not only were the intact shells with steel-patched bullets, but the shots fired were also steel-patched bullets, as the Indian noticed from their holes through the logs. So here were two men with five metal-patched shells apiece firing at each other.
“It still more strongly suggested some sort of a duel to me,” the psychologist continued, “when they told us the singularly curious fact that two of the bullets had pierced the wall directly above the place where your brother’s shoes stood. This could reasonably be explained if I held my suspicion that the men had fought a duel in the dark—shooting by sound; but I could not even guess at any other explanation which was not entirely fantastic. And when I discovered immediately afterwards that, of the ten special shells which these men seemed to have chosen to fire at each other, five had been unloaded, it made the fact final to me; for it was utterly absurd to suppose that of the ten shells to be shot under such circumstances, five—just one half—would have been without powder by accident. But I am free to confess,” Trant continued frankly, “that I did not even guess at the true explanation of that—for I have accepted Mr. Findlay’s statement as correct. I had accounted for it by supposing that, in this duel, the men more consciously chose their cartridges and that the duel was a sort of repeating rifle adaptation of two men dueling with one loaded and one unloaded pistol. In the essential fact, however, I was correct and that was that the men did choose the shells; so, granting that, it was perfectly plain that one of the men had been able to clearly discriminate between the loaded and the unloaded shells, and the other had not. For not only did the one have four good shells to the other’s one—in itself an almost convincing figure—but the man with four did not even try to shoot his bad shell, while it appeared that the other had tried to shoot his bad one first. Now as there was not the slightest difference to the eye between the bad and good shells and—that which made it final—the duel was fought in the dark, the discrimination which one man had and your brother did not, could only have been an ability for fine discrimination in weight.”
“I see!” Comprehension dawned curiously upon Sheppard’s face.
“For the bullet and the case of those special shells of yours, Mr. Sheppard,” the psychologist continued rapidly, “were so heavy—weighing together over three hundred grains, as I weighed them at your gun cabinet—and the smokeless powder you were trying was of such exceptional power that you had barely twenty grains in a cartridge; so the difference in weight between one of those full shells and an empty one was scarcely one-fifteenth—an extremely difficult difference for one without special deftness to detect in such delicate weights. It was entirely indistinguishable to you; and also apparently so to Mr. Chapin, though I was not at first convinced whether it was really so or not. However, as I have trained myself in laboratory work to fine differences—a man may work up to discriminations as fine as one-fortieth—I was able to make out this essential difference at once.
“This reduced my case to a single and extremely elementary consideration: could young Tyler have picked out those shells in the dark and shot Neal Sheppard with them. If he could, then I could take up the circumstantial evidence against him, which certainly seemed strong. But if he could not, then I had merely to test the other men who carried Sheppard-Tyler rifles and were gone from camp the night your brother was shot, as well as young Tyler—though that circumstance seemed to have been forgotten in the case against Tyler.”
“I see!” Sheppard cried again. “So that was what you were doing with the steins and shot! But how could you tell that from the steins?”
“I was making a test, as you understand now, Mr. Sheppard,” Trant explained, “to determine whether or not Tyler—and after him, Mr. Chapin—could have distinguished easily between a loaded shell weighing something over 320 grains and one without the 20 odd grains of smokeless powder; that is, to find if either could discriminate differences of no more than one-fifteenth in such a small weight. To test for this in the laboratory and with the proper series of experiment weights, I should have a number of rubber blocks of precisely the same size and appearance, but graded in weight from 300 grains to something over 320 grains. If I had the subject take up the 300 grain weight and then the others in succession, asking him to call them heavier or lighter or the same weight, and then made him go over all the weights again in a different order, I could have as accurately proved his sense of weight discrimination as an oculist can prove the power of sight of the eyes, and with as little possibility of anyone fooling me. But I could not arrange a proper series of experiment weights of only 300 grains without a great deal of trouble; and it was not necessary for me to do so. For under the operation of a well-known psychological principle called Weber’s Law, I knew that the same ratio of discrimination between weights holds pretty nearly constant for each individual, whether the experiment is made with grains, or ounces, or pounds. In other words, if a person’s ‘threshold of difference’—as his power of weight discrimination is called—is only one-tenth in grains, it is the same in drams or ounces; and if he can not accurately determine whether one stein weighs one-fifteenth more than another, neither can he pick out the heavier shell if the difference is only one-fifteenth. So I merely had to take five of your steins, fill the one I used as a standard with shot till it weighed about six ounces, or 100 drams. The other steins I weighted to 105, 107, 108, no drams respectively; and by mixing them up and timing both Tyler’s and Chapin’s answers so as to be sure they were answering their honest, first impressions of the weights of the steins and were not trying to trick me, I found that neither could consistently tell whether the steins that weighed one-twentieth, one-fifteenth or even the steins which weighed one-twelfth more were heavier, lighter or the same as the standard stein; and it was only when they got the one which weighed no drams and was one-tenth heavier that they were always right. So I knew.”
“I see! I see!” Sheppard cried eagerly. “Then the coins you took to Findlay were—”
“Weights to try him in precisely the same sense,” Trant continued. “Only they approximated much more closely the weights of the bullets and had, indeed, even finer differences in weight. Five were genuine old florins weighing 400 grains, while the other five were light twenty grains or only one-twentieth; yet Findlay picked them out at once from the others, as soon as he compared them, without a moment’s hesitation.”
“Simple as you make it out now, young man,” Sheppard said to his young adviser admiringly, “it was a wonderful bit of work. And whether or not it would have proved that you were needed to save Tyler’s life, you have certainly saved me from making the most serious criminal charge against him; and you have spared him and my niece from starting their lives together under the shame and shadow of the public knowledge of my brother’s past. I am going now, of course, to see that Jim is freed and that even the suspicion that my brother was not killed accidentally in the woods, gets no further than Captain Crowley. I can see to that! And you, Mr. Trant—”
“I have retained the privilege, fortunately, Mr. Sheppard,” Trant interrupted, “since I am unofficial, of judging for myself when justice has been done. And I told you that the story we have just heard satisfied me as the truth. My office is i
n the next block. You will leave me there?”
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 39
