“What does Mr. Exon say?”
“Not much of anything, except that if we’ll put a gun in bed with him he’ll manage to take care of himself without bothering any policemen or detectives. I don’t know whether he knows who shot at him or not—he’s a closemouthed old devil. From what I know of him, I imagine there are quite a few men who would think themselves justified in killing him. He was, I understand, far from being a lily in his youth—or in his mature years either, for that matter.”
“Anything definite you know, or are you guessing?”
Gallaway grinned at me—a mocking grin that I was to see often before I was through with this Exon affair.
“Both,” he drawled. “I know that his life has been rather more than sprinkled with swindled partners and betrayed friends; and that he saved himself from prison at least once by turning state’s evidence and sending his associates there. And I know that his wife died under rather peculiar circumstances while heavily insured, and that he was for some time held on suspicion of having murdered her, but was finally released because of a lack of evidence against him. Those, I understand, are fair samples of the old boy’s normal behavior; so there may be any number of people gunning for him.”
“Suppose you give me a list of all the names you know of enemies he’s made, and I’ll have them checked up, and see what we can find that way.”
He raised an indolent hand in protest.
“The names I could give you would be only a few in many, and it might take you months to check up those few. It isn’t my intention to go to all that trouble and expense. As I told you, I’m not insisting upon results. My wife is very nervous, and for some peculiar reason she seems to like