Mrs. Gallaway and the nurse followed me into the latter’s room, where I questioned them. They were of as opposite type as you could find anywhere; and between them there was a certain coolness, an unmistakable hostility which I was able to account for later in the day.
Mrs. Gallaway was perhaps five years older than her husband; dark, strikingly beautiful in a statuesque way, with a worried look in her dark eyes that was particularly noticeable when those eyes rested on her husband. There was no doubt that she was very much in love with him, and the anxiety that showed in her eyes at times—the pains she took to please him in each slight thing during my stay at the Exon house—convinced me that she struggled always with a fear that she would not be able to hold him, that she was about to lose him.
Mrs. Gallaway could add nothing to what her husband had told me. She had been awakened by the shot, had run to her father’s room, had seen nothing—knew nothing—suspected nothing.
The nurse—Barbra Caywood was her name—told the same story, in almost the same words. She had jumped out of bed when awakened by the shot, pushed the screen away from the connecting doorway, and rushed into her patient’s room. She was the first one to arrive there, and she had seen nothing but the old man sitting up in bed, roaring and shaking his feeble fists at the window.
This Barbra Caywood was a girl of twenty-one or two, and just the sort that a man would pick to help him get well. A girl of a little under the average height, with an erect figure wherein slimness and roundness got an even break under the stiff white of her uniform; with soft golden hair above a face that was certainly made to be looked at. But she was businesslike and had an air of efficiency, for all her prettiness.
From the nurse’s room, Gallaway led me to the kitchen, where I questioned the Chinese cook. Gong Lim was a sad-faced Oriental whose