Stepping out of the door, I came face to face with Hilary Gallaway, coming from the direction of the garage. His face was flushed, and his breath was eloquent of the refreshments that had accompanied the game in Ady’s back room; but his step was steady enough, and his smile was as lazy as ever. He had apparently arrived while I was sending Figg to the phone and running downstairs—otherwise I would have heard his car.
“What’s the excitement?” he asked.
“Same as last night! Meet anybody on the road? Or see anybody leaving here?”
“No.”
“All right. Get in that bus of yours, and burn up the road in the other direction. Stop anybody you meet going away from here or who looks wrong! Got a gun?”
He spun on his heel with nothing of indolence.
“One in my car,” he called over his shoulder, as he broke into a run.
The farm hands still at their posts, I combed the grounds from east to west and from north to south. I realized that I was spoiling my chance of finding footprints when it would be light enough to see them; but I was banking on the man I wanted still being close at hand. And then Shand had told me that the ground was unfavorable for tracing prints, anyway.
On the gravel drive in front of the house I found the pistol from which the shots had been fired—a cheap .38-caliber revolver, slightly rusty, smelling freshly of burnt powder, with three empty shells and three that had not been fired in it.
Besides that I found nothing. The murderer—from what I had seen of the hole in the girl’s side, I called him that—had vanished completely.