“Where’s he gone?” cried the man
with the beard. “Out?”
“This way,” said the policeman, stepping
into the yard and stopping.
A piece of tile whizzed by his head and smashed among
the crockery on the kitchen table.
“I’ll show him,” shouted the man
with the black beard, and suddenly a steel barrel
shone over the policeman’s shoulder, and five
bullets had followed one another into the twilight
whence the missile had come. As he fired, the
man with the beard moved his hand in a horizontal
curve, so that his shots radiated out into the narrow
yard like spokes from a wheel.
A silence followed. “Five cartridges,”
said the man with the black beard. “That’s
the best of all. Four aces and a joker. Get
a lantern, someone, and come and feel about for his
body.”
DR. KEMP’S VISITOR
Dr. Kemp had continued writing in his study until
the shots aroused him. Crack, crack, crack, they
came one after the other.
“Hullo!” said Dr. Kemp, putting his pen
into his mouth again and listening. “Who’s
letting off revolvers in Burdock? What are the
asses at now?”
He went to the south window, threw it up, and leaning
out stared down on the network of windows, beaded
gas-lamps and shops, with its black interstices of
roof and yard that made up the town at night.
“Looks like a crowd down the hill,” he
said, “by ‘The Cricketers,’”
and remained watching. Thence his eyes wandered
over the town to far away where the ships’ lights
shone, and the pier glowed—a little illuminated,
facetted pavilion like a gem of yellow light.
The moon in its first quarter hung over the westward
hill, and the stars were clear and almost tropically
bright.
After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled
into a remote speculation of social conditions of
the future, and lost itself at last over the time
dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled
down the window again, and returned to his writing
desk.
It must have been about an hour after this that the
front-door bell rang. He had been writing slackly,
and with intervals of abstraction, since the shots.
He sat listening. He heard the servant answer
the door, and waited for her feet on the staircase,
but she did not come. “Wonder what that
was,” said Dr. Kemp.
He tried to resume his work, failed, got up, went
downstairs from his study to the landing, rang, and
called over the balustrade to the housemaid as she
appeared in the hall below. “Was that a
letter?” he asked.
“Only a runaway ring, sir,” she answered.
“I’m restless to-night,” he said
to himself. He went back to his study, and this
time attacked his work resolutely. In a little
while he was hard at work again, and the only sounds
in the room were the ticking of the clock and the
subdued shrillness of his quill, hurrying in the very
centre of the circle of light his lampshade threw
on his table.
