Later on having to dispose of the body, he used the same ladder to reach the top of the sewer.
That was why she had wanted to look at it. There was red clay around the sewer.
But we were not there more than fifteen minutes in all, perhaps less.
And next door the firecrackers were popping, and the cars on the street were backfiring after coasting down the hill.
What was one report more or less to us, as we stood there?
When we started back toward the kitchen Judy and Dick lagged behind me, like the lovers they were, and as I was leading Jock by the collar, it so happened that I was still in this stooped position when I reached the pantry door.
Joseph was still there, in his chair. But he did not rise when I entered, and I released the dog and straightened up, rather surprised.
I saw then that a thin stream of blood was slowly spreading over his shirt front, and as I stared at him his body relaxed and he slid out of the chair and onto the floor.
His eyes were open, and he seemed to be looking at me.
It was as though we gazed at each other, Joseph and I, and as though he said:
“You see what has happened to me.
It is incredible, but here I am.”
He was not conscious.
Just when that look of shocked surprise left him I do not know.
One moment it was there, the next it was as though a hand had been passed over his face and left it smooth.
I dropped down on my knees beside him, stricken with grief.
I caught his hand, which had served me for so many years. Strange, in all that time, how seldom I had touched his hand.
I felt a deep remorse, an overwhelming pity.
There, under the light, still shone beneath his thin iron-gray hair the scar from that mysterious attack which might have killed him.
I put my hand up and touched it, and with that I remember that I began to cry.
I realize now that some time in those shocked first seconds I heard the front door slam, but it no more than registered on my dazed brain.
On the kitchen porch Dick and Judy were still talking, and the red spot on Joseph’s shirt front spread a little, but very little.
I got up and went into the kitchen.
“Judy,” I said, “will you go around by the front door?
Joseph is—not well.”
“Not well?
You don’t mean that he’s been drinking?”
“No.
Please do what I tell you.”
I left them and went back to the pantry.
There was no indication there of any visitor.
The evening paper lay on the table, and Joseph’s reading glasses beside it.
Apparently he had stopped reading, and perhaps had dozed.
I had noticed lately that he dozed rather often; a sort of half-sleep, like that of a very old man.
Although Joseph was not that. He was perhaps in his late fifties.
Of a weapon there was no sign whatever.
I was apparently calm enough by that time. I knew that we had probably heard the shot, but that we had laid it to the customary explosions in the street.
I knew that Jock had not seen a rabbit, but something infinitely more sinister, and even to an extent I was able to reconstruct the crime; Dick had left open the door to the kitchen, and Joseph had not closed it, or certainly not locked it.
There had been ten minutes after Dick had passed through the pantry, and a shot required but a second of time.
I think it was then that I remembered the slamming door, and I realized that while I stared at Joseph the murderer was still in the house, working his way forward.
The sharp ringing of the door bell over my head at that moment sent a chill over me.
But it was only Dick and Judy, to report that the front door had been closed, although Dick had recklessly left it standing open, and to stare at me with curious eyes.
“Look here,” Judy said.
“Something’s happened to Joseph, hasn’t it?”
“He’s hurt.”
“Who hurt him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I broke down and began to cry again.
That shocked them profoundly.
I remember Judy pushing me into the library and Dick running back.
Then I believe I fainted, for I recall very little until the police were in the house, and Doctor Simonds was bending over me.