the place was derelict. Then I heard groans.

"Struck a bunch of matches then, found the hall lamp, and got it alight.
Wished I'd got a gun, but there wasn't nothing handy except the poker,
so I took that and the light--just followed the groans. He was lying on
the barroom floor."

"Brooke?"

"Yes. Shot through the throat, blood spurting down the side of his neck,
making a big pool on the oil-cloth. You know the thing you make with a
stick and a scarf to twist up? A tourniquet, yes. Well, it choked the
swine, so I quit. He whispered something about my thumb hurting the
wound, so I told him my father's neck hurt worse.

"Up to that I thought he was just acting, playing pathetic to touch my
feelings. Once he muttered your name, and then he was dead."

"Brooke dead!"

"Yes, he'd been shooting Polly, too. I traced her blood tracks all the
way to the front door. Hello, what's that? I thought I heard--"

I listened and there was only the sound of the rain.

"I suppose it's all right," said Billy, "we'd better close that door,
though."

But before he could reach the door, Nurse Panton called him away to her
corner, where she spoke in a whisper so that I should not hear, sending
him, perhaps, for her cloak. Meanwhile I came from behind the counter to
my former seat before the open doorway, where I sat staring into the
darkness, unable to feel any more, but just benumbed. Across my
weariness flickered the mournful soliloquy of a poor barn-door
fowl--"Yesterday an egg, to-morrow a feather duster! What's the good of
anythin', why, nothin'."

Then I, too, heard a sound in the night, and because Billy and the nurse
were muttering, I stood up with the candle-light behind me, trying to
see into the darkness. Billy said afterward he had moved quickly, to
shut the door, but I waved him back just as the shot rang out.

The explosion blinded, deafened, seemed even to scorch me, while the
mirror on the wall came crashing down. Stunned, dazzled, horrified, I
felt a dull rage at this attempted murder.

A second revolver-shot stirred my hair, and I'm afraid then that I lost
my temper. I am not a fish-fag that I should stoop to fighting a
creature such as Polly, but I would have died rather than let her see
one trace of fear.

Billy rushed past the firing to reach the door and close it, but I
ordered him to desist, then grasped the candle and held it out to show a
better light.

"Lower your lights!" I shouted into the dark,