the lamp beside the
Nurse was out, and the only light was that from the landing, coming
through the open door. Miss Trelawny was kneeling on the floor beside
her father, and was screaming. I thought I saw something move between
me and the window; so, without thinking, and being half dazed and only
half awake, I shot at it. It moved a little more to the right between
the windows, and I shot again. Then you came up out of the big chair
with all that muffling on your face. It seemed to me, being as I say
half dazed and half awake--I know, sir, you will take this into
account--as if it had been you, being in the same direction as the
thing I had fired at. And so I was about to fire again when you pulled
off the wrap." Here I asked him--I was cross-examining now and felt at
home:

"You say you thought I was the thing you fired at. What thing?" The
man scratched his head, but made no reply.

"Come, sir," I said, "what thing; what was it like?" The answer came
in a low voice:

"I don't know, sir. I thought there was something; but what it was, or
what it was like, I haven't the faintest notion. I suppose it was
because I had been thinking of the pistol before I went to sleep, and
because when I came in here I was half dazed and only half awake--which
I hope you will in future, sir, always remember." He clung to that
formula of excuse as though it were his sheet-anchor. I did not want
to antagonise the man; on the contrary I wanted to have him with us.
Besides, I had on me at that time myself the shadow of my own default;
so I said as kindly as I knew how:

"Quite right! Sergeant. Your impulse was correct; though of course in
the half-somnolent condition in which you were, and perhaps partly
affected by the same influence--whatever it may be--which made me sleep
and which has put the Nurse in that cataleptic trance, it could not be
expected that you would paused to weigh matters. But now, whilst the
matter is fresh, let me see exactly where you stood and where I sat.
We shall be able to trace the course of your bullets." The prospect of
action and the exercise of his habitual skill seemed to brace him at
once; he seemed a different man as he set about his work. I asked Mrs.
Grant to hold the tourniquet, and went and stood where he had stood and
looked where, in the darkness, he had pointed. I could not but notice
the mechanical exactness of his mind, as when he showed me where he had
stood, or drew, as a