THE TRAP

This is a very instructive story. It deals with the value of a reputation, the best way to commit murder, what to do with embarrassing letters, and where stolen thousand-dollar bills may be exchanged or spent with the minimum discount—all of which information is useful; but mostly it deals with the value of a reputation.

Colby had thought about reputations rather carefully, but the sound of the shot with which he killed Grahame had not quite died away before he remembered the reputation of Detective Sergeant Nesbit. Then cold sweat came out on his forehead.

He stood stock-still for a matter of seconds, with a horrible sick feeling coming all over him. Grahame, of course, caused none of that feeling of nausea. Grahame had acted according to schedule. The load of buckshot went into his skull just where the spinal column entered it. While the thunderous crash of the gun still echoed among the nearer tree trunks, his arms went stiffly out in an aimless gesture and he fell with a slight splashing sound in the leaf-littered mud underfoot. Colby stood still, with thinning smoke coming out of the gun barrel, while the echoes died away to a dimming murmur among the trees, until even that sound was lost in the noise of the breeze in the bare branches overhead and the dry rustling of lingering brown leaves.

It was very peaceful, here among the trees. The brown clothing of the crumpled figure on the earth blended in color with the carpet of leaves. Any living creatures that might have been within hearing had been startled into immobility and silence by the shot. Colby had not yet moved even his feet after pulling the trigger. There was no sound at all, except a faint trickling noise from a little stream some twenty yards to the right.

Colby pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead—not at all the conventional thing for a murderer to do, of course; but he was not thinking of the dead man at his feet. He was thinking of Nesbit.

He stood with his handkerchief held rather absurdly before him, listening to the stillness. Then he moved to put the handkerchief away. His gun interfered irritatingly. Somehow his hands fumbled. Eventually he shifted the gun to his left hand and stuffed the thing into his coat pocket.

The silence continued. All the world seemed full of a vast immobility, a vast quietude, which was only emphasized by the faint whispering of dry branches and drier leaves overhead. The stillness was reassuring. Nesbit would never know of this! Colby’s plan was too well worked out for him ever to find out anything.

The murderer bent over the huddled mass at his feet. Grahame would have ten thousand dollars on him. Colby searched for it industriously; but it is a curiously unhandy business to go through another man’s clothes. One’s hand catches, the linings follow one’s fingers out of the pockets, one spills things messily—especially if the other man happens to be dead.

Colby went into one pocket after another. A little trace of panic came over him. He found a cigarette case, a lighter, a handkerchief, a notebook, twenty or thirty dollars loose in a vest pocket. Then he remembered—it would be in a money belt, of course.

He unbuttoned Grahame’s vest clumsily and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. It was unpleasant to have to search like this. Colby felt hideously ashamed—not of the murder, of course, or even of the fact that he was a thief; but searching like this, searching a dead man’s clothing, made him feel unclean.

No, there was no money belt. Colby swore, a trifle shaken. Grahame must have the money on him! He was a free-lance bootleg operator. He had come down to make a deal for two thousand gallons of corn whisky. Colby told him that he had been running a still for three months, and wanted to sell all his product in a lump, avoiding constant dealings and mysterious trucks and cars, and so eliminating the probability of suspicion. Grahame must surely have brought the money; but where was it?

Colby felt sick with disappointment before he had finished hunting. Every pocket contained its appropriate objects—a knife, a watch, a luck piece, scraps of paper with undecipherable notations on them, a newspaper clipping in an envelope.

Pure despair filled him the instant before he thrust his hand into Grahame’s inside breast pocket. But the wallet was there, and the shock of finding it brought back confidence. He should have known! Dealing as Grahame did, the man knew all the tricks of the trade. An inside breast pocket is the one place that a dip will never touch. It is the safest possible receptacle for any valuable.

Colby opened the wallet. Four twenties, six hundreds, and ten, twelve, thirteen other bills—thousand-dollar bills. Colby’s breath whistled in his nostrils. Much better than he had expected! He had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before.

He folded them and thrust them into his own breast pocket with a strong sense of satisfaction. He felt a sort of professional gratification at remembering why one should use a breast pocket. Now there remained only the business of getting rid of Grahame and going back to town and making his proper report. He had everything worked out. Nesbit would never even hear of this affair. He was safe!

He rubbed his handkerchief carefully over every article that he replaced in Grahame’s pockets, to remove possible finger-prints. The woods remained very quiet. To be sure, as the effect of the single shot wore away, there were little sounds near by. An old dog squirrel barked reassuringly, and his wife and relations came out of their holes and went about their businesses. A partridge that had frozen into stillness at the sound of the shotgun came to life and darted to a more promising spot. Colby heard it scratching and rustling among the fallen leaves.

It whirred off into nowhere when he picked Grahame up, however, and the squirrels lapsed abruptly into utter silence when his feet crackled on leaves and small branches as he staggered toward the stream with his burden.

Twenty yards, no more. He had seen the glitter of the stream curving toward the footpath before he shot Grahame. It was an unimportant little watercourse, nowhere more than half a dozen paces across, and it murmured and sang pleasantly to itself over its gravelly bed.

Colby went painstakingly down to its margin. He knew exactly where he was and what he was going to do. After a heavy rain the stream ran with a strong current. It was always carving at its banks or making minor changes in them, and at one spot it had undermined the six-foot clay wall which confined it so that a hollow of considerable depth was roofed over only by tree roots and the earth on top of them. Sooner or later that roof would cave in.

It was easy to push the dead body into the hollow, where it was well hidden. Few people ever came near this place, anyhow. No one would ever dream of creeping in there and risking a cave-in for no purpose. With one single rain of any size, the roof would probably collapse and bury Grahame securely. No one would ever think of looking for a missing man under a cave-in of that sort.

Colby climbed up the bank and tested the roof with his foot. It quivered promisingly. He stamped. He stamped harder. With a sticky thumping of rain-softened earth, it gave way. Small rootlets snapped, falling earth cascaded, and Grahame was safely buried under three feet of soil.

There was absolutely no suspicious sign above. The cave-in looked perfectly natural. No searching party would ever dream of anything hidden under there. No searching party would ever look for Grahame, anyhow. He had come up from Richmond by train, and had ostensibly gone out to hunt with Colby. Colby would explain that as they walked back along the concrete road toward town, a car had come by, headed for Richmond, and in it was an acquaintance of Grahame’s. The man had hailed Grahame and offered a lift, which the latter had taken.

There would be no inquiry, no investigation. There was no need for anything of the sort. It was unlikely that any one in Richmond knew where Grahame had gone.

After Colby had spent twenty minutes clearing away tracks and had carefully dropped one or two blood-spattered leaves into the hollow of a double-trunked poplar, there was absolutely no evidence of a murder anywhere except under that collapsed bank. There was the money in Colby’s pocket, of course, but nobody would know anything about that for a long time—not even Nesbit.

Colby had done his murder in an absolutely perfect way. As you see, this story is instructive.

II

Walking to a little distance among the trees, Colby found a fallen trunk, and on this he seated himself comfortably. He was supposed to be hunting, and he wanted to kill a suitable amount of time, so he sat there for two hours and smoked the better part of a pack of cigarettes, going over and over his plans. He could find no flaw in them anywhere.

Before he emerged from the woods he dug a tiny hole and buried the cigarette butts, just as an added precaution. The white paper would be conspicuous, and a dozen of them lying in one spot would tell that a man had been waiting there. Buried, and with pine needles strewn over the spot, even that incitement to idle curiosity was removed.

He came out on the concrete road at a moment when there were no cars in sight, and he marched sedately on toward town with his gun over his shoulder. Within fifteen minutes he was passed by at least a dozen cars going in both directions. He found it possible to smile comfortably at the perfection with which things were going.

About a mile from the spot where he came out on the road, he overtook two colored boys dawdling toward Culpeper, with a single antiquated gun between them. They gazed at him fearfully and tried to hide the rabbit that one of them was carrying. Colby passed them with a negligent nod. They dropped behind, and were out of sight before he had gone a mile farther.

Colby had gone over his plans so thoroughly that he felt entirely secure. He felt so secure, in fact, that he began to puzzle a little over his moment of terror immediately after firing the shot.

He had known all about Detective Sergeant Nesbit before he planned this coup. He knew Nesbit personally, as he knew nearly everybody in Culpeper. The man had a reputation altogether out of proportion to the size of his territory. People considered him the equivalent of Nemesis.

For instance, when Jud Harris’s wife was found with her head beaten in, and there was every indication that she had been killed by a casual tramp, Nesbit had gone through the usual motions of investigation and had turned up nothing at all; but a full two years later he got a new story and convicting evidence from Jud Harris’s second wife. He had been working on a bootleg case, and had terrified her into revealing the secret of the nearly forgotten murder. That case was typical of the way he worked.

Nesbit’s reputation, in Colby’s opinion, came from the fact that he never forgot an unsolved case. He might not work out a solution at once. Indeed, it seemed to Colby that he rarely did; but if any evidence turned up, however belatedly, Nesbit was sure to fit it into its place among the innumerable half solved puzzles that he always carried in his brain. His results were slow but dramatic, and his reputation was secure.

Hiking along with his gun over his shoulder, Colby congratulated himself upon his own system. Nesbit would have no chance to come in this time. There would be no mystery for him to mull over in his painful, patient way. Grahame had come to town as Colby’s guest. Nobody knew him. He and Colby had gone out hunting. A car had picked Grahame up and carried him back to Richmond. That was all, absolutely all, except the little wad of currency in Colby’s pocket.

The rattling rumble of an old Ford sounded behind him and came thudding solemnly in his wake. It came roaring alongside, and its brakes squealed.

“H’llo, Mistuh Colby!” said Nesbit heavily. “I’m goin’ in to town. Can I give ye a lift?”

Colby swallowed something. He felt his forehead beading; but Nesbit was bending down in the driver’s seat, critically adjusting the carbureter ferrule and watching the radiator absently.

“Th-thanks,” stammered Colby.

He got in. Nesbit shoved in the clutch to first speed and took off his foot, and the car jerked into high. It went quivering and rumbling along the road to town.

Colby wiped the sweat from his face again. In the back seat, silent and awed, and perhaps a trifle fearful, sat the two colored boys whom he had passed twenty minutes before. They gazed at him with the amazing blank woodenness of colored boys in a white man’s car. Colby felt his heart racing.

“Get any shootin’?” asked Nesbit presently, never taking his eyes from the road ahead. “I saw ye goin’ out with yer friend.”

“We bagged a few,” said Colby. He was fighting off a panic that he knew to be unreasonable, so he added: “We started back to town, but a car came along with one of Grahame’s friends in it. He was going on to Richmond, so Grahame got in with him. Saved him a train trip. I gave him the whole bag.”

“Yeah,” said Nesbit heavily. He drove in silence for a space. “I don’t reckon we realize how much city people like birds. We can get ’em when we want ’em. They can’t.”

“Grahame seemed to enjoy himself,” said Colby.

He forced himself to be calm. Nothing was wrong. Nesbit’s presence was a pure accident. Those colored boys, with their rabbit—they must have been near by when he shot Grahame; but Nesbit did not look suspicious. He couldn’t know anything.

“He’s a good fellow,” said Colby rather breathlessly, “though he’s one of the worst shots in the world.”

Nesbit nodded. He was coarse and unlovely, and seemed almost embarrassed by Colby’s presence. He had offered a lift purely as a matter of the courtesy of the road—nothing more than that. Colby gradually convinced himself that the thing was pure coincidence. It couldn’t be anything else.

He drew out his cigarette case and offered it to Nesbit. Nesbit took one with a mumble of thanks. Colby shielded a match with his hands, lighted his own, and offered to light Nesbit’s. Too late, he saw a tiny smear of dried blood on one of the fingers. His cupped hands trembled like tuning forks.

“Car shakes a lot,” said Nesbit heavily.

He took the match and puffed at it himself. Then he tossed it over the side of the car and drove on, frowning over something in his mind.

“I got to get a new car somehow,” he observed presently. “This heah one’s goin’ to fall apart.”

He jammed on the brakes and turned in his seat. The two colored boys rose and tumbled out, headed for a small negro cabin set back from the road. The older of the two mumbled his thanks. The car took up its rattling way again.

“I sent their father to jail,” said Nesbit heavily. “Runnin’ a still. He’ll be out in a couple o’ months.”

Colby felt a throb of satisfaction. The colored boys wouldn’t have been willing to talk to Nesbit, anyhow. As a law officer, they would have avoided him instinctively; but with a personalized family terror of him they would have sat dumb behind him, no matter what they had seen or suspected. Probably they had seen nothing at all. Probably, if Nesbit had noticed the blood, he would credit it to a partridge. Colby could ignore the little speck, now wiped off inconspicuously on the cracked leatherette cushion.

The rather absurd confidence about the colored boys relieved his mind so thoroughly that he was chatting amiably as the car chugged into town and Nesbit obligingly turned off and set him down at his own door. It was almost bravado that led him to say, with the wad of money that he had taken from Grahame’s body pressing delightfully against his chest:

“I wish I’d thought of it before, Mr. Nesbit. I hear you’re a mighty good shot. I’d have asked you to make a third with Grahame and myself.”

Nesbit managed to mumble something politely, without looking at Colby. He would never shine in society, would Nesbit. Then he said heavily:

“Maybe nex’ time. I’d like to talk to Mistuh Grahame. I—uh—I think I know him.”

His tone seemed peculiar to Colby; and as the sergeant drove off, Colby found his heart pounding in a sudden paralyzing suspicion.

III

One phrase made Colby descend alive into hell, where he remained for seven days and nights: “I—uh—I think I know Grahame.”

In seven days he aged five years, and all the time he spent desperately in an effort to seem exactly as usual. The phrase might mean anything or nothing. Nesbit might know everything, or nothing at all, or he might merely be suspicious. It depended on the colored boys, perhaps; but mostly it depended on how well he knew Grahame.

Colby was seeing him now and then, and he was waving abstracted, meaningless greetings and disappearing amid the tinny rumblings of his ancient car.

Colby tried to assure himself that he was safe. There was no evidence anywhere to prove him a murderer. If the colored boys had had a tale to tell—and most likely they had not—there might be suspicion of him, but he could never be convicted. After he had burned the boots worn the day of the murder, even footprints from the stream edge cast in plaster would not incriminate him. Nesbit could not find proof that he was a murderer. There was no proof!

He lay awake at night, staring at the moonlit rectangle of his window, going over and over his plan in search of a flaw in it; but he found none. There was no flaw in his plan.

Then he remembered Nesbit’s heavy, dull-witted patience, and how he had hanged Jud Harris two years after his first wife’s murder. It had taken him two years to solve that crime, but he had done it. If he believed Colby had murdered Grahame, he would keep on working until he had an air-tight case, if it took him ten years.

In the meantime all that Colby could do was to behave in a perfectly natural fashion. Nesbit might know nothing. He had said that he thought he knew Grahame. He might have meant just that. It might have been pure coincidence. He was acting exactly as any man would act who had known a fellow townsman vaguely for years, and one day had picked him up in a car and talked to him for half an hour or so. His nod of recognition would change to a wave of the hand thereafter. That was all. That was how Nesbit was acting; but that was also how he would act if he were suspicious.

Colby watched the moonlight wax nightly to full brightness and begin to wane again, lying awake in the darkness while the curtains at his window flapped idly in and out of the window sill according to the vagaries of the chilly night breezes.

He would have given one of—no, he would give half of the thousand-dollar bills set in behind the horrible chromo above his washstand, if he could find out what Nesbit meant by saying that he thought he knew Grahame when he saw him with Colby.

That one thing made Colby’s nerves grow taut and jangling. For seven nights he lay awake and stared at the idiotically garnished rectangle that let in the moonlight. For seven nights that one phrase fretted at his nerves. During the day he went about his business under the horrible, the overwhelming strain of acting exactly as usual, and at night the problem banished sleep.

If Nesbit had known Grahame as a bootleg operator, he would have watched the man closely. Going hunting with Colby, it would have occurred to him that something else was in the wind. He might have cranked up his car to find out. He might have thought of Grahame as intending to make a cache of liquor near Culpeper. He might have gone out on the concrete road just to look about, to see if there were signs of heavy trucks turning off on the dirt side roads.

If he was out scouting around on Grahame’s account, he would know that Grahame did not leave Culpeper in the car of an acquaintance. He might have known from the beginning that Colby lied. That possibility put dark circles under Colby’s eyes, and hollowed his cheeks a little, and after a few days made his hands the least bit clumsy. One of his customers—a motherly, meddling person—commented sympathetically that he did not look well. Colby cursed her frantically in his heart, while he was beaming at her and assuring her that there was nothing wrong except too much Sunday dinner.

But he looked carefully in his mirror that night, and told himself to stop worrying. There was no sign of anything wrong. Nesbit had shown no suspicion. Colby and Grahame together had probably faded entirely from his mind.

That same night, however, Colby lay awake despairingly in his bed with the cold night air in his nostrils, watching the weaker rays of the waning moon strike through his window upon the elaborately figured wall paper, move slowly across to the washstand, reflect upward from the china basin, and make wavy lines of feeble light upon the atrocious chromo behind which he had hidden his booty. He had taken off the paper backing of that picture and had gummed the bank notes beneath it.

It was near dawn, then, and he had not slept at all.

If Nesbit knew that he had lied, and knew Grahame, the detective might have made inquiries in Richmond. He might have learned that Grahame was not to be found. He would know, of course, that a man in Grahame’s business makes his deals with cold cash, and carries it on him. He might couple that fact with Grahame’s disappearance, and have a case to work on in his clumsy, patient fashion. If so, his patience would lead him to devise a trap for Colby.

The trap appeared on the eighth morning. No one but Colby would have recognized it as a trap. It was the most innocent-appearing of envelopes, bearing no return card, and mailed in Richmond the day before. It was addressed to Grahame, in care of Colby.

Colby took it from the mail rack in the front hall as he came down for his breakfast. He felt the blood draining from his face as he stared at it. His knees shook horribly as he retreated to his room in panic-stricken haste.

There he sat on his bed and gazed unseeingly at nothing, while the blood drummed in his ears. After a long time he realized that he was staring at the hopelessly inartistic picture which hid his booty—“Playmates,” it was called, showing an impossibly benevolent St. Bernard dog with a little girl in an impossibly starched pink dress.

Colby swallowed nothing whatever, and tried to fight down utter terror. Nobody knew that Grahame was coming to Culpeper. Nobody would have dreamed of writing to Grahame in his care, except Nesbit. It was a trap of Nesbit’s. No doubt he had asked that a watch be kept in the post office, to see what Colby did with the letter—to see if he remailed it or destroyed it—to see what effect it had.

With a feeling of panic, Colby realized that he was already showing an effect. His face was ashen. His hands were shaking. If he arrived late at his business, Nesbit would assuredly notice that.

He rubbed his face desperately with a rough towel until the color came back to it. He went down the stairs, savagely making his knees serve him. He went out and set off briskly toward the store. If he acted naturally in every way, Nesbit would think he was mistaken. Nesbit was only suspicious. He couldn’t be more than suspicious.

He had gone three blocks when Nesbit passed him amid the tinny thunderings of his decrepit car. He turned heavy, indifferent eyes upon Colby, abstractedly waved a meaningless salute, and went on.

But Colby was ashen white and utterly limp behind him, and he could not but believe that Nesbit had noticed.

That day was torture. Three people remarked that he didn’t look well. Black blasphemy yammered in his heart as he assured them that it was a touch of indigestion, nothing more. He lived all day in deepest hell, and that night he cursed himself because he had not kept Grahame’s notebook. There would be addresses in it, to one of which he could forward the letter. Nesbit’s suspicions would follow whoever kept the letter; but Colby knew no one who would accept the mail.

Of course he knew better than to go to the stream bank and dig down for the notebook. Nesbit would have somebody watching there, night and day.

Colby’s terror was the deeper because he did not know what to do. He dared not destroy the letter, for that would confirm Nesbit’s belief. He did not dare open it, because that would be detected when Nesbit had it again. He did not dare hold it. The frenzied helplessness that he felt racked his already tortured nerves unbearably.

On the ninth morning after the murder he made his first panic-stricken move. To make Nesbit doubtful, to get rid of the letter, which he knew to be a trap, to gain time—anything!—he scribbled an address on the envelope and crossed out his own. The address was meaningless, written at random. He mailed the letter openly, so that he would be seen.

At noontime he saw Nesbit go into the post office, where he remained for a long time. Colby had a nervous chill.

He had made a mistake. He should have burned the letter, written another, and put it into a precisely similar envelope. It would not matter to whom his own letter was addressed. He should have gone to Richmond and mailed it in the central post office, at the busiest possible instant, when it could hardly be picked out for Nesbit. It would be assumed that he had remailed the trap letter to a proper address for Grahame. Nesbit’s trap would have been useless.

This story, as you see, is instructive. That is the proper thing to do with embarrassing letters—burn them.

Colby had made a mistake; and four days later his hands were shaking uncontrollably as he stared down at a little white envelope in his fingers. It was the letter addressed to Grahame. A rubber-stamped notation with a penciled correction on the envelope showed that some postal clerk had been zealous in the effort to keep a piece of mail with no return card out of the dead letter office.

The notation read, in rubber-stamped characters, “Return”—in pencil, “to previous addressee”—and in rubber-stamped letters again, “For Better Address.”

IV

A room in a boarding house can be horribly still. On the night when Colby came home and saw the trap letter returned, his room was quiet with a deadly, isolated silence in which innumerable small noises from outside came with the sharpness of scratches on a window pane. He heard the squeaking of a car’s brakes blocks away; voices in the street outside; the creak of bed springs somewhere in the house, as someone, reading in bed, shifted his position.

The lamp shed a dismal glow about the room. Its shade was cracked, and an irregular blotch of light was smeared against the figured wall paper. Colby sat on the edge of his bed, twitching a little, while he stared at the letter that had been returned. His brain was exhausted.

Some one walked past the house with measured, sedate footfalls—the walk of a man who is not in a hurry. Colby’s mouth twitched. Of course the house was watched now. He had no chance—none at all!

Heavily, drearily, his worn-out brain essayed one last review. He had foreseen everything, he had taken care of everything, with one exception; but no living man could have foreseen that Nesbit knew the man he had chosen as a victim. Nobody could have known that! Colby repeated it passionately, as a vindication, as an excuse—although there was no one requiring excuses.

The tinny roaring which was unmistakably Nesbit’s car, was not even a surprise when it came. Colby heard it blocks away. He heard it come nearer and stop with squawking brakes before his door. The roaring rumble of its engine ceased. Nesbit’s footsteps sounded crisp and crackling on the cinder walk, and heavy and solid on the porch. He heard Nesbit’s ring.

Minutes later there came a rap on the door, and the landlady’s voice.

“Mr. Colby! Mr. Nesbit’s downstairs to see you,” she said.

Colby’s voice was a croak.

“Tell him to come up,” he replied feebly.

Apathy possessed him. He stared at the little white envelope on the dresser. His eyeballs burned from sleeplessness. His muscles twitched occasionally, without warning. His throat felt dry. He seemed to be moving feverishly amid a myriad thoughts without the possibility of sleep, while his brain was desiccated, dried up, mummified from the lack of rest.

The landlady turned the knob and released the door. Nesbit came in, mumbling embarrassed thanks. The woman drew the door shut behind her.

One last flicker of spirit made Colby stand up. In the shadow of the lamp shade, perhaps, his pallor did not show. He waited as if for the volley from a firing squad.

“Howdy, Mistuh Colby?” said Nesbit awkwardly. “Maybe ye remember a couple o’ weeks ago we were talkin’ about huntin’.”

Colby nodded. The movement was ghastly, the acquiescence of one who looked like a dead man.

“I—uh—I was thinkin’ of takin’ a day off tomorrow,” said Nesbit, “an’ I thought maybe ye’d like to go huntin’—”

Colby’s weary, wakeful brain told him pitilessly what Nesbit really meant.

“Maybe,” said Nesbit heavily, “ye could locate Mistuh Grahame. That’d be right nice.”

Colby’s face had been ghastly before. It became corpselike now. He moved stiffly to a chair and sat down. His muscles twitched uncontrollably as his knees gave way.

Nesbit moved embarrassedly, unlovely and ill at ease. He moved his hands awkwardly.

“Mighty nice place ye got heah, Mistuh Colby. It’s just to my taste. I—uh—I got a copy o’ that picture, too. It’s mighty pretty, ain’t it?”

Colby’s sleepless, smarting eyeballs turned to follow Nesbit’s gaze. They stared at the benevolent St. Bernard dog and the coy, impossible child in the pink starched dress.

Colby’s voice was dull and expressionless when he spoke.

“You don’t have to play with me, Nesbit. How much do you know?”

Nesbit was suddenly still.

“How much do you know?” repeated Colby apathetically. “I didn’t think you knew the money was behind that picture, but I’ve known for a long time you knew the rest. How did you find out?”

Nesbit mumbled inarticulately, staring at Colby.

“You don’t have to take me out hunting tomorrow,” continued Colby in a flat, dull voice. “I’ll show you where I buried Grahame after I shot him. You can count the money I got from him. It’s all there.”

It may be that Nesbit started, or perhaps he did not; but he looked steadily at Colby now, and embarrassment had dropped from him.

Colby managed a mirthless grin. He was sick at heart. He didn’t know how much evidence Nesbit had, but it was enough; and he was tired—so hopelessly tired!

His voice was flat and lifeless. The small insistent noises of the world outside intruded into his speech at first; but his tone rose when he spoke of the letter. He had already told everything else, even where and how he had hidden Grahame’s body.

“That damned letter told me you knew everything,” he said in a dreary pride. “You thought it would break me down, or maybe make me go to look at Grahame’s body; but it didn’t. If you hadn’t guessed where the money was I’d have bluffed you at that.”

His muscles relaxed suddenly. Without any warning whatever, Colby, who had just put his head in a noose, found it possible to sleep for the first time in nearly two weeks. He slept heavily, slumped in his chair, twitching a little from his fretted nerves.

Nesbit stared at him and whistled softly. It was the sort of whistle with which a man expresses blank amazement. Also, perhaps, it was Nesbit’s way of showing that he was disturbed. It is upsetting to go to a man’s room for the sole purpose of inviting him to hunt with you, and have him confess a cold-blooded murder.

“All mixed up,” muttered Nesbit. “All fussed up over a killin’!”

Colby had been hopelessly wrong from the beginning. Nesbit’s acquaintance with Grahame had been limited to half an hour’s desultory talk in a smoking car, a year or more ago. The envelope that Colby had taken for a trap actually contained no more than the words:

Pete said you left this address in case of a telegram. Limpy’s hanging around and says he wants to see you. When are you coming back?

Jim.

It was evidently a letter from a gentleman in Grahame’s own line of business, but the matter to which it referred would never receive Grahame’s personal attention. Nesbit, of course, had never seen it before.

The detective’s reference to the picture of the benevolent dog and the pink starched dress had been merely an expression of his whole-hearted admiration for that particular work of art. Colby had been entirely, utterly wrong all through. Even the money for which he had killed Grahame—

Nesbit checked the bills with a list of scribbled numbers in his notebook. He nodded. Thousand-dollar bills are much used in wholesale bootleg circles. That is the only place, in fact, in which stolen thousand-dollar notes are accepted with the minimum of discount. Colby’s tale was proven in its entirety by the numbers on the bills, because all banks and most police departments have their lists of stolen currency.

“What d’ye know about that?” asked Nesbit heavily. “What d’ye know about that? Everything in the world breakin’ his way, an’ he blows the works because he lost his nerve!”

Nesbit was wrong—Colby had not lost his nerve; he had been trapped. Nesbit’s reputation was the trap that caught him.

As you see, this story is instructive.