"But who wound the clock? I saw you do it, Mr. Leigh-I saw you do it, sir, and all this Birmingham tale is gammon."
"Again you are wrong. And now, to show you how far you are wrong, I will tell you a secret. I have two deputies. One I told that fool Williams about, and requested him as a great favour not to let a soul know. By this, of course, I intended that every one who enjoyed the privilege of Mr. Williams's acquaintance should know. But of my second deputy I never spoke to a soul until now, until I told you this moment. The other deputy is a man extremely like me from the waist up. He is ill-formed as I am, and so like me when we sit that you would not know the difference across your own store. But our voices are different, very different, and he is more than a foot taller than I. You did not see the winder last night standing up. He always takes his seat before raising the gas."
A light broke in on Timmons. This would explain all. This would make Stamer's story consist with his own experience of the night before. This would account for this man, whom Stamer said he had shot, being here now, uninjured. This would make the later version of the tale about Birmingham possible, credible. But-awful but! it would mean that the unfortunate, afflicted deputy had been sacrificed! Yes, most of what this man had said was true.
"What's the unfortunate deputy's name?" he asked, with a shudder.
"That I will not tell."
"But it must come out on the inquest, to-day or to-morrow, or whenever they find the remains."
"Remains of what?" asked Leigh, frowning heavily.
"Of your deputy. They say in the paper it was you that lost your life in the fire."
"Fire! Fire! Fire where?" thundered the dwarf, in a voice which shook the unceiled joists above their heads and made the thinner plates of metal vibrate.
"Don't you know? Haven't you seen a paper? Why Forbes's bakery was burnt out last night, and the papers say you lost your life in the fire."
CHAPTER XXXIV THE WRONG MAN
He had often, in thought, faced the contingency of having to fire on some one who found him at his midnight depredations, but he had not, until he formed the resolve of putting Leigh away, contemplated lying in wait for an unsuspecting man and shooting him as if he were a bird of prey.
Once it had entered his mind to kill Leigh, nothing seemed simpler than to do it, and nothing easier than to bear the burden of the deed. He had no hint of conscience, and there were only two articles in his code-first, that prison was a punishment not to be borne if, at any expense, it could be avoided; and, second, that no harm was to be allowed near Timmons. Both articles were concerned, inextricably bound up, in Leigh's life. He saw in the dwarf the agent, the ally of the police-the police, absolutely, in a more malignant form than the stalwart detective who, with handcuffs in his pockets, runs a man down. This Leigh was a traitor and a policeman together. It seemed as though it would be impossible for one human being to possess any characteristic which could add to the hatefulness of him who exhibited these two. And yet this Leigh was not only a traitor and a policeman combined, but an enemy of Timmons-a beast who threatened Timmons as well! Shooting was too merciful a death for such a miscreant. But then, shooting was easy and sure, so he should be shot.
The act itself had been very easy. There had been no more difficulty about it than about hitting the old hat in the shadow of the factory wall. But when the silent shot was sped and the air-gun disposed of by being carefully hung down the inside of a chimney and hooked to a copper-wire tie of the slate chimney-top, and he was safely down the water pipe and in the mews, the aspect of the whole deed changed, or rather it became another thing altogether.
Before pulling the trigger of the air-gun, he was perfectly satisfied
that Leigh deserved, richly deserved death. That was as plain as the dome of St. Paul's from London Bridge. It had been equally plain to him that when Leigh was dead, and dead by his hand, he should never because of any compunction be sorry for his act. No sooner was he at the bottom of the water-pipe than he found he had no longer any control over his thoughts, or more correctly that the thoughts in his mind did not belong to him at all, but were, as it might be, thoughts hired in the interest of the dead man, hostile, relentless mercenaries, inside the very walls of the citadel within which he was besieged, and from which there was no escape except by flinging his naked bosom on the bayonets of the besiegers.
It made not the least difference now whether the man merited death a thousand times or not, that man insisted on haunting him. It did not now matter in the least how it pleased him to regard the provoker of that shot, it was how the murdered man regarded him was the real question. He had always told himself that a murdered man was only a dead man after all. Now he had to learn that no man ever born of woman is more awfully alive than a murdered man. He had yet to learn that the blow of the murderer endows the victim with inextinguishable vitality. He had yet to learn that all things which live die to the mind of a murderer except the man who is dead. He had yet to learn that in the mind of a murderer there is a gradually filling in and crowding together of the images of the undamned dead that in the end blind and block up the whole soul in stifling intimacies with the dead, until the murderer in his despair flings himself at the feet of the hangman shrieking for mercy, for mercy, for the mercy of violent and disgraceful death in order to put an end to the fiendish gibes of the dead who is not dead but living, who will not sink into hell, but brings hell into the assassin's brain. The desire to kill is easy, and the means of killing are easy, but the spirit of the murdered man takes immortal form in the brain of the murderer and cleaves to him for evermore.