As if they were going to a wedding party, the two men went out into the deserted, snow-white streets, turned at the corner by the post office, and started up the street towards the Square. As they reached the Square and turned into it they heard Dick’s shot into the lunchroom and the crash of glass.
“There he is, Jim!” said Wilson Redmond happily. “Now I’ll have some fun. Let’s go get him.” The two gentlemen moved rapidly across the Square and into South Main Street.
Dick kept coming on, steadily, at his tireless, easy stride, straight up the middle of the street. Wilson Redmond started down the street to get him. He lifted hisgold-headed cane and waved it at Dick Prosser.
“You’re under arrest!” Wilson Redmond said.
Dick shot again, and also from the hip, but something faltered this time by the fraction of an inch. They always thought it was Wilson Redmond’s tall silk hat that fooled him. The bullet drilled a hole right through the top of Judge Redmond’s tall silk hat, and it went flying away. Wilson Redmond faded into the doorway of a building and fervently wished that his too, too solid flesh would melt.
Jim McIntyre was not so lucky. He started for the doorway but Wilson got there first. Dick shot cleanly from the hip again and blew Jim’s side in with a fast shot. Poor Jim fell sprawling to the ground, to rise and walk again, it’s true, but ever thereafter with a cane. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Square, at police headquarters, the sergeant had sent John Chapman out to head Dick off. Mr. Chapman was perhaps the best-liked man on the force. He was a pleasant, florid-faced man of forty-five, with curling brown mustaches, congenial and good-humored, devoted to his family, courageous, but perhaps too kindly and too gentle for a good policeman.
John Chapman heard the shots and ran forward. He came up to the corner by Joyner’s hardware store just as Dick’s shot sent poor Jim McIntyre sprawling to the ground. Mr. Chapman took up his position there at the corner behind the telephone pole. From this vantage point he took out his revolver and shot directly at Dick Prosser as he came up the street.
By this time Dick was not over thirty yards away. He dropped quietly upon one knee and aimed. Mr. Chapman shot again and missed. Dick fired. The high-velocity bullet bored through the post a little to one side. It grazed the shoulder of John Chapman’s uniform and knocked a chip out of the monument sixty yards or more behind him in the center of the Square.
Mr. Chapman fired again and missed. And Dick, still coolly poised upon his knee, as calm and steady as if he were engaging in a rifle practice, fired again, drilled squarely through the center of the pole, and shot John Chapman through the heart. Mr. Chapman dropped dead. Then Dick rose, pivoted like a soldier in his tracks, and started back down the street, right down the center of the car tracks, straight as a string, right out of town.
THIS WAS THE story as they got it, pieced together like a train of fire among the excited groups of men that clustered there in trampled snow before the shattered glass of Joyner’s store.
And the rifle? Where did he get it? From whom had he purchased it? The answer to this, too, was not long in coming.
Mark Joyner denied instantly that the weapon had come from his store. At this moment there was a flurry in the crowd and Uncle Morris Teitlebaum, the pawnbroker, appeared, gesticulating volubly, clinging to a policeman. Bald-headed, squat, with the face of an old monkey, he protested shrilly, using his hands eloquently, and displaying craggy nuggins of gold teeth as he spoke.
“Vell,” he said, “vhat could I do? His moaney vas good!” he said plaintively, lifting his hands and looking around with an expression of finality. “He comes with his moaney, he pays it down like every-bodies—I should say no?” he cried, with such an accent of aggrieved innocence that, in spite of the occasion, a few people smiled.
Uncle Morris Teitlebaum’s pawn shop, which was on the right-hand side of South Main Street, and which Dick had passed less than an hour before in his murderous march towards town, was, unlike Joyner’s hardware store, securely protected at night by strong bars over the doors and show windows.
But now, save for these groups of talking men, the town again was silent. Far off, in the direction of the river and the Wilton Bottoms, they could hear the low and mournful baying of the hounds. There was nothing more to see or do. Mark Joyner stooped, picked up some fragments of the shattered glass, and threw them in the window. A policeman was left on guard, and presently all five of them—Mr. Shepperton, Mark Joyner, and the three boys—walked back across the Square and got into the car and drove home again.