Summary. It was Xerxes Hartfield who left that page unfinished, and did it himself, with a house pistol taken up and put back before the party rose. He shot the Captain not for money, as the ledger might suggest, but because the Captain had stopped merely taking money and had threatened to publish what he held. A leech that only bleeds a man may be tolerated for years. A leech that promises to bleed him publicly, on Friday, in print, is a different animal, and Xerxes killed it.

The Reckoning. The two of them had run a long and quiet arrangement — Xerxes the income and the name, Wat the cargo and the silence that let both stand — and it had suited them both while it stayed quiet. It had lately stopped being quiet. The oilskin pocketbook, opened that day to a fresh page, showed a column of debtors already inked, and against Xerxes a heavier figure than the rest, twice underscored, with the line beneath it that no patron cares to read twice: or it goes to press Friday. A man may pay a blackmailer for years without much trouble to his sleep. He does not pay one who has stopped being content with money. Wat had made himself, in that half-hour, worth less alive than dead, and Xerxes had a house full of noise, an unlocked gun rack a few steps from the dining room, and a plausible reason to step out — seeing to the wine — that nobody troubled to question until the shot was already old news.

The method wants little explaining, which is rather the point of it. One of the cased duelling pistols, common to that rack and familiar to the whole household, was taken up, carried the short distance to the gun room, and used once, on a man sitting quietly with the very page that had condemned him open on his knee. The report went under the music, as it was meant to. The pistol went back. Xerxes returned to the cushions before the party rose, and took the news of his own cargo-runner's death with a composure that struck one or two guests as remarkable — though not remarkable enough, in a house that had just spent an evening in Aziz's Morocco, for anyone to look at him twice.

The others fall away readily enough. Aziz never left his own table; he carved and poured from the first dish to the last, watched the whole time by guests and servants both, and had no way to reach the gun room at all, whatever his devotion to Xerxes might otherwise have recommended him for. The Colonel sat in the billiard room with Nan Pringle from the fish course until the party rose, each vouching for the other across the whole window; his debt gave him a motive and nothing more. Lady Lavinia was giving her sitting in the small drawing room, her three sitters present the entire time and the door in the hall footman's view; she never crossed the hall. Effie Strange was put to lie down by the housekeeper's girl, who sat with her until the party rose — watched throughout, and nowhere near the rack. Each of them owed Wat money. None of them had five unwatched minutes.

I nearly forgot the line about the wine. Xerxes said he stepped out to see to it, and no wine came, then or later — the house has a butler for that office, and everyone at Hartfield House knows it. It is a small thing to lie about, and he needn't have troubled. But a man freshly a murderer generally cannot help giving himself an errand, and it was the one detail in the whole account that nobody else had any reason to invent for him. I charge Xerxes Hartfield with the killing of Wat Frew, the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and close the file.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Xerxes the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Wat lies quiet, a candle, a knife,
the tidiest exit from Cairnholm and life.
The lesson is here, should we trouble to learn —
but the cards, being cards, will be dealt a fresh turn.