The guns came out of the gun-room at first light, and the party scattered across the covers all morning, and at noon the whole company reassembled in the stable-yard for the count. This is the Colonel's custom, and the Colonel's customs are not amended.
It was in the harness-room off that yard, at noon, that Cousin R was found: lying neatly on the flagstones between the saddle-horse and the door, having been beaten to death with a horsewhip. The whip lay across his boots, its stock snapped clean through.
The whip-rack in that room holds four whips on brass hooks. Three hung in their places. The fourth — the Colonel's own long-thonged carriage whip — was the one on the floor. Every whip in the rack is the Colonel's, it should be said, and the harness-room stands open to anyone crossing the yard.
Nothing else in the room was arranged. A tin of saddle-soap had gone over and rolled to the wall; a girth hung half off its peg, in the attitude of a thing that had been struck in passing. Cousin R's own pose was the only tidy thing in the harness-room, and that only because he had fallen straight.
His pocket-book lay open beside him, its pencil unbroken. The last entry on the page, in his small even hand, read: "C. — the wife. Not eaten by grief." No money had been taken from it, though there was money in it to take.
Dr Tobias Quill, who is the coroner as well as the Colonel's port-drinking physician, put the death between 10:30 and 11:15 — after the covers had been beaten, and before the yard filled for the count. He gave the hours in a steady voice and then required a glass.
No shot was heard near the stables all morning, and Cousin R had carried no gun. He had gone out with the party at first light in his usual town coat, and turned back within the hour, saying the wet did not suit him.
The Colonel came into the yard at ten past eleven with his coat over his arm and mud to the knee, and called for the count. Mrs Sib Gow, the housekeeper, remarked that his knuckles were freshly grazed and that he had lost his hat somewhere in the covers. Mrs Gow has kept the belowstairs book these eleven years and is believed by everyone, including the Colonel.
The gun-room ledger, kept by the Colonel's own rule, records every gun out and in by name. Every gun signed out that morning was signed in again at the count, and every entry is in the Colonel's hand.
Of the deceased, little can be set down that has not already been set down by nobody. Cousin R had no surname anyone ever established, no stated business, and no address. He had sat at the Colonel's table three or four days a week for two years, invited by no one and never once turned away. In the caller-book that stands in the hall — in which every guest signs in and out, by the Colonel's rule — his name appears fifty-one times over two years, always in the Colonel's own hand rather than R's, and never signed out.
He kept, as has been noted, a pocket-book of small even entries upon the households through which he moved. He was never known to ask anyone for money, and never known to sell what he wrote down.
The Colonel's wife died at sea some years ago, and the Colonel has never said how. Lady Lavinia Loveless is paid four guineas a week to sit for her on Fridays, and is under standing instruction never to ask the manner of it. At the Michaelmas dinner three weeks past, Cousin R asked the Colonel, pleasantly and across the whole table, whether the sea had been kind that year. The Colonel left the room and did not come back to it; the caller-book for that night shows R's name entered afterwards in a hand that had gone unsteady. A week before the breakfast, at the Friday sitting, Cousin R did not sit with the company at all: he stood at the back of the room and watched the Colonel's face instead of the medium's.
It may be recalled, without emphasis, that the Colonel horsewhipped a carrier in that same yard two winters ago for backing a cart into his gatepost, and was fined for it, and paid the fine without comment. He has since kept his whips racked in the harness-room rather than in the hall.
The company must be accounted for, and largely accounts for itself. The Colonel was out with the guns from first light, walking the far covers alone from about half past ten, having sent the beaters on ahead. Nan Pringle, the poor relation who lives at the Manor and is looked through rather than at, was in the still-room from ten until the yard filled, bottling for the winter under Mrs Gow's eye the whole while. Dr Quill was in the breakfast-room from half past nine with his coffee and the two footmen going in and out, and did not leave it until he was called to the harness-room; he attends the breakfast every year and has never once carried a gun.
Lavinia arrived by the eleven o'clock train from town and was driven up from the station, the station-master and the trap-driver both accounting for her. Zane Swain, the footman the Colonel trusts with the gun-room key, was in the gun-room and the breakfast-room all morning with trays and cartridges, constantly in view of both Mrs Gow and Dr Quill. His twin Fifi, who prefers to be looked past and generally is, was in the front bedrooms with Mrs Gow from ten o'clock, turning out the guest rooms for the luncheon. Effie Strange, the Colonel's heir-presumptive and the brightest thing at any table, deep in debt and deeper in laudanum, slept in the blue bedroom until Fifi and Mrs Gow turned her out of it at half past ten, and sat with Dr Quill in the breakfast-room thereafter until the count.
Out of doors, Captain Wat Frew — who had come up from the harbour with a case of brandy for the breakfast and stayed for the shooting, and who prices every man he meets and had never managed to price Cousin R — was in the low cover with two beaters and the Colonel's keeper, in company from first light. Xerxes was in the high cover with Aziz from first light, the two within sight of each other and of the keeper's boy all morning; Aziz does not shoot, but walks the covers, and his fez was visible to the boy at intervals throughout. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at Cairnholm all that day, at the Kirk of St Colm from morning prayer until dusk, attested by his verger and by the parish register in his own hand; he was not invited to the shooting and does not shoot.
At noon, then, the yard: eleven guns laid out in a row upon the trestle for the count, every one of them accounted for in the Colonel's neat hand; and beyond the open harness-room door, a pocket-book still open on the flagstones, its last small even line facing the ceiling.