Once a week, after divine service, the Colonel has a
pistol laid at every place setting of his table — charged or no, by
rules of his own devising. The household observes the custom; the reader
observes the household. When the company rose, one of them did not.
❦
The Colonel’s Protocol
The company’s
particulars, so far as the rules require them: the Colonel and Xerxes
Hartfield are partners in the venture, and no one is under litigation;
the Swains are twins, and the Reverend Gaunt is elder half-brother to
Lady Lavinia; no guest has quarrelled with the host. Of the ladies of the
company, Lady Lavinia Loveless alone is widowed; none is titled; and
none now of the company, the Club is assured, has ever shot a bishop.
What the Household Attests
How a Murder is Read
— the Club’s reckoning, and none of the Colonel’s
The powderThe Colonel is a military man before he is a host, and keeps every pistol at his table charged as a matter of course — loaded unless one of his own rules gives cause to leave it bare. So an uncharged pistol is always a rule at work; and a pistol charged where a rule should have left it bare is the anomaly on which the whole reckoning turns.
The Colonel’s eyeThe Colonel is, in his way, a shrewd judge of character and of motive, and lays each pistol — charged or bare — precisely as that judgment directs. At a table armed exactly to his instruction, no guest has ever died. A death, then, is proof in itself that one pistol sat against his direction: that single departure is the door the murder came through.
The line of fireA pistol carries only to the guest at one’s elbow, or the one seated directly across. The Colonel and the empty chair reach the places that flank them, and each other — no further.
The reachA guest may take up only the pistol at their own place, or at either place beside them.
The murdererOne pistol at this table lies charged against the Colonel’s decorum — loaded where his rules would leave it bare. His guests are armed by his observance; the murderer is armed against it: the single guest who, by the Colonel’s own rules, could have reached no loaded pistol at all, and whom that one contrary charge put within a shot of the victim.
The Colonel, always armed by his own decorum, is never the one an anomaly singles out — he does not shoot his guests at Sunday dinner.
The Table
Set each guest in a chair, and set each pistol as it
was found — touch a place’s pistol to turn it charged or
uncharged. The Colonel keeps his own chair.