DEAR MR. SIPPY:
Do join Billy and me at the museum for a picnic lunch at one thirty P.M.
Cook will pack the hamper—remind her there must be horseradish! Please carry it carefully, the teapot is rather precious.

LADY (C.) SNOW

P.S. You might wish to bring your kit—you’re leaving.

16.

My kit, as Cecily called it, consisted of nothing more than the clothes I had been wearing the day I arrived at Winds’ Hill—now laundered and mended by the old Irish crones. I had been wearing Lord Snow’s clothes during my stay, but before noon I surrendered these to Bertram, reminded cook about the horseradish, saw that the teapot was well padded, and set off, carrying the picnic.

Of course, I had to pass the graveyard where Pedro was still trying to excavate a grave long enough to hold the Negro of the Nile, who lay on the hot ground, dead and unturbaned, beside the fresh grave of Joe Lovelady.

I had never had a really good look at Mesty-Woolah—a look not clouded by fear, I suppose I mean—so I stopped and took one. His turban had been dislodged in the fall from the porch, and I saw that his hair was white. Dead, he looked like an old man—not so old as his master, Isinglass, but older, certainly, than myself. Perhaps that was why Joe hadn’t killed him when the two of them finally stood exhausted on the Mogollon Rim. Perhaps he had seen that the man was old.

There were two bloodstains on Mesty-Woolah’s tunic, near the heart. I knew the minute I saw them that Cecily Snow had killed the African warrior, as neatly as she had once killed the antelope of Kenya.

The historians and the legend-makers still dispute this point, imputing to Billy Bone powers of marksmanship that he never remotely possessed. It was more than one hundred yards from the corner of the barn where the shots were fired to Mesty-Woolah’s tower—and Billy Bone in all his life never killed a man who stood more than twenty feet from him. Billy was a blaster, not a marksman. It may even be that he was myopic, though the truth of that will never be known. He seldom fired a rifle, and Cecily’s gun was unfamiliar to him: I doubt he could have hit the tower itself twice in a row, much less Mesty-Woolah’s heart.

“Just in time, we are famished!” Cecily said when I arrived with the picnic. The two of them were lounging in the shade of the big barn. Cecily looking lovely and frisky; she had grass stems in her hair, and was so impatient for the lunch that she ate half the cold mutton before Billy and I could even get a tablecloth spread.