“It must have been done at the garage. The six nuts of the left front wheel. Kill me this instant, if it ain’t the truth. While I was havin’ supper. Foul play it was. They left the bolts in. Devilish. As soon as I speeded up, on the curve, after the tracks.... It was someone hellish. Kill me if it wasn’t. Oh--kill me at any rate.” He plunged his face in the pillows. He moaned. Then his pain sobered him. I wanted to soothe him with my hand. I could not touch him. “Be quiet, Fergus. I am sure you are right. No one is blaming you. Be quiet, I say.” A fleshly gray-haired man, his smooth, round face a daze of terror, waited at the door. He owned the garage where my parents’ car had stayed while they dined with friends, while Fergus supped, while the rain fell. The man was named Dukes. He drove me silent to the place of the deaths. The open road was washed fresh with the rain. Clouds still hung black, and the air blasted like wet words, clean and ominous, against the drought of my face. We crossed railroad tracks, and stopped. “That last bump done it, sir,” said Mr. Dukes. “Shook the bolts out. The nuts was gone already.” The car was ditched rubbish against a telegraph post, a shut and mangled wreck. Fifty yards beyond, also in the ditch, we found intact the tire and rim of the left wheel, where they had rolled together. We returned to the garage. Death was there in the open mouths of the men, in their blanched eyes, in the heavy hanging shadows. “I’m an honest man, sir,” said Mr. Dukes to me. “If this here was murder and has to do with any o’ mine, I’ll see this here place which is all I has in the world a heap of ashes before I’ll spare myself.” “What motive,” said I, “could any of your men have had in such a thing?” “None,” growled Dukes. The men’s murmur wreathed about me, an assent that was ready to rage into flame at the kindle of any doubt of mine. “Any boys about? Mischief-makers? Rowdies?” “None.” “Any strangers?” A man came forward: a lean, cave-jawed fellow with the eyes of a starved poet. “There was that stranger that come askin’ fer work.” He spoke not to me, but to Dukes. The men wreathed closer to him. They felt that his words were a healing truth. They were one, sustaining him in what he was ready to say. “’Bout 8.30 it was or 9.00. While that car was here.” The man was eloquent: quietly sure of himself, as if the assent of his fellows transfigured his words. “He come to the floor and he says: ‘Lookin’ fer a mechanic?’ The car was the last in, and was goin’ out first. It was right there, next that oil-tank. I says: ‘No chance’. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘won’t you go and ask the boss? Won’t cost you nothin’.’ I looks at him. ‘No chance,’ I says, an’ then, sudden, surprisin’ myself, I gives in: I says: ‘But if you wants, why--I’ll go.’ So I leaves him.” “Alone?” His eyes burst at me. Then he remembered who I was. Pity controlled his eyes.