It seemed a fatality that a pair in their open case should have been lying on the sill of the window, where their owner had just been cleaning and oiling them. Hoxer, of course, had no certainty that they were loaded, but the change in Jeffrey's expression proclaimed it. He was sober enough now--the shock was all sufficient--as he sprang to the case. The younger man was the quicker. He had one of the pistols in his hand before Jeffrey could level the other that he had snatched. Quicker to fire, too, for the weapon in Jeffrey's hand was discharged in his latest impulse of action after he fell to the floor, the blood gushing from a wound that crimsoned all the delicate whiteness of his shirt-front and bedabbled his snowy hair and beard. This was the moment, the signal, fatal, final moment, that the levee contractor had come to meet, that placed the period to his own existence. He lived no longer, Hoxer felt. He did not recognize as his own a single action hereafter, a single mental impulse. It was something else, standing here in the red gloaming--some foreign entity, cogently reasoning, swiftly acting. Self-defense--was it? And who would believe that? Had he found justice so alert to redress his wrongs, even in a little matter, that he must needs risk his neck upon it? This Thing that was not himself--no, never more!--had the theory of alibi in his mind as he stripped off his low-cut shoes and socks, thrusting them into his pockets, leaping from the door, and flying among the dusky shadows down the glooming grove, and through the gate.