Granted that a wildly ricocheting bullet from one of these guns could have entered into the same wound made by Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber bullet, unlikely as this may seem, it could by no stretch of the long arm of coincidence have made its exit as a small bluish puncture. Even if it alone caused the wound of exit, leaving a small bullet still in the body of its victim, the point at which it plowed its way out of Long’s back would have been a gaping orifice and not, as Thomas Davis graphically described it, “so small I doubt we’d have seen it had it not been pointed out to us.” Another fact not to be overlooked is that the moment Dr. Rives saw the clean dressing that had been placed over the wound and the operational incision in the anterior wall of Long’s abdomen, he came to the conclusion that any bullet entering at that point in the manner described, most probably emerged in the area of the kidney, and was likely to have damaged that organ. It was for this reason that he asked whether any blood had been found in the patient’s urine, learning to his astonishment that the critically wounded man had not even been catheterized to determine the existence and extent of kidney damage. The visible abdominal trauma disclosed by the Vidrine operation was small; so small that only a small-caliber bullet could have caused it. Two holes had been left in the large bowel at the bend where it turns horizontally across the abdomen from right to left. These holes were so small that there was “very little soilage.” Reports that when the abdomen was opened by Vidrine it was “a mass of blood and fecal matter” were simply fabrications into which a minute fragment of fact was expanded, like some of Huey Long’s murder-plot charges. Finally, the available evidence is conclusive in one respect: By the time the bodyguard fusillade began, Huey Long had fled the corridor where the shooting took place. Coleman, Frampton, and Fournet are unanimous on that point. Roden, blinded by the searing muzzle blasts of his comrades’ guns, could no longer see what was going on, but testifies that the other guards waited until he had struggled to his knees from beneath the lifeless body of Carl Weiss, before they started their volley. O’Connor describes how the firing was still audible after Huey had reeled down four short flights of steps and was being led out of a ground-floor door into the porte-cochere. In sum, every item of credible evidence--surgical, circumstantial, and the testimony of eyewitnesses--indicates that Huey Long could not have been struck by a bullet from the gun of one of his bodyguards. That leaves but one other conceivable hypothesis, namely: Huey Long died of the effects of a bullet wound inflicted by Carl Weiss and no one else.