Explore "The Lone House Mystery" by Edgar Wallace on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How quickly can a man think? Not a second had passed between the shot being fired and the moment I jumped to my feet, but I had followed nearly twelve thousand miles, I had lived over the life of Field and had gone over every aspect of his killing-and I knew the murderer. I knew him as I stood by that table, half twisted round towards the smashed window. I knew just why that smoke signal had been used in Tadpole Copse, and why I had found the print of the man's foot on the soft earth outside Field's study.
A second? It could not have been a tenth of a second. I'll do Gurly justice: he was out of that room before I could say "knife," and I was not far behind him. We flew into the hall, over the terrace-there was nobody in sight. The grounds were as black as pitch; we could see nothing. Our only hope was that the couple of men we had left on duty patrolling the river bank near the copse would have heard the shot and might have seen the man who did the shooting, but although they hurried up to the house, they had met nobody.