The Bradmoor Murder by Melville Davisson Post

these heavy rifles is usually some ten pounds; but the catch on the triggers on this rifle had been filed until they were practically hair-triggers.
    This rifle could be fired with the slightest touch on the triggers.
    This seemed incomprehensible to me. A rifle like this with a hair-trigger would be an impracticable and dangerous weapon. No big game hunter would have ever thought of so filing the triggers. It must have been done witha deliberate intention—for some particular reason.
    It was clear that this was the weapon with which the old Duke had been killed, for one barrel had been discharged. It was, therefore, more than probable—it was, in fact, certain—that the rifle had been made thus to fire at a touch, for the express purpose of this tragedy.
    But who could have wished it to fire at a touch?
    Who filed it, and for what definite purpose? I put the rifle together again, and we stood beside it where it lay across the table, the butt toward the stone fireplace. We were both aflame with the possibilities of this discovery. I winged out on the first suggestion that came into my mind.
    The triggers had been thus filed for a phantom finger, a finger with no power of this world in the crook of it; and the threat of that old forgotten god—on his bench of rose-colored stone—cut in the wedge writing of the Sumerian priests, came up before me.
    We could dismiss ancient religion with a gesture. These sinister gods were impotent images. How could they influence events? Butafter all, when we looked at the matter fairly, how did we know? The sacred books of every religion in the world were crowded with examples—especially the sacred books of the Jews, upon which our modern religions were all basically founded. What sinister power over events had the magicians of Pharaoh, the witch of Endor, the dead prophets of Yahveh!
    And I could see this hideous idol of blue ivory moving about the doomed man, invisibly.
    But I could not see it as Lord Dunn imagined, stumping heavily down from its seat of rose-colored stone to destroy the man who had outraged its dignity and looted it of its treasure. It seemed a nimble, insidious thing like that Devil’s imp around which the butler’s mother had built up her fantastic theory. I could see an avenging agent, of this sinister image, like that. Taking the doomed man at the moment of his unconcern—with a trigger filed to its phantom finger—and then slipping through that narrow slit in the wall to leap off into the sea, casting away the rifle as it descended!
    And then the accident happened that unlocked the mystery of Bradmoor’s death,like a key turned in the lock of a closed door.
    So many involved suggestions were moving in my mind, that, I fancy, I failed to remember the change that had been made in the mechanism of the rifle, and I no longer thought about it. The old established knowledge of such weapons must have taken the place of what I had just discovered, for in resting my hand on the table beside the rifle, I touched one of the triggers with my finger.
    I had forgotten that the opening of the breech had thrown back the hammers.
    There was an explosion. The big lead bullet flattened against the stone of the opposite wall, and the gun leaped back from the table, the butt striking the stone corner of the chimney.
    Joan cried out, and I stood for a moment astonished.
    Then I realized another thing that threw a ray of light into this mystery. The heavy recoil of this gun would carry it backward; and it carried it backward with enough violence to cause it to be thrown entirely off the table.
    It was Joan who caught the meaning of this thing.
    â€œDid you see that?” she cried. “How itleaped back of itself, without being touched?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “These rifles all have a heavy recoil. They are apt to bruise the shoulder unless they are tightly held.”
    â€œBut it leaped back,” she cried. “It leaped