Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

Having no way of knowing on what it was that he had snagged himself, and with his mental functioning perhaps understandably impaired by his mounting sense of urgency, the sheriff chose to force the issue. That is to say, to barge recklessly ahead, or rather behind, without first disentangling himself from the snag. It was a strategy that had disastrous consequences.

Unfortunately, you see, in its current state of advanced decay the pipe to which the valve was attached was somewhat weaker than was the coarse fabric of the sheriff’s trousers. Therefore, the pipe, which had not been drained along with the tank, was the first to give way, and the rather substantial quantity of fuel oil that still remained within it began to pour out.

Feeling the cold, wet fluid rushing onto his flank and identifying the highly combustible fuel from its distinctive odor, the sheriff quite understandably panicked. His pursuers suddenly completely forgotten, the sheriff let loose with a piercing, high-pitched yelp that left little doubt as to his whereabouts. He then began to wriggle his behind frantically while pushing himself with all his might backwards toward the opening through which he had entered, managing somehow to make good progress but scraping the side of his gun against the wall just before he emerged, knocking it from its holster.

Naturally, given the general lines along which the events of the day had been unfolding, when it landed, the gun discharged. And when the gun discharged, the blast ignited a tendril of fuel oil that was slowly trickling its way across the basement floor, flowing roughly along the very same path the sheriff had chosen to follow.

Not certain whether he’d been shot, only certain that if he didn’t get out in a hurry it wouldn’t matter whether he’d been shot, the sheriff renewed his already violent efforts to free himself from the narrow confines of what he believed was quickly becoming a deathtrap. Finally reaching a point at which there was room to rise, he climbed to his feet, wheeled wildly about, and lunged for the relative, albeit short-term, safety of the open territory in the middle of the basement, in the process banging his head against one of the many foot-thick pipes sprouting from the furnace.

With Withers and Jeffries standing by, watching his antics in open-mouthed astonishment, Sheriff Duncan emerged at a dead run from behind the furnace. Blinded as much by the blood that was pouring from a gash he had opened up in his forehead as by the intensely bright light coming from their hurricane lantern, he careened from one obstacle to the next, bouncing his way across the basement. Navigating from memory alone, as it were, yet always traveling in the general direction of the foot of the stairwell. And he almost made it.

In all likelihood would have made it had his mad dash for freedom not been foiled along the way. Tripped up by a misplaced roll of carpet remnant that had been left over from Miss Petula’s renovation project last spring, stumbling ahead a few more steps under the momentum he’d built up, traveling on a course tangential to the original, he fell headlong through the open doorway that led into the smaller room in the back of the basement that housed the fuel oil tank.

It was a relatively low-slung open doorway, unfortunately. Striking his head on the top of the doorway frame as he passed through and knocking himself unconscious in the process, he pitched forward into the room beyond. Where he first knocked over, then landed smack on top of, a small folding chair set up in the middle of the floor. A chair that at the time contained the bound and gagged, and rather startled, Miss Virginia Watson, lately of Kansas City.

Miss Watson, having been whisked without benefit of explanation from the sidewalk in front of her college dormitory back in Kansas City late one night of the previous week, had in the intervening days had little opportunity to orient herself to her new circumstances, much less to acquaint herself with the details of the case. Under the circumstances, then, I’m certain she can be forgiven if she quite naturally jumped to the same conclusion anyone else in her position would. Believing that she was experiencing the preliminary stages of a violent sexual assault, and discovering that her fall had freed her legs from their bonds, she immediately began to rain downward, or rather upward, upon the limp and unconscious body of the sheriff a veritable storm of swift and vicious kicks.