Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/307

Rh logs. So here were two men with five metal-patched shells apiece firing at each other.

"It still more strongly suggested some sort of a duel to me," the psychologist continued, "when they told us the singularly curious fact that two of the bullets had pierced the wall directly above the place where your brother's shoes stood. This could reasonably be explained if I held my suspicion that the men had fought a duel in the dark—shooting by sound; but I could not even guess at any other explanation which was not entirely fantastic. And when I discovered immediately afterwards that, of the ten special shells which these men seemed to have chosen to fire at each other, five had been unloaded, it made the fact final to me; for it was utterly absurd to suppose that of the ten shells to be shot under such circumstances, five—just one half—would have been without powder by accident. But I am free to confess," Trant continued frankly, "that I did not even guess at the true explanation of that—for I have accepted Mr. Findlay's statement as correct. I had accounted for it by supposing that, in this duel, the men more consciously chose their cartridges and that the duel was a sort of repeating rifle adaptation of two men dueling with one loaded and one unloaded pistol. In the essential fact, however, I was correct and that was that the men did choose the shells; so, granting that, it was perfectly plain that one of the men had been able to clearly discriminate between the loaded and the unloaded shells, and the other had not. For not only did the one have four good shells to the