The Case of the Smoking Chimney

Chapter 3

In a ranch house some eight miles outside of Petrie Hugh Sonders lay wide awake.

A night breeze stirred the curtains on the window. The air was scented with eucalypti and orange blossoms, and held that balmy freshness which is of the country. Sonders’ ranch stretched in fertile, well-kept acres — irrigated, cultivated, pruned, neat, orderly. And on a hill, not over a hundred yards from the bedroom window, where Sonders could see its stark outline against the night sky, was an oil derrick... The court had said Pressman had the right to put it there.

Sonders’ hands twitched under the covers. If he only had Pressman by the throat... Steady now! Those thoughts wouldn’t do anyone any good.

Sonders rolled over to his right side so he couldn’t see the window and the silhouette of the oil derrick. His body was tired with that comfortable weariness which comes from work in the open air. Only in the last two months had he had trouble getting to sleep. Now he’d been in bed for an hour — for more than an hour. He looked at the luminous dial of the clock on the stand by the side of his bed — eleven-fifteen.