one o'clock
For two hours nearly he wrote away steadily , rarely changing or erasing a word , stopping only to repoint the lead of his pencil . Methodically as a machine he covered sheet after sheet with his fine old-fashioned script . Never for one instant did he hesitate or falter . Just before one o'clock he finished . The completed manuscript , each page of the twenty-odd pages properly numbered , lay in a neat pile before him . He scooped up the pistol shells and stored them in an inner breast pocket of his coat ; then he opened a drawer , slipped the emptied revolver well back under a riffle of papers and clippings and closed the drawer and locked it . His notes he tore into squares , and those squares into smaller squares -- and so on until the fragments would tear no finer , but fluttered out between his fingers in a small white shower like stage snow .