Colonel Luttrell's rifle

Colonel Luttrell’s rifle is a rook rifle used for hunting around Styles. In the shooting of Daisy Luttrell, it is both the visible source of the gunshot and the apparent explanation for her injury; later, Arthur Hastings realizes that the shot may have concealed a second, deliberately fired bullet. The rifle’s importance lies in that gap between what everyone saw and what the evidence was never made to establish.

The rifle as a hunting object

At about six o’clock, Colonel Luttrell comes along a path carrying the rifle and two dead wood pigeons. Its presence is initially unremarkable: he has been shooting, and the birds offer a concrete sign of that ordinary activity. Later, when a wood pigeon settles in a tree, he picks up the gun and prepares to aim, but the bird flies away before he can shoot.

The rifle’s next target appears to be a rabbit near the young fruit trees. Colonel Luttrell notices movement on the far slope and says he thought he had wired the place against rabbits. He raises the rifle and fires. In that moment, the weapon seems to have performed exactly the familiar task its earlier appearance promised: a hunting shot at an animal on the grounds.

The shooting of Daisy Luttrell

The gunshot is immediately followed by a woman’s scream. Colonel Luttrell drops the rifle, and, recognizing Daisy, says that he has shot her. Arthur Hastings runs across the lawn with Stephen Norton behind him. They find Daisy Luttrell near a small fruit tree, where she had been kneeling to tie a stake. Long grass and confusing light had obscured her from the Colonel’s view, giving the apparent accident a plausible physical explanation.

Daisy has been shot through the shoulder, and Hastings examines her while Norton remains by a tree, saying that he cannot stand blood. The rifle’s role at first seems settled: Colonel Luttrell fired it, Daisy was in the line of fire, and the circumstances explain how he could mistake her for the rabbit. The weapon appears to connect cause and consequence without leaving room for another shooter.

A shot that may conceal another

That apparent certainty is what makes the rifle consequential. Later, Hastings reasons that if the broader pattern of crimes is to make sense, Colonel Luttrell may not have been the person who shot Daisy. He does not deny what he witnessed: the Colonel raised his rifle and fired, and Hastings heard only one shot. Instead, he considers whether another person could have fired at Daisy at precisely the same instant, so that the two reports would have sounded like one, or that a slight difference would have been mistaken for an echo.

Hastings recognizes that a bullet’s marks could, in principle, be compared with the rifling inside the weapon’s barrel to determine which gun fired it. But he also sees why that test would not have been pursued. Colonel Luttrell believed he had fired the fatal shot, as did everyone else; the accepted account made the issue whether his shot was accidental or criminal, not whether a second weapon had been involved. The rifle’s visible presence therefore supplied an explanation that could foreclose the very inquiry capable of challenging it.

Narrative and evidentiary significance

Hastings connects the shooting to the cases of the labourer Riggs and Maggie Litchfield: people who appeared to accept responsibility for crimes they had not committed. In his reasoning, the rifle’s apparent responsibility belongs to the same pattern. The crucial distinction is between the fact that Colonel Luttrell fired and the assumption that his shot alone caused Daisy’s injury. The first is witnessed; the second is accepted without examination.

The rifle thus changes from an ordinary object in a hunting scene into a misleading piece of apparent evidence. It does not itself prove who fired at Daisy; rather, its expected use, the Colonel’s sincere belief, and the absence of forensic testing combine to make the wrong explanation seem complete. Hastings’s later reconstruction exposes how a single, apparently straightforward shot could leave a second shooter hidden behind the familiar authority of the gun in the Colonel’s hands.