A small-town deputy, Deputy Stickley, and a nurse, Miss Polk, investigate a dead body in a creek, fallen off a bridge. Stickley assumed it to be an accident, but Miss Polk, brought to the scene to medically examine the body, deduced that the man was struck in the face before falling. Deputy Stickley has a crush on Miss Polk.

The two go together to speak with the Wainwright sisters, two unmarried elderly sisters who live together: Lucretia and her older half-sister, Beryl, who is deaf and too anxious to come talk to them.

Lucretia tells them about how she sets Beryl's watch each morning so her deaf sister can cross the bridge that the man fell from without being hit by a train. Each day, Beryl looks at the train schedule. On the way out, Iris, the Wainwrights' Black servant, tells them a story of how Beryl's finger was cut off by "a renegade Yankee soldier" trying to get her wedding ring (she had been married in the past). Iris doesn't believe the story.

The next day, Stickley receives notice that Beryl died overnight. When he comes to her deathbed he finds Miss Polk already there with Lucretia. Lucretia pulls them aside to relay Beryl's deathbed confession: Beryl killed the man. Lucretia had wound her watch incorrectly and Beryl crossed the bridge when the train was coming. The man tried to save her, but she hit him with her cane, twice, until he fell, saying she'd rather be hit by a train than touched by a Yankee (the man was from Michigan). Lucretia seems happy about her sister's death, making plans to travel.

As Stickley and Miss Polk leave, something occurs to Miss Polk. She proposes to Stickley that Lucretia deliberately set her sister's watch wrong, hoping her sister would be hit by the train and finally die.