Eating Iron – a wild western action adventure

CHAPTER I

The sun poked above the eastern horizon and flung the long, crooked shadow of the Joshua tree almost to the boy’s toes.
He did not move, as the shadow reached out toward him.
He still crouched there beside the spindly mesquite, toes deep in the sand, arms clasped around his thin legs, chin on his knees.
The sun climbed slowly higher.
The shadow writhed back like a sluggish, full-bellied snake.
He watched it disappear, inch at a time, up the thick gray green trunk, and he was almost surprised that it did not leave a track in the sand where it had crawled.
He opened his red-rimmed eyes just a little wider, as the shadow slithered down from the face of the man who lay sprawled on his back in the sand.
But still the boy did not change his position.
He had crouched there all night, stirring only once or twice.
Then he had taken a hesitant step toward the shapeless heap on the sand, each time dropping back on his heels.
Numbing grief and fear held him tightly.
They dulled his brain and paralyzed his muscles.
In his fourteen years he had known something of death—had seen it intimately when his father and mother died.
But the violent kind that had swept the lonely sand and mesquite that last day was new to him.
And twice he had seen that ruthless violence strike.
It left him helpless and terribly lonely.
There was nothing he could do—no thoughts he could think straight—no hope that he could cling to.
All that was left was waiting — waiting with the dread patience of the very young or the very old.
Waiting through the long, fearsome hours of night until the equally fearsome hours of day began.
The man in the sand had not been dead last night when- darkness settled down over the tangle.
He had heard a low moan then, that mingled with the moan of the wind through the clutching fingers of the mesquite.
But that had been hours ago.
Now that strong face looked set and lifeless.
There was a smear of blood, dried and black, across the broad forehead and down over the high cheekbone.
The wide mouth was fixed in a grimace that showed white, even teeth.
The clenched hands and the sprawling legs seemed hard with the rigor of death.
The boy drew a long, half-sobbing sigh, as the sun cast a slash of gold across the high-bridged nose, and touched the purplish closed eyelids.
The man was dead now—the boy had no doubt of that.
But death was no more terrible than the vast loneliness that engulfed him.
He felt as if he cowered in the very center of an empty world.
He straightened his legs slowly, scarcely noticing the stiffness of his knees from hunkering motionless for so long.
Standing, he could see a little farther.
But there was nothing to see, except more mesquite and twisted cactus clear to the horizon.
The narrow trail twisted its tortuous way through the tangle, winding between the boy and the body of the man.
But each end of the trail disappeared into nothingness.
He looked in both directions.
He knew what was to the east, for he had-come over that trail —a full thousand miles of it.
The other way looked exactly the same, except for the purple haze of.
a range of mountains far in the distance.
What lay between him and those mountains he could not even guess.
Again he squatted in the sand, and turned his eyes to the motionless figure.
Not with hope, or even fear now.
But in grim despair.
The only being in the vast circle of the silent land, as far as he knew— and dead.
But now his thin body stiffened.
He caught his breath sharply, and his teeth closed on his dry, cracked lips.
His eyes blinked, and he shook his head as if to clear them of something.
It must have been a moving shadow that brought the illusion of movement to that set face.
It couldn’t be.
But now he saw it again.
And this time he could not be mistaken.
Those swollen purple lids quivered ever slightly, as if the sun burned the eyeballs beneath.
For a full ten minutes he watched, not so much as moving a finger.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the lids had opened the tiniest crack, until the boy thought he could see the thin black streak of eye beneath them.
He still could not believe it.
The man could not be alive.
It was all more of the nightmare that had terrorized him since the afternoon before.
But now he saw the unmistakable quiver of a leg— saw the hands open and clench again with a spasmodic jerk.
If he had been frightened before, he was frozen with fear now.
Terror that gripped him by the throat—the terror of the supernatural—of seeing a dead man move.
His hands tightened where they clenched in front of his shins, until the knuckles were white.
His eyes were wide and unblinking.
Now those thick, cracked lips moved as if the man was trying to speak.
But no sounds came.
The eyes were half open, and he could see the eyeballs rolling.
It seemed as if they were staring sightlessly at him.
Minute by minute the movements became stronger.
The legs straightened.
One broad hand came up jerkily to shield the eyes from the gun.
In that grim moment the boy was fascinated by the thick black hair on the back of that hand.
The man struggled to rise now, while the boy stared unbelievingly.
Mumbled sounds came from the thick lips.
Knees bent, and booted heels dug into the sand.
At last, with an explosive grunt and a great heave, the man rolled over onto his face.
His arms bent, and his big hands spread themselves on the sand.
Slowly, inch by inch, he forced his body up until it left the hollow it had made in the sand.
The blood-smeared face with the wild eyes was turned toward the hunkering boy.
A hollow laugh that was more terrible than a curse came from those parched lips.
The words that followed were thick and barely intelligible.
‘“You—buzzard—sitting’ over there— with your claws and your beak—honing for a hunk of my flesh! I fooled you —you’re going to miss your feed! I ain’t—”
That croaking voice brought the boy from the hypnosis of fear that had held him motionless.
His head jerked up from his knees.
His hands loosed their grip from around his shins, and he wriggled his fingers to rid them of the gnawing ache.
He straightened his thin legs and rose shakily, his wide eyes still upon the man.
He took a staggering step toward the prone figure, hope and fear equally strong in his breast.
Again that croaking voice.
“You’re not a—buzzard! You’ve got no—claws and no beak—no feathers! Not a coyote—for you’re walking on two feet! Been watching’ you for hours—for days—thinking you was a stinking carrion buzzard—waiting for me to die! What are you?”
The boy moved closer now, his legs shaking with fear: beneath him, His dry tongue tried to wet his dry lips, but only deepened the cracks.
Twice he tried to speak before the rasping voice, high pitched and thin, came.
“I’m—Elisha Hosea Carter. I’m not a buzzard—and you couldn’t have been watching me for days. You only been there yesterday afternoon and last night.”
The man heaved again, and with a mighty effort swung his body around and came to a sitting position on the sand.
For a moment he swayed there, and the boy held his breath as he watched, The man planted his hands on each side of him, and leaned a little toward the boy.
Twice he shook his head as if to clear his bleary eyes and his hazy brain.
But now the mad look was fading.
He even tried a grin which turned out a crooked grimace.
“Elisha — Hosea — Carter.
Quite a handle—to fasten on a spindly younker like you.
What you doing—away out here in the mesquite?” The boy moved toward the man with hesitant feet.
Then he dropped on his heels again, and his elbows rested on his knees.
No more than five feet from the sitting figure, he stared into the man’s eyes.
“I saw them—kill my granddad—and saw them gun you.”
The boy’s words came with hardly any inflection.
The expression on his face did not change.
He had been drained too completely of emotion for any to be left for his simple statement.
For just an instant, too, the man’s face held stiff and set.
Then slowly the bushy brows drew together in a frown.
His cracked lips tightened over his teeth.
His right hand lifted from the sand and moved instinctively toward his hip, only to come away when he realized that his gun belt and filled holster were gone.
“So that’s what happened! Somebody gunned me from behind.”
His hand went shakily to his head now.
“Creased me, I reckon. Must have figured I was plumb dead.
Took my gun—likely everything else on me.”
The boy nodded.
“I didn’t get close enough to hear them, but they did search you.
And they tied your horse to the back of the wagon when they drove off.”
The man leaned a little toward the boy.
“You saw them? But you didn’t know them, huh?” The boy shook his head.
“I don’t know, Mister. There was two men. Killed my granddad back down the road a piece, before they shot you. Buried him in the sand.” The man licked his dry lips.
“My head feels as big as a barrel—and I sure could use a drink of water. Don’t happen to have a jug with you? Well, never mind. Go ahead and tell me about it. Who was your granddad? And why did they kill him?”
“Granddad was Amos Carter. And there wasn’t no reason for them killing him.”
“Amos Alonzo Carter—don’t sound like no range name I ever heard.
” “We come from Union County in Missouri,” the boy said slowly.
“When mom and pop died, me and granddad was all alone.
We hitched Tom and Nelly to the covered wagon, and headed West.
Granddad allowed the West was the place for a boy to grow up.” “Maybe he was right,” the man grunted.
“But it was shore bad medicine for him.
But how about the killing? How did it happen?”
“A couple of men rode up alongside the wagon.
I was sleeping in the back, and didn’t get a good look at them.
It was their talk that woke me up.
Then I heard the shot, and granddad tumbled back off the seat.
One of the men laughed—and then they tied their horses alongside Nelly and Tom, and climbed into the wagon.
” “Yeah—but you? How come they didn’t drill you, too?”
“I dropped out of the back where the end gate was down—without them seeing me.
Hid behind a bush until they drove off.
I followed, but I couldn’t get a look at their faces. Then I saw them shoot you. I didn’t go no further. That was nigh sundown last night.”

 
CHAPTER II

The man nodded.
The explanation had been short and to the point.
“So I been laying in the sand for going on twelve hours, huh? Feel like it, too.”
Then he looked at the boy out of bleary eyes again.
“You didn’t sound none too certain when you said you didn’t recognize the killers, son. Sure it wasn’t someone you know—and for some reason you ain’t telling?”
For a full minute the boy did not answer, his brow was furrowed, and his eyes were staring with intense concentration.
When he did speak, it was in hesitant words.
“They looked—sort o’ like—a couple of men we saw back in the feed-yard at the last town—Lorber, I think it was.
But like I told you, I didn’t see their faces in the wagon.”
“And you think they might have followed you, huh? Was there any reason? Did your granddad have any words with them, or did he flash a roll of bills—or something?”
The boy shook his head.
“Granddad never quarreled with nobody in his life. And a big roll—you mean—”
“If the old man was flashing a roll, it might have been the reason—” “Granddad did have nigh five thousand dollars onto him.
He sold off everything, when mom and pop died.
Everything, except Tom and Nelly and the wagon. But he didn’t flash the money. Might have been in sight for a minute when he paid the feed-yard bill. I don’t know.”
The man’s iron strength was returning, even though his lips and tongue were becoming thicker and drier with every second.
At last he heaved himself to his feet.
He stood shakily, with feet widespread, and a look of dizzy pain swept his face.
“Talking ain’t getting us nowhere, son.
We’re here on our own, without a horse or a gun or any water or grub. Don’t reckon you know the country. Likely as much a stranger as I am. Wouldn’t know where there was a waterhole or a place to get a bait of grub.”
“Ain’t never been here before,” the youngster answered.
“But granddad allowed we’d make Railley late last night.
Maybe three-four hours driving. And we’re a little closer.
Reckon Railley must be a right smart good town.”
“Must be a heap different from any of these here dry-country towns I’ve hit, then,” the man grunted.
“But anyhow there’ll be water and grub.
Let’s get to moving.”
“You’re sure you think you can walk, Mister? That gouge onto your head—”
“Jest a gouge,” the man grunted. “Been hurt a heap worse many is the time. I’ll make it—if I don’t starve to death.
” Now he glanced around the spot again, as if to satisfy himself that all his possessions really were gone.
Then he moved with shuffling steps to the twisting trail through the mesquite, and headed west.
The boy trudged at his side.
For a hundred yards they were silent, but the youngster studied the tall, broad-shouldered man.
For some reason he trusted the stranger, trusted and liked him.
He wondered where he was from—what brought him to this country—wondered what was ahead of the pair of them.
And the man must have sensed what was going through the boy’s mind.
For he half turned toward the youngster, and gave him a twisted smile that was more than half grimace.
“Elisha Hosea Carter, huh? What do they call you? Not that whole name, I hope.”
“Eli, mostly.
Mom used to call me all of it, when she was a little put out at me.
But mostly it was just Eli.
” The man grinned again.
“Eli is good enough for me, son.
And me, I’m Rip Campbell.
Come from Wyoming on account of a special job that has to be done.
Reckon you and me jus’ as well team up.
Ain’t no bargain for either one of us, but likely our trail will be running side by side for quite a spell.”
The boy drew a long breath of relief.
“That suits me, Rip, until we meet up with the men who—who killed my granddad. Then I aim to—”
“Whoa up, feller,” the man grunted.
“I’ve got as much stake in meeting them as you have. They gunned me, too, and took my horse and guns. And the sizable roll I was carrying.”
The boy nodded soberly.
“Yeah, I reckon you have.”
Now they gave their whole attention to forcing their dragging feet along the sandy trail.
The sun beat down with searing intensity, and their thirst grew unbearable.
Everything became shimmery and unreal before Eli Carter’s eyes, and he could see that Rip Campbell was staggering like a drunken man.
They did not try to talk—and just as well, for their thick tongues filled their mouths.
A dozen times in the next four miles they saw what looked like little lakes ahead of them.
They would hurry their steps, only to find the mirages fading beneath their feet.
More times than they cared to count, ahead of them appeared to be riders approaching—or buildings huddled between them and the shimmering horizon —or moving herds along the crest of some low dune.
Each time they were disappointed.
And so it was that when the little town of Railley suddenly loomed in front of them, they did not feel the faintest tinge of excitement.
Rip Campbell’s thick lips moved in a wordless curse.
Eli Carter’s red-rimmed eyes did not widen or brighten.
It was just another mirage.
A mirage that would not trick him into wasting precious strength in useless hurrying.
A mirage that would not excite him with false hope of cool water, of rest and food.
He’d keep trudging on as long as he could move one foot in front of the other.
Then he’d lie down and die.
Even when they staggered out of the broiling sun into the actual shadow of the huge livery barn, they did not allow themselves to believe.
Instinctively they moved a little closer to each other.
They eyed each other, looking for a sign of the same illusion.
Rip Campbell’s dry lips moved as he tried to voice a question.
Eli Carter understood, even though no words came, He moved a little ahead of Rip, and touched the weathered slabs with a hesitant hand.
He looked back at the big man, and nodded.
Together, they moved around the corner of the rickety old barn.
The straggling town, with its drab, false-fronted buildings and ramshackle shacks spread out in front of them.
The trail, which widened slightly to make the main street, bent around the barn.
To their sun-scorched, sand-reddened eyes, Railley looked hardly more than a shimmering haze.
The two or three moving men on the humpy sidewalks were mere moving blots in the brilliant light.
But the long wooden trough, spilling over from cool water that trickled from the end of a pipe, was no mirage.
And the creak of the old windmill on its creaky tower was not the moan of the wind through the mesquite.
Rip Campbell looked at Eli Carter.
The boy answered the stare.
Then both staggered at a half-run to the trough.
They plunged their faces deep into it.
When the water had cooled their burning brains a little, when they had drunk sparingly, they straightened and turned.
A tall, incredibly thin old man, with a sparse and straggly mustache and twinkling little black eyes, faced them.
He stood with his feet wide apart, knobby fists on his hips close to his filled holsters.
A smile that held no hint of humor played across the thin lips beneath the mustache.
“Hi, strangers. Wasn’t looking for you to show up. Figured the buzzards was picking your bones.”
Rip Campbell licked his lips, found that his tongue had lost some of its stiffness.
But his voice, when he spoke at last, was still raspy.
“Them words need a little explaining, Mister.”
The tall man moved a step closer.
“Didn’t figure you was in the land of the living—not any.
Not when Bix Gaffney and Pat Lomax hit town late last night, driving a team to a covered wagon and leading a strange horse from the north country.”
Rip Campbell felt his senses clearing from the cool water, felt the strength returning to his whipcord body.
And for the first time in hours, what had happened out in the mesquite assumed real importance.
“You know what happened then? You know who—”
“Whoa up, stranger. Don’t know nothing. Can only guess by what I see and hear. Know the wagon and team came from back East. Horses wasn’t branded. Know the saddled horse came from the north range. Carrying a double-cinch saddle with a long rope.
Wyoming’, or Montana, or some of them places.”
“Go ahead!” Rip Campbell’s voice was low, but hard.
“I know Gaffney and Lomax didn’t come by them honest.
Because I know them two pelicans—have for ten years.
They wouldn’t buy nothing they could steal. And anyway, they offered them to me too damn cheap.”
Rip Campbell nodded slowly.
He shot a glance at Eli Carter, caught the wide-eyed look on the boy’s face.
Then back to the old liveryman.
“If you know that much, maybe you can tell me where I can find them two gun slicks. I’m hoping to meet up with them.”
Still smiling crookedly, the tall old man turned and started toward the little office at the corner of the barn.
“Come in and set a spell, strangers.
We’ll make a little talk, whilst you’re stowing a bait of grub.”
Rip Campbell and Eli Carter followed eagerly.
While they ate cold beef and beans and drank the scalding coffee, the old man talked.
He’d been in Railley for twenty years, ever since a riding injury forced him to give up punching.
And he didn’t like the way things had been going lately.
More especially, he didn’t like Bix Gaffney and Pat Lomax —not any.
Pair of crooks without conscience.
Nothing he could do, though.
Bix Gaffney owned the hotel and bar, and controlled all the gambling in Railley.
Pat Lomax had drifted up from below the line two years ago, and was thicker than molasses with Gaffney.
Both of them trigger-quick killers.
Rip Campbell nodded to himself.
The old man had a quick mind, and a knack of putting things together.
Plenty evidence of that was his appraisal of Wyman and Eli Carter.
Looked honest, too.
He looked the old man in the eyes.
“You read us right, Mister—”
“Tooney—Dan Tooney, is the name.”
“You read us right, Tooney. Now I’m wondering’ if you’ve got a line on another waddy from up north. Slender, laughing redhead.
He was down this way three or four months ago.”
Dan Tooney’s little eyes were almost closed.
For a moment he did not speak.
Then he looked up at Rip Campbell, and nodded slowly.
“Don’t recollect no redhead. But likely he was forking a Chain Lightning horse, sort of a red roan with a white stocking on its left forefoot.”
“That was Dick Braden’s animal!” Rip said eagerly.
But Dick, hisself—”’
“Never seed the redhead,” Tooney repeated.
“But Bix Gaffney forks the Chain Lightning roan right frequent.
Same brand as that black he brought in last night.”
For a full minute Wyman did not speak.
But Eli Carter, who had been listening wide-eyed, saw his lips moving and his hands clenched into tight fists at his sides.
The boy moved closer and put his hand on Wyman’s arm.
The muscles _ were tense, and as hard as a boulder.
At last Rip spoke, slowly, as if he voiced his thoughts aloud for his own ears.
“I came down here on account of Dick Braden.
Carryin’ two thousand dollars to help him out of trouble.
Wrote his old man he had to have it to save his skin.
The old man was right worried, and me—why, Dick’s closer than a brother to me.”
Then he looked up at old Dan Tooney.
“The letter Dick wrote was sort of mixed up. Sort of sounded like he wrote it at the point of a gun. Said something about sending the money to the Dobe Dollar— whatever that is.”
Dan Tooney’s old eyes narrowed.
“The Dobe Dollar! That’s the place Bix Gaffney owns! Likely they forced this here young Braden to write the letter.
And then, figuring that somebody’d bring the money instead of sending it, they waited and dry gulched you.
Likely recognized the brand on your animal’s flank.
No doubt they gunned the boy’s granddad jest for the hell of it—and what little they could rob him of.”
Eli Carter was watching Rip Campbell’s face, as he listened to the old liveryman.
And he was a little frightened at the killing rage he read there.
He broke in softly.
“You didn’t tell me about the two thousand dollars, Rip.
Along with the five thousand they got from my granddad, them polecats made a right good haul.
” “Yeah! A good haul—and probably figuring they’ll get still more, when they tell Dick the money didn’t come, Old Jim Braden will spend every cent he’s got for Dick—and figure it’s cheap at the price.
But they ain’t going to get away with it.
I’m collecting from them two right sudden! I ain’t heeled.
They got my gun, along with everything else.
But I’ll tackle them barehanded!”’ “Steady, feller!” Dan Tooney said evenly.
“I could loan you a gun.
Be glad to do it.
But even then, you wouldn’t have a chance.
They’re two against one—and both plenty poison with their six-guns.”
Rip Campbell smiled frostily.
“I ain’t so slow, Tooney. Might stack up pretty good—”
“And they’d recognize you at sight,” Dan Tooney continued.
“Must have seed you plenty close whilst they were robbing what they thought was your dead body. There wouldn’t be a chance of getting the drop on them. Business they’re in, they al- — ways have a lookout. Cagey as a pair of coyotes.”
Rip Campbell nodded reluctantly.
He knew the logic of the old man’s words.
“But if I could only get them away from where they hang out, if I could only meet them on even terms—just two to one—”
“Not a chance,” Tooney grunted.
“They scarecly ever leave the Dobe Dollar. And when they do, they keep their eyes peeled and their hands on their holsters. Got everybody in town scared of them.”

 
CHAPTER III

Eli Carter was listening, and wild thoughts took shape in his brain.
He knew how it hurt Rip to come to a dead end like this, how much effort it cost the puncher to fight down the impulse to face the two killers in their own hideout.
But if he could lure them away— He spoke up hesitantly.
“But—they don’t know me, Rip, They never saw me. Don’t know anybody else was in the wagon. I dropped out and hid behind a clump of brush.”
Dan Tooney blinked, peered at the slim boy.
Apparently he read the desperate courage on the youngster’s white face.
A slow smile spread across his mustached lips.
“I admire your spunk for aiming to go gunning for Gaffney and Lomax. But they’d jest laugh at you. Wouldn’t gun you, of course—for they wouldn’t dare, even in Railley. Reckon the town would rise up against anyone who killed a youngster your age. But you couldn’t shoot them, either, not if they didn’t draw on you.”
“But I can handle a rifle-gun!” Eli broke in. “I’ve shot a squirrel out o’ the top of a tree many is the time, And a man’s a heap bigger than—”
Then it dawned upon him what old Dan Tooney had said—and meant.
He realized its truth.
He couldn’t shoot a man who didn’t dare shoot back.
Not even if that man had killed his granddad.
Dan Tooney moved toward him, put a skinny hand on his shoulder.
“Jest set tight, son. We’ll figure some way out of it, though I’ll be damned if I see how right now. But any way you look at it, it’s a man’s job.”
“It’s my job, too! They killed my granddad, took Tom and Nelly and the wagon—”
He stopped, and a funny look crept into his eyes.
“Where are the team and wagon, Mister Dan? You allowed Gaffney and Lomax brought them in last night.
” The old man blinked.
“What idea’s buzzing in your bonnet now? Reckon that team and wagon are over at Gaffney’s place, half mile beyond town. Couple of no-account sots live there, doing what little work there is, and watching things for Gaffney and Lomax. But that don’t mean nothing in your young life.
You can’t—”’
“Reckon Dick Braden is there, too, huh? Likeliest place they’d keep him, whilst they tricked his father into paying ransom money?”
Rip Campbell jerked erect, as the boy mentioned Dick Braden’s name.
And now Eli Carter turned toward him,
“You’d better borrow that gun Dan Tooney promised you, Rip, ’Cause Bix Gaffney and Pat Lomax will likely be heading this way hell-bent, right sudden.”
“You’re plumb locoed, boy! Some crazy idea—”’
“No crazy idea, Rip! I’m going to bring Gaffney and Lomax down here to you, and you better be ready.
I’ll be safe enough.
They don’t know me.
And anyhow, Dan Tooney said they wouldn’t gun a boy.
” “Pm not going to let you start off on no fool—” But already Eli Carter had turned to Tooney again.
The startling suddenness of his question brought the answer to the old man’s lips.
“Just whereabouts is Gaffney’s place, Mister Dan?” “Half mile beyond the Dobe Dollar.
Off to the left from the first turn beyond the Rancher’s Supply Store.
But you ain’t aiming—”’
Before the words had left Dan Tooney’s hips, Eli Carter was heading for the door.
He stopped, half turned, and spoke once more to the two men standing openmouthed.
“Your varmints will be along right sudden, Rip. I’ll bring them here, then it’s up to you.”
Young Eli Carter walked from the livery stable with his back stiff and his shoulders squared.
He knew that Rip Campbell and Dan Tooney would be watching him from the window— knew that only the suddenness of it all had kept them from stopping him.
But his knees were strangely weak beneath him, and deep in his heart was grim fear.
He had not forgotten—would never forget—the merciless cruelty of the men who had shot his unarmed grandfather, and laughed while the old man died.
Dan Tooney had said they would not dare to shoot an unarmed boy.
But Eli Carter was none too sure of that.
Gaffney and Lomax were ruthless and without conscience, And he didn’t want to die.
He had the healthy boy’s dread of pain and death, intensified still more by his vivid imagination.
But he had his grandfather’s courage, too—a courage that had driven the old man into a new country at an age when a man wants peace and quiet.
And there was a fathomless well of bitter grief and anger to spur the boy on.
He reached the sidewalk that led down the east side of the street and past the Dobe Dollar, Other little false-fronted buildings were between him and the saloon, and the bigger Rancher’s Supply Store was on beyond.
He passed only two men before he reached the Dobe Dollar.
They were just ordinary men, who might be punchers or even townsmen.
Nothing to distinguish them.
They looked at him frankly and appraisingly, but with nothing more than healthy curiosity about a stranger—and a boy, at that.
Eli paused for a moment in front of the Dobe Dollar.
The glass in the window was grimy, and the interior gloomy.
But he did catch a glimpse of several men around a table at the north wall.
Several others were bellied up to the bar, One man lounged on the porch, apparently dozing.
But Eli knew that this man was staring at him through almost closed lids.
A shiver chased itself up and down his spine.
He knew the man was a lookout for Gaffney and Lomax, that he was stationed on the porch to warn the pair of any danger approaching.
The boy half turned and shot a glance back up at the livery stable.
He breathed a little easier when he realized that no one could be recognized at that distance.
There wasn’t a chance that the two killers knew that one of their supposed victims was here in Railley—and that another, of whom they had never heard, stood just outside the Dobe Dollar.
They would be certain that Rip Campbell was dead out there in the sand.
And Eli Carter did not exist as far as they knew.
The youngster moved on down the sidewalk.
He could almost feel the impact of that man’s gaze between his shoulder blades.
But he did not look back until he had reached the corner beyond the store.
A glance told him that the watcher had not moved.
Apparently he didn’t sense any danger in the slim fourteen year-old boy.
Eli drew a quavering breath of relief.
Now he turned left, as Dan Tooney had directed.
The squat adobe house and the cluster of outbuildings and corrals a half mile away must be Gaffney’s place.
He hurried his steps, as he took the narrow path that wound across the sand and sagebrush.
Fifty yards from the house, he paused and hunkered on the sand to study it.
He saw a heavy-bodied man in a splint backed chair, leaning back against the wall in the shade of the overhanging roof.
The man’s hat was pulled far down over his eyes, and he did not move.
Eli knew that he had not yet been seen.
This must be one of the two men Gaffney had to watch the place.
The other was not in sight.
The boy’s eyes strayed beyond the house now.
And he caught his breath, as he saw the end of a covered wagon beyond the saddle house to the left.
Even that short glance brought instant recognition.
But Tom and Nelly were not in sight.
Now Eli straightened and strode silently toward the house.
The fat man did not stir in his chair.
And now, as he came closer, the boy knew he was half drunk, and sleeping soddenly.
A twisted smile, half fear and half amusement, flicked the youngster’s lips.
He circled the house silently and headed for the long, low horse shed back beside the corral some twenty yards beyond the house.
Still no sign of anyone else around the place.
He began to wonder now whether or not Dick Braden really was being held here for ransom.
Maybe he had been killed, and Gaffney or Lomax had written that letter to Rip’s boas.
No time to puzzle that out now, though.
He slipped around the corner of the horse shed and lifted the latch on the door.
For an instant he stood just inside, blinking in the hot gloom.
Then his eyes, becoming accustomed to the darkness, made out the two heavy draft horses in the two back stalls.
“Tom and Nelly!” he breathed.
“They’re here—and they’re all right!” He hurried back along the dank passageway.
Now he saw the harness, hanging on the pegs back of the stalls.
With hands that trembled in hurried fear, he lifted the harness down and stagered toward the horses.
Before he led the team from the horse shed, he stole to the door and swept the cluster of buildings with a swift gaze.
Still no one in sight.
The stolid horses followed the boy and took their places beside the wagon tongue with practiced facility.
Eli Carter hitched up, climbed to the seat and gathered up the reins.
He shot a downward glance at the dark stain on the seat where his grandfather habitually had sat, and moved over to the other side with a shiver.
For a full minute he sat there before he spoke to Tom and Nelly.
Now that the biggest part of his preparations was over, he began to doubt his own wisdom, after all.
Perhaps old Dan Tooney didn’t know Gaffney and Lomax.
Maybe the two killers would shoot him on sight.
Or maybe even the men here at Gafney’s place would gun him.
Likely they were just as conscienceless as their employer.
And certainly they would not have the least compunction at killing a youngster.
But he forced those thoughts from his mind.
After all, he had promised Rip Campbell that he would lure Gaffney and Lomax up to the livery stable.
He couldn’t back down on his new-found friend now.
The feast he could do was to try—was to follow his plan as far as he could.
With a tongue so dry he could hardly make a sound, he clucked to the horses and tightened the lines.
The even, unhurried pace of the two sturdy animals strangely did something to calm his nerves.
Expertly he guided the team toward the saddle house.
He pulled them to a stop just in front of it, and climbed down.
He moved toward the door, shooting a glance at the house.
Then he stopped short, for a man stood in the door of the adobe.
A wide man, squat and short necked, with a stubble of black beard covering his face.
“Hey you! What’s going on down there?” The man’s voice was a deep bellow.
Not waiting for an answer, the squat hombre stepped down and headed at a rolling walk toward the trembling boy.
His hand was hovering over his gun butt, and his beady eyes were upon the youngster.
Eli Carter waited until the man faced him, waited until the beady eyes held his own—until the bellow came once more, with the same question.
“Bix Gaffney and Pat Lomax have got a chance to get rid of this outfit,” the boy said then.
And he marveled that his trembling voice had steadied, that he could force a smile to his lips.
“Sent you after it? Who are you, anyhow?”
“Stranger in Railley,” Eli Carter answered, steadily now.
“But it don’t take long to do business with Gaffney.”
Then a swift decision swept him—a decision that he would not have made upon mature thought.
“Better bring out that redheaded man, too. Gaffney and Lomax would like him along.”
As the squat man eyed him still more closely, Eli almost held his breath.
The hombre took still another step toward him, and his little eyes seemed to be looking right through the boy.
Eli Carter felt his legs getting weak beneath him, just waiting for the man’s answer.
“Young Braden, huh?” A grin that made the man’s face more repulsive than ever twitched his stubble strewn upper lip.
“Has that there fellow with the money showed up?”
“Man from up Wyoming way is in Railley,” Eli Carter answered steadily. “And he’s right anxious to see if Gaffney really has Braden.”
The squat man grinned again.
And now Eli Carter turned to climb back onto the wagon seat.
The man moved toward the door of the saddle house.
“I’ll get him out, youngster. Reckon he won’t know how to act out in the sun.”
Eli Carter waited, and it was the hardest work he had ever done.
Every impulse urged him to climb down from the wagon seat and run for it as fast as his legs would go—run, no matter where, just so it was away from here.
But he held himself fast.
In a moment the squat man appeared again, pushing another whose hands were bound with a tie-rope behind his back.
Eli Carter’s eyes swept this new comer.
He saw the disheveled red hair, the haggard face with its fine stubble of red beard, the rumpled and dirty clothing.
But he noticed that Dick Braden walked erect, and that his eyes did not waver as they met his.
“Get up there, fellow! We’re going to meet up with a friend of yours.” the burly hombre growled.
Dick Braden shot a questioning glance at the boy on the seat of the wagon.
Eli Carter’s left eyelid dropped ever so slightly, and his head nodded.
The squat man did not catch the wink, did not see the nod—but Dick Braden did.
“You’ll have to loose this here rope or give me a boost,” he said softly.“Reckon you’re afraid to slip the knot, though.”
The squat man laughed loudly, coarsely.
“Never seen the day I was scared of a skinny redhead from up north. If it was me, I wouldn’t bother with no rope. But Gaffney is right anxious you don’t get away. We’ll leave the rope onto you.”
He boosted Dick Braden onto the boot of the wagon with an easy show of strength.
Then he climbed up beside him.
Braden sat in the middle, with Eli Carter and the squat man on either side.
The burly ruffian slipped his six-gun from its holster and laid it in his lap now.
“Were ready to go, kid. Don’t want to keep Bix Gaffney waitin’.
Prod them broomtails.”
Eli Carter straightened the lines and clucked to Tom and Nelly.
But the old fear had come back to him again.
Too many things that could happen.
In the first place, he had not counted on the big man coming along.
Nor had he been sure that Dick Braden would be in the wagon.
Both complicated matters.
But sitting stiffly erect, eyes straight ahead, he guided the team along the narrow, twisting trail.
He felt Dick Braden’s gaze flicking toward him, could read the question in the blue eyes.
But he did not speak.
 

CHAPTER IV

When they passed the adobe house, the squat man called to his.
companion, slouched in the shade.
The other lifted a heavy hand at last, and waved it aimlessly.
He didn’t bother to straighten his thick body or shove the hat back from his eyes.
Eli Carter breathed a little’ easier when the house was behind.
But he could not keep his mind from those two hundred yards of street they must travel.
Worry and fear rode him heavy.
Then it was too late to stop—too late to turn back.
For the wagon left the dim trail, and came out at the turn by the Rancher’s Supply Store.
The street was straight ahead of him, clear to the livery stable at the far end.
Eli Carter shot a glance at Dick Braden, sitting straight in.
the seat, hands bound tightly behind him.
Then he looked at the squat man at the other end of the seat.
Braden still looked puzzled, but there was no hint of fear in his expression.
The other man, slightly drunk, held a swaggering posture that was almost comical.
“When we get there, you climb down and tell Gaffney.”
Eli Carter spoke softly, without turning his head.
He felt Dick Braden stiffen beside him.
But the burly ruffian did not answer.
After a second, Eli half turned to look at the man.
The hombre apparently had not heard the low words.
Eli Carter blinked.
He tried again, just as softly.
Still no answer.
The man was so busy trying to look important that he paid no attention to anything else.
Now the youngster lowered his voice to little more than a whisper.
“If you can hear me, Braden, nudge me with your elbow.”
The nudge came.
“Now listen. When we get in front of the Dobe Dollar, I’ll act like I’m going to stop. Then when this big ox starts to climb down, I’ll snap the lines. And you give him a push at the same time. Understand?” A sidelong glance caught Braden’s nod.
Caught, too, the startled, excited look that swept across the redhead’s face.
A half-grin wrinkled Eli Carter’s lips.
But he felt no amusement.
Instead, cold, desperate fear gripped him.
Fear that seemed to give added quickness to.
his mind and muscles.
He clucked to the team, and they moved ahead at a plodding walk up the middle of the street.
Now the boy’s left hand stole to his pocket and pulled out the long-bladed jackknife.
As he glanced at the burly ruffian, saw that the man was still intent upon the street ahead, he opened the long blade.
Then he switched the reins to his left hand and slipped his right behind Dick Braden, The redheaded puncher realized what he intended, and leaned forward ever so slightly.
The sharp blade severed the rope that bound Braden, but the man still kept his hands behind him.
Now the Dobe Dollar was but a few yards ahead.
Eli Carter tensed.
He felt Braden stiffen beside him.
The boy spoke, fighting to keep the tremble of excitement from his voice.
“I’m pulling up, feller. Get ready to climb down.”
He repeated the statement in a louder tone before the big ruffian caught it.
The man turned and grinned at him wickedly.
“Yeah. You pull up. I’ll go tell Gaffney you’re here.”
Eli slowed down the team, stopped them for a bare instant.
The squat man turned in the seat and thrust a booted foot down to feel for the hub.
At the same instant the boy lashed the team with the line ends.
Dick Braden’s hands came from behind him.
He shoved with all his strength with his left hand.
His right shot out in a clenched fist, taking the big man behind the ear.
The hombre grunted, pitched forward onto his face in the street.
The team lunged forward in a gallop, and the cowered wagon rumbled and creaked behind.
Dick Braden spoke for the first time now, his voice tight with excitement.
“Good work, son! But now where to? We ain’t heeled, and we’ll have them skunks—”
“Rip Campbell’s waiting for us—and Gaffney—up at the livery stable! That’s where we’re heading!”
Now a backward glance.
The squat man was only now staggering to his feet in the middle of the road.
His voice, just a thick bellow, was calling Gaffney.
Men were pushing from the front door of the Dobe Dollar.
As Eli Carter turned and gave full attention co driving, he saw a tall, wide-shouldered man with a shock of rumpled black hair driving with prodding elbows out of the crowd toward the stricken guard.
Even in that short glance he recognized one of the men who had gunned his grandfather—recognized him by his build and not his face.
He knew it was either Gaffney or Lomax—most likely the leader.
himself.
He leaned forward and flicked Tom and Nelly with the line ends again.
They redoubled their speed.
And then the huge old livery stable was only a few yards ahead.
The boy saw that old Dan Tooney had thrown the wide doors open, and he headed straight for the opening.
As the wagon rumbled into the barn, he heard the doors swing shut with a bang behind.
He stopped the team and turned toward Dick Braden.
But already the redheaded puncher was off the seat and streaking back toward the door.
As Eli Carter swung down, he saw Braden and Rip Campbell meet— saw the quick handclasp, the smile that flicked Rip’s lips.
Then both men whirled and made for the little office.
Eli followed at a run.
Rip was standing just to one side of the half-opened door, where he could see without being seen.
Old Dan Tooney’s gun belt with filled holster was buckled around Rip’s waist.
The old man was back in one corner, an excited grin on his face and a glitter in his bright little eyes.
Dick Braden stood a step back and to one side of Rip.
None of them spoke as the boy charged in.
They just glanced at him and back to the street outside.
Eli Carter raced to the high little window of the office and looked out.
A crowd was gathered down in front of the Dobe Dollar Saloon.
And halfway up to the livery stable, two men strode side by side.
One was Bix Gaffney and the other was Pat Lomax.
Eli Carter recognized them by their huge stature, even if he had never seen them face to face.
Rip Campbell shot a questioning look toward the boy.
Eli nodded swiftly.
“That’s them!”
The cold smile widened on Rip Campbell’s face.
For the two killers were striding swiftly and with little care for their safety.
The men in the little office knew that they expected nothing except a slim boy and an unarmed puncher.
“Better get them on the run, Rip!” Dan Tooney said in a thin, high voice. “They’re poison with their six guns!”
Rip Campbell shook his head, the grin still on his face.
Gaffney and Lomax were only fifty yards down the street now, and coming fast.
Eli Carter could feel his nerves and muscles tensing until they became almost painful.
But Rip Campbell looked cool and deliberate.
The pound of hurried feet came clear now.
Gaffney’s voice, raspy and penetrating, came to them plainly.
They even caught the words.
“Ain’t got no idea who that kid is, Pat! Butch Gilpin says he’s a plumb stranger in Railley, Must have known Braden, though.
Called him by name. I’ll pistol-whip that damn booze-hoister after we finish with the kid and the redhead.
Letting a kid like that outsmart him.”
“But maybe the kid did have a gun, Bix!” Lomax’ voice was deeper, coarser.
‘“‘No—he wasn’t heeled. Gilpin wasn’t too drunk to know that. Just some crazy idea that a kid gets sometimes. He’ll shore wish he was never born. I’ll give old Tooney what’s coming, too.
He’s been a troublemaker ever since we hit Railley.”
The men were just in front of the barn.
They paused for a second— and in that instant Rip Campbell pushed the door of the little office wide.
He stepped out into the bright sunlight, and faced the two startled killers.
‘Maybe it’s me instead of the kid you’re looking for, Gaffney! Maybe you’d like to drag down on me whilst I’m facing you, huh? You tried shooting from behind, and it didn’t take!” “It’s that—hombre from—up north!” The words that came from Pat Lomax’ throat were thick, strangled.
His eyes went wide with swift fear.
He crouched, leaped wide of Bix Gaffney.
Gaffney himself, with his round, stubbled face beneath the shock of unruly black hair, blinked swiftly.
His mouth dropped open in amazement, in desperate fear.
But even then his reflex actions, the result of long practice, came to his rescue—or to bring him his doom.
For he crouched low, turning his side to Rip Campbell.
His right hand darted to his holster and the long-barreled six-gun leaped into his fist.
As the muzzle swept toward the Wyoming puncher, Rip moved.
The draw was startling swift, so fast that Eli Carter’s wide eyes could hardly follow the movement.
The two guns roared almost in unison, but Rip’s was just the tiniest fraction of a second faster.
Gaffney’s bullet plowed into the ground right at Rip Campbell’s toe.
But Rip’s found its mark, squarely through the killer’s heart.
The man staggered backward as his knees buckled beneath him.
His eyes rolled until only the whites showed.
His mouth opened, but only a gurgle came as he crumpled in a heap.
Rip Campbell barely glanced at the man as he whirled toward Lomax, for he knew that his shot had been true.
Lomax had started to draw.
But when he saw the lightning speed of the Wyoming puncher, his six-gun dropped back into it’s holster.
He whirled and started at a zigzagging run back down the street.
Rip Campbell stood with feet widespread, shoulders slightly hunched.
He swung his gun up deliberately, aimed it carefully.
Its sullen bellow came once more.
Pat Lomax stumbled two steps forward and pitched onto his face.
A shrill, fear filled scream left his lips as he dropped.
Rip Campbell stood like a carved statue for three seconds.
Behind him, Dick Braden found his voice.
“You shouldn’t ought ot have gunned him in the back, Rip! That ain’t like—”
But now Rip Campbell was racing toward Lomax.
He stood above him, as the man rolled over with a groan.
The puncher stooped and snatched the gun from the prone man’s holster.
“Get up, you coyote!” Rip growled. “Get up, afore I stove in your ribs with my toe!”
Still hardly believing that he was not dead, eyes wide and brimming with terror, Pat Lomax staggered to his feet.
Dick Braden, Eli Carter and old Dan Tooney were speeding to the Wyoming puncher’s side.
And now the boy saw what had downed the killer.
A grin spread across his white face.
For Rip Campbell’s last bullet had struck Pat Lomax’ right boot heel, tearing it off and knocking the man from his feet at the same time.
Rip had his six-gun muzzle in the trembling man’s ribs now.
“Your boss is dead, but we’re collecting from you, feller.
We want the bag of coin you took off me —the five thousand dollars you stole from this here kig’s granddad, after you killed him—and we want my horse and Dick Braden’s.”
“It—it was—Bix Gaffney’s idea!” Pat Lomax said, his voice thin and high with terror.
“I—I didn’t do none of the killing! I didn’t want to hold this here redheaded—” Rip Campbell’s smile was cold and his voice steely, “You ain’t got Gaffney to back you up now. And Railley ain’t behind you no more. Never was for you— just scared of you.”
“That’s right, Rip!” Dan Tooney’s cackle broke in.
“Railley shore owes you plenty for ridding it of its varmints!”
“I’ll get you the money!” Lomax promised, “I’ll get you more than you ask for, if you’ll let me get my horse and hit the trail.”
“Your only trail from here is to the gallows!” Rip Campbell said brusquely.
“Now get to moving, Dick and me and my partner, Eli Carter, is aiming to hit the trail right sudden back to Wyoming’.”
Eli Carter blinked.
“You—you mean, Rip, that you’re going to take me with you? That I’ll be going along—” Rip Campbell smiled again, this time a softer smile that held a hint of real affection.
“Couldn’t get along without you, Eli. Reckon old man Braden and Dick, here, would be tickled to get a new cowhand, too.
Anyhow, I’m hoping to see how it would be to ride in a covered wagon clean to Wyoming, Ain’t never rode in one of them things.” “Gosh!” Eli Carter said. “You mean I’ll learn to be a real cowboy? I still can’t hardly believe it! It’s what I’d rather do than anything else in the world!”
Then, almost as an afterthought, for a boy’s memory and grief are mercifully short, he said: “Granddad would be glad, too.
He was right set on my growing’ up in the West.”

The End

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More Work by the Author

Check out the Rip Campbell Classic Western adventure series
(can be read in any order)

California Toothpick: A classic western action adventure novel

Bone Orchard – a classic western action adventure

Crowbait – a classic western action adventure

Tinhorn – a classic old west adventure

Cowpoke – a classic western action thriller

Beats Dying – a Rip Campbell classic western action adventure

Out and Out – a classic western action adventure thriller

Piebald – a classic western action adventure

Bangtail – a classic western action adventure

Blue Blazes – a classic western action adventure

Hog Leg – a classic western action adventure

Noose Fever – a classic western action adventure tale

Pan Out – a classic western action adventure

Pack Iron – an old west action adventure tale

Overcareful – an old fashioned western action adventure

Old Pie – a classic western flash fiction adventure

Played Out – an western action adventure

High Range Revenge – a classic western action adventure

Pony Up – a classic old west action adventure

Bullet Bait – a classic wild western adventure

 BULLET BAIT

He was aware of his ragged ten-day beard and his travel-stained gear against the subdued elegance of this room.

  They had told him at the office in Denver that this would be a peculiar case.

 He was beginning to understand what they had meant.

 The mechanical problems of erecting this magnificent house in the bottom of the most inaccessible canyon of the Yampa badlands hinted strongly that its builder had been an unusual man.

 It was not surprising that the circumstances of his reported death had also been unusual—sufficiently so to attract the sharp attention of the claims department of the Mountain Divide Insurance Co.

  A door opened and closed beyond the railed balcony across the far end of the living room.

 Footfalls clicked lightly and quickly along an interior hall.

 A girl appeared on the balcony and descended the stairs.

 Rising, Rip waited for her to traverse the length of the room.

  She was small, beautifully so, but she moved with sure grace and perfect athletic balance which a girlhood spent in the saddle will give a woman.

 Rip was aware of slightly snubbed, piquant features, large and expressive eyes which, he noted, could be provocative, and a figure out of a line rider’s dream.

 But these had nothing to do with the business at hand—business in which death was involved at the worst and fraud at the best—and he went no further than automatic appreciation of them.

  What caught his attention most strongly and held it were the white lines of internal struggle which chiseled the girl’s face and darkened her eyes.

 Grief, he supposed; the obvious conclusion.

 A daughter could be close to her father in so remote a place as this.

 But it was strong grief.

 A grief which had become desperation.

 And Rip wondered at it.

 Suspicion was a claims man’s second nature.

  Communication being what it was between the canyons of the Yampa and distant Denver, it was nearly three weeks since John Thomas had been reported dead.

 There were characteristics of strength in this girl’s face.

 Sufficient strength to accept death and control grief in three weeks.

 Rip was aware of this.

  The girl stopped in front of him with a queer admixture of resentment and uneasiness in her eyes.

  But the desperation remained, also, wild and barely controlled, deep within her.

  “I’m Sara Thomas,” she said stiffly.

 “I understand you insist on seeing me.

 I can’t imagine why.

 I’ve signed affidavits.

 My foreman and two riders from the ranch have signed them.

 My father is dead.

 Isn’t that enough? You show little consideration for the tragedy in this house.

 I hope, Mr.

 Rip, that you’ll make your business brief and your stay in Circle T Canyon short!”  There was a bitter acidity in her and Rip felt its sting.

 But this was a huge claim and the circumstances were highly irregular as regarded the death of the insured.

 The Denver office had been explicit in its instructions.

 The claim supervisor there had a reputation for ferreting out fraud and the Thomas case had been a dead fish dragged across his trail.

  “As brief and as short as possible.

 Miss Thomas,” Rip told the girl quietly.

 “You can help in that.

 A few questions.

 I’m field investigator for the Mountain Divide Co.

 We have a claim, accompanied by the affidavits of death you mentioned, filed in your name for a life benefit of one hundred thousand dollars under a policy your father carried  with us.

 I have been sent out to verify the circumstances of his death.”  “You think our affidavits are lies?”  Rip shrugged.

  “It’s possible. I have seen some which were.” 

“Then you’re not, You’re not going to pay the claim? Your company’s going to cheat us?” 

“Us, Miss Thomas?” Rip murmured.

 “Our files show you to be the sole survivor and beneficiary.” 

The girl caught herself with an effort.

 “A ranch isn’t an individual,” she said hastily. “Besides, I’ve been so used to having dad with me so long—”

Rip nodded.

 “Of course.  I’m sorry. How did your father die?” 

“He was riding a canyon trail a mile below the house.

 An outcropping above broke loose and knocked him from his saddle into the canyon.

 There’s a huge eddy there we call the Devil’s Pool.

 We’ve not found his body—” 

“Knocked from the saddle? An accident, Miss Thomas?” 

“What do you think?” the girl countered bitterly.

 “That I killed him?”

“That’s not my job.

 Not to find how he died.

 That’s for the Jaw.

 Just as prosecution of involved parties for fraud would be for the law if he was found alive.

 I have only to make up my mind whether or not John Thomas is dead.

”  The girl leaned forward eagerly.

  “And you can decide from what I’ve told you? You can decide that fast?” 

“Yes,” Rip agreed. “I think I can.” 

The girl eased immediately.

 She walked with him to the door and opened it.

 “I’m sorry if I’ve been rude, Rip,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve not been myself the past few weeks. And this ranch is a terrible burden for a woman, alone. Bert Hauser, our foreman, will be in with the crew directly. He’ll see you have quarters for the night and fresh horses for your trip back. Maybe you’d like to look around till he comes in.” 

The girl paused and looked searchingly at Rip.

  “And one other thing? You’ll hurry that payment when you return to Denver, won’t you?”

 “When I return.” Rip nodded.

 He stepped down into the yard and moved down among the home buildings toward the smoky, noisy run of the Yampa.

  He sauntered along with the apparent aimlessness of a stranger with time on his hands, but his eyes were busy.

 Cattle association records al which he had hastily glanced in Denver had rated Circle T Canyon the top producer on the western slope.

 From the record, there was evidence that John Thomas had left a rich enough estate that his daughter should not be greatly concerned over the immediate payment of even a hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy.

 In spite of the fact that the ranch was huge, its income should be large enough to permit Sara Thomas to hire a competent manager who would take the burden of its operation from her.

 And the maintenance of the ranch property should have been able to continue without in the least reflecting the death of its builder.

Yet Rip saw disquieting signs on his walk to the river.

He saw a cream separator out of use because of a broken drive sprocket which could have been replaced for a couple of dollars and a letter to a mail order outfit.

 There was a good wagon abandoned in a weed lot because of a sprung kingpin when the Studebaker outfit would ship a whole front assembly for less than twenty-five dollars.

 Wood trim about the buildings told a story, too.

 It had been once carefully kept, but it was already a season past needing a fresh coat of paint.

 These things spoke loudly to a man who operated his own clean ranch on the Green between cases.

 This ranch was plainly suffering from a shortage of cash.

 The kind of shortage which might hit even a big outfit in a bad season.

 But the market had been high for two years and the mountain country had never known such grass as lay in the bottoms, now.

 It was a bad situation.

 The need for money was obvious on the ranch.

 Too obvious, to Rip’s practiced eye.

  He went out to the corral and hunkered on the top rail there.

The Mountain Divide was a rich outfit and many attempts had been made to bilk it.

 Rip had uncovered several of these.

 Each had given him satisfaction.

 But in spite of the familiar signs which indicated fraud here, he could feel no elation.

 The girl, he supposed.

 Something about her had drawn his sympathy.

  He was still atop the corral rail, chewing thoughtfully at a hay stem, when a knot of riders came up the canyon and scattered in the yard.

 He watched one of these, a tall, swinging, thick-bodied man, light  down and step into the main house.

 The man came out again after a moment, swung his gaze over the yard and started toward Rip.

 Ed slid from the fence and took the man’s hand when it was offered.

 “I’m Bert Hauser, foreman here, Rip,” the man said easily.

 “Miss Thomas tells me you’re leaving in the morning. Quick work.

 We’re grateful. This has been hard on us all, We’ll cut you out some stock after supper. Meanwhile, is there anything I can do for you?”  Hauser was smooth.

 Smooth and sure.

 His lips were smiling but his eyes were not.

 Rip was aware of a veiled hostility.

 He nodded and pointed at the crew gathered around the wash trough.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “I want to talk to the hand with the longest service on this ranch.” 

Hauser blinked curiously, shrugged, and shouted across the yard.

  “Baldy. Baldy Brown. I’ll have him down here a minute!” 

A grizzled, sour-faced veteran detached himself from the riders and rocked across the yard.

 Hauser made a brief introduction.

  “One question, Baldy,” asked Rip.

 “How long have you been in the canyon?” 

The oldster frowned and spat.

  “Sixty days,” he said truculently.

 “Make anything of that?” 

“Possibly,” Rip “That’s all.” 

The rider turned away and moved back among his companions,  “That’s all you wanted to know?” Hauser grunted in astonishment.

“From Brown, yes.”

Rip nodded.

 “Now, how long have you been here?” 

“Two months,” snapped Hauser.

 Then, seeing the implication of the question, he made a hasty and unnecessary addition.

 “Baldy came in with me.” 

“And when the two of you were set, you let the old crew go and brought in a new one,” Rip suggested. “Thomas must have liked efficiency. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to see how his new crew panned out. Hauser, you can forget about cutting me out some saddle stock. I don’t believe I’ll be leaving in the morning.” 

Hauser smiled thinly.

“No,” he agreed. “I don’t believe you will, either. We eat in ten minutes.” 

The foreman turned on his heel and walked abruptly away, leaving Rip with that peculiar sandy and thickened feeling at the base of the tongue which is the last vestige in most men of an ancient instinct warning of danger.

Chapter Two

When the Circle T crew was done washing, Rip stopped by the trough and sloshed the dust from him.

 This done, he followed the others into the mess hall.

 The meal was virtually silent, a peculiar thing among ranch hands whose daily riding and the usually solitary nature of their work generally resulted in a bedlam of hooraying and gossip at meal time.

 Hauser’s face was a mask.

 However, Rip noted distrust in many of the eyes covertly watching him and in Baldy Brown’s gaze he read an open, smoky uneasiness.

  The meal finished, Rip went out into the gloom of the yard and found a wagon tongue from which he could watch the front of the main house.

 He sank onto it, rolled a smoke, and enjoyed it unhurriedly.

 Bert Hauser went from the mess hall to the big house.

 He was gone about half an hour.

  When he came back down the yard Hauser carefully avoided Rip Campbell, as did the rest of the crew.

 Ranch hands, particularly in so remote an area, usually made the first hours of a stranger’s arrival miserable with a constant fire of questions and talk in a desire to pick up fresh trade gossip, word of friends, and the general run of outside news.

 And in addition, saddle men were generally a garrulous and friendly kind.

  Rip noted this aloofness.

 Coupled with the distrust he had seen in many eyes and Baldy Brown’s open nervousness, it made basis for thought.

 Rip finished his smoke but remained on the wagon tongue until he saw Sara Thomas come out on the veranda of the main house, apparently to enjoy the drift of the evening breeze.

 He rose, then, and sauntered across to her.

 She was a little startled when he appeared at the rail below her, but the determination in her eyes was evidence that she had been expecting him.

 She did not turn her head toward him and she spoke very urgently.

 “You’ve got to leave Circle T. Quickly. Tonight.” 

“Why?” Rip’s question was blunt.

 “I can’t tell you. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t there enough trouble here without your adding to it? Can’t you see you can accomplish nothing; that there’s nothing to interest you here? You only make it harder for me, for all of us—” 

Rip saw that the girl was on the ragged edge of emotional collapse.

 Her voice was unsteady.

 And again she had used the plural “us” instead of the singular “me”.

  “How long has bad luck been hounding this ranch?” Rip asked, keeping his voice soft. “Since before your father hired Hauser?” 

The girl started visibly.

There was almost hope in her eyes.

  “How’d you know about Circle T’s luck? Has somebody been talking—?” 

Rip shook his head.

  “I was born in a saddle, Miss Thomas,” he said gently.

 “It would be hard to hide some things about a ranch from me.” 

The girl shrugged listlessly.

  “The trouble began more than a year ago,” she explained.

 “Prize feeders run off even home meadows; whole herds on the upper pastures vanishing; Circle T stock being trimmed until we couldn’t ship a head. And ambush shots at riders when they cut too wide for sign. Then letters threatening dad’s life started coming.

 Circle T had been doing so well that dad was about to drop his policy with Mountain Divide. When the letters started coming he decided to keep it up. We couldn’t trace the letters and with the badlands around us we couldn’t track down the stolen cattle.” 

“So your dad advertised for a hard-rock foreman, hoping he’d get a man who could stop it?” 

Sara Thomas nodded.

  “Hauser?” 

The girl nodded again.

  “Yes,” she said. “He came in with one man. He took hold of the crew and cut the dead wood out of it. He brought in a rougher kind of man. He rode hard and he fought when he could find something to fight.” 

“But the rustling didn’t stop?” 

“Not completely. It cut down. But maybe that was natural.

 There aren’t too many head of beef left on our range, any more.” 

Rip looked upward at the girl.

  “You know this is all none of my business? You know my job isn’t to find what’s wrong with Circle T?” 

“Yes,” Sara said.

  “But I can do my job as I see fit,” Rip went on.

 “You know that I might be able to help you?” 

“I know you might try.” 

“But knowing that, you tell me to get off the ranch—tonight!” 

The girl stood up.

  “There’s nothing you can do!” she said desperately.

 “There’s nothing anyone can do. Get back to Denver, please! Get payment on that insurance to me as quickly as you can. Do that and I’m sure I can straighten out Circle T’s trouble.”  

Rip shook his head.

  “Not if you’re caught in the kind of trap I think you are. That money would only sink you deeper. I’m not going back to Denver.

 Not tonight and not tomorrow. Do you know why?” 

The girl made no answer.

 All color had drained from her cheeks.

 She was staring at Rip with a terrible intensity in which there was an unexplainable mixture of wild hope and livid fear.

  “I’ll tell you why, then,” Rip continued steadily. “Because your father is not dead, Miss Thomas. And when I find him, I’ll have found the root of all your trouble!” 

The girl stared a moment longer, then whirled and ran into the house.

 As Rip turned away from the railing a shadow slid out of the darkness beyond the corner of the building.

 Bert Hauser, followed by two of his men, moved swiftly up to Rip.

 The foreman held a gun low before him.

  “Since you like to talk so much, mister,” growled Hauser, “I reckon you and me had better palaver. Get moving. Down toward the river, where we can keep it private.” 

Rip saw that the man’s words were edged with purpose.

 He was aware that Hauser was making no bluff with the gun in his hand.

 It was plain that if Rip did not start moving, he would die where he was.

 He stepped out, angling across the dark ranch yard toward the distant rumble of the racing Yampa.

 His captors fell in behind him.

  Once, far across the yard, Hauser grunted a brief command.

 Rip altered his course and took a narrow trail which held level along the wall of the canyon while the river and the canyon bottom slanted steeply away below.

  As the walls of the slot constricted along this lower reach, the noise at the river became more pronounced and an ugly note rose in it.

 Rip felt a drift of mist across his face.

 A tremendous hydraulic power shook the air.

 Then suddenly the narrows were past and the sound of the Yampa became a soft, swift sibilance.

 He glanced down.

 Below him was a natural tank in the course of the canyon.

  A roughly circular area in which the entire river spun in a great, almost silent eddy, a vast and incredibly swift whirlpool.

 Hauser spoke from behind him.

 “The Devil’s Pool, Rip. You’re so anxious to find John Thomas you can go the way he went.”

Rip heard a whisper of movement.

 He flung himself against the rock wall rising above the trail, but he was too slow.

 The barrel of Hauser’s gun sliced downward.

 Hot violence exploded in Rip’s head.

 His knees sagged and he staggered.

 He tried to cling to the rock but rough hands seized him and spun him loose, away and outward.

Chapter Three

Momentarily dazed by the blow on his head, Rip was only partially aware of the thin, rising terror which accompanies a long, plummeting drop into space.

 He knew water was below, silently rushing water which would have the force of stone if his body struck it in an awkward position.

 He threshed in mid-air, trying to straighten himself.

 Then he struck, feet first and at only a small slant.

 Even then the impact was brutal, driving the wind from him, and he went far below the surface.

  The water was cold.

 In that way it was a welcome shock.

 It cleared his head.

 Fighting down panic, he stroked powerfully with his arms, fighting toward the surface.

 After an interminable time air was against his face and he gasped for it.

He was conscious of rushing movement, of the living, treacherous  power of the current carrying him.

The segment of night sky framed by the canyon walls wheeled dizzily above him.

Something in the water smashed painfully against him.

His hands pawed out and gripped the branch-stubbed, uprooted length of a small cedar sapling.

He clung grimly to it.

 A down current seized him and sucked him under, sapling and all.

 A cross eddy turned him twice over.

 When he broke water again, he was close to the wall of the canyon.

 The segment of sky above continued to wheel.

 Suddenly it stopped and Rip was conscious that the circular whirling had become a swift downward rush toward another constriction in the walls of the canyon.

 Remembering the thunder and the spray thrown up by the narrows above, he knew he could not live through another such race.

 Still clinging to the dead cedar stub, he struck out with his free hand.

It was agonizing work, what little progress he made seemingly lost in the swift run toward the narrows ahead.

A rock jutted out from the canyon wall.

He fixed his attention on it and paddled desperately until sobs were sticking in his throat, gasping spasms of exertion.

The rock seemed too distant, impossible to reach.

Then one of the wild, pattern less eddies alive in the water caught Rip and slammed him with merciless force toward his goal.

Water-polished granite slid under him, then a tearing, potholed sandstone formation.

Using the cedar stub as a brake against the rough surface, he slowed the drag carrying him until his fingers could grip the edge of a pothole.

 Slowly, very carefully for fear he might slip and fall back into the racing current, he dragged himself from the water.

  The potholes were scattered up a steeply slanting scarp.

 He worked his way painfully and after an interminable time, he came to a shelf damp with spray only about a safe twenty feet above the rushing Yampa.

 Exhausted and shaken, he sprawled onto this.

  He did not know how long he had been lying on this shelf, wet and trembling with reaction, when a voice spoke very close to him.

 It was a peculiar voice, half plaintive and filled with a peculiar note of terrible uncertainty.

  “Sara, is that you, Sara?”  Rip rolled over

  A rising moon, up the canyon, was throwing a yellow brilliance into the slot of the Yampa.

 Because of a marked, bulging overhang above, little light filtered onto the bench where Rip lay.

 But there was enough for him to distinguish a startling figure.

  The owner of the plaintive, uncertain voice was a man.

 A big man, evidently, in spite of the dispirited sag of his shoulders and the emaciated condition of his body.

 He had no shoes, but wore a ragged pair of pants, and a cloth swathing about his head which Rip could not identify.

 It was either a crude bandaging or a bandana of sorts against the mists rising from the river.

  Rip rose slowly and the man shrank back with a quick, livid look of fear.

  “No, not Sara, Mr. Thomas,” Rip said quietly. “But I bring you a message from Sara. She’s still working hard to save the Circle T. And she wants you to know there’s hope, now.” 

“Hope?” the man muttered. “Hope? How can there be hope? But you bring the kind of message Sara would send to me.

 Not the kind I always hear. You aren’t one of the others, then. You aren’t one of Bert Hauser’s men?” 

“No,” answered Rip Campbell. “I’m an investigator from the Mountain Divide Co.” 

John Thomas sank back against the wall behind the shelf and slowly slid down it to a sitting position.

 His hands rose to the swathing about his head.

  “Hope, you said!” he muttered bitterly. “You said there was hope.

 But if the company has sent an investigator, then it won’t pay that insurance. And without the insurance money, there can be no hope.

 Hauser promised us that—” 

Rip sat down beside the man.

 Thomas was obviously sick in body.

 It was possible that much of his sickness of spirit could sprout from the same source.

 Rip felt an elation in having found the man whom he had decided must be alive.

 A hunch was not always so reliable or so readily substantiated.

 But there were a hundred questions.

 It required an effort to go slowly.

  “You are John Thomas?” 

The gaunt man nodded.

 “What happened to you?” 

Thomas raised his head, then shook it and lowered it again to his hand as if it hurt him savagely.

  “I’m not sure,” he said vaguely. “It’s hard to remember.

 I’m not sure what really happened and what I’ve just imagined. From the beginning, you mean?”  

It was Rip’s turn to nod silently.

“Hauser. He was the beginning.” Thomas spoke slowly.

 “I should have seen it, but I didn’t. Half the stock on Circle T vanishing into the cedar breaks, an empire—an honest-to-God one-man empire—bled to death right under my nose.

 And when I advertised for a hard-case foreman to fight for me, Hauser showed up. I should have seen it was too quick—that he’d been waiting. When he started cleaning out my regular crew and bringing in his own men, I should have known I’d brought the devil right into my own house. Sara saw it. Maybe I was stubborn. But I’d built this ranch and I had to save it.” 

The man stopped.

 His voice trailed off.

 He seemed almost asleep.

 He roused himself with an effort.

 “Then I was hurt. A bad fall from a horse. My head. Fuzzy so much of the time. To think hurts now. And there are times I can’t think. A doctor. A doctor is the answer. But how can I get to one when Hauser keeps me here and watches Sara? He wants the insurance money. I’m dead. I am to stay dead. When the insurance money is paid, Hauser will take it. He’ll leave Circle T. Then I will be free of the canyon. Sara can take me to Denver.

 I’ve been sick. No one will know me and we’ll be careful. A doctor will fix my head. When I can think again Sara and I can come back to the ranch. We’ll have that, at least. John Thomas will be dead, but a nameless old man will be alive and Sara will have Circle T after me.”  Rip remained silent.

Here was the whole thing; none of it surprising and all of it fitting together.

 The ammunition the claims department in Denver needed to put virtually every soul on the ranch behind bars.

Certainly Hauser and Thomas himself, possibly the girl.

Rip found himself thinking of her.

As field man, he might be able to draw his report to ease her out of it.

But the old man was a sitting duck for the law-book boys Mountain Divide had hired to protect it.

And after this session here on the river, there was little doubt what a prison term would do to this battered, shaken rancher.

Rip swore quietly.

 If there was a man with a heart in the Denver office and the right kind of a report went in, the ax could fall where it belonged—on Hauser alone.

But Mountain Divide didn’t have that kind of a man in Denver and a field investigator was supposed to report facts—all of the facts.

 “It’s dishonest,” Thomas murmured. “Disgrace. Can’t even use my own name any more. But Sara will have the ranch. She’ll have what I built for her.” 

His voice softened down to unintelligibility, Rip tried to rouse him again and failed.

 The man appeared to have fallen asleep.

 Curious, Rip unwrapped the swathing about Thomas’s head.

 The cloth proved to be a clumsy bandage about a terrible scalp injury.

 Rip’s shirt was wet and far from clean, but it was better than the filthy rags he had removed from the wound. 

He ripped the shirt into strips and bandaged Thomas’s head anew. He was just finishing this when Thomas stirred.

His eyes rolled wildly about.

Suddenly he scrambled to his feet, crouching.

  “They’re coming!” he breathed wildly.  “They’re coming again.

 Down the foot trail from the house and swearing because they have to walk a mile of ledges in their boots. They’ll bring food and they’ll hold it away from me. They’ll laugh and make jokes at me. Hide! That’s the thing to do? Hide! Sometimes they can’t find me.” 

The man scuttled down the ledge and vanished.

 Rip followed him a few feet and discovered that when the Yampa had been at the level of this ledge it had hollowed out a cave of sorts back of it, perhaps a series of caves.

 Thomas had vanished into the mouth of this.

  Rip was puzzled for a moment, wondering if the rancher’s alarm was due to his dazed and sick condition.

 Certainly Rip had heard no sound.

 Then he realized that Thomas had been here in the bottom of the canyon long enough to have become accustomed to the roaring of the river and that he could likely pick up sounds which  would be lost to others in the thunder rocking the canyon.

  Moving carefully, Rip stepped back into the mouth of the cave into which the demented rancher had vanished.

 A moment later a ladder roughly fashioned of a pair of riatas and a series of short cedar rungs appeared magically on the wall beside the cave mouth.

 It had been, Rip realized, dropped down from above.

  The ladder swayed.

 A man’s boots appeared, then another’s.

 The two Hauser men looked down into the river below uneasily, then swung toward the cave.

  “Damned old fool’s holed up inside again,” one of them growled.

 “Suppose we’ve got to root him out. Bert’s got to keep posted as to how he’s doing. That girl’s a firebrand. If that insurance money comes in, she sure as hell won’t part with it till Bert’s shown the girl her dad, ready to deliver.”

“How the old boy keeps alive is past me,” the other man answered.

 “That rap on the noggin he took when that wild black pitched him out of his seat would have killed two ordinary guys, and this hole Bert’s been keeping him in ain’t exactly a healthy place, what with practically no food and all.” 

“If you’d built this ranch, you’d put up a pretty good fight to keep it,” muttered the first man.

 ‘There’s sand in Thomas, all right. Did you see anything below? That son of a gun Bert tossed into the drink tonight was Rip Campbell. I’ve heard of him. Runs to sand, himself. I’d  feel better, and I reckon Bert would too, if we’d sight his carcass along the river somewhere.”

 “What carcass?” the other man grunted.

 “When the Devil’s Pool gets through chawing a man there ain’t no carcass left! Sand or not, Rip’s dead.

 Come on, let’s smoke out Thomas and get back up on top.

 I don’t like it down here.” 

The two stepped into the mouth of the cave.

 Rip had been scrabbling about on the rock floor, hunting for some kind of weapon.

 He realized suddenly that Thomas’s prison had been carefully cleaned of such before the rancher was brought here.

 There was only one course left open.

 He flattened against the wall, the inner darkness his one hope for even odds.

 A moment later the two were abreast of him and he shot out from his hiding place in a hard, wicked dive.

  CHAPTER FOUR

Rip’s dive was low.

 He passed between the two Hauser men, his shoulders catching both in the knees and spilling them roughly.

 It was so dark a man could not use his eyes.

 And this was no time for rules, Like a cornered cat, Rip worked in a silent fury.

  A man’s face was close at hand, his breath in Rip’s ear.

 Ed rammed an elbow outward, centering a face.

 The man grunted noisily.

 Rip’s hand clamped in his hair.

 He jerked the head high, then rammed it downward with the full weight of his body.

 The impact  against the floor made a soft, hollow sound within the cave and limpness ran through the fellow.

  A little to one side, the second rider was entangled in Rip’s legs.

 Ed could hear the rasp of steel along stone as the man whipped his gun from under him.

 There was likelihood that a third man had been left at the top of the ladder.

 A shot might alarm him; send him for help.

 There was no time to reverse and reach the second rider with his hands.

 Rip bunched his legs and drove them outward in a lashing kick.

 They brushed the man’s torso and apparently caught his arm.

 There was a metallic click and a faint spark showed where the man’s gun hit the stone flooring of the cave somewhere yards into the interior.

 The man himself rolled free with a startled, angry oath:  “Why, you scrawny old scarecrow!” 

Mistaking Rip for Thomas, the Hauser man scrambled to his feet and came back in a rush of his own.

 Flat on his back, risking chance of a wild kick in the head in order to have the purchase of the floor under his shoulders, Rip waited.

  The fellow came in knees first, cleverly locating his foe by the sound of his breathing.

 The man was heavy and he understood close work.

 Ed writhed a little to one side at the last moment, avoiding the full force of the driving knees, but they were crushingly punishing, even then, and Ed felt the air burst from his lungs as the impact came.

  Big hands reached and clamped about his throat.

 Powerful shoulders were behind the grip and Para    vane realized he was in danger of the same treatment he had himself administered to the other Hauser man.

 Sickened, retching for air, and with his throat virtually closed in a fingered vise, a frenzy swept him.

 Arching his body suddenly and twisting at the same time, he threw the man’s weight from him.

 The suddenness and the twist broke the fellow’s grip.

  The darkness was too much for Rip, whose fists instead of clamping fingers were his best weapons.

 He rolled, got his feet under him, and dove for the faint light of the cave entry.

 The Hauser man was close behind him.

  Just as Rip reached the opening to the shelf outside, his boot toe caught on a small unevenness of the floor and he pitched headlong onto his face.

 The man behind him squawked sharply.

 At the same time, Rip felt a jolt against his thigh and realized the Hauser rider had tripped against him.

 The man shot over Rip, landed hard on the very edge of the shelf, and clawed frantically for an instant for a grip.

 But his momentum was too much and he tipped on over the edge and vanished.

  A short, rising wail came up from the void floored by the silent maelstrom of the Devil’s Pool.

 A voice on the rim above shot down anxiously, 

“Christie, what’s the matter down there?” 

Rip roughened his voice.

  “The blamed old fool’s in a wild spell. We can’t corral him.

 Give us a hand here, will you?” 

The man above grumbled an oath and the ladder down the face of the rock commenced to swing again.

 Rip ducked back into the cave.

 He could not find the gun he had kicked from the hand of the man who had gone into the Pool, but the weapon of the first man was still in his belt.

 Lifting this, Rip moved back to the shelf.

  The ladder was apparently short.

 The man from above had already reached the bottom.

 He stood on the ledge, glancing about uncertainly, his gun in his fist.

 Rip had before witnessed the phenomenon of a situation in which a man could seemingly smell something wrong without there being any other warning at hand.

 This now seemed to be the case.

 The man from above was very cautious and as Rip moved a little toward one side to keep himself hidden as much as possible, the fellow saw him.

  Not only that.

 Already suspicious, the man seemed to recognize that the figure dim within the cave was not that of either of his companions or of John Thomas.

 He made no outcry and gave no warning.

 He flung his gun up and fired.

 It was hasty and the shot missed Campbell, but it struck the rock a scant two feet from him and flung a painful screen of shattered stone against one whole side of his head and neck.

  One eye clouded with blood.

 The man on the shelf dimmed, but Ed saw his wrist move, preparatory to triggering a second shot.

 Without time to raise his weapon high enough for fine shooting and with his torn  face a distraction which made accuracy difficult, Rip fired his commandeered weapon twice from waist level.

 For a long instant he was afraid he had missed.

 Then the man on the shelf turned awkwardly, took two steps toward the foot of the ladder beside the cave entrance, and buckled.

 He went to his knees, lurched once more to his feet, and, completely losing his direction, staggered off into space from the edge of the narrow shelf.

  Rip felt shaken.

 He dropped down on his hunkers for a moment.

 Finding a strip of his shirt left over from bandaging John Thomas’s injured head, he wiped at his face and fingered the wounds along one side of it.

 They were superficial though bloody.

 Painful in the extreme, but of no consequence.

Rising, Rip went deeper into the cave than he had thus far gone and found John Thomas huddled on a pallet on the floor with ragged bedclothes pulled up over his head after the fashion of an uneasy child in a thunderstorm.

 He raised the man to his feet.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Thomas,” Rip said quietly. “It’s all right, now. Were going to get out of here. We’re going home.”  “Back to Sara?” whispered Thomas.

  “Back to Sara,” Rip agreed.

  The old man stiffened.

 His head straightened on his neck.

  “We’ve whipped them, then! By hell, I knew no thieving son could beat Circle T down!” 

“We’ve won the first hand,” Rip corrected. “If we’re careful and work it right, we’ll clean the table.” 

“We’ll be careful, then,” Thomas said with an exaggerated, somehow pitiful, demonstration of caution.

 And he followed Rip Campbell to the foot of the ladder.

  Sending the old man ahead of him and following closely so as to guide the uncertain feet and to catch the rancher should he be unable to complete the climb because of his weakened condition, Rip moved up the ladder.

 Ed was aware that his escape from the Devil’s Pool and his tangle with the three Hauser men at the cave under the overhang had been close things, strongly streaked with luck.

 But the premonition was in him that they were pale preludes to what would face him when he returned to the Circle T headquarters with this dazed, light-headed, and unpredictable man who was worth a hundred thousand dollars in cash to both Rip’s own employers and Bert Hauser.

CHAPTER FIVE

 The climb up the thirty-foot ladder was interminable.

 John Thomas was breathing heavily when they reached an upper ledge on the side wall of the canyon.

 Rip was momentarily uneasy for fear the injured man would collapse.

 But one of the unpredictable changes which appeared to seize Thomas as a result of the effect of his injury swept him and he stiffened.

  “Sara!” he muttered. “Sara.”

And he started steadily along the narrow shelving trail.

 Rip fell in behind him, readily understanding why Hauser’s men cursed at having to foot this mile-long tortuous track from the ranch to the cave.

 They had traveled considerable distance when Thomas halted.

 “I want to go over this slowly,” he said carefully. “I want to be sure I understand. You are an insurance man, come here to see if I was alive or not. Your name is Rip. You understand what Bert Hauser has been up to—that he has virtually broken the Circle T and that since my accidental injury he has kept me prisoner in the hope of getting the insurance money?”

Rip nodded.

 Things looked good, for the moment.

 It appeared Thomas was in for a period of lucidity.

 This would be of great value, particularly since he knew the details of the ranch layout, even in the darkness about them.

 However, the hope was short-lived.

 Thomas immediately passed his hand over his eyes and began to mutter again.

 “Enemies, enemies everywhere. But I’m not down yet, Sara. Not  clear down. Keep hoping, girl.  Keep hoping .”

 Rip took the older man’s arm and started forward again along the trail.

  The next half hour was an eternity of uncertainty.

 There was the constant fear that Thomas’s fevered imagination might work up hallucinations which would terrorize him; that he would cry out and alarm Hauser’s crew.

 It was a fair guess, also, that Hauser would directly become impatient over the failure of the three who had gone to the cave to return and the chances were good that he would send others out to see what had become of them.

 There was a constant chance, too, that some man of the new Circle T crew would be idling about the yard at the wrong time and place and thus cut across Rip’s slow approach to the main house.

  Rip guarded against these possibilities as best he could.

 But his primary purpose was still to get Thomas into the house where his daughter could look after him.

 He believed this was essential.

 It seemed reasonable that when Hauser discovered that Rip Campbell was not at the bottom of the Devil’s Pool and that Thomas himself was no longer prisoner in the cave, the foreman would take two abrupt, simultaneous steps.

  He would, in the first place, make certain that the investigator who had escaped him once did not do so again.

 At the same time, he would attempt to remove Thomas completely, taking his chances on being able to hold the rancher’s daughter until such time as the insurance money had been paid rather than again run the risk of another company man filtering down the Yampa and discovering, as Rip had done, that the supposedly dead rancher was still alive.

  The approach to the main house was therefore very touchy work.

 In the end, however, Rip and his companion made it and out of a long habit which had not been derailed by suffering and injury, Thomas fumbled along the logs of the rear wall of the building until he found a rusty key to the small rear door letting into his office.

 The room within was dark.

 Thomas stumbled against a small table and muttered a soft, protesting complaint.

  Quick footfalls sounded in another part of the house and a moment later Sara pulled open the door into the study.

 Her fear was more marked.

 She was at the obvious limit of control.

 Her lips formed a stiff query.

  “Who, who is it?”

 “Quietly, Miss Thomas,” Rip cautioned. “It’s Rip Campbell— and your father.” 

“Dad!”  This time her voice was soft, controlled.

 She ran swiftly into the room.

 Thomas took a few uncertain steps and they met in an embrace of shaken relief.

 Rip stood apart, permitting them this moment.

 He would have to shatter it soon enough.

  This man, though prisoner, had agreed to a representation of his death to an insurance company for the purpose of illegally receiving benefits under a policy.

 This girl had of her own free will signed false affidavits of her father’s death for the same purpose.

 That the money was to be used as a virtual ransom to buy her father’s freedom and safety was a point beyond consideration of the law.

  According to the books, these two were due for prosecution, hands down.

 And Rip reflected sourly that the Denver claim office was so blasted righteous that a common sense plea would not budge them.

 This was fraud and the Thomas  would be crucified for it—if the field reports contained all the facts.

  It was a temptation.

 A certain inner pride had always held Rip to strictest accuracy.

 But there seemed circumstances here.

  He was wrestling with the thought when Sara Thomas crossed to him.

 Her eyes were not friendly.

 Ed realized she knew much of what was going on in his mind.

 She knew the inevitable result of the insurance company finding her father after the incriminating affidavits had been filed.

 And he admired her for the fact that whether or not she was aware of his own reluctance, she did not attempt to cajole him.

  “Now that you’ve found father, 1 suppose the next step is to start for Denver,” she suggested acidly.

 “The brilliant investigator and his two prisoners!”  Rip winced.

 He nodded toward the windows.

  “Ordinarily, maybe, yes,” he said.

 “But the custom is to take in all conspirators in a fraud when you take in any, and there’s one or two still missing.” 

“Hauser?” 

Rip nodded again.

  “Don’t be a fool!” the girl said sharply. “You may be good, but Hauser has nine men on this ranch. Not even you could face those odds, Mr. Mountain Divide. Lets go quietly, out the back way. Any other risk is too big.” 

Rip smiled.

  “And with that big a crew you think Hauser is so asleep that the three of us could quit this ranch without being caught in the process?  If any of us are to leave Circle T, Hauser will have to be taken care of first.” 

The girl bit her lip.

  “Take your father,” Rip went on, “and hide him. Hide with him.

 Keep out of the way. If I’m not back in half an hour, then you can try the back way if you like— and you won’t have to worry about any reports. There won’t be anybody to make them.” 

The girl started across the room with her father, then stopped abruptly.

  “Reports?” she questioned. “Just what kind of reports are you going to file?”

Rip scowled.

  “Miss Thomas, I don’t know,” he said honestly.

 “Now, find a hiding place.”

 The girl nodded numbly and piloted her father out the door into the body of the big house.

When they were gone Rip stepped again into the night by the little back door.

 Circling toward the front of the main building, he surveyed the yard.

  Although lights were up in the bunkhouse across the compound, Hauser and his men were gathered about ten yards out from the veranda of the main house.

 They appeared to be watching the front of the building very closely.

 Rip shoved out far enough from his own corner to see what was drawing their attention.

 He swore softly.

  Sara Thomas had done a very stupid thing—or a very underhanded one.

 It set Rip’s doubts about her to wheeling again.

 The girl was in a tight spot; he knew that.

 Having signed a false statement of her father’s death, she must now realize her own position, once the facts reached Denver and Mountain Divide began prosecution.

 She must also realize that her father would be involved to the wreck, also.

  Rip cast his mind back to the reunion scene in the darkened ranch office in an effort to measure the girl’s attitude there.

 A numbness had seemed to characterize her, but it could have been a screen for bitter enmity and rapid planning.

 And there was always the possibility that Sara Thomas had measured the odds her own way.

  There was the possibility that she felt that since her father and herself were again together they might be able to deal to better advantage with Hauser—past experience be damned -—than with the tall, quiet man whom Mountain Divide had sent to Circle T.

 If she had so decided, then Rip had enemies behind him as well as in front.

 He watched the light moving across the windows in the front of the house, the light Hauser and his men were watching so intently.

  It was obviously a lamp in the hands of either John Thomas or his daughter, and it plainly marked their course along the second floor.

 It disappeared momentarily, then winked again into being in one of the tiny dormer windows of the attic space.

 It was a complete revelation of the hiding place to which Rip had sent the girl and her father.

 It might also be a signal to Hauser.

 Or it might be nothing more than the utter stupidity of shaken nerves.

 Whatever it was, it created a diversion and Rip seized it.

  Hauser’s men had bunched close about their boss.

 Rip, flattened against the front wall of the house, slid carefully closer to them.

  “It’s the gal, all right,” one of the riders growled.

 “Prowling. She’s gone off her head, too, I reckon.” 

Hauser snorted.

  “Not that little witch!” he bit out. “She knows that all that’s between me and this ranch right now is her. She’ll fight till she drops, but she’ll hang onto her senses. This is something different. Looks -like she’s holing up. And why? I don’t like the way this fits in. You boys remember what I told Christie and Harris and Sawyer to do?” 

“Get down to the cave and see if the old man was still kicking,” somebody said.

 “And while they was there to look along the edge of the pool for the carcass of that long gent from Denver.” 

Hauser nodded.

  “And those three boys ain’t back. See how it fits? Something’s gone wrong. Nobody could live through the Devil’s Pool, but Baldy, who’s heard something about this Rip, says he was rocky enough to do it if anybody could. Maybe Rip got to the cave and jumped Christie and the boys—him and the old man together, say.

 Or the old man, crazy wild, might have turned on them and surprised them. I’ll give you odds, either way, that they’re right there in the house— now!” 

Baldy Brown shoved forward.

  “Then I reckon we’d better root him out, eh, Bert?”  Hauser grunted.  “See he makes a stand against you, this time. I’m fed up with playing. Bring him out toes up, this time. We’ll ship his carcass to Denver C. O. D. I that blasted insurance company wants its proof so blamed bad. And I’ll settle with the girl when the money comes through!” 

Knotted together, Hauser and his men started silently forward.

  VI 

Rip had planned an Indian game in the yard, biding his time and picking his men one at a time.

 He had a chance in this fashion.

 But now he was crowded.

 He was aware that the borrowed gun in his hand did not contain enough loads to handle Hauser’s bunch in a lump, even if he ran into the luck of the gods.

 Still, if Hauser got his boys into the big house, the game would be done.

  Rip decided swiftly and scuttled along the wall of the house toward the steps leading up to the veranda.

 Then, a fractional moment before he was certain to be seen, he dropped into a crouch and spoke sharply.

  “Let’s stop it here, Hauser!”  He had hoped the element of surprise would give him an additional moment.

 So far as the balance of the crew was concerned, it did.

 But Rip had underestimated  Hauser.

 The man’s swift senses and quick mind recognized his voice, placed it, and grasped the entire situation, all in an instant.

 Hauser wheeled a little, dropped low himself, and flung a shot into the wall behind Rip’s shoulder.

 Only a little behind his boss, Baldy Brown flung up his iron.

  Rip fired while Brown’s weapon was still moving and the man doubled abruptly onto his face in the dust.

 Hauser ducked back in a quartering turn which took him behind the remaining five men with him.

 Another man fired at the flash of Rip’s gun and Ed was flung back against the peeled poles of the house wall, shaken and hurt.

 From the shelter of his men Hauser fired again, still a little wide but much too close.

  Rip straightened.

 He knew he was going to go down but the grim thought persisted that if he could reach Hauser—if he could take the Circle T foreman out of it before he caved himself—the others would probably break.

 They’d be through with their scheme here.

 They’d lack the drive and guts to carry it through without Hauser’s prodding.

 They’d clear off the ranch.

 Holding his gun up steadily in front of him, he stepped away from the house, firing with a merciless regularity as he advanced.

  He was hit again.

 Then, suddenly, a heavier note was taken up in the firing.

A man went down a yard wide of the mark at which Rip had loosed his last shot.

The Hauser bunch broke, scattering a little.

Another doubled up.

Hauser himself was again in the open, fully startled now, and without shelter.

 The heavier fire was ragged.

 Rifles, Rip knew— from the house behind him.

 From the dormer windows of the attic space.

 Sara Thomas and her father.

 But why? Why had the old man and his daughter joined him? In the hope, perhaps, that with Hauser and his men out of the way they could then deal with the insurance man whose return to Denver would put them at the mercy of the company they had attempted to defraud.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

 Once Hauser’s men were scattered or cut down, one of those big rifle slugs from the house between Rip’s shoulder blades would solve a lot of problems for John Thomas and his daughter.

 A lot of problems.

  Rip shook his head, clearing it and driving the Thomas’s from his mind.

 His eyes were fixed on Bert Hauser.

 He swung grimly toward the man.

  The foreman fired, missed, and dropped to one knee.

 He fired again and Rip leaned into a hard blow which brought a windy, tortured grunt from him.

 But he held on.

 Suddenly Hauser was directly in front of him, coming up from his knee-bent position with eyes wide in alarm and his whole attention riveted on Rip’s face.

  The balance of the renegade crew had vanished from Rip’s own attention.

 The rifles were still roaring intermittently somewhere behind him but none of their slugs were  whistling about him so he supposed the Thomas’s still had other targets in the yard at which to shoot.

  Hauser was his man.

 Hauser was within reach of his hands.

 The rest could wait on this.

 A running pain which rose as the shock of his wounds subsided left no room for other thought in Rip’s mind.

 His hands went out.

 They seemed slow, yet there was impact when they closed on Hauser, so he supposed, after all, the move had been swift.

  He caught the foreman by one shoulder and jerked him toward him.

 Then, because this was not punishment or self-defense but a final thing, to be settled swiftly, he used the hard bludgeon of his forearm instead of his fist.

 As he was dragged forward, Hauser pivoted.

 Rip used this spinning motion and turned himself in the opposite direction so that both movements added to the velocity of the blow.

 With smooth and beautiful timing, he raised and stiffened his bent arm, catching Hauser on the side of the jaw with the hard and solid bone of his arm, just below the elbow.

  Hauser’s head went up and to one side at a crooked angle.

 The man began to sag.

 Without breaking the rhythm of his own advance, Rip caught Hauser’s head under the crook of his arm, locked his own wrist with his free hand, and made a terrific, twisting upward heave.

 At about the height of Rip’s shoulders Hauser’s head pulled from his grip and the man somersaulted backward.

 He landed heavily in the dust of the yard and lay motionless except for a slow pulling up of one leg so that its knee was raised a little, This ceased and the leg fell over limply and unnaturally to one side.

Rip swabbed clumsily at his face with one hand and took a forward step to look down at Hauser, Satisfied and filled with a vague wonder at how quickly a thing could end, he turned and started back toward the house.

He could see light behind the attic dormers and both of the small windows were open.

 But the guns which had fired from them were silent.

 He wondered about the Thomas’s but could not focus his mind.

 A glance over the yard showed him six men lying in a ragged sprawl across the compound.

 Four had dropped as they ran toward the corral.

 Two lay close at hand, where Rip had himself tagged them.

 The crew Hauser had brought onto Circle T was wiped out.

  There was a big rocker on the veranda of the house.

 Rip’s attention fastened on it.

 He wanted to sit down.

 He’d walk that far.

 He’d walk up the steps.

  But it was an interminable distance and the need to sit down grew too great to bear.

 He sat flatly in the dust and his mind, veering reasonless, touched on the Circle T report he would have to forward to Denver.

 That report had troubled him so gravely.

 It seemed ridiculously easy, now.

 It was simplicity itself.

The devil with the bloodless and self-righteous desk men in the claims department.

 John Thomas had been found alive.

 There had been an honest error.

 The affidavits were  rescinded.

 The death claim was retracted.

 The whole thing had been a mistake.

 And there was another thought in Rip’s mind.

 A man born on the grass should stay on the grass.

 Maybe he was done with protecting Mountain Divide’s bank account.

 Maybe he would clean up this thing.

 Maybe he would settle with the Thomas’s.

 And after that, maybe he would ride north a ways—toward the Gunnison would be a good place—and find him a canyon to his own liking.

  Rip looked up.

 The front door of the house had opened.

 Sara Thomas, rifle still in hand, ran down across the yard.

 Her father came out after her and sank into the rocker on the porch which Rip had been trying to reach.

 Rip watched the girl.

 He would have to make her understand that she was done with fear.

 He would have to make her believe that retraction of her claim to the company was all that was required from her.

  But Sara’s hostility was gone.

 So was the tightness from her face.

 And she seemed to have forgotten her earlier concern about his report.

 She dropped to one knee beside him in the dust.

  “You? You’re all right?” she choked.

  “Considering,” Rip agreed dryly.

  “Here, let me help you. We’ll get you into the house. There’s a sheepherder down canyon. I’ll ride for him and send him on to Cedar Crossing for a doctor.”

The girl bent above Rip and lifted.

 The brief rest in the dust seemed to have helped.

 He came up and allowed himself to be piloted unsteadily into the house.

 A little later Sara came back into the room in which she had installed Rip and her father.

 She was clad in saddle gear, ready to ride down the canyon.

 Rip motioned her close to his bed.

  “Ma’am, if you’d bring me paper, there’s my report. The sheepherder could take it to a telegraph office. And you could send a retraction of your claim.” 

Sara smiled.

  “I thought you were worrying about that. Stop it. I’m not. I’ll send my retraction when I’ve got a doctor here. And I had time up in the attic to think about your report. I knew what it would be in the end.

 You’re a saddle man. Enough of a saddle man to see into Bert Hauser’s game immediately and to know something was wrong with Circle T. You’re too much of a saddle man to send in a report that would ruin this ranch or dad or me. I think.” 

“What?” 

“I think that you’re even too much of a saddle man to leave the canyon while Circle T while dad and I need a man like you as much as we do!” 

Rip tried to reason out the girl’s words.

 Instead, his eyes clung to her and the thought kept repeating itself that she was beautiful.

Beautiful.

 And this Yampa canyon ranch was a cattleman’s dream.

  Sara smiled blindingly, turned, and left the room.

 Rip raised himself a little to call her back.

 He was afraid she still did not understand.

 A quiet voice spoke from the other bed in the room.

  “Ease back, son,” John Thomas counseled.

 “You’ve not only been shot up plenty; you’ve been roped, thrown, and tied snug with a pigging string.

 If you’ve a mind to bow your back about it, better save your breath and rest whiles you’ve got a chance, cause it’ll be a chore to get untangled if that’s what you’re thinking of.” 

Rip sank back onto the pillow.

 His mind was beginning to drift again, but along pleasant trails where the grass was deep and green.

  “What’ll you pay a foreman?” he asked Thomas.

  “Shares—if he’s in the family,” the old man answered.

 It was enough for Rip Campbell.

The End

How Broke is Your Give a Damn Button?

 

Do you let internal small childish fears about rejection direct your life or you listen to the voice inside of you that tells you to try. 

To give. 

To keep building and making something new.

Most people will cheer you on. 

Most people will want you to succeed. 

Anyone who does not want you to succeed does not belong in your life.

Everyone is an expert at failure. 

Everyone can point out how “this won’t work,” or “that won’t work” or my personal favorite, “you suck.”

And they are right. 

For them, these haters, these non-friends, these ID 10 T’s are absolutely correct.

To them you do suck.

And why would you want to have that in your life?

Cut them out.

Find the people who will support you.

I found it in running.

I tried 4 100 mile races over the last 12 months and my running friends didn’t care that I was only able to finish 2.

They said things like, “You still ran 50 (or 60 Miles).” “Good job.” “Great effort.”

Sometimes success is in the trying.

I’ve been working/trying to start a new business.

I’ve had a couple of good months, and I’m still learning and trying.

But I’m scared.  I have been scared.

And I realized that the fear comes from a place of being rejected.

Feeling rejected.

It’s a childish feeling about writing that I’ve carried since college, when a Professor told me I sucked. 

See, I wrote the story about some guys fighting over coffee. 

His response was “I drink coffee and I can’t ever see it being that important.” 

This was pre-Friends, pre-Starbucks, pre-coffee becoming a national phenomenon.

So I listened to him, and not to the voice inside of me.

When I moved to LA to pitch scripts to Hollywood, I was told NO more times than I was rejected for dates in high school.

It just became another word.

The approach was “if this producer doesn’t like it, then the next one will.”

And I wrote my ass off.

I just opened up a box and found seventeen completed scripts I forgot about.

Can you imagine that, writing so much that you forgot what you wrote?  I found a half finished novel and almost a dozen outlines.

I found that short story, the one that made me afraid to try to become a literary figure.

I stacked those piles of paper up and figured something out.

I’m probably not going to be a major literary figure in my lifetime.

But I’m a pretty good hack.

I mean that in the best way.

I write fun, interesting stories that are like beach reads, or candy for the eyes.

I’m going to be okay with that.

I’ll sing the Beatles song, paperback writer, and crank out dime novels based on the scripts I wrote, and the outlines I have.

Since September, I’ve published 30 projects on Amazon. 

4 novels in the Sci Fi genre, 2 of 13 in my Shadowboxer series and some of the scripts I’ve written.

That’s an average of one book per week, which is an ACTION ITEM on the PLAN for my publishing company.

I’m staring an author’s page, and if you are a reader, I’d like your support.

Watch for it here, and then like it to get updates.

I’ll do a free promo for each book as it comes out, so download it and leave a review.

If you like one, you might want to buy another.

Am I still afraid of being rejected?

Yep. 

But I’m also afraid of trying to run some major distances this year after a couple of disappointing races and injuries last year.

I’m afraid of failing at this new career.

I’ve been working on turning off my “give a damn” button. 

But I do give a damn.

A damn about trying something new, about pushing my preconceived limits, about believing in a dream. 

I give a damn about the freedom to travel, and build a brand, and stand for something that is important to me.

I give a damn about writing fun fiction about spies, and zombies, and a couple about magic (not all in the same book though!) and even a few non-fiction books that talk about what I’ve learned along the way.

Can Too Much Ever Be Enough?

It’s too much, she said.

Normally I hear that after a date.

In bed.

Just kidding.

I’m more used to, is that it?

And the slap that follows the answer.

Which is he or she who finishes first is the winner!

I didn’t make the rules of racing.

I just live them.

But she was not talking about racing.

Or dating.

She was referring to the vast number of promotional giveaways I send out.

It’s a lot, she said.

And even if I refrained from the familiar dive into the gutter, at least you know I’m thinking it.

Yes, it is a lot.

I’m a giver.

Plus, you never know what you’re going to find.

Sometimes, you have to sift through a lot of chatter to find that golden nugget that lets you know you’ve struck the motherlode.

By that I mean eighteen books of awesome.

Like Kyla Stone.

I ate up her 7 book series on EMP.

Gave up book 3 on the nuclear one.

It just felt… familiar.

And yet, I dropped back into Lee Child and chowed down on Killing Floor, Gone Tomorrow, The Sentinel and Blue Moon all in just a week.

This might be my third time through.

Then when the dogs wouldn’t let me sleep, I popped over to SCYFY and caught Harry Potter’s Prisoner of Azkaban for the “so high I can’t count” showing and watched it through.

It made me want to dive back into the series again, even though I just read it back in December.

Why do we do that?

Why do we revisit some familiar tales only to not enjoy other “felt like I read it before” stories?

Maybe it’s comfort. Maybe it’s nostalgia.

Or someone told me once that the reason we love old stories revisited is because we are not the same person we were when we read them the first time.

A literary twist on it’s not you, it’s me.

I have to deal with the fact that I’m some folks Kyla Stone, and some others Lee Child.

Which could apply to a lot of situations in life.

And if you are like me, who likes you sometimes depends on the day.

Even down to the hour.

I wish I could advise you not to care, but it is a lesson I am constantly working on.

The whole, I don’t give a flip attitude is a good one to foster.

Because in the grand schemes, opinions do not matter.

There are too many variables.

I interviewed this week to be a Marketing Director at a Trucking Company.

They seemed impressed despite the lack of certified credentials on my resume.

I also got a rejection email from a call center where I applied to be a customer service agent.

They said they were looking for a different kind of candidate.

I have over twelve years of call center experience all the way to bottom level management.

Which told me one thing.

Nobody knows nothing.

Everyone thinks they know, but they don’t.

Some kid sees I graduated in the 90’s and thinks old.

Some guy five years older than me sees me as a peer who has spent five years retraining in a new skill set.

Perspective.

Are they both right?

Who knows.

Does it matter?

Nope.

Sometimes I wish it did, but man plans and God laughs.

Lady luck and the universe don’t give a flip who wins the race.

Sometimes it goes to the bold.

Sometimes it goes to the gifted.

Unless you’re on a date with me.

Then you better hurry up or I’m going to win.

CHAPTER ONE

He saw Vilma first.

She was the blonde one.

Then he saw Gilda.

She was the golden one.

Naturally strawberry dark, but gilded.

He didn’t see the man at all, that first night.

He didn’t know any of their names.

He didn’t want to.

He’d just gone to a show on his night off.

He had an aisle seat, alongside the runway.

He’d told the ticket seller he wanted to see more than just their baby-blue eyes The ticket seller had said:

“You will.” He’d been right, it turned out.

At the moment Gumbo took his seat, there wasn’t anything going on that a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl couldn’t have watched with perfect propriety.

A yellow haired singer in a flowing, full-length dress was rendering a sentimental tune.

And she was good, too.

Gumbo noticed several onlookers, who certainly hadn’t come in to be reminded of mother, furtively sticking thumbs into the corners of their eyes.

But this was his night off and he felt kind of cheated.

“Did I walk in on a funeral?” he asked himself.

He shouldn’t have asked that, maybe.

The mocking little gods of circumstances were only too willing to arrange it for him.

The singer walked off, the orchestra gave out with an introductory flourish, and the proceedings snapped back into character.

The curtains parted to reveal a living statue group—five or six statuesque chorines presided over by a central “statue” poised on a pedestal in their midst.

This was Gilda, the main attraction.

Gilda stood up there, head thrown back, seemingly in the act of nibbling at a dangling cluster of grapes.

Whether she was as innocent of vesture as she seemed was beside the point; her body was coated with a thick layer of scintillating golden paint which was certainly far more protective than any ordinary pair of tights would have been.

But that didn’t dampen the general enthusiasm any.

She got a tremendous hand without doing a thing, just for art’s sake.

The curtains coyly came together again, veiling the tableau.

There was a teasing pause, maintained just long enough to whet the audience’s appetite for more, then they parted once more and the “statuary” had assumed a different position.

Gilda was now shading her eyes with one hand, one leg poised behind her, and staring yearningly toward the horizon—or, more strictly speaking, a fire door at the side of the auditorium.

Gumbo caught the spirit of the thing along with everyone else and whacked his hands.

The curtains met, parted once more, and again the tableau had altered.

This time Gilda was up on tiptoes on her pedestal, her body arched over as though she was looking at her own reflection in a pool.

Again she held the graceful pose.

Just before the curtains obliterated her, Gumbo thought he saw her waver a little, as if having difficulty maintaining her balance.

Or maybe it was simply faulty timing.

She had prepared to change positions a little too soon, before the curtains entirely concealed her from view.

That slight flaw didn’t discourage the applause any.

It had reached the pitch of a bombardment.

The audience wasn’t a critical one; it didn’t care about complete muscular control as long as it got illusions through gold-plating.

The pause was a little longer this time, as though there had been a slight hitch.

Gumbo wondered where the dancing came in.

They had billed her out front as

“The Golden Dancer,” he remembered, and he wanted his money’s worth.

He didn’t have long to wait.

The footlights along the runway, unused until now, gushed up, the curtains parted, and Gilda was down on the stage floor now, and in motion.

The audience forgot it had homes and families.

She was coming out on the runway to dance over their heads, wearing a mantle of gauzy black.

She wasn’t any great shakes of a dancer; nobody expected her to be, nobody cared.

It was mostly a matter of waving her arms, turning this way and that, and flourishing the mantle around her, a little bit like a bullfighter does his cape, managing to keep it all around her at all times, in a sort of black haze, like smoke.

But indifferent as her dancing ability was to begin with, a noticeable hesitation began to creep into its posturing after she had been on the runway a moment or two.

She seemed to keep forgetting what to do next.

“They hardly have time to rehearse at all,” Gumbo thought leniently.

Her motions had slowed down like a clock that needs winding.

He saw her cast a look over her shoulders at the unoccupied main stage she had just come from, as if in search of help.

The lesser chorines hadn’t come out with her this last time, were probably doing a quick change for the next number.

For a moment she stood up there perfectly still, no longer moving a muscle.

The swirling black gauze deflated about her, fell limp.

Gumbo’s grin of approval dimmed and died while he craned his neck up at her.

Suddenly she started to go offbalance.

He had only had time to throw up his arms instinctively, half to ward her off, half to catch her and break her fall.

Her looming body blurred the runway lights for an instant, and then she had landed across him, one foot still up there on the runway behind her.

The black stuff of her mantle came down after her, like a parachute, and half-smothered him.

He had to claw at it to free his head, get rid of it….

Those in the rows further back, who hadn’t been close enough to notice the break in her performance that had come just before the fall, started to applaud and even laugh, like fools.

They seemed to think it was still part of her routine, or else that she had actually missed her footing and tumbled down on him, and either way it struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen.

Benton already knew better, by the inert way her head and shoulders lay across his knees.

“Take it easy. I’ve got you,” he whispered reassuringly, trying to hold her as she started to slide to the floor between the rows of seats.

Her eyes rolled unseeingly up at him, showing all whites, but some memory of where she was and what she had been doing still lingered in the darkness rolling over her.

“I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you, mister?” she breathed.

The performer’s courtesy to the spectator, so seldom returned 1

“Guess I’ve spoiled the show—” It ended with a long-drawn sigh—and she was still.

The laughter and handclapping was dying down, because her head didn’t bob up again at the place where she had disappeared from view, and they were catching on that something was wrong.

A hairy-armed man in rolled blue shirtsleeves popped partly out of the wings, not caring if he was seen or not, and wigwagged frantically to the bandleader, then jumped back again where he’d come from.

The droopy music they’d been playing for her broke off short and a rackety rhumba took its place.

A long line of chorus girls came spilling out on the stage, most of them out of step and desperately working to get their shoulder straps adjusted.

Gumbo was already struggling up the aisle with his inert golden burden by that time.

A couple of ushers came hustling down to help him, but he elbowed them aside.

“You quiet the house down. I can get her back there by myself.”

 A man with a cigar sticking flat out of his mouth like a tusk, met him at the back, threw open a door marked Manager.

“Bring her in here to my office, until I can send out for a doctor.” Before closing it after the three of them, he stopped to scan the subsiding ripples of excitement in the audience.

“How they taking it? All right, keep’em down in their seats, usher.

No refunds, understand?” He closed the door and came in.

Gumbo had to put her in the manager’s swivel chair; there wasn’t even a couch or sofa in the place.

Even with the shaded desk light on, the place stayed dim and shadowy.

Her body gleamed weirdly in the gloom, like a shiny golden girl.

“Thanks a lot, bud,” the manager said to him crisply.

“You don’t have to wait; the doctor’ll be here in a minute, mister.”

“The tin says stick around.” Gumbo reburied the badge in his pocket.

The manager widened his eyes.

“That’s a hot one. You’re probably the only headquarters man out there tonight, and she keels over into your lap.”

“That’s the kind of luck I always have,” Gumbo let him know, bending over the girl.

“I can’t even see a show once a year, without my job horning in.” The manager took another squint outside the door to see how his house was getting along.

“Forgotten all about it already,” he reported contentedly.

He turned back.

“How’s she coming?”

“She’s dead,” Gumbo said.

The manager gave a sharp intake of breath, but his reaction was a purely professional one.

“Crap. Who’ll I get to fill in for her on such short notice? What the hell happened to her? She was all right at the matinee!”

“What’d you expect her to do,” Gumbo said, short-tempered.

“Come and inform you she was going to die in the middle of her act tonight, so you’d have time to get a substitute?” He lifted one of the golden eyelids to try for optical reflex; there wasn’t any.

The hastily summoned doctor had paused outside the door, trying to take in as much of the show free as he could before he had to attend to business.

He came in still looking fascinatedly behind him.

“You’re too late,” the manager scowled. “This headquarters man says she’s dead already.”

Gumbo was on the desk phone by now with his back to the two of them.

A big belly-laugh rolled in from outside before they could get the door closed, and drowned out what he was saying.

He covered the mouthpiece until he could go ahead.

“Okay.” He hung up.

“The examiner’s office is sending a man over. We’ll hear what he says in a couple of minutes.” The doctor smiled.

“Well, he can’t say any more than I can. She’s dead and that’s that.”

“He can say why,” Gumbo countered, dipping four fingers of each hand into his coat pockets and wiggling his thumbs.

The private doctor closed the door after him.

“Now he’s going to stand and chisel the rest of the show free, just because he was called in,” the manager predicted sourly.

“He can have my seat,” Gumbo remarked. “I won’t be using it any more tonight.”

He brushed a fleck of gold paint off the front of his coat, then another off the cuff of his coatsleeve.

“Let’s get the arithmetic down.”

He took out a black notebook, poised a worn-down pencil stub over the topmost ruled line of a blank page.

Those that had gone before—and many had gone before—were all closely scrawled over with names, addresses and other data.

Then, one by one, wavy downward lines were scored through them.

That meant; case closed.

He hadn’t bothered to tear them out and throw them away.

When the entire booklet itself was used up, he would probably throw that away, intact.

But what a light it could have thrown on the vicissitudes of human existence in a large city, what a tale of theft, violence, accident, misfortune, crime! The manager opened a drawer in his desk, took out a ledger, sought a pertinent page, traced a sausage-like thumb down a list of payroll names.

“Here she is.

Real name, Annie Willis.

‘Gilda’ was just her—” Gumbo jotted.

“I know.”

He gave the address on West 135th.

“There’s a phone number to go with it, too.” Gumbo jotted.

He looked up, said,

“Oh, hello, Jacobson,” as the man from the examiner’s office came in, went back to his note-taking again.

Outside, three-hundred-odd people sat watching a line-up of girls -dance.

Inside, the business of documenting a human death went on, with low-voiced diligence.

Gumbo repeated:

“Nearest of kin, Frank Willis, husband—” The examining assistant groused softly to himself:

“I can’t get anything out of it at all, especially through all this gilt.

It mighta been a heart attack; it mighta been acute indigestion.

All I can give you for sure, until we get downtown, is she’s dead, good and dead.” The manager was getting peevish at this protracted invasion of his privacy.

“That makes three times she’s been dead, already.

I’m willing to believe it, if no one else is.” Gumbo murmured,

“This is the part I hate worst,” and began to dial with his pencil stub.

An usher sidled in, asked:

“What’ll we do about the marquee, boss? She’s still up on it, and it’s gotta be changed now for tomorrow’s matinee.”

“Just take down the ‘G’ from ‘Gilda’, see? Then stick in an ‘H’ instead, make it ‘Hilda’.

That saves the trouble of changing the whole—”

“But who’s Hilda, boss?”

“I don’t know myself 1 If the customers don’t see anyone called Hilda, that’ll teach them not to believe in signs!” Gumbo was saying quietly:

“Is this Frank Willis? Are you the husband of Annie Willis, working at the New Rotterdam Theater?.

… All right, now take it easy.

She died during the performance this evening.

Yeah, on stage about half an hour ago.

“No, you won’t find her here by the time you get down.

You’ll be notified when the body’s released by the medical examiner’s office.

They want to perform an autopsy….

Now don’t get frightened, that’s just a matter of form, they always do that.

It just means an examination….

You can claim her at the city morgue when they’re through with her.” He hung up, murmured under his breath:

“Funny how a strange word they don’t understand, like ‘autopsy,’ always throws a scare into them when they first hear it.” He eyed the manager’s swivel chair.

It was empty now, except for a swath of gold-paint flecks down the middle of the back, like a sunset reflection.

Gumbo grimaced discontentedly.

“I shoulda stayed home tonight altogether.

Then somebody else would have had to handle the blamed thing! Never saw it to fail yet.

Every time I try to see a show—”

CHAPTER TWO

The next day at eleven a cop handed Gumbo a typewritten autopsy report.

Gumbo didn’t place the name for a minute.

Then:

“Oh yeah, that girl in the show last night—Gilda.” He glanced down at his own form with rueful recollection.

“It’s going to cost me two bucks to have the front of that other suit dry-cleaned.

Okay, thanks.

I’ll take it into the lieutenant.” He scanned it hastily himself first, before doing so.

Then he stopped short, frowned, went back and read one or two of the passages more carefully.

Death caused by sealing of the pores over nearly the entire body surface for a protracted period.

This substance is deleterious when kept on for longer than an hour or two at the most.

It is composed of infinitesimal particles of gold leaf which adhere to the pores, blocking them.

This produces a form of bodily suffocation, as fatal in the end, if less immediate, than stoppage of the breathing passage would be.

“The symptoms are delayed, then strike with cumulative suddenness, resulting in weakness, dizziness, collapse and finally death.

Otherwise the subject wars perfectly sound organically in every way.

There can be no doubt that this application of theatrical pigment and failure to remove it in time was the sole cause of mortality —” He tapped a couple of nails on the desk undecidedly a minute or two.

Finally he picked up the phone and got the manager of the New Rotterdam Theater.

He hadn’t come in yet, but they switched the call to his home.

“This is Gumbo, headquarters man that was in your office last night.

How long had this Gilda—Annie Willis, you know— been doing this gilt act?”

“Oh, quite some time—five or six months now.”

“Then she wasn’t green at it; she wasn’t just breaking it in.”

“No, no, she was on old hand at it.” He hung up, tapped his nails some more.

“Funny she didn’t know enough by this time to take it off before it had a chance to catch up with her,” he murmured half under his breath.

The report should have gone to his lieutenant, and that should have ended it.

Accidental death due to carelessness, that was all.

She’d been too lazy or too rushed to remove the harmful substance between shows, and had paid the penalty.

But a good detective is five-sixths hard work and one-sixth blind, spontaneous “hunches.” Gumbo wasn’t a bad detective.

And his one-sixth had come uppermost just then.

He folded the examiner’s report, put it in his pocket, and didn’t take it in to his lieutenant.

He went back to the New Rotterdam Theater, instead.

It was open even this early, although the stage show didn’t go on yet.

A handful of sidewalk beachcombers were drifting in, to get in out of the sun.

The manager had evidently thought better of his marquee short-change of the night before.

The canopy still misleadingly proclaimed

“Hilda, the Golden Dancer but below it there was now affixed a small placard, so tiny it was invisible unless you got up on a ladder to scan it:

“Next Week.”

The manager acted anything but glad 1 to see him back so soon.

“I knew that wasn’t the end of it! With you fellows, these things go on forever.

Listen, she keeled over in front of everybody in the theater.

People are dropping dead on the streets like that every minute of the day, here, there, everywhere.

What’s there to find out about? Something gave out inside.

It was her time to go, and there you are.” Gumbo wasn’t an argumentative sort of person.

“Sure,” he agreed, unruffled. “And now it’s my time to come nosing around about it—and there you are.

Who shared her dressing-room with her—or did she have one to herself?”

The manager shrugged disdainfully.

“These aren’t big stars playing this house. She split it with Vilma Lyons. That’s the show’s ballad-singer, you know—the only full-dressed girl in the company— and June McKee, who leads the chorus in a couple of numbers.”

“Are her belongings still in it?”

“They must be. Nobody’s called for them yet, as far as I know.”

“Let’s go back there,” Gumbo suggested.

“Listen, the show’s cooking to go on—”

“I won’t get in its way,” Gumbo assured him.

They came out of the office, went down a side aisle skirting the orchestra, with scattered spectators already lounging here and there.

A fifteen-year-old motion picture, with Morse Code dots and dashes running up it all the time, was clouding the screen at the moment.

Climbing onto the stage at the side, they went in behind the screen, through the wings, and down a short, damp, feebly lighted passage, humming with feminine voices coming from behind doors that kept 63 opening and closing as girls came in from the alley at the other end of the passage, in twos and threes.

The manager thumbed one of the doors, turned the knob and opened it with one and the same gesture—and a perfect indifference to the consequences.

“Kids, there’s a detective coming in.” The manager stood aside to let Gumbo pass, went back along the passageway toward his office with the warning:

“Don’t gum them up now. This show hits fast once it gets going.” There were two girls in there, working away at opposite ends of a three-paneled mirror.

The middle space and chair were vacant.

Gumbo’s map appeared in all three of the mirrors at once, as he, came in and closed the door after him.

One girl clutched at a wrapper, flung it around her shoulders.

The other calmly went ahead applying make-up.

“You two have been sharing the same dressing-room with Annie Willis,” he said. “Did she usually leave on this shiny junk between shows, or take it off each time?”

The chorus leader, the one the manager had called June McKee, answered, in high-pitched derogation at such denseness.

“Whadd’ye think, she could go out and eat between shows with her face all gold like that? She woulda had a crowd following her along the street! Sure she took it off.”

Suddenly they looked at one another with a flash of enlightened curiosity.

The McKee girl, a dark-haired honey, turned around toward him on the make-up bench.

“Sa-ay, is that what killed her, that gold stuff?” she asked in an awestricken, husky whisper.

Gumbo over-rode that.

“Did she take it off yesterday or did she leave it on?”

“She left it on.” She turned to her bench mate, the platinum-blonde singer, for corroboration.

“Didn’t she, Vilma? Remember? I do—it was only yesterday.”

“Where is this gold stuff? I’d like to see it.”

“It must be here with the rest of her stuff.” The McKee girl reached over, pulled out the middle of the three table drawers, left it open for him to help himself.

“Look in there.” It was in pulverized form, in a long jar.

It had a greenish tinge to it that way.

He read the label.

It was put up by a reputable cosmetic manufacturing company.

There were directions for application and removal, and then an explicit warning:

“Do not allow to remain on any longer than necessary after each performance.” She must have read that a dozen times in the course of using the substance.

She couldn’t have failed to see it.

“You say she left it on yesterday.

Why? Have you any idea?” Again it was the McKee girl who answered, spading her palms at him.

“Because she mislaid the cleanser, the stuff that came with it to remove it.

They both come together.

You can’t buy one without the other.

It’s a special preparation that sort of curls it up and peels it off clean and even.

“Nothing else works as well or as quick.

You can’t use cold cream, and even alcohol isn’t much good.

You can scrub your head off and it just makes a mess of your skin, gets it all red and fiery—”

“And yesterday it disappeared?”

“Right after the finale, she started to holler: ‘Who took my paint remover? Anybody seen the paint remover?’ Well, between the three of us, we turned the room inside out, and no sign of it.

She emptied her whole drawer out.

Everything else was there but that.

“She even went into a couple of the other dressing-rooms to find out if anybody had it in there.

I told her nobody else would want it.

She was the only one in the company who used that gilt junk.

64 It wouldn’t have been any good to anyone else.

It never turned up.”

“Finish telling me.”

“Finally Vilma and me had to go out and eat. Time was getting short. Other nights, the three of us always ate together. We told her if she found it in time to hurry up after us. We’d keep a place for her at our table. She never showed up. When we got back for the night show, sure enough, she was still in her electro-plating. She told us she’d had to send Jimmy, that’s the handyman, out for something and had eaten right in the dressing-room.”

Gumbo cocked his head slightly, as when one looks downward into a narrow space.

“Are you sure this bottle of remover couldn’t have been in the drawer and she missed seeing it?” “That was the first place we cased.

We had everything out—even two cockroaches that lived in a crack on the side.

I remember holding it up in my hand empty and thumping the bottom of it just for luck!” His wrist shot out of his cuff, hitched back into it again, like some sort of a hydraulic brake.

“Then what’s it doing in there now?” He was holding a smaller bottle, with liquid contents and a small sponge attached to its neck.

It got quiet in the dressing room, deathly quiet.

So quiet you could even hear the sound track from the screen out front.

They both had such frightened looks on their faces, the superstitious fright of two giddy, thoughtless creatures who have suddenly come face to face with nameless evil.

The McKee girl’s lower lip was trembling with awe.

“It was put back —after Somebody wanted her to die like that! With us right here in the same room with her!” She took a deep breath, threw open her own drawer, and with a defiant look at Gumbo, as if to say, “Try and stop me,” tilted a small, flat gin bottle to her mouth.

-The ballet singer, Vilma Lyons, suddenly dropped her head into her folded arms on the littered dressing table and began to sob.

The stage manager bopped a fist on the door and called in:

“The customers are waiting.

If that dick ain’t through questioning you in there, tell him to follow you out on the runway 1”

CHAPTER THREE

“Yes sir, I’m Jimmy, the handy| man.” He put down his bucket, followed Gumbo out into the alley, where they wouldn’t be in the way of the girls hustling in and out on quick changes.

“Yes, sir, Miss Gilda done send me out last night between shows to try to get her another bottle of that there stuff, which took off the gold paint.” “Why didn’t you get it?”

“I couldn’t 1 I went to the big theat’cal drugstore on Eighth where she told me.

It’s the only place around here where you can get it.

Even there they don’t keep much on hand, never get much call for it.

The drugstore man tole me somebody else just beat me to it.

He told me he just got through selling the last bottle he had in stock, before I got there.”

“Keep on,” Gumbo said curtly.

“That’s about all.

The drugstore man promise to order another bottle for her right away from his company’s warehouse or the wholesaler what puts it up, see that it’s in by the first thing in the morning.

So I go back and tell her.

Then she send me across the street to bring her in a sandwich.

“When I come back the second time, she already sitting there acting kind of low, holding her head. She said she was sorry she ordered that bite, after all. She didn’t feel well. She said she hopes nothing happened to her from leaving this stuff on too long.”

Gumbo told him:

“You con along and point out that druggist to me.”

“Come in, Gumbo.” “Lieutenant, I’ve got a problem.

I’ve got a report here from Jacobson that I haven’t turned in to you yet. I’ve been keeping it until I know what to do about it.”

“What’s the hitch?”

“Lieutenant, is there such a thing as a negative murder? By that I mean, when not a finger is lifted against the victim, not a hair of her head is actually touched.

But the murder is accomplished by withholding something, so that death is caused by its absence or lack.” The lieutenant was quick on the trigger.

“Certainly! If a man locks another man up in a room, and withholds food from him until the guy has starved to death, you’d call that murder, wouldn’t you? Even though the guy that caused his death never touched him with a ten-foot pole, never stepped in past the locked door at all.”

Gumbo plucked doubtfully at the cord of skin between his throat and chin.

“But what do you do when you have no proof of intention? I mean, when you’ve got evidence that the act of withholding or removal was committed, but no proof that the intention was murderous.

And how you gonna get proof of intention, anyway ? It’s something inside the mind, isn’t it?” The lieutenant glowered, said:

“What do you do? I’ll tell you what you do? You work on your bird until you get the intention out of his mind and down in typewriting! That’s what you do!”

The man was alone when he started down the three flights of stairs in the shoddy walk-up apartment on West 135th.

He was still alone when he got down to the bottom of them.

And then, somehow, between the foot of the stairs and the street door, he wasn’t alone any more.

Gumbo was walking along beside him, as soundlessly as though his own shadow had crept forward and overtaken the mourning man along the poorly lit passage.

He shied sideways and came to a dead stop against the wall, the apparition was so unexpected.

He was gaping.

Gumbo said quietly:

“Come on, what’re you stopping for? You were leaving the house, weren’t you, Willis? Well, you’re still leaving the house, what’s the difference?”

They walked on as far as the street entrance.

Gumbo just kept on fingertip touching the other’s elbow, in a sort of mockery of guidance.

Willis said:

“What am I pinched for?”

“Who said you were pinched ? Do you know of anything you should be pinched for?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then you’re not pinched.

Simple enough, isn’t it?” Willis didn’t say another word after that.

Gumbo only said two things more himself, one to his charge, the other to a cab driver.

He remarked:

“Come on, we’ll ride it.

I’m no piker.” And when a cab had sidled up to his signal, he named a precinct police station.

They rode the whole way in stony silence from then on.

Willis staring straight ahead in morbid reverie; Gumbo with his eyes toward the cab window—but on the shadowy reflection of Willis’ face given back by the glass, not on the quiet street outside.

They got out.

Gumbo took him in and left him waiting in a room at the back for a few minutes, while he went off to attend to something else.

This wasn’t accidental; it was the psychological buildup—or rather, breakdown—preceding the grill.

It had been known to work wonders.

It didn’t this time.

“All right, you can take him out now,” he said to the subordinate who had been helping.

Willis went out on his own feet, waveringly, leaning lopsided against his escort, but on his own feet.

A sense of innocence can sometimes lend one moral support.

But so can a sense of having outwitted justice.

“The guy must be innocent,” the other dick remarked when he had come back.

“He knows we can’t get him. There’s nothing further in his actions to be uncovered, don’t you see? We’ve got everything there is to get on him, and it isn’t enough. And we can’t get at his intentions.

They got to come out through his own mouth. All he has to do is hold out. It’s easy to keep a single, simple idea like that in your mind, no matter what happens.

“What breaks down most of them is the uncertainty of something they did wrong, something they didn’t cover up right, cropping up and tripping them—an exploded alibi, a surprise identification by a material witness.

He had none of that uncertainty to buck.

All he had to do was sit tight inside his own skin.” B ENSON said to his lieutenant the next day,

“I’m certain he killed her.

What are the three things that count in every crime? Motive, opportunity and method.

He rings the bell on each count.

Motive? Well, the oldest one in the world between men and women.

He was sick of her; he’d lost his head about some one else, and didn’t know how else& to get rid of her.

“She was in the way in more than just the one sense.

She was a deterrent, because of the other woman’s sense of loyalty, as long as she remained alive.

It wouldn’t have done any good if he walked out on her or divorced her; the other woman wouldn’t have had him at her friend’s expense and he knew it.

“It happens that the other woman was a lifelong friend of the wife; the kind of friendship that is more often met with between men than women, a real thick and-thin partnership.

She even lived near them, up at the 135th Street place, for awhile after they were first married.

Then she got out, maybe ’cause she realized three’s a crowd and a set-up like that was only asking for trouble.”

“Have you found out who this other woman is?”

“Certainly. Vilma Lyons, the ballad singer in the same show with the wife. I went up to the theater yesterday afternoon.

I questioned the two girls who shared Annie Willis’ dressing-room with her. One of them talked a blue streak.

The other one didn’t open her mouth; I don’t recall her making a single remark during the entire interview. She was too busy thinking hack. She knew; her intuition must have already told her who had done it.

At the end, she suddenly buried her face in her arms and cried.

I let her take her own time.

I let her think it over.

I knew she’d come to me of her own accord sooner or later.

“And she did, after curtain time last evening, down here at the station house.

Weren’t we going to get the person that had done that to her friend, she wanted to know? Wasn’t he going to be punished for it? Was he going to get away with it scot-free?”

“Did she accuse him?”

“She had nothing to accuse him on.

He hadn’t said anything to her.

He hadn’t even shown-her by the look on his face.

And then little by little I caught on, by reading between the lines of what she said, that he’d liked her a little too well.” He shrugged.

“She can’t help us, she admitted it herself.

Because he started giving her these long, haunting looks when he thought she wasn’t noticing, and falling into reveries, and acting discontented and restless, that isn’t evidence he killed his wife.

“But she knows, in her own mind, just as I know in mine, who hid that remover from Annie Willis, and with what object, and why.

She hates him like poison now.

I could read it on her face.

He’s taken her friend from her.

They’d chummed together since they were both in pigtails, at the same orphanage.”

“All right. What about Opportunity, your second factor?”

“He rings the bell there, too. And again it doesn’t do us any good.

Sure, he admits he was sitting out front at the matinee day before yesterday. But so was he a dozen times before.

Sure, he admits he went backstage to her dressing room, after she’d gone back to it alone and while the other two were still onstage. But so had he a dozen times before.

“He claims it was already missing then.

She told him so, and asked him to go out and get her another bottle.

But who’s to prove that? She’s not alive, and neither of the two other girls had come off the stage yet.”

“Well, what happened to the second bottle that would have saved her life?”

“He paid for it. 

The clerk wrapped it for him.

He started out holding it in his hand the way one does any circular package. And at the drugstore entrance, he collided with some one coming in. It was jarred out of his grasp, and it shattered on the floor!”

And as if he could sense what the lieutenant was going to say, he hurriedly added: “There were witnesses galore to the incident; the clerk himself, the soda jerk, the cashier.

I questioned every one of them.

Not one could say for sure that it wasn’t a genuine accident.

Not one could swear that he’d seen Willis actually relax his hand and let it fall, or deliberately get in this other party’s way.” “Then why didn’t he go back and tell her? Why did he leave her there like that with this stuff insidiously injuring her system, so that she had to send this Jimmy out to see if he could get hold of any for her?”

“We can’t get anything on him for that, either.

He did the natural thing; he went scouting around for it in other places— the way a man would, who was ashamed to come back empty-handed and tell her he’d just smashed the one bottle they had left in stock, afraid she’d bawl him out maybe.” Through thinned lips Gumbo added acidly:

“Everything he did was so natural.

That’s why we can’t get him!” The lieutenant said:

“There’s an important little point lurking in that smashed-bottle angle.

Did he know it was the last bottle on hand before he dropped it, or did he only find out after he stepped back to the counter and tried to get another?” Gumbo nodded.

“I bore down heavy on that with the drug clerk.

Unless Willis was deaf, dumb and blind, he knew that that was the last bottle in the store before he started away from the counter with it.

The clerk not only had a hard time finding it, but when he finally located it, he remarked that it was the last one they had.”

“Then that accident was no accident.”

“Can you prove it?” was all Gumbo said.

The lieutenant answered that by discarding it.

“Go ahead,” he said sourly.

“I checked with every one of the other places he told me he’d been to after leaving there, and he had asked for it in each one.

They corroborated him on that.

He wasn’t in much danger of coming across it anywhere else and he knew it! The drug clerk had not only forewarned him that he didn’t think he’d find it anywhere else, but his wife must have told him the same thing before she sent him out.” Screwing his mouth up, Gumbo said:

“But it looked good for the record, and it kept him away from the theater—while 68 she was dying by inches from cellular asphyxiation, without knowing it!”

“Didn’t he go back at all? Did he stay out from then on?”

“No one saw him come back, not a soul.

I made sure of that before I put it up to him.” Gumbo smiled bleakly.

“I know what you’re thinking there, and I thought of that, too.

If he didn’t go back at all, then he wasn’t responsible for making the remover disappear in the first place.

Because it was back in the drawer before the next matinee—I found it there myself.

Now get the point involved.

Willis had a choice between the natural thing and the completely exonerating thing.

But an exonerating thing that would have meant behaving a little oddly.

The natural thing for a man sent out on an errand by his wife is to return eventually, even if it’s an hour later, even if it’s only to report that he was unsuccessful.

“The exonerating thing, in this case, was for him to stay out for good.

All he had to do was claim he never went back, and he was absolutely in the clear, absolutely eliminated.”

“Well?” The lieutenant could hardly wait for the answer.

“He played it straight all the way through.

He admitted, of his own accord and without having been seen by anybody, that he stopped back for a minute to tell her he hadn’t been able to get it, after chasing all over the Forties for the stuff.

And that, of course, is when the mysteriously missing bottle got back into the drawer.” The lieutenant was almost goggle-eyed.

“Well! She was still alive, the murder hadn’t even been completed yet, and he was already removing the traces of it by replacing the bottle from where he’d taken it.”

“The timing of her act guaranteed that she was already as good as dead, even with the bottle back within her reach.

She couldn’t take the gilt off now for another three hours.

Using it continuously had already lowered her resistance.

That brief breathing spell she would have had between shows spelled the difference between life and death.

“In other words, Lieutenant, he left her alive, with fifty people around her who talked to her, rubbed shoulders with her in the wings, after he’d gone.

And later she even danced onstage before a couple hundred more.

But he’d already murdered her.”

“But you say he didn’t have to admit he stopped back at the theater, and yet he did.”

“Sure, but to me that doesn’t prove his innocence, that only proves his guilt and infernal cleverness.

By avoiding the slightest lie, the slightest deviation in his account of his actual movements, he’s much safer than by grasping at a chance of automatic, complete vindication.

Somebody just might have seen him come back, he couldn’t be sure.”

Gumbo paused, thinking it through again.

He took a deep breath.

“There it all is.

Lieutenant: motive, opportunity and method.

And it don’t do us much good, does it? There isn’t any more evidence to be had. There never will be. There’s nothing more to uncover—because it all is uncovered already. We couldn’t get him on a disorderly-conduct charge on all of it put together, much less for murder.

What do I do with him now?”

The lieutenant took time answering, as though he hated to have to.

Finally he did.

“We’ll have to turn him loose; we can’t hold him indefinitely.

There just aren’t any loopholes here.”

“I hate to see him walk out of here free,” Gumbo said.

“There’s no use busting your brains about it.

It’s a freak that only happens maybe once in a thousand times—but it happened this time.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Later that same morning Gumbo walked out to the entrance of the precinct house with Willis, after the formalities of release had been gone through.

Willis had a lot of court-plaster here and there, but he was free again.

That was what mattered.

Court-plaster wears off after awhile; several thousand volts of electricity does not.

“Well, I guess you think you’re pretty smart,” Gumbo said taciturnly.

Willis said;

“That’s the word for people that have held out something, gotten away with it.

I got a beating for something I didn’t do.

Unlucky is the word for me, not smart.” Gumbo stopped short at the top of the entrance steps, marking the end of his authority.

He smiled.

“Well, if we couldn’t get anything out of you in there last night, I didn’t expect to get anything out of you out here right now.” His mouth thinned.

“Here’s the street. Beat it.”

Willis went down the steps, walked on a short distance alone and unhindered.

Then he decided to cross over to the opposite side of the street.

When he had reached it, he stopped a minute and looked back.

Gumbo was still standing there on the police station steps, looking after him.

Their stares met.

Gumbo couldn’t read his look, whether it conveyed mockery or relief or just casual indifference.

But for that matter, Willis couldn’t read Gumbo’s either; whether it conveyed regret or philosophic acceptance of defeat or held a vague promise that things between them weren’t over yet.

There was a brittle quality of long smoldering rancor about her, even when she first opened the door, even before she’d had time to see who was standing there.

She must have just got home from the show.

She still had her coat on.

But she was already holding a little jigger glass of colorless liquid between two of her fingers, as if trying to cauterize inner resentment that was continually gnawing at her.

Her eyes traveled over him from head to foot and back again.

“Been letting any more killers go since I saw you last?” she said.

“You’ve taken that pretty much to heart, haven’t you?” Gumbo answered levelly.

“Why wouldn’t I? Her ghost powders its nose on the bench next to me twice a day! A couple performances ago I caught myself turning around and saying: ‘Did you get paid this week, An—’ before I stopped to think.”

She emptied the jigger.

“And do you know what keeps the soreness from healing? Because the person that did it is still around, untouched, unpunished.

Because he got away with it.

You know who I mean or do I have to break out with a name?” “You can’t prove it, any more than we could, so why bring up a name?” Gumbo asked her.

“Prove it! Prove it! You make me sick.” She went back and refilled the jigger.

Her face was livid.

“You’re the police! Why weren’t you able to get him?” “You talk like a fool,” he said patiently.

“You talk like we let him go purposely.

“D’you think I enjoyed watching him walk out scot-free under my nose? And that isn’t all.

I’ve been passed over on the promotion list, on account of it.

They didn’t say it was that; they didn’t say it was anything.

They didn’t have to.

I can figure it out for myself.

It’s the first blank I’ve drawn in six years.

It’s eating at my insides, too, like yours.” CHE relented at the signs of nursed bitterness that matched her own.

“Misery likes company, I guess. Come on in, as long as you’re here, detective-by-courtesy. Have a stab,” she said grudgingly, and pushed the gin slightly toward him.

They sat in brooding silence for several minutes, two frustrated people.

Finally she spoke again, a cruller of white hate outlining her mouth.

“He had the nerve to put his flowers on her grave! Imagine, flowers from the killer to the one he killed!

“I found them there when I went up myself, before the matinee today, to leave some roses of my own.

The caretaker told me whose they were.

I tore them in a thousand pieces when he wasn’t looking.”

“I know,” he said vindictively.

“He goes up twice a week, leaves fresh flowers each time.

I’ve been casing him night and day.

The hypocritical rat.

All the way through from the beginning, he’s done the natural thing.

He does it whether he thinks anyone’s watching or not, and that’s the safe way to do it.” He refilled his own jigger without asking her permission.

He laughed harshly.

“But just the same, he’s not pining away.

I cased his flat while he was out of it today, and I found enough evidence to show there’s some brunette has been hanging around to console him.

“Hairpins on the kitchen floor, a double set of dirty dishes in the sink.

He’s probably just waiting for the temperature to go down enough, before he marries up with her.” She lidded her eyes, touched a hand to her own platinum-blonde hair.

“I’m not surprised,” she said huskily.

“That would be about his speed.” She got up suddenly.

“These jiggers are too small.” She came back with a tumbler, a third full.

“Maybe you can still get something on him through her,” she suggested balefully.

He shook his head.

“He can go around with ten brunettes if he feels like it.

He’s within his rights.

We can’t hold him just for that alone—”

“What’s the matter with the law these days?” she said almost savagely.

“Here we are, you and I, sitting here in this room.

We both know he killed Annie Willis.

You’re drawing pay from the police department, and he’s moving around immune and fancy-free only a few blocks away from us at this very minute!” He nodded as though he agreed with her.

“They fail you every once in awhile,” he admitted gloomily,

“the statutes as they are written down on the books.

They slip a cog and let someone fall through.” Then he went on:

“But there’s an older law than the statutes we work under.

‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ It’s short and sweet, got no amendments, dodges or habeas corpuses to clutter it up.

‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ ”

“I like the way that sounds,” she said.

“You’re getting a little lit.

I shouldn’t be talking like this.”

“I’m not getting lit.

I understand every word you say.

But more important still, I hear the words you’re not saying.” He just looked at her, and she looked at him.

They were like two fencers, warily circling around each other to find an opening.

She got up, moved over to the window, stared grimly out toward the traffic intersection at the corner ahead.

“Green light,” she reported.

Then she turned toward him with a bitter, puckered smile.

“Green light. That means go ahead—doesn’t it?” Green light,” he murmured.

“That  means go ahead—if you care to.”

The gin was making him talk a little more freely, although that was the only sign of it he showed.

“The man that throws the switch in the deathhouse at Sing Sing, what makes him a legal executioner and not a murderer? The modern statutes. The ancient code can have its legal executioners, too, who are not just murderers.”

She had come over close to him again.

“But never,” he went on, looking straight at her,

“repay the gun with the knife, or the knife with the club.

Then that’s murder, not the ancient code any more.

In the same way, if the State executioner shot the condemned man on his way to the chair, or poisoned him in his cell, then he wouldn’t be a legal executioner any more, he’d be just a murderer himself.”

He repeated it again for her slowly.

“‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Annie Willis met her death by having something withheld from her that her safety required.

No weapon was used on Annie Willis, remember.”

“Yes,” she said with flaming dreaminess.

“And I know where there’s a trunk that belongs to me, down in a basement storage room, seldom entered, seldom used.

One of these big, thick theatrical trunks, roomy enough to carry around the props for a whole act. I left it behind when I moved out.

I was going to send for it but—”

She didn’t finish it.

She looked down at his empty jigger, as if he was listening intently to her, but without looking at her.

“And if I came to you, for instance, and said: ‘What’s been bothering you and me both has been taken care of,’ how would you receive me—as a criminal under the modern law or a legal executioner under the old one?”

He looked straight up at her with piercing directness.

“The modern law failed you and me, didn’t it? Then what right would I have to judge you by it?”

She murmured half audibly, as if endeavoring to try him out:

“Then why not you? Why me?” “The injury was done to you, not me.

A friend is a personal belonging, a professional disappointment isn’t.

Nothing was done to me personally.

Under the ancient law, a frustrated job can only be repaid by another frustrated job, by making the person who injured you suffer a like disappointment in his work.” She laughed dangerously.

“I can do better than that,” she said softly.

She kept shaking her head, looking at him from time to time as if she still found the situation almost past belief.

“The strangest things never get down on the record books! They wouldn’t be believed if they did! Here you are, sitting in my room, a man drawing pay from the police department, with a shield in your pocket at this very minute—” She didn’t finish it.

“I’m a little bit tight on your gin,” he said, getting up,

“and we haven’t been talking.” She held the door open for him.

“No,” she smiled,

“we haven’t been talking.

You weren’t here tonight, and nothing was said.

But perfect understanding doesn’t need words.

I’ll probably see you again to let you know how—what we haven’t been talking about is coming along.”

The door closed and Danny Gumbo went down the stairs with an impassive face.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Lady Says

“Die!” TT THAT followed this event was \/\/ even more incredible yet.

A cop ’ ’ came in to him, down at the precinct house three nights later, said:

“There’s a lady out there asking for you, Gumbo.

Won’t state her business.” Gumbo said:

“I think I know who you mean.

Look, Corrigan, you know that little end room on the left, at the back of the hall? Is there anyone in there right now?” The cop said:

“Naw, there’s never anyone in there.” “Take her back there, will you? I’ll be back there.” He got there first.

She stood outlined in the open doorway first, watching the cop return along the hall to where he’d come from, before she’d come in.

Gumbo acted slightly frightened.

He 72 kept pacing nervously back and forth, waiting for her to come in.

When she finally turned away from seeing the cop off, she came in and closed the door after her.

He said:

“Couldn’t you have waited until I dropped over to see you?”

“How did I know when you’d be around again? I felt like I couldn’t wait another half hour to get it off my chest.” There was something almost gloating in the way she looked around her.

“Is it safe to talk here?”

“Sure, if you keep your voice down.” He went over to the door, opened it, looked along the passageway outside, closed it again.

“It’s all right.” She said, half-mockingl’y, with that intimacy of one conspirator for another:

“No dictaphones around?” He was too on edge to share her bantering mood.

“Don’t be stupid,” he snapped.

“How did I know you were going to pull a raw stunt like this ? This is the last place I ever expected you to—” She lit a cigarette, preened herself.

“You think you’re looking at a cheap ballad singer on a burlesque circuit, don’t you?”

“What am I looking at, then?”

“You’re looking at a legal executioner, under the ancient code.

I have a case of justice to report.

I had a friend I valued very highly, and she was caused to die by having the skin of her body deprived of air.

Now the man who did that to her is going to die sometime during the night, if he hasn’t already, by having the skin of his body—and his lungs and his heart— deprived of air in the same way.” He lit a cigarette to match hers.

His hands were so steady—too steady, rigid almost—that you could tell they weren’t really.

He was forcing them to be that way.

His color was paler than it had been when he first came in.

“What have you got to say to that?” She clasped her own sides in a parody of macabre delight, gloated with pleasure.

“It’ll tell you in a minute.” He went over to the door, opened it and looked out again, as if to make sure there was no one out there to overhear.

He’d dropped his cigarette on the way over to it.

She misunderstood.

“Don’t be jittery—” she began scornfully.

He’d raised his voice suddenly, before she knew what to expect.

It went booming down the desolate hallway.

“Corrigan! C’mere a minute!” A blue-suited figure had joined his in the opening before she knew what was happening.

He pointed toward her.

66 \ RREST this woman for murder! Hold her here in this room until I get back! I’m making you personally responsible for her!” A bleat of smothered fury ripped from her.

“Why, you dirty, double-crossing— The guy isn’t even dead yet.”

“I’m not arresting you for the murder of Frank Willis.

I’m arresting you for the murder of his wife, Annie Willis, over a month and a half ago at the New Rotterdam Theater!” The greater part of it came winging back from the far end of the hallway, along which he was moving fast on his way to try to save a man’s life.

They came trooping down single file, fast, into the gloom.

White poker chips of light glanced off the damp, cemented brick walls from their torches.

The janitor was in the lead.

He poked at a switch by his sense of memory alone, and a feeble parody of electricity illuminated part of the ceiling and the floor immediately under it, nothing else.

“I ain’t seen him since yesterday at noon,” he told them in a frightened voice.

“I seen him going out then.

That was the last I seen of him.

Here it is over here, gents.

This door.” They fanned out around it in a halfcircle.

All the separate poker chips of 73 torchlight came to a head, focused on one big door, which was fireproof; nailstudded iron, rusty but stout.

But it was fastened simply by a padlock clasping two thick staples.

“I remember now, my wife said something about his asking her for the key to here, earlier in the evening while I was out,” the janitor said.

“So he was still all right then.”

“Yes, he was still all right then,” Gumbo agreed shortly.

“Get that thing.

Hurry up!” A crowbar was inserted behind the padlock chain; two of the men with him got on one end of it and started to pry.

Something snapped.

The unopened lock bounced up, and they swung the storagespace door out with a grating sound.

The torchbeams converged inside and lit it up.

It was small and cramped.

The air was already musty and unfit to breathe —even the unconfined air at large between its four sides—and it was lifeless.

All the discarded paraphernalia of forgotten tenants over the years choked it.

Cartons, empty packing cases, a dismantled iron bed frame, even a kid’s sled with one runner missing.

But there was a clear space left between the entrance and the one large trunk that loomed up in it, like a towering headstone on a tomb.

It stood there silent, inscrutable.

On the floor before it lay, in eloquent meaning, a single large lump of coal brought from the outside part of the basement and discarded after it had served its purpose.

Two smaller fragments had chipped off it, lay close by.

“A blow on the head with that would daze anyone long enough to—” Gumbo scuffed it out of the way with his foot.

“Hurry up, fellows.

She’d only left here when she looked me up.

It’s not a full hour yet.

The seams may be warped with age, there’s still a slim chance—” They pushed the scared, white-lipped janitor back out of their way.

Axe blades began to slash around the rusted snaplock.

“Not too deep,” Gumbo warned.

“Give it flat strokes from the side, or you’re liable to cut in and— Got that pulmotor ready?” The axes held off at his signal and he pulled the dangling lock off the splintered seams with his bare hands.

They all jumped in, began pulling in opposite directions.

The trunk split open vertically.

A face stared sightlessly into the focused torchbeams, a contorted mask of strangulation and unconsciousness that had been pressed despairingly up against the seam as close as it could go, to drink in the last precious molecule or two of air.

ILLIS’ body, looking shrunken, tumbled out into their arms.

They carried him out into the more open part of the basement, one hand that ended in mangled nails trailing inertly after him.

An oxyden tank was hooked up, and a silent, grim struggle for life began in the eerie light of the shadowy basement.

Twice they wanted to quit, but Gumbo wouldn’t let them.

“If he goes, that makes a murderer out of me! And I won’t let myself be a murderer! We’re going to bring him back, if we stay here until tomorrow night!” And then, in the middle of the interminable silence, a simple, quiet announcement from the man in charge of the squad:

“He’s back, Gumbo.

He’s going again!” Somebody let out a long, whistling breath of relief.

It was a detective who had just escaped being made into a murderer.

At the hospital later, in the early hours of the morning, when he was able to talk again, Willis told him the little there was to tell.

“She showed up and said she wanted to get something out of that trunk she’d left behind here in our care, when she’d moved away.

I got the key to the storage room from the janitor’s wife.

I should have tumbled she had something up her sleeve when she asked me not to mention who it was for, let them think I wanted it for myself.

“Then she got me to go down there with her by pretending there were some things of Annie’s in the trunk, from their days in show business together, that she wanted to give back to me.

“I didn’t open my mouth to her, didn’t say a word.

I was afraid to trust myself, afraid if I came out with what was on my mind, I’d beat her half-senseless and only get in more trouble with you police guys.

I couldn’t wait to get rid of her, to see the last of her—

“I even helped her to open the trunk, because it was pretty heavy to handle.

Then she asked me to bend down and see if I could reach something that was all the way down at the bottom of one of the two halves, and I stepped between them like a fool.

“Something that felt like a big rock hit the back of my head, and before my senses had a chance to clear, the two sides had swung closed on me like a—” He shuddered.

“Like a coffin when you’re still alive.” He swung one finger-bandaged paw in front of his eyes to shut out the recollection.

“The rest was pretty awful.”

’’ The lieutenant came in, holding the confession in his hands.

Gumbo followed.

“She put away?”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant went ahead, reading the confession.

Gumbo waited in silence until he’d finished.

The lieutenant looked up finally.

“This’ll do.

It’s strong enough to hold her on, anyway.

You got results, but I don’t get the technique.

What was this business of her coming here and confiding in you that she’d made an attempt on Willis’ life tonight, and how does that tie in with the murder of Annie Willis? You hit the nail on the head.

This confession proves that, but I don’t follow your line of reasoning.

I miss the connecting links.” Gumbo said:

“Here was the original equation.

A wife in the middle, a man and a woman on the ends.

She was in the way, but of which one of them ? Vilma Lyons claimed it was Willis who loved her.

Willis didn’t claim anything; the man as a rule won’t.

She watchedthem to see which would approach the other.

Neither one did.

The innocent party, because he had never cared in the first place; the guilty, because he or she had a guilty conscience, was not only afraid that he was being watched by us, but also that the other might catch on in some way, connect the wife’s death with him or her, if he made a move too soon after.

“But still I couldn’t tell which was which—although my money was still on Willis, up to the very end.

“Here was the technique.

When I saw neither of them was going to tip a hand, I tipped it, instead.

There’s nothing like a shot of good, scalding jealousy in the arm for tipping the hand.

I went to both of them alike, gave them the same buildup treatment.

I was bitter and sore, because I’d muffed the job.

“In Willis’ case, because we’d already held him for it once.

I had to vary it a little, make him think I’d changed my mind, now thought it was Vilma, but couldn’t get her for it.

“In other words, I gave them both the same unofficial all-clear to go ahead and exact retribution personally.

And I lit the same spark to both their fuses.

I told Willis that Vilma had taken up with some other guy; I told her he had taken up with some other girl.

“One fuse fizzled out.

The other flared and exploded.

One of them didn’t give a damn, because he never had.

The other, having already committed murder to gain (Continued from page 74) the object of her affection, saw red, would have rather seen him dead than have somebody else get him.

“You see.

Lieutenant, murder always comes easier the second time than the first.

Given equal provocation, whichever one of those two had committed the murder the first time, I felt wouldn’t hesitate to commit it a second time.

The one that hadn’t, probably couldn’t be incited to contemplate it, no matter what the circumstances.

“Willis had loved his wife.

He smoldered with hate when I told him we had evidence Vilma had killed her, but he didn’t act on the hints I gave him.

It never occurred to him to.

“Only one took advantage of the leeway I seemed to be giving them, and went ahead.

That one was the real murderer.

Having murdered once, she didn’t stop at murder a second time.

“It’s true,” he conceded,

“that that’s not evidence that would have done us very much good by itself, in trying to prove the other case.” But what it finally did manage to do was make a dent in the murderer’s armor.

All we had to do was keep hacking away and she finally crumbled.

“Being caught in the act the second time weakened her self-confidence in her immunity for what she’d done the first time, gave us a psychological upper-hand over her, and she finally gave up and told us all.” He indicated the confession she had dictated and signed.

“Well,” pondered the lieutenant, stroking his chin,

“it’s not a techique that I’d care to have you men make a habit of using very frequently.

In fact, it’s a damn dangerous one to monkey around with, but it got results this time, and that’s the proof of any pudding.”

THE END

Chapter I

When I pulled up to Brian’s Last Stop Service Station, the tall man in the office jumped a foot and jerked away from the cash register. That told me plenty, and so did this business of looking relieved when I poured myself from behind the wheel.

“I guess you’re Mr. Brian,” I said.

“I’m Danny Gumbo. The agency in Saint Augustine sent me out.” He wiped some imaginary grease on his clean overalls and poked out a nice white hand.

“Yes, I’m Charles Brian,” he said a little nervously. That was probably a plain lie. He acted like a man expecting to be tapped on the shoulder. He had a long face and sunken eyes and a thin nose. An educated fellow, I’d say—maybe a professional man but certainly not a grease-monkey.

“Where does a fellow eat and flop?” I asked him. “And what’s the trouble?”

Brian pointed to the second-floor rooms over the grease rack and washing stall. “

“Up there I don’t get to town often but I have plenty of canned provisions.”

If he sold a hundred bucks worth of gas a week, it was a miracle.

The station was  Moorish with peeling stucco.

All that part of Anastasia Island was low sand dunes, rolling over the cement curbs that some real estate genius had put in to bait customers.

There weren’t more than half a dozen houses, as far as I could see, and they all looked lonesome and haunted.

A few hadn’t even been finished.

There I was, making headquarters at what had started out to be the village center.

The Last Stop Service Station was shaped like an E with the middle bar missing. One wing, with dirty, broken windows, had been a lunch counter, delicatessen, and grocery, judging from the blistered letters on the glass. The other wing, with arches to let in the salt breeze, was mostly garage space. The biggest laugh was the four gas pumps out in front.

“What’s all this that’s threatening you, Mr. Brian?” I asked again.

He poked his head a little farther forward and squinted toward the highway that runs the whole length of Anastasia Island.

His eyes were blue and worried, with veins standing out on the whites.

I couldn’t decide if he’d been drinking too much or not sleeping enough.

He had a weakish sort of mouth that didn’t match the rest of his face.

A nice fellow with a good voice, only I wouldn’t want him on my side in a knock-down-and- drag-out fight.

No, Brian wasn’t his name, not by a damn sight.

The Brian’s are a fighting tribe, like the Gumbos.

“Well, there’s a bearded man hanging around, shooting at me,” he said. It would have been silly to ask him if he ever shot back and if not, why not. He just wasn’t the type.

“When and where?” I asked.

Brian looked helpless.

He made a gesture at the sand dunes.

“I don’t know exactly. From all directions. Usually at night.”

“How about the sound?” Boy, was he dumb!

“There isn’t any sound. He must use a silencer.”

That meant the other guy was a businesslike man.

Still and all, Brian had been close enough to see that the guy was big and had a beard, and he hadn’t got his head shot off.

That was funny.

The shaggy man was a screwball, or Brian was, or they both were. I didn’t ask him why didn’t he call the cops.

That’d be rotten for my business.

“How did it all start?” I asked when he turned to the glassed-in room where the dusty cash register was and showed me the stairs that led to the second floor.

“What’s in back of it all?” Brian fished a butt out of his pocket and got his lighter going.

I turned down his offer of a cigarette.

“Hell, no,” I said. “Not when I got half a cigar left.”

While I was waiting for Brian to start talking, I looked out across what decided not to be a town.

One of the houses, the nearest, didn’t have any broken windows. But that wasn’t what caught my eye.

It was the flicker of light, as if a mirror, for a second, had caught the sun.

I didn’t say anything about that but I was wondering plenty.

“Can you shoot?” Brian finally asked. My answer made his eyes bug out.

Before he had even seen my hand move, I had a gun pointing at his stomach.

“Ever see it done faster?”

That brag was purely a business matter.

He admitted he hadn’t. Then he twisted his face into a sour grin, one of the kind with memories behind it.

“If you handled cards that way, you’d make a million,” he said.

That was a laugh.

Maybe you know that place in Saint Augustine, the one with a bric-a-brac front and horseshoe arches with colored tiles. Well, it’s a club.

They let me in without a card and they let me out without my dough. So I was glad to take this job.

A pal at the agency had told me about it. His men were busy with divorces and things like that and they’d turned Brian down.

But I needed gas money to San Francisco and before long, I’d have been eating egg stains off my tie.

 “Who lives in that house over there?”

I still didn’t tell him about the flash in the window.

“A Cuban lady. She hasn’t been here long.”

“Oh, you mean she took a powder on account of Havana politics?”

“Exactly,” said Brian and frowned plenty.

“What’s wrong with her—halitosis?” His grin reminded me of a warm gin fizz.

“She’s my best customer. But the threats didn’t start till she moved in.” I noticed a little round hole in the stand that held the cash register. Reaching for my pocket knife, I began digging. When I got the bullet out, Brian explained in a hurry.

“That was fired one night when I got through waiting on a customer who came in from the highway.” The slug wasn’t awfully big, but something about it was funny looking to me. I didn’t know just what.

“This slug might have killed you,” I said bluntly.

“When do I get my advance dough?”

“Right now, Mr. Gumbo.”

“Skip the mister. They call me ‘Honest’ Gumbo.”

He looked at me, kind of amused and shrewd.

“You used to be a policeman, I would wager.”

Brian meant I didn’t look dumb enough to be called

“Honest,” so I must be a crooked ex-bluecoat.

My uncle, the one Brian had used for a namesake, had a face pretty much like mine, only a little rounder and redder, and he didn’t carry his liquor so well. The handle I had was a rib, though. They winked when they called me

“Honest” Gumbo.

 I was on the square but I couldn’t prove it. Brian knelt at the floor safe which was flush with the concrete.

Anyone trying to steal it would have had to haul away the whole floor slab. I saw what must have been at least a thousand bucks in worn bills.

He dug up my down payment and spun the dial to lock the safe.

“You might as well trust me whole hog or not pay me,” I said. Brian gaped like a dead bass.

“What do you mean?” he blurted.

“Buddy, how can I go to bat to protect your business if I don’t know the score?”

“All you’re supposed to do is find out about that prowler,” he mumbled and fidgeted.

“Do you understand?”

“Oh, all right.”

I ran my car into the garage.

Like I said, that took up most of the left wing of the Moorish palace. It had a lot of arches, facing into the E and also facing Sunset Beach and the ocean.

His car, a six-cylinder job, was standing in the corner.

He gave me some overalls which I put on.

Then I took my suitcase upstairs.

I waded ankle-deep in dust.

My room was at the end of the hall that ran in the direction of the drive.

The furnishings were dirty and flimsy, and the bath was across the hall. My windows faced sand dunes one way.

From the others, inside the E, I got a slanting look at more dunes and the ocean.

Through two windows in the opposite wall, I could see the main highway that runs the eighteen-mile length of the island. Brian pointed up the hall.

“There’s the kitchen,” he said.

“Up at the other end is the living room. On the right are empty rooms. You might take a look around.”

Opposite the kitchen door was a little cross hall that led to steps going to the rear.

There were coquina block walks, half buried in drifted sand, and a little patio enclosed by a wall about waist- high.

Before I made my inspection, I stood there grinning at my new overalls. Brian caught the point.

“After all, it’s plausible, having you here. Picnic and week-end parties do stop for gas, even if they can’t get frankfurters, film, cokes, and so on any more.”

“No good,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m buying you out, get it?”

He nodded.

Then I heard an engine below.

“There’s a customer now,” he said. It was a last year’s convertible. Nile green with chrome trim, not much heavier than my bus, though longer, and about forty more horsepower.

It was made for speed, and so was the woman at the wheel.

I hurried down.

“Fill her up?” I asked, polishing the windshield.

The red hat bobbed, and so did the black curls.

She had a nice smile and nicer eyes—big, dark ones.

I couldn’t see much more, because she didn’t get out, but I knew she’d look good.

“Where’s Mr. Brian?” she asked, looking me over.

“I’m the new pump twister. How about a grease and polish job?”

I ran the tank over.

It needed only three.

She laughed, but the joke was on her, after all.

“Later, maybe,” she said.

“I’ll call for it,” I told her, “and deliver it.”

“Business must be good if Mr. Brian needs a helper.”

That was a raspberry, but the way her nose crinkled a little with her smile made it nice.

“I’m buying Brian out,” I explained shortly.

“Oh.” That sobered her just a shade.

She dug up some bills out of a red-and- white handbag that matched her dress.

Then she waved a sweet little mitt, gave me a heart-stopping smile over her shoulder, and fed that straight-eight whirlwind a quarter of gas.

The spattering gravel nearly broke a window.

She went helling toward the central island highway in a cloud of sand.

Brian came out and looked after her with soft, narrowed eyes.

When the dust was settling back, he turned to me and smiled weakly.

“You’ve met our neighbor, Monica del Rio,” he said.

She wasn’t too smart, tanking up for three gallons—not after I’d seen that funny flash from her window.

But I didn’t tell Brian.

“She hasn’t got a Cuban accent,” I said.

He sniffed.

“Many of them come to the States for their schooling, those who can afford it.”

I thought of the gravel kicking up from her wheels.

She drove like a Cuban, all right, and she had a high-class Spanish complexion, like Jersey cream and magnolia blossoms.

That girl might be a lookout for smuggling unsuccessful Cubans into .

She might also be turning a pair of field glasses on Brian’s Last Stop Service Station.

Pretty good name—the last place any customer would stop.

Chapter II

It was getting dark. Brian gargled straight rye while I heated up a can of chili and made coffee on the electric range. The kitchen was in the center of the E, looking toward Monica’s house. I was wondering whether she went for honest faces and whether she could cook. When the percolator started bubbling, Brian didn’t look so worried any more. He even began to wipe the whisky from his chin. The kitchen had quite a bit of first- floor canopy reaching out in front of it. The whole building cast a long shadow, which lost itself in the shadows of the dunes and the brush. That didn’t mean much, and I didn’t bother to wonder why Brian squatted in a corner. I snapped on a light and stirred the chili.

“Come and get it,” I said. The second he got up, a window smashed to bits. I heard a chuckling sound. Something hit the door jamb.

“Down!” I hollered; diving for the corner and snapping the wall switch. But Brian had ducked. There hadn’t been any blast. The slug I picked out matched the one I had dug out of the office. From where Brian and I had been standing, I couldn’t tell whether it was meant for me or for him. Then I felt foolish about not having risked a gander out over the drifted sand. Somebody had plenty of moxie, sniping before it was fairly dark.

“He’s g-got a silencer, I t-told you,” Brian stuttered.

“Nuts!” I snapped.

“Judging from how the slug went in, it’s an air gun. But it’d kill you deader’n hell if it hit. They make ’em powerful these days.” It began to look like I’d earn my first seventy-five bucks. But if I caught the shaggy man, I was fixing to shave him with a tire iron, the one on the desk in the downstairs office. It all smelled as if that del Rio gal had made a quick report to the gunner. Brian got nicely plastered that night. He needed the relaxation after the few months of what he had gone through. He’d been there about a year and a half, he had told me. Judging from some odds and ends I found in one of the rooms, a woman must have been there. Anyway, MURDER II with me to look things over, he could let his nerves unkink a bit. My looking was a dead loss the next morning. Whatever footprints had been made in the sand had been blotted out by the wind. There was nothing in sight but the main highway down the center of the island, *which varies from half a mile to two miles in width. The station was on a cross road, about halfway between the highway and Sunset Beach. It was lonesome as hell at night and pretty desolate by day.

Sometimes, way off, I could see boats landing for beach parties, though most of the swimming was near the Saint Augustine end, where a bridge comes from the mainland to the island.

That night, I made a prowl among the scattered cottages, looking for the place where the shaggy man camped.

I didn’t expect to see him, though.

He already seemed too foxy.

There wasn’t any chance of frisking Monica’s house, either, because she was staying home.

When I came back, Brian was practically sick.

He just stood shaking and pointing.

There was another busted window and another slug in the window sill.

“So it’s hide-and-seek, huh?” I asked quietly.

“Shoot that scoundrel—” Brian’s voice cracked.

“Buddy, you’ll have to wait till I catch him first.”

The job began to drive me so batty that I greased my car and Brian’s and waxed them both.

I started sorting out the junk, tools, old hose, lawn sprinklers, battered coffee urns, and the rest of the stuff that was stacked in the storeroom and in the wash stall.

The garage floor was an inch deep in crankcase drippings and grease.

If things got tense enough, I’d probably clean up even that mess. But to restore Brian’s confidence, I had to spend some time tossing chili cans in the air and popping them with my double-action .38. When I got kicked off the Force and they called me Honest Gumbo, with a wink, I threw all my medals in the sewer. But a guy doesn’t forget how to shoot. Monica came over to have her tires checked. 

“It’s so lovely today, I think I’ll go out to Summer Haven,” she chattered, powdering her nose and eying me over the rim of her compact mirror.

“I love the solitude out there.”

“Yeah, it’s nice down there, but I don’t like that toll bridge at Matanzas,” I chipped in, referring to the one at the south end of the island. I was thinking:

“Nuts, madam. Do I look sappy?” It was just as well I didn’t frisk her house. She came back too quick, just like I’d had a hunch she would. She waved at me from the green convertible. That afternoon, a V-8 pulled in from the highway. It had enough horns for two jobs that size, so I charged from the patio in the back and made a dive for the windshield.

“Where’s Brian?” the sandy-haired guy at the wheel snapped at me like he owned the place. He wore tweeds and had a horse face.

“Do you want gas or don’t you?” I asked suspiciously.

The other guy was dark and roundish faced, smooth and good-looking, with a little black mustache and an expensive green tie that went just right with his brown suit.

I was willing to bet his socks matched his tie. They were both slick customers.

They smelled of hair tonic, shaving lotion, and high-class soap.

The dark fellow’s coat bulged a bit, and not from bum tailoring.

I guess I didn’t like him because he reminded me of the boys at the club where I’d got cleaned out.

“Listen, you smart hick,” the dark man gritted, sliding out of the seat, “we want Brian. This is Brian’s Last Stop Service Station, and we’ve made a stop.”

He had long hands.

One of them was making absent-minded brushing movements up and down his vest buttons.

“Easy, Zahn,” the horse-faced fellow said and left the wheel.

When he passed around the back of the car, I half turned.

Then Zahn made a false move.

I don’t think he wanted to shoot.

He just wanted to sap someone.

But he got a shock when my gun barrel clipped his knuckles and knocked his Colt to the gravel. I didn’t want to shoot, either—not just then.

“You dirty skunk!” he hollered. Then he looked at his buddy.

“All right, Hale how do you like our pal’s new mug?” 102 

“Hail or snow, I’ll take on both of you rats,” I said easily.

“How about it, greasy puss? Pick up your gat if you want to play.” Zahn nursed his bleeding knuckles.

“Now, take it easy,” Hale said. Brian clumped out of the door and stood there, looking sick. Hale poked out his hand.

“My old pal! Long time no see, Brian.”

“We been looking for you,” Zahn said.

“So it’s come to this.” He pointed at me. I still had my gun out, ready for action.

“Then it was Kathleen, after all,” Brian muttered, sort of dazed.

“Kathleen, all right,” Hale answered, chuckling as sympathetically as a coyote.

“Sweet kid. You might have known she’d get lonesome out here in the sand dunes. You’re awful dumb, Charlie.”

He chuckled.

“Is this the way to treat your pals, Charlie?”

But he backed toward me, and I frisked him.

He didn’t have a rod. It looked like Zahn was the guy to watch, after all. I picked up Zahn’s rod and

“Want them herded to town?” I asked.

When Brian shook his head, Zahn winked at Hale.

“He’s glad to see us. We got messages from home.”

“That’s right,” Brian admitted glumly. Seeing those two skunks holding him over a barrel, I was all for quitting. When a man won’t take your help, how can you do anything for him?

“All right, mug, you’re fired.”

Hale took out a silver case and fished for a smoke.

“Charlie doesn’t need you any more.” That was Brian’s business, but Hale’s crack was strictly mine.

“I was paid in advance,” I said.

“I’m earning it.” I reached and snagged the cigarette case out of his hand. Before he could move, I tossed it up, drew, and drilled it with a slug. Hale and Zahn blinked.

“Now, if you gents are staying, I’ll give you a hand with your baggage,” I said.

“I’m Honest Gumbo, in case you didn’t get the name the first time.”

“The pleasure nearly overwhelms me,” Hale grunted.

He was sore about his cigarette case, but Zahn just shrugged.

He didn’t seem to mind my having his gun, and that was something I couldn’t understand.

After supper, which I fixed up, I mixed a rye and soda and hung around in the living room. It was all glassed in like a sun parlor and it was over the garage section. When I found a blind spot where I couldn’t be sniped, I sat down to read and smoke a cigar. I picked on the living room because it was across the hall from Brian’s room where the pals were in a huddle. They weren’t talking loud, and that was a bad sign. I couldn’t hear enough to do me any good, though I gathered it was about money, Tulsa, running out, and debts on the cuff. Once Brian poked his head out. Hale, the horse-faced guy, was right at his back. He gave me a dirty look.

“That mug don’t have to listen, does he?”

“It’s handy having him there when I want a bottle or something,” Brian explained in a hurry.

“Have him bring us a couple and get the hell out!” Zahn snapped. I took that smiling and got two fifths out of the case in the kitchen. I shook out three trays of ice cubes. The fourth one jammed, so I had to use the big butcher knife I fished out of the sink. It was a bit rusty, but it felt heavy as a sword. Naturally I stuffed a fifth into my own pocket. When I came back, Hale looked sociable.

“Get yourself a bottle, too. No hard feelings. Hell, you just did your work this afternoon.” I showed him my side coat pocket.

“I already got one.” Zahn grinned.

“Drink deep but make sure you wake us up early.” I guess my face fooled him and Hale. Theirs didn’t fool me, though. When I got to my room at the far end of the hall, I took one tiny snort. Before anything happened to Brian, they’d try to cool me first. Blankets are good for more than just to sleep under.

I wadded mine up, did some tricks with the table lamp.

It was a gag with whiskers on it, but it’s the old ones that work. That’s why they last long enough to get old.

Anyway, I when I got through, anyone from the ground would have sworn it was Honest Gumbo slumped in a chair, drunk as a fifth of good whisky will make anyone but a he-man.

The huddle down the hall wasn’t over when I went out, barefooted, after locking my door.

For a second, I thought of going down the back stairs to listen under Brian’s windows.

But everyone was quiet, and those back stairs creaked like a wet fiddle.

I wouldn’t risk it.

Anyway, I had bigger business. This was a double play, you understand. Brian might have a gun of his own stashed somewhere, and someone might steal it to do a bit of playing with me. Either I’d nip the shaggy man or else Zahn or Hale. They weren’t wild. They didn’t have beards, and Brian really had been surprised when he’d seen them. I wasn’t even trying to get the score, it was so complicated. The only sure thing was that Brian’s two pals wouldn’t knock him off until I was buried in the sand dunes.

Naturally Brian must be some sort of crook.

But he was human, and a nice guy, with maybe just one mistake to his credit.

Chapter III

The grease rack wasn’t a comfortable place to squat.

The wind and concrete made me plenty unhappy, and I couldn’t hear a thing from upstairs.

Like I said, Brian’s room and the Hale Zahn cell faced the other way.

But where I sat, it was easy to watch the angle from where the dummy upstairs was nicely visible. Later, I heard enough to think someone was parking his crullers. Someone else was snoring or muttering.

It wasn’t long after when I got a hunch that someone was prowling around from the back of the station.

The moon wasn’t high enough to help, and the wind killed little sounds.

The dunes and brush threw tricky shadows.

I finally caught sight of the fellow, but I couldn’t even guess whether it was Zahn, Hale, or the unidentified prowler. Whoever he was, he had a gun, a long- barreled job.

Also, he had a forked stick. It’s surprising how neat you can make a long-range shot with a revolver if you have a gun rest. The gent with the artillery was across the road now, right where my dummy made a nice target. That was getting personal, so I had to cut in, quick. If the boys upstairs heard the shot and figured I was cooled, there was no telling what’d happen to Brian. But a guy can’t be everywhere at once. I edged for the gas pump and gained a few yards. Though he had murder in his heart, I still didn’t want to pop him off. He was fidgeting around, getting set. I could tell that from the off-and-on glint of the blued barrel which had worn spots that picked up the light. When I gained another few yards, there wasn’t much time left. He was too intent to notice what was happening behind him.

“Rut it away!” I hollered. Just then, he shot, and a window splattered behind me. But he had heard me sing out. He jumped and cursed, just startled enough to get rattled. I saw the gun shift a bit, but the first flash had exposed his position. He shot at the sound when I moved. That was a mistake, so I let him have it. You can’t talk to a guy who thinks he’s killed a drunk and then finds out he had an audience. He was still kicking a little when I got to him. The gun was a long-barreled Luger, almost as accurate as a rifle. The guy was Hale. Well, that was a nice start. Zahn would feel different about his business with Brian. So would Monica del Rio and the shaggy man. Hale, I began to figure, must have had a gat stashed in the car. Like a dummy, I hadn’t frisked the bus. A fellow sometimes get absent-minded, so I went up to talk to Brian before I forgot something else. When I got back to the second floor, Zahn staggered out of the bathroom and into the hall. Getting so sloppy drunk in such a short time meant that he’d tried to do a week’s drinking in an hour or two. Maybe he was celebrating my death. The bleary look he gave me when he stumbled unceremoniously toward Brian’s room left me wondering. Brian was long-faced and cold sober. He sat twiddling a glass and staring at the floor. He didn’t look up when Zahn came in and he didn’t pay any attention to me till I said:

“I told you I ought to run these mugs in. Hale tried to knock me off. Maybe you heard the shot.” Brian dropped his glass.

“When?” he blurted.

“What shot?” With the wind and the way the room faced, a small bore gat might not be noticed.

“Hale made a mistake,” I said.

“He’s out in the sand, not being interviewed.” Zahn straightened up. He spoke slowly, a little too carefully, and blinked. But he wasn’t crying.

“So you went and done it, huh?” he muttered.

“Come on and look,” I invited. I jerked my thumb toward the hall and herded them ahead of me.

“He tried to shoot you, and you shot him,” Brian was saying.

“My God! My God!”

He didn’t seem to like violence.

I guess that was why he had run out on something and tried to hide from his pals.

It was all too cockeyed to be thought out, so I didn’t try.

I just showed them the dummy in my room and pointed at the hole, halfway up on the window.

Glass had fallen inside.

Chunks of it lay on the sill because the drawn curtain had kept it from spattering around.

He thought it was me, only I was downstairs—and sober.

I hollered at him, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“So you knew he’d gun you!” Zahn whispered.

“I had a hunch one of you would try.”

“What for? Hell, we weren’t sore. You were just doing your job. You didn’t know.”

“Okay. Listen, Zahn. Even if you do find another gat, don’t try anything. Look at Hale first, out there in the sand.”

I turned to the door.

“Where are you going?” Brian asked.

“I’m phoning the cops. Being a detective, I have to. From what I’ve seen since I’ve been here, you probably don’t want them around. That’s just too bad.”

But I didn’t phone.

I’m not an expert lineman, so I couldn’t.

The black gadget box had been pried off the wall, and broken wires poked out.

Someone had picked up the heavy tire iron off the desk and smashed the phone with one blow.

The iron was hefty, with a round handle and a long blade.

It had been shaped out of the spring leaf of a big car.

The guy who used it had laid it back within a couple of inches of the dust marks that showed where it had been.

Deliberate, all right.

I noted a fresh smudge of grease on the wall near where the phone had been.

Probably it came from the guy’s hip, in which case he was about as tall as me, Brian, or Zahn.

Also, grains of greasy sand lay in the dust on the floor, but I couldn’t track the fellow past the crushed rock drive.

He must have been squatting in the garage. In that case, he had watched me cool Hale.

The phone had been okay when I’d come down for that job. Somebody was strictly neutral where Hale and I were concerned. When I went Upstairs, Zahn and Brian were in Brian’s room.

“Wise guy, you figured I’d be cooled,” I said to Zahn.

“So you gummed up the phone so Brian couldn’t squawk.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

I yanked him out of his chair.

He stood blinking, wobbly and groggy. T

here wasn’t any grease smudge on his coat or his pants pocket.

“Maybe you didn’t do it,” I said.

“Hale coulda done it,” he mumbled stupidly.

“No go. The buzz box was okay when I went past it. Anyway, you and Brian are material witnesses, and I’m still reporting to the cops. I’m driving to a phone.”

Zahn didn’t care.

He shrugged jerkily and stumbled down the hall.

“What have they got on you?” I asked Brian.

“That’s my business,” he said almost defiantly.

“Suit yourself. Here’s my guess. You’re holding out dough on Zahn and the late Mr. Hale. A girl by the name of Kathleen spilled your hide-out.”

“I wish it had been the bearded prowler instead of Hale,” he retorted.

“I’m not a skeet shooter. How much do you want for seventy-five bucks— Armageddon and the burning of Rome? Do you know that Monica del Rio has been watching this dump with spyglasses?” Brian reared up straight.

“No! What makes you think so?”

“I saw the reflection of lenses. A couple of minutes later, she came over to buy some gas she didn’t need—a stall to look me over and find out what the latest score was. My idea is that she’s teamed up with the shaggy man. Do I have to tell myself everything or will you save me some time?”

Brian just sat there and looked tired.

What I had said about the gal was more or less bluff, to open him up.

But he wasn’t talking.

The way things looked now, Zahn was too drunk to be dangerous. As long as I was circulating around, he wouldn’t have the nerve to cool Brian.

Also, Zahn had enough interest in Brian to block any monkey business the shaggy man might pull.

But Hairy-face couldn’t have been a killer, or he’d have taken Brian long before I arrived.

Anyhow, that’s what I figured, when I headed downstairs to drive for the nearest dog stand or wherever there might be a phone. If I always figured things out right, I’d be a genius and not a cut-rate detective.

As I left, Brian was doing some tall frowning.

He was good at meditation that got nowhere.

A fellow gets that way when he’s been hiding out a long time.

Gambling and some woman—that was how it sized up—hiding out from mugs he owed money and afraid they’d take it out of his hide since it wasn’t in his pocket.

But he wasn’t broke, with that roll.

Well, what some people consider being flat would make another guy rich.

When they’re down to their last hundred grand, they dive out of windows.

Then I got a real shock. Monica del Rio was hoofing it down the drive, all breathless and worried, except for that high-powered smile. She had teeth that were good enough to model for advertising. Her shoes were all dusty, and one of those perfect legs showed through a long runner. But she hadn’t been pawed. Nobody had made her get out and walk.

“Oh, Mister—”

“Gumbo, madam. Honest Gumbo to you. Where’s the long and rakish car?”

“That’s why I’m walking. I ran out. Did you know that in England, during the Norman rule, if a person, other than an Englishman, was slain, the people living in the district in which the crime was committed were compelled either to produce the murderer in a hurry, or shell out with a stiff fine? That in France, a judge always wears a black cap when pronouncing the sentence of death, that the Dum-Dum, or soft-nosed bullet, which expands on striking, was named after the town of Dum-Dum, in Bengal, India, where it was originally manufactured, that in a court of law, a confession, though admissible as evidence against the person who made it, cannot be admitted as same against his accomplices. That fifty per cent of the youth doing time in reformatories in this country are mentally deficient—and that the same thing holds true of from twenty-five to fifty per cent of adult prison population?

That the average prison stretch In the U. S. (for major crimes) is ten years. I was slightly over of gas. Would you mind bringing some along? It’s not far.”

It was no use telling her I had urgent business.

Also, by being a Boy Scout, I might have a glance in her shack.

“It’s going to be a bit tough. The boss’s car is down for a valve grind, and mine’s got a bum battery. But I’ll walk it.”

“I hate to trouble you. I’ll go back myself. I don’t mind.”

That was baloney.

She wouldn’t listen when I insisted I could find the bus myself.

When she agreed to come along, I said:

“You must’ve done some heavy driving since this afternoon.” She flipped her hand to include the island and the mainland.

“Oh, all over. I love .”

If Monica had ever spoken Spanish, I was the Sultan of Sulu.

Those Latin languages leave something on your tongue that you can’t get rid of.

“How’s things in Cuba?”

I asked casually.

She sighed, looked up at me, and shook her head.

Her eyes looked like she was heartbroken.

“Mr. Brian told you, didn’t he?” she replied.

“Yeah, but not half enough.”

She changed the subject when I said I was homesick for dear old Havana.

That proved she was a phony.

I’d never been there, either.

Chapter IV

Less than a mile away, we found the Nile green convertible. That was the shortest mile I ever hoofed, and I don’t like walking. They must have paved the highway with air or something. Monica hoped we’d get better acquainted when I took over the filling station. So I dumped the fuel in. She leaned over and opened the door. I drive a lot and, naturally, I always head for the wheel. Before I knew it, I was at the controls.

“Say, can you beat that?” I said.

“Like it was my own bus. I guess I was thinking in that direction.”

“Like it?” She smiled.

“Plenty. And it’s in good company, Miss del Rio.”

“Monica, please.” Well that made it cozy. I certainly didn’t boot that high-powered bus on the way back. I nosed it into her garage.

“How about using your phone?” I asked.

“Ours is out of kilter.”

“Don’t you have the toughest luck!” I liked her laugh. Hearing it was like drinking a case of champagne.

“Come right in.” The bungalow had regular beach cottage furnishings, wicker and this and that, mainly velour-upholstered. But everything was as clean as if she had a dozen servants per square yard. Before I got into the living room, I knew there wasn’t a shaggy man hanging out there. It wasn’t that there were no men’s hats on the rack. It just didn’t have that messed-up look. The only thing out of place was a pair of field glasses on the window seat which faced Brian’s Last Stop Service Station. I got just one glance, but it was enough. They were twelve-power Zeiss, and the lenses were big enough for night work.

“Nice place you got here, Val,” I said admiringly.

“Simple, but I love it.” I stepped to the phone. Then I learned a few things more, such as why Monica had given me the wheel of her car. She wanted both her hands free, and not to put her arms around me. Her idea was to poke a gat into my ribs. It’d been in her pocketbook all the time. Naturally she didn’t know I was going to walk right in to phone.

“Never mind that call,” she ordered.

“Just wait and don’t move.”

“I guess you’d fire,” I said sarcastically but I was bluffing. She meant business.

“Of course, I would. I’m alone, and you might be a prowler.”

“Nice field glasses you got,” I led off, making small talk.

“Great for watching Cuban ships offshore, huh?”

She didn’t answer.

But I got a glimpse of her, reflected in one of those polychrome mirrors.

It was streaked, though not enough to spoil the view.

Her makeup was redder than ever against that white face, and her mouth was too thin to look kissable any more.

Monica was waiting for something to happen, and it wasn’t all in the bag.

She was worried.

“Mind if I sit down?” I asked.

I began to see a way out.

It was that look from the corner of her eyes, toward the window that faced the filling station.

She was trying not to let watching what I was doing split her attention.

“Stay where you are,” she snapped.

“Look here, if you’re going to plug me and make a good story, you better drill my chest and not my back. And don’t forget to muss up your hair a little.” She sniffed.

“A burglar’s a burglar, even with his back turned.”

“Listen, baby, I got flat feet. My dogs are killing me. How about sitting down or at least shifting my weight? Say, what’s wrong with Brian, and what are you interested in him for?”

“The dirty thief—” She cut short.

“So your feet are tired? Try walking a little. Go slowly to the hall.” She prodded me across the room. We went down the hall. When we got to her bedroom, I didn’t have a chance to look around. All I could see was that the rug was torn, and the dresser had old cigarette bums on it, and there were a lot of clothes in the closet.

“Inside!” Monica had an expressive way of jabbing with a pistol.

“Way inside to the end.” There wasn’t a chance of turning. I walked until a lot of sweet-smelling clothes surrounded me. Suddenly the bar that the hangers were hung on flopped loose, and Monica’s wardrobe half smothered me. Before I could tear all that chiffon and stuff off me, she’d slammed the door and locked it. I heard her pushing the dresser against the door just to make sure.

“Now stay quiet,” she said. I didn’t make any moves until I heard her winding up that green car in the garage. Then I began giving that pastel hell, but there wasn’t enough room for action. Some doors are easy to bust open, piece by piece, only this wasn’t one of them.

I guess the contractor made a mistake and put in a good one. It got so hot inside that I began to choke, and my shoulder was hurting.

Finally I wadded up a bunch of her clothes and made a buffer. That helped me hammer the door, but still I was getting nowhere.

I got up a heavy sweat, just from wondering how things were moving outside.

When the panel began cracking, I did a Houdini.

I got my feet braced so I could use my shoulder for shoving. That didn’t do a bit of good for a while.

Then everything let go, including the dresser in front.

This was no time to phone the cops. I was sure of that the minute I broke loose.

Before I got within jumping distance of the station, my hunch worked out in a large way.

Things were happening.

What they meant, though, I didn’t have the slightest idea.

Two guys were grappling near the gas pumps.

One of them was big and lean.

He wore overalls and had a beard that was dark and shaggy, hiding his face almost up to the cheek bones.

The other fellow was Zahn and he was getting the worst of it.

I quit wondering where Brian was when the shaggy man shook Zahn loose.

Neither had heard me pounding through the sand.

He socked Zahn a honey.

The slick guy went limp and smashed against the ethyl pump.

For a second he hung there, then slowly crumpled up.

The shaggy man dusted his hands, grinned, and made a dive for the brown leather briefcase that lay on the crushed rock.

The boys had been kicking it around during the scuffle. One of the straps had come loose. With the lights I’d left on, down below, it was easy to see. I made a dive for the bearded man.

“Drop it, mug!”

He was no slouch.

He didn’t break that scooping motion at all.

I was ready to knock him cross-eyed, even if huge shoulders did fill that flannel shirt.

But he just heaved the briefcase and smacked me in the face.

The loose strap flicked my eye.

For a split second I couldn’t see.

So my swing missed just enough for me to rasp my knuckles on his beard. It was like a horse’s tail.

He nearly took my head off.

I knew he didn’t have a hammer in his hands, so it must have been his fist.

I guess I could have pulled my gun but I didn’t like shooting after that Hale business.

Anyway, this gent seemed to enjoy using his dukes.

I clinched long enough to clear my head and then I handed him a nice one. He slammed against the wall, and some stucco cracked off.

Then I saw more of the briefcase that had socked me.

Cigar coupons weren’t poking out from under the flap.

They were bonds or stock certificates—a bale of them!

Zahn lay on his face, shaking all over.

His bloody hands clawed the crushed rock, and his face was like hamburger.

He was making funny sounds, as if his mouth were too small for his tongue.

I saw all this while I took a jump for the bearded man.

He yelled something, and then we tangled.

After taking care of Zahn, he should have been winded but he was tough.

We tripped and hit the crushed-rock drive.

That cut the shoulders out of my coat.

I heard a woman screech.

The bearded guy hollered.

Letting go with one hand, he looked like he was flagging the girl to check out.

That gave me a chance to shift around and crack his head against the gas pump. It didn’t hurt him enough to notice. He cut loose with his knee, but I was moving, and the wallop caught my ;hest. That pried us far enough apart for a fresh start. I was dizzy now, and if the woman was still shrieking, I didn’t hear her. The bearded guy got to his feet. I was on my knees, losing time. So I made a dive and tackled him. He crashed down, and a couple minutes more—or maybe it was hours—settled him. When I got to my feet and could stand without grabbing a gas pump, I saw that Zahn was sitting up and feeling his face.

“Where the hell have you been?” he croaked.

“Where have you been?”

“Taking gas to a woman’s car. I just came back. What happened? Who’s this guy here?”

“He killed Brian!” Zahn wiped his bleeding mouth.

“Brained him and knocked me silly. I heard them battling and came downstairs and tried to stop him.”

“Get a rope or a wire before this Tarzan snaps out of it.”

I stood by, ready to boot him down if he made a quick comeback, but Zahn was fast enough.

Then I began to wonder about the briefcase and the woman.

Both were gone, and I heard an engine winding up, down the cross road.

With my head whirling, I couldn’t be sure but I was willing to bet it was Monica and her convertible. There was no sense trying to chase her.

I couldn’t catch that bus with any of the three around the filling station. I wasn’t even sure whether she was heading for the Matanzas Bridge or toward Saint Augustine. So I went to see the corpse.

Chapter V

Zahn was sober but he smelled like a liquor warehouse that had been hit by a bomb.

He was plain soaked with rye.

Without staggering, though, he led me to the foot of the stairs that came down from the kitchen, in back, where there was a walk made of coquina blocks.

Toward the other end, I saw Brian lying under the steps.

He was gripping that big butcher knife from the kitchen.

A flashlight was still glowing under him.

He had flopped across it.

There was enough reflection from the stucco to show me that his skull had been smashed practically in half.

He was twitching and making choked sounds.

How he did it, I don’t know, with his face sunk in the sand.

The tire iron had done a real job of murder.

There wasn’t any use moving him or trying to do anything for him. That was the sickening thing about it. I was glad when he stopped twitching and choking.

He had been handed two socks across the head, and either one would have been plenty. T

hen I saw why the knife was there.

He had been prying up one of the coquina blocks of the walk.

It lay to one side, and underneath it was the print of a briefcase. The only footprints I could see were a couple of skidded ones, and the twisting wind was swiftly driving sand into them. All I heard for a second was Zahn’s heavy breathing. He was still winded, almost as badly as I was, and getting a little dizzy.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

“Upstairs in my room. I felt rotten. Then I heard the riot below. I looked out I the window and saw the bearded guy smack Brian. He would have got away if I hadn’t come downstairs.”

“Did you see a woman around?”

“When? Hell, I had my hands full.”

He looked like he had. I tried another tack.

“How about the briefcase?” I rapped out.

“What briefcase?”

“The one Brian had stashed under the coquina block. You and Hairy-face were kicking it around when I came along.”

“I didn’t notice it.”

“The hell you didn’t! Listen, guy, you haven’t been anywhere yet. You mean you didn’t know Brian had some dough around here?” Zahn’s grin was painful.

“Sure, I knew. That’s what we came here to see him about. But we didn’t know where he kept it.”

“What was it for?” Zahn sat down weekly on the bench.

“He owed us some dough because of gambling on the cuff back in Tulsa. He ran out. Hale and I followed him. We owned the Happy Hour Club and we couldn’t afford to loose sixty grand that way. We came out here when his girlfriend told us about this Last Stop Service Station.”

“And he promised to pay off tonight?”

“He said he had it buried somewhere else. He began promising us that tomorrow he’d fix us up.” So far, it was straight enough. But I was wondering about the bearded guy and Monica. I asked Zahn about him.

“Another wise guy, playing tramp and looking for a cut,” he explained.

“That jane must be the front for the tramp. He had poor Brian scared.”

“Brian, hell! What was his real name? It’ll come out, sooner or later, now that he’s dead.”

“Oh, all right—Ryerson, then. I don’t know who the tramp is or anything, except he beaned Ryerson.”

He went with me to Monica’s house when I wanted to phone.

The place was dark.

If I hadn’t busted out of the closet, she and the bearded gent would have made a clean walkout.

He’d shave, and there’d be no description of her until someone found me.

Having a prisoner wasn’t any satisfaction.

Zahn chuckled when I hung up, after telling the cops the whole score.

“Two corpses, one prisoner.”

“Buck up, Gumbo,” he said.

“After all, you haven’t lost sixty G’s because someone beaned a guy before you could collect. Let’s look the place over and figure out where the woman went.”

This mess left me with a couple of things to think about. Having my client knocked off made a monkey of me.

Then I was wondering how the cops would look at my party with the late Mr. Hale. But I didn’t have time to worry, I was too busy digging into Zahn. I ended by wiring my prisoner to a chair while I went upstairs to look around. A suitcase was packed.

“He didn’t want to see the cops and he was checking out,” Zahn said.

“I was pretty drunk and sick. But when I heard a noise in back, I looked out my window. I saw that Ryerson had a knife and a flashlight and was digging. That made me wonder if he was going to pay and run or just run. Before I could holler, the tramp with the beard came up and slugged him. He never had a chance.”

“So you ran down to head off the killer?”

“That’s right.”

“Sick and drunk but you got going, anyway?” Zahn grinned.

“What would you do for sixty grand?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” But there were a couple things I did know, though I wasn’t telling him.

“Suppose you go to your room and wait. Don’t mess around with anything in Ryerson’s room. I want to talk to the guy with the beard.” I followed him to his door. I couldn’t tell whether he had been packing up or had just stopped unpacking. His suitcase was on a chair, full of stuff and wide open.

“You looked out that window?” I pointed.

“Yes, that’s the one.” I went to it and stared down. Ryerson looked funny, huddled over the flashlight. At that distance, I couldn’t see the shape his head was in.

“Too bad,” I said.

“It would have been an easy shot from here.”

Zahn gave me a dirty look.

“If you hadn’t taken my gat, I’d have done it. It would have been easy.” I guess it was my fault, that I wasn’t too sure, after all. So I went downstairs. When I asked the prisoner who he was, he politely told me his name was George Lake and he wasn’t worried about a thing. He wasn’t surprised when I said Ryerson had been bumped off.

“I didn’t do it,” he said.

“It must have been Zahn.”

“So you know the boys?” I blurted.

His mouth twisted and his beard twitched. His eyes got so narrow they looked like blue murder.

“Rather!” he answered.

“How does that del Rio woman fit into this?”

“I never heard of her.” He said it flat and level.

“Don’t be like that,” I said.

“She snitched the briefcase stuffed full of bonds while you and I were mixing it. I wasn’t too dizzy to hear and see.”

“That’s her business,” Lake retorted from behind all that wire beard.

“It’s her money. Ryerson stole it, and I helped her reclaim it. If you want her as a material witness, you have my sympathy. Try to bring her back to . Anything I say can be used against me, and I don’t give a damn.”

“You know the answers.”

“I ought to. I’m a lawyer. That is, I used to be.”

He had courage, all right—guts, not bluster.

With a murder rap hanging over him, he was positively cheerful.

“You like Monica del Rio?”

“Plenty,” Lake admitted.

“But what is that to you?”

“Ryerson was my client. If you killed him—and it looks like you did—you’re my meat if it takes ’til judgment day. If you didn’t, I’m all for you.”

“You’re not boosting Zahn?” he asked suspiciously.

“I wasn’t working for him. But look here, Lake.” I stuffed a cigarette into his mouth.

“Monica is a long way from home. If Zahn found Ryerson, he can find her. You won’t be on deck to look out for her any more.” He laughed in my face.

“No good, Gumbo. You want to find Monica and that briefcase. So did Hale and Zahn.”

“Oh, all right. Let’s hear your story. I like stories.” Lake grinned.

He was the happiest guy I ever saw wired to a chair.

“I was waiting for Ryerson and Zahn to run out, once you had shot Hale,” he began.

“I was sure they’d want to leave before the police arrived. Investigation might have exposed the hidden bonds, negotiable paper that passes on delivery. It’s like cash, you know.”

“Yeah, I know, only I never owned any. You heard me give it to Hale?” Lake grinned.

“Mister, I saw it and liked it. I was squatting in that garage at the time. Yes, I was intimidating Ryerson with air-gun shots to make him run out so I could nail him with the loot in his hands. But I didn’t kill him. You know I could have any time before you came here and nearly any time after. It would have been easy.” I admire nerve, and Lake had plenty. He was talking now the way he wouldn’t later. Battered, tired, and a big job just finished, he was considerably shaken. Who wouldn’t have been?

“So you beaned Ryerson? You were sore, thinking of living in the dunes for weeks.”

“Don’t be stupid, Gumbo. While I was waiting, a man came out of the office. He looped around the vacant store and raced toward the rear. I didn’t hear any voices or wrangling. A minute later, a man came back. It was Zahn. I tackled him as he headed for the car that was farthest from Ryerson’s.

“Then you came up, damn your hide, as I was pounding Zahn silly. I’d seen Ryerson, through a window, packing a suitcase. Therefore, I knew the loot would be dug up. But the man I tangled with was Zahn, and he was carrying a briefcase. The idea was to have Monica run away with it while I toyed with you. I didn’t know you were a detective.”

“You know now, and getting kayoed isn’t my idea of toying. You’re on the spot, pal. Monica needs a lift. Well, do we play ball?” He laughed in my face again. I was beginning to get tired of it.

“I still don’t know a thing about you.”

“Oh, is that it? Weren’t you the guy who pried the phone off the wall?”

“Yes, I did that.” “Why?”

“So you couldn’t call the police after you settled Hale. I wanted you to go to Monica’s to call them, figuring on having you kept there. That would make the odds against me a little better—only Zahn and Ryerson, and both ready to run out.” That sounded right, but there was a catch.

“If you thought I was a mug and not a legitimate detective, why’d you think I’d want to phone?” I asked him.

“I was playing every chance. If you hadn’t wanted to call, she’d have got you into the house some other way. Now what?”

“So you’re asking me things, huh? All right. Suppose you ask me what weapon killed Ryerson.” “Well, what did kill him? It wasn’t a gun, or I’d have heard it. Ask Zahn. He knows.” “That tie iron you used to jimmy the phone,” I shot out.

“It’ll have your fingerprints.” He made a good job of spitting, considering that his mouth was bruised.

“You’ll wipe them off if I tell you about Monica?” He grinned. There wasn’t anything more to do with that guy. Between him and Zahn, one of them had cooled Ryerson. Each accused the other, and it was up to me to figure which was the one. I had a hunch, but it would take plenty of proving. What made the job even lousier was that the cops might pick the wrong guy. Then what chance would I stand?

Chapter VI

For a while, things began unreeling.

The sheriff, a long, hatched-faced fellow, came out with a couple of city detectives from Saint Augustine, which is the St. Gumbo County seat. One of them was a tall guy named Castro and he looked a little like Zahn used to, before he got his face lifted—smooth, darkish, and with sleek hair. The other was a guy with an undershot jaw and eyebrows like nail brushes.

He was stocky, and his puss was square and tough.

It was Sheriff Haley who worried me, though.

He just stood there, teetering on the balls of his feet and sucking his pipe and saying nothing.

He let Castro do all the looking, and the other fellow, O’Toole, did the tobacco chewing. T

hen there was a second carload of fellows with cameras and fingerprint stuff. A nice time was had by all, except the two stiffs and the prisoner.

“I didn’t brain Ryerson,” was all Lake would say.

“He was a skunk, and I would have beaten him silly. I wouldn’t have used a weapon.”

It wasn’t my party for the moment. I was busy because the sheriff went out to see Hale, who was still lying there in the sand.

“So you let him have it, huh?” he asked grimly.

“What would you have done, Sheriff? If I was a shooting person, wouldn’t I have let that bearded guy have it instead of taking this beating? Hell, he nearly killed me.” The sheriff nodded.

“Yeah, Lake did nearly do that.” He fumbled with his droopy mustache and jerked his thumb back toward the filling station at the prisoner.

“He sure did give you hell. Only Zahn says you hated Hale’s guts.”

“He did, huh?” I was losing patience.

“You saw that dummy. These two guys came to squeeze dough out of Ryerson. I was working for Ryerson and that’s why I was in the way.”

“You could have thrown something,” Sheriff Haley said stubbornly.

“If I took a shot at you, what would you throw? A slug?”

“Sure,” he agreed.

“I would. But he was shooting at a dummy. That’s different.” I tried to draw him a picture that would be real simple.

“It was his second shot that made me give it to him,” I said, like talking to a kid.

“Oh, I guess I forgot that,” he admitted.

“Do you want to pinch me or leave it to the D.A. to decide?”

“Well, you’re a private detective. If I don’t pinch you, you’ll*be messing around, getting in people’s way. I guess I ought to pinch you.”

The sheriff was a practical fellow.

He ended by figuring there was no use doing anything until he’d seen the D.A.

That was his general method, anyhow—doing nothing and letting Castro and O’Toole and the fingerprint man handle the job. When I finally headed for town, I was wondering how I stood on this business of plugging Hale.

I didn’t like Zahn’s face.

He probably couldn’t twist the story enough to keep me in a jam but he might get me into one for a while.

It might be enough to get me indicted, say, or jugged until the D.A. got wise.

Why should Zahn try that? Well, I was pretty sure he’d killed Ryerson. He wanted me discredited as a witness, which would leave him and his story the main prop of the case. That way, he’d not only be free of supicion but he’d have a chance to find Monica del Rio and the bundle of dough. One thing was lucky. He couldn’t change his story to make me the guy who had brained Ryerson.

But discrediting me—you know what happens to a guy and his testimony, once he’s been under suspicion—would be a worthwhile move.

Like I said, I was sure that between Zahn and Lake, Zahn was the one who had cooled Ryerson.

But that would take lots of proving.

At first, Zahn didn’t know I was locked in a closet, so he was fussed up.

Once he learned where I’d been, he got real bright and cheery, and a gent who’s lost sixty grand hasn’t any business cheering up.

It was lucky that my pal at the agency went to bat for me.

He knew the right people.

The sheriff softened a bit, and I ended up at the little hotel near Fort Marion, overlooking the Bridge of Lions and Vilano Beach and the breakwater.

There was a radio in the room. I turned it on, being tired but not sleepy.

The air was crowded with police calls.

They wanted the highway patrols to look for a green convertible, with a black-haired woman, supposed to be heading for Georgia. Any other way out of  would take too long.

Someone would pick her up. I wondered if she’d be foxy enough to take that risk and beat it, just by doing the unreasonable thing. I was beginning to nod when my phone rang.

It was Monica, all breathless!

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” she asked.

“I ought to be after that rotten trick,” I grumbled. She laughed.

“If I’d known—if Uncle George had known—who you were, everything would have been different. I listened to the news flashes.”

“Say, where are you?”

“A couple of blocks away.” She gave me the name of the place.

“Why should I run out? As soon as I had time to think it over, I called on the police and turned over the briefcase. Evidence, you know.”

“But the highway patrols are looking for you!”

“They were,” she corrected.

“You’re way behind the times, and so is the radio. I want you to help me clear Uncle George.”

Getting George Lake out of that jam began to sound already like a tough job. According to the news dispatches on the air, his fingerprints were the only ones on the blunt instrument.

“Lady, am I a magician?” I said to Monica.

“It’ll cost you plenty, so why pick on me?”

“You were there. You saw them all, just before it happened. I don’t care what it costs. Come over right away, won’t you?”

What else could I do? Among other things, I needed cash badly, and someone had made a monkey of me by knocking off my client.

In a way, though, I didn’t want the case.

Supposing I ended by proving that George Lake had cooled Ryerson?

But I went over to see her. I wanted to, anyhow. Monica’s hotel wasn’t far from Bay Street. There was no lounge private enough, so I planted myself in a deep chair in her room. She put up a brave front, but her eyes were desperate. They got under my skin.

“What’s the score?” I led off.

“Now that you know who I am, tell me.”

“Ryerson was my uncle’s law partner, back in Tulsa. He embezzled all the securities from my mother’s estate. You see, Uncle George was executor without bond. He hadn’t got permission from the administrator to turn the securities over to me—about a hundred and ten thou- sand in negotiable paper.”

“Let’s get something else straight. You gave me just the room number, not your registered name. Who are you, anyway?”

“The name is Lake, like my uncle’s. Del Rio was camouflage. This embezzlement happened while I was in the East, at school. Ryerson had never seen me, so I furnished a front for Uncle George.”

“Ryerson left him holding the bag?” She nodded.

“He gambled a lot, though we didn’t know it then. When it was discovered, the securities were missing from the partnership deposit box, the probate judge lifted the roof. Uncle George’s story wasn’t good enough to keep him out of jail. I did my best, but they sent him up. Naturally, the firm of Lake and Ryerson was finished. Everyone was sorry for poor Mr. Ryerson, who left town. Nothing could be proved against him, you see.”

“So you picked up the trail from Kathleen, Ryerson’s girl friend?”

“That’s right,” Monica answered.

“That was when she came from  and began running around with a fellow named Hale. Kathleen Wayland didn’t know me and she let a few things slip. So when Uncle George got out, I helped him by taking that cottage near the service station. He lived in the little cellar room he dug under the house. The idea was to intimidate Ryerson until he ran out with his loot. Then Uncle George was going to catch him.

“You see, my uncle couldn’t prove Ryerson had the bonds until he caught him with them. An ex-convict’s suspicions aren’t well received. The reason I picked up the briefcase and ran was to avoid the chance of a slip. No matter what happened later, Uncle George’s reputation would be clear. He wanted it that way.”

“Only he ends up looking a murder rap in the eye. ” That shook her but only for a second.

“He’d rather be accused of killing a thief than have people think he had robbed me!” she retorted. I could understand that.

“How about Hale and Zahn?” I asked.

“Hale, I think, is the one who led Ryerson into gambling on credit, then 113 blackmailed him into stealing. When Ryerson did embezzle to save himself, he decided he might as well keep the loot and get a fresh start in life. ”

That made sense.

Like I said, Ryerson looked like a decent chap with just one weakness.

After seeing his partner sent up on a bum rap, he got sore at himself and at Hale and Zahn.

He didn’t have nerve enough to confess and clear George Lake, so he ran out. T

hen his girl crossed him, and the wolves tracked him to .

“What are you scowling about?” she asked finally.

“Must you bite that cigar in half?” I looked up and shook my head.

“Thinking always hurts me. When you said they blackmailed Ryerson into embezzlement, it gave me an idea. Every trick works two ways.”

“What do you mean?” She leaned forward eagerly and caught my arm.

“I’m not saying now. It’s pretty thin, but the gag might work. It looks like the only chance, anyhow. If it wasn’t for Uncle George’s fingerprints on that tire iron, Zahn would be in the thick of it with him.”

“Is it that bad?” she blurted, white-faced.

“Fingerprints are hard to beat.”

“But he didn’t do it!”

“Maybe he didn’t, baby, but the cops have a case. Your uncle had a motive. He could have been sore enough to kill Ryerson. Do you think I’m a magician, making the police back down? I’m liable to make a chump of myself, like I’ve already done twice tonight.” She had gorgeous eyes, and now they were full of tears. When she caught both my arms, her nails dug right in.

“You’ve got to help me! Can’t you risk failure? Don’t be so proud, you big gorilla!”

“I’m sorry for you and your uncle. Honest, I am. But if I get on the job, I might find out he really had done it. If I do, it’ll kill his last chance of making a defense. My client was knocked off, and I’m not pulling my punches. Would you like that?” Her chin lifted.

“You can’t scare me. Uncle George didn’t do it.”

“Okay, baby, you asked for it. I’m on the job.”

For a second she looked at me as if she were going to kiss me.

And then—I’ll be damned if she didn’t!

I walked out, trying not to breathe and figuring it would sure be hell if Lake really had cooled Ryerson.

Chapter VII

The next morning, I had a session with the D.A. and got myself all squared about Hale.

That part was easy.

But when I told him he didn’t have a snowball’s chance against Lake, he flared up. He not only flared up—he sprang up and glared.

“You’re crazy! It’s plain larceny, taking Monica Lake’s retainer. Look here!” He threw me some enlarged fingerprint photos and the rest of the picture stuff.

“Lake handled that tire iron. He had the motive and the opportunity. We found that air-gun of his. He admits he tried to drive Ryerson crazy.

“The rest of it is easy. Lake kept under control until he had the bonds and then he cracked. Why would Zahn do the job? You were away. Ryerson was packing up. The securities were dug up. According to your own story, Ryerson was too timid to fight back.” That was a pretty good mouthful. There wasn’t much I could say, so I just sat looking at the photos of the tire iron, the corpse, everything. I’d made the D.A. sore on purpose, and he’d bitten. Then to calm him down, I said:

“To hell with you. I’ll handle the case free. I’m not blackmailing Monica Lake.” I didn’t tell him about the photos. The case looked a shade easier, though not enough to brag about. No amount of argument that Lake hadn’t done it was worth a dime. I had to prove that Zahn had done it, which the photos wouldn’t do. So I checked out and had a word with Lake’s lawyer. He was a nice chap but a pessimist who had advised Lake to plead guilty to manslaughter or second degree.

Then he’d put Monica on the stand.

Murder for such a woman is seldom frowned on.

Lake was stubborn as a pig, but I persuaded him to let his lawyer tell the reporters he was pleading guilty.

That’d get on the air in time.

I spent the afternoon out at the Last Stop Service Station.

I walked up and down those creaking steps.

I looked down from Ryerson’s room, Zahn’s room, the bathroom.

I squatted in the grease of the garage.

I ran back and forth, figuring how I’d go about conking a guy, squatting under the steps that led from the second floor.

Finally I dug up the mate to the tire iron and practiced conking a fellow.

If anyone had seen me, he’d have said I was nuts, but there was nothing but sandpipers and gulls around. Maybe I was nuts, anyway.

At last, I laid the tire iron near the phone, checked up on the liquor supply and found it had been seized for evidence. It all came back to the blackmail which Hale and Zahn had used to make a thief of Ryerson. So I drove back to Saint Augustine to do some blackmailing myself. First, I called Monica and told her to drive out, run her car into a cross drive, and hide in the sand dunes.

“Never mind the details,” I said.

“Just watch the station and listen. Whatever you hear will be evidence, unless it’s me being shot in the back.”

Then I went to see Zahn.

I found him in the lobby of a flossy hotel, one with a $2,000,000 price tag on its souvenir post cards.

Saint Augustine has more big hotels per square yard than any other city on earth.

Zahn had a good cigar in his face, and four more in his breast pocket.

They reached up from the blue-edged handkerchief that went with the gray suit and red-striped tie.

His face wasn’t quite fit for a screen test, but then neither was mine, after George Lake had worked us over.

Zahn didn’t lose that contented look when I barged in. He had no business being contented when he was out sixty grand he had almost collected.

A dealer in hot paper would easily have given him that for Monica’s legacy. I picked a Juan de Fuca from his pocket and threw my old cigar away.

“You got your nerve, you cheap mug!” he said.

“So have you, looking so cool after losing the dough you and Hale figured on grabbing. You’re wearing a contented- cow look because George Lake is taking I the rap. Otherwise, you’d have a face longer’n the bridge with the lions at each end.”

“What do you mean?” He knew, but I told him.

“You slugged Ryerson. You crabbed a nice job I had. I’m broke, but you still got dough. You’re the sole owner of the Happy Hour Club, now that Hale’s dead. What do you say we play ball?”

“Wait a minute, fellow. Why should I want to play ball?”

“Come on out to my car. We can talk better.” He came along. I went into my dance before I touched the starter.

“It’s this way, Zahn. The cops have muffed things. There’s a lot that doesn’t add up, out there at the Last Stop Service Station. Things happened too fast while I was hauling gas to Monica’s stalled car. They happened so fast that you got a goofy story. If you hadn’t, you’d be with the cops, sweating, instead of stalling here as a material witness against an innocent guy.”

“What would you say happened?” he came back.

“Well, you already had a hunch that Ryerson figured a run-out, so you faked being drunk. Most of that liquor was spilled on your clothes from a bottle, not from your mouth. The bathroom didn’t look right for anybody claiming he was sick. Your clothes didn’t.”

“So what? The cops aren’t interested in my health. Go ahead and tell them, sap.”

“That’s because they don’t think the way I do. I’m going out to make that place a genuine last stop for you, pal. It’s gonna be your last stop, unless you suddenly get smart. What makes you think you can knock off my client and crab a nice job?”

“Oh, putting the bee on me, huh? Try it.” I sat back against the cushions and laughed. Then I dug into my pocket and handed back the automatic I’d taken away from him.

“I don’t believe in petty larceny. This is yours.” I jerked the slide back and held the gat so he could see when I let go. A cartridge slipped into the chamber, out of the clip.

“My compliments. If you think you want to pay me with  this instead of in cash, pick your time.”

He sat looking at the gat.

He pumped out a shell and frowned.

Then he looked up, satisfied the gun hadn’t been tinkered with and that the action was okay.

He hefted the cartridge he picked up from the floor. It weighed right, so he grinned a little.

“Been funny if you’d handed me blanks and claimed self- defense.”

“Hell, I knew you’d look. Now, maybe you’d rather settle in cash, after all. Hale didn’t have a chance gunning me, and neither do you.”

“Honest Gumbo,” he guffawed, and winked.

“Listen, you rat, I was a square cop!”

“That why they call you Honest Gumbo?” I was really sore, getting a rib from him. Then I caught myself. All those dirty winks were coming in handy.

“Well, look here, Zahn. Lake’s decided to plead guilty. Defending his niece’s legacy and trying to square his own reputation will make it a bit easier. He’ll claim Ryerson’s knife and then he struck. What can I do? I ain’t really selling Lake out. He just hasn’t any guts.”

“Where do I come in?” Zahn was puzzled.

“No one can prove Lake didn’t do it,” I explained.

“Unless they prove that you did do it. The D.A. will drop Lake like a hot rock, but only if someone makes a case against you. And I’m the guy that’ll do it, you rotten heel, unless you square up for the job I lost with Ryerson.”

“You can’t prove it. You’re nuts.”

“All right, I’m nuts. I don’t want your dough unless you think I rate it. Five grand is the price, and a man should earn what he’s asking. So before you pay off, I’m going to prove to you I’ll really be earning five grand.”

“Huh! Why’d Lake cop a plea?”

“Because he’s crazy about his niece. If he doesn’t play ball, she’ll be nailed as an accessory—hiding him before the crime and helping him get away.” He got a fresh cigar, and I handed him my lighter. He was thinking.

“You really figure you can throw out a case like that?” he asked finally.

“Brother, I’ve offered to prove it to you in private. I’m going to act out the crime the way you did it. When you see, you’ll reach for your dough. And I can’t cross you. If I did, I’d joke my head out of an accessory-after-the-fact rap—concealing a criminal. Right?”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

He wasn’t frowning any more.

He was that smooth, slick smile, except for the gauze and tape on his face.

“Show me.” It was getting near dusk when we headed out over the bridge and passed the ostrich and alligator farm at the north end of the island. It didn’t take us long to cover the fifteen miles to the Last Stop Service Station. When I got out of my bus, I knew it was going to be somebody’s last stop— Zahn’s, George Lake’s, or mine. Zahn followed me into the office, and I pointed at the tire iron.

“Just like the one that killed Ryerson,” I said,

“except it hasn’t got Lake’s fingerprints on it. It’s wiped clean.”

Zahn began rubbing his vest buttons, slow and languid.

“Now what?” he breathed.

That worried me.

He’d made that same kind of move the last time he had tried to pull a gun on me.

If he got ambitious when my back was turned, I wouldn’t be clearing George Lake, and my reputation would make Zahn okay with the law.

If I beat him to it, I’d be behind the eight ball. I couldn’t make this case against a dead man.

Then that Hale business would sink me if I got Zahn before he began resisting arrest.

Boy, I was sweating, and my stomach felt funny.

I glanced around for a second, wondering if Monica was hid out of sight and yet was close enough to hear things.

“While we go upstairs, I’ll explain,” I said.

“I’ll be Ryerson. You’ll be yourself. And we’ll imagine Lake is squatting in the garage.”

“I like games,” Zahn said, chuckling.

“Don’t be afraid of handling that tire iron down there. You’ll use a handkerchief the way you did when you hit Ryerson.” He tightened a bit, then shrugged.

“The cops thought of that one, sap,” he retorted.

“Okay, okay. Lake’s greasy hands left prints that your handkerchief didn’t blot. Transmission grease is like that. But don’t worry about being framed by that iron. The original one is with the D.A.”

“Get going!” he snapped, impatient now.

“All right. You’re in that room, drunk.”

He went over the threshold into the room while I walked into Ryerson’s room.

“I’m packing a suitcase,” I called.

“You’re not really drunk. You know he’s trying to dig up that loot and run out before the cops get here. If Monica, you, Ryerson, and I get questioned about Hale, someone is going to spill about stolen securities. Then you’ll be out of luck for keeps. Ryerson takes a rap. You both want to run out, and you know he’s trying to do you another double- cross.”

“Mind reader, huh?” Zahn sneered.

“That ain’t worth five grand.” I came out and went into the kitchen.

“I got a flashlight and a heavy knife,” I said.

“Heavier than this little one I just picked up. I hear you snoring and mumbling. It fools me. I tried to get you drunk and I don’t know you’re faking. So I’m going down those creaky stairs to the back to dig under a paving block.”

“All right. Are you doing it or just talking?”

“I’m doing it. While I’m doing it, you’ll see you were a damn liar. You cooked a fast story and it’s lousy. If I hadn’t nailed Lake, the cops would have grabbed you and you’d be sunk. But they’re so happy about Lake, they didn’t think about the cockeyed things.”

“Such as what?”

He was polishing his vest buttons.

But his eyes told me he was afraid to draw, even if I had both hands full with a flashlight and a knife.

“Put up or shut up.”

“When Ryerson went down the back stairs, you knew what for. You couldn’t sneak down after him, because the creaking would give you away. You didn’t have your gat, so you ran down the front steps which are solid. At the phone, you picked up the tire iron and sneaked along the side of the building toward the back. Lake saw a man, and it wasn’t I me nor the Sultan of Sulu.”

“Nuts! The D.A. doesn’t believe Lake.”

“I do, Zahn. You needed a weapon because Ryerson had a big knife. You ran up behind him and beaned him. Then you came back the same way you went. When you headed for your car, Lake tackled you.”

“No good,” Zahn said but he licked his lips, and his eyes narrowed.

“I was in my room. I heard Lake mix with Ryerson. I watched it from my window. When I saw him drop the tire iron, I went down and tangled with him. You saw the fight.”

Chapter VIII

It was easy to see what kind of mess I was trying to clear up.

Each story sounded logical, and the breaks were against Lake.

But I was ready for the payoff and praying Zahn would bite so that Monica would hear.

I needed a witness to anything he’d say when I popped it to him.

He let out a deep breath. My story seemed to have caused a bit of strain.

He was itching to use his gun but he was afraid.

“There’s one bad slip the D.A. will see when I talk to him,” I said.

“Go down and grab that tire iron as if you were going to slug me when I squat over the bonds. See what kind of fingerprints you’d leave. Then use that iron like you were trying to pry a phone off the wall. Same whorls and loops but in a different position, because your fingers will be spreading from a different grip.”

“What about it?” he grated.

“Just this. The prints on the iron in the D.A.’s office show that Lake couldn’t have made them while smashing the phone. The D.A. never tumbled because he had the case in a bag. Is that worth five grand for me to shut up?”

“You dirty—” That slipped. He looked foolish, clenched his fists, then relaxed and smiled.

“You’d try to put the bee on me for that? It ain’t worth a cent!” I laughed right out, half turned to the door.

“You haven’t heard the rest. Wait till I go into my act.” I was talking over my shoulder as I headed for the stairs.

“You made one more slip that’s an all-time high. It’s as good as hanging yourself.”

“What?” His snarl nearly made me jump and draw.

“You said you were at your window, kind of leaning out and looking down, so you could see Lake cool off Ryerson. It all hangs on that. You saw him hit twice.”

“Sure I did. Hell, don’t I have eyes? Wasn’t there a moon?” I was almost to the ground now, and he’d come to the head of the steps. They creaked loudly under my weight.

I still had my back turned, but I twisted my head a little to one side to watch him when I said:

“The window’s open in your room, just like it was. I’m going to squat like Ryerson did. You poke your head out and see if you can watch me. From that window, you couldn’t see him. The landing blocks the line of sight from up there!”

“Huh!” His jaw sagged, and his hands opened and closed.

“Yeah, you described the socking perfectly, only you couldn’t see it from there. You could have from the bath but not from the one you pointed to. Is that worth five grand? It’s worth that much to Lake.”

“You—you damned liar!” he yapped.

“I’m squatting. Go to the window and look.”

He said something, kind of choked, but I didn’t answer.

When he stumbled down the cross hall, his feet thumped like clods on a coffin in that empty house.

I took the last couple of steps real slow, looking around intently for a glimpse of Monica.

The stairs, in case I’ve forgotten to mention it, just came out from the landing but hugged the wall. You get the picture.

One of the coquina slabs of the little patio was well under the overhang of the stairs.

I squatted with my back to the window, the flashlight playing on the place where poor Ryerson had made his last stop.

Zahn was thumping across the floor of his room. I could count the steps.

They stopped.

Maybe I lost count, but he must have been at the sill. I hoped Monica would not get hysterical and ruin it all.

The payoff was hanging on exactly what Zahn did and said when he looked out to see if my story was worth five grand.

He didn’t say a thing.

Suddenly a window jerked up with a smash. I had forgotten to tell him I’d lowered them all just a couple of inches too much for him to lean out easily.

I stayed squatted, but it was tough waiting.

I could feel the sweat running down my face.

Maybe it was dumb, letting him have his gun, but I’d had to or he’d have been afraid to come out.

Card sharps have a move they call

“forcing” a card. You think you’re selecting any card in the deck, but you actually have it pushed on you. You couldn’t grab any but the planted one.

No wonder the fellow can tell the spots on you, huh? Well, I did the same with Zahn, only I forced a window on him. He had spent a rotten half hour, thinking he wouldn’t be able to see me. Naturally he couldn’t from the window I

“forced.” He’d said, offhand, that he was looking out of one of the two. When he pointed, everybody had let it go at that. Why wouldn’t they? Nobody was making a point of exactly which window. A window is a window, isn’t it? So there he was, above me. He was thinking about Lake’s fingerprints, how they would crab the case and how that would make the D. A. look for another suspect. I’d shaken Zahn on two plays. One was faked, the other real enough. He couldn’t take it, and I was wondering whether I could. The window that was jerked up was the one through which he could see me too damned easily. He began firing while the sash was still rattling. He must have had his gat out before he made a move. Just then, a woman screeched like a fire siren. It was Monica, getting nervous about me, I guess. That spoiled Zahn’s shooting for a split second. A slug kicked up sand while I rolled away from the flashlight and wedged myself against the back of the bottom step. He was pouring lead and hollering, half crazy:

“You dirty heel! You think you can pull that?” Splinters hit me. I couldn’t risk letting him empty his gun, so I let him have it. He was too wild to have sense enough to duck or run. He was just killing mad. He jerked back over the sill, and his half empty gun dropped to the sand. Before he could recover enough to run out, I dashed up and grabbed him. Zahn wasn’t hurt bad. I had got him once, high in the chest near the shoulder. My other shot had gone wild and clipped some tape from his cheek. When a guy is pumping away at you, it isn’t like target practice. Monica was out in the open now. She followed me, but I made her stay in the hall. I guess it made her sick when I picked Zahn up and slapped him down.

“I’ll tear your head off!” I snorted.

“Trying to plug me in the back, huh? Thought you could try that a second time, huh? He was bleeding like a stuck pig.

“I’ll leave you here to drip dry if you don’t cough up. You did it, didn’t you?” The unlucky mug had been running into one snag right after another and now he’d missed making this my last stop. He was half crazy.

“Sure I did!” he screeched.

“Try to make it stick! I’d do the same for you! You—”

He’d heard Monica’s yeep.

That had probably saved my hide, because I couldn’t turn around to face him until he’d opened fire.

But he wasn’t using his bean.

Before he had sense enough to shut up, she had heard enough. When he realized she’d tuned in on the works, he nearly collapsed. So we hauled him to town.

The way it turned out, it hadn’t been absolutely necessary for me to give him a chance at my back.

The position of Lake’s hands when he used the tire iron to jimmy the phone got the D.A. off on a fresh start, and Uncle George walked out clean.

Zahn’s trying to hose my back with lead was what made his rap tougher.

I heard later it was Zahn’s last stop, and he got complete service. George Lake is back in Tulsa, practicing law without a partner.

He’s on top again, like he deserves to be.

He’s okay, even if he did nearly knock my head off.

And every once in a while I get a postcard from Monica.

Yeah, a postcard.

If I were ten years younger and didn’t have a bald spot and red face like my Uncle Charlie Brian, maybe I’d have got more than a card.

But what the hell, a guy can’t have everything, can he?

The End