The Collected Dashiell Hammett

The Parthian Shot

The Smart Set, October 1922

When the boy was six months old Paulette Key acknowledged that her hopes and efforts had been futile, that the baby was indubitably and irredeemably a replica of its father. She could have endured the physical resemblance, but the duplication of Harold Key’s stupid obstinacy — unmistakable in the fixity of the child’s inarticulate demands for its food, its toys — was too much for Paulette. She knew she could not go on living with two such natures! A year and a half of Harold’s domination had not subdued her entirely. She took the little boy to church, had him christened Don, sent him home by his nurse, and boarded a train for the West.

Immortality

10 Story Book, November 1922, as Daghull Hammett

I know little of science or art or finance or adventure. I have never written anything except brief and infrequent letters to my sister in Sacramento. My name, were it not painted on the windows of my shop, would be unknown to even the Polish family that lives and has many children across the street. Yet I shall live in the memories of men when those names are on every one’s lips now are forgotten, and when the events of today are dim. I do not know whether I shall be remembered as a great wit, a dreamer of strange dreams, a great thinker, or a philosopher; but I do know that I, Oscar Blichy, the grocer, shall be an immortal. I have saved nearly seventeen thousand dollars from the profits of my shop during the last twenty years. I shall add to this amount as much as I can until the day of my death, and then it is to go to the writer of the best biography of me!

The Great Lovers

(Article)

The Smart Set, November 1922

Now that the meek and the humble have inherited the earth and it were arrogance to look down upon any man — the apologetic being the mode in lives — I should like to go monthly to some hidden gallery and, behind drawn curtains, burn perfumed candles before the images of:

Joachim Murat, King of Naples, who mourned, “Ah, the poor people! They are ignorant of the misfortune they are about to suffer. They do not know that I am going away.”

The Earl of Chatham, who said, “My lord, I am sure I can save the country and no one else can.”

Louis XIV of France, who perhaps said, “L’etat c’est moi,” and who, upon receiving news of the battle of Ramillies, cried, “God has then forgotten all that I have done for Him!”

William Rufus, who held that if he had duties toward God, God also had duties toward him.

Prince Metternich, who wrote in his diary, “Fain’s memoirs of the year 1813 are worth reading — they contain my history as well as Napoleon’s”; and who said of his daughter, “She is very like my mother; therefore possesses some of my charm.”

Joseph II of Austria, who said, “If I wish to walk with my equals, then I must go to the Capuchin crypt.”

Charles IV of Spain, who, playing in a quartet, ignored a three-bar pause which occurred in his part; and upon being told of his mistake by Olivieri, laid down his bow in amazement, protesting, “The king never waits for anyone!”

The Prince of Kaunitz Rietberg, whose highest praise was, “Even I could not have done it better”; and who said, “Heaven takes a hundred years to form a great genius for the generation of an empire, after which it rests a hundred years. This makes me tremble for the Austrian monarchy after my death.”

Virginicchia Oldoni, Countess of Castiglione, who kissed the baby, saying, “When he is grown up you will tell him that the first kiss he ever received was given him by the most beautiful woman of the century.”

The Lord Brougham, who paid for his dinner with a cheque, explaining to his companions, “I have plenty of money, but, don’t you see, the host may prefer my signature to the money.”

Paul of Russia, who had his horse given fifty strokes, exclaiming, “There, that is for having stumbled with the emperor!”

And Thomas Hart Benton, who, when his publishers consulted him concerning the number of copies of his book, Thirty Years’ View, to be printed, replied, “Sir, you can ascertain from the last census how many persons there are in the United States who can read, sir”; and who refused to speak against Calhoun when he was ill, saving, “When God Almighty lays His hands on a man, Benton takes his off!”...

The Barber and His Wife

Brief Stories, December 1922, as Peter Collinson

Each morning at seven-thirty the alarm clock on the table beside their bed awakened the Stemlers to perform their daily comedy; a comedy that varied from week to week in degree only. This morning was about the mean.

Louis Stemler, disregarding the still ringing clock, leaped out of bed and went to the open window, where he stood inhaling and exhaling with a great show of enjoyment — throwing out his chest and stretching his arms voluptuously. He enjoyed this most in the winter, and would prolong his stay before the open window until his body was icy under his pajamas. In the coast city where the Stemlers lived the morning breezes were chill enough, whatever the season, to make his display of ruggedness sufficiently irritating to Pearl.

Meanwhile, Pearl had turned off the alarm and closed her eyes again in semblance of sleep. Louis was reasonably confident that his wife was still awake; but he could not be certain. So when he ran into the bath-room to turn on the water in the tub, he was none too quiet.

He then re-entered the bed-room to go through an elaborate and complicated set of exercises, after which he returned to the bath-room, got into the tub and splashed merrily — long enough to assure any listener that to him a cold bath was a thing of pleasure. Rubbing himself with a coarse towel, he began whistling; and always it was a tune reminiscent of the war. just now “Keep the Home Fires Burning” was his choice. This was his favorite, rivaled only by “Till We Meet Again,” though occasionally he rendered “Katy,” “What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?” or “How’re You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm?” He whistled low and flatly, keeping time with the brisk movements of the towel. At this point Pearl would usually give way to her irritation to the extent of turning over in bed, and the rustling of the sheets would come pleasantly from the bed-room to her husband’s ears. This morning as she turned she sighed faintly, and Louis, his eager ears catching the sound, felt a glow of satisfaction.

Dry and ruddy, he came back to the bed-room and began dressing, whistling under his breath and paying as little apparent attention to Pearl as she to him, though each was on the alert for any chance opening through which the other might be vexed. Long practice in this sort of warfare had schooled them to such a degree, however, that an opening seldom presented itself. Pearl was at a decided disadvantage in these morning encounters, inasmuch as she was on the defensive, and her only weapon was a pretense of sleep in the face of her husband’s posturing. Louis, even aside from his wife’s vexation, enjoyed every bit of his part in the silent wrangle; the possibility that perhaps after all she was really asleep and not witnessing his display of manliness was the only damper on his enjoyment.

When Louis had one foot in his trousers, Pearl got out of bed and into her kimono and slippers, dabbed a little warm water on her face, and went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. In the ensuing race she forgot her slight headache. It was a point of honor with her never to rise until her husband had his trousers in his hand, and then to have his breakfast on the table in the kitchen — where they ate it — by the time he was dressed. Thanks to the care with which he knotted his necktie, she usually succeeded. Louis’s aim, of course, was to arrive in the kitchen fully dressed and with the morning paper in his hand before the meal was ready, and to be extremely affable over the delay. This morning. as a concession to a new shirt — a white silk one with broad cerise stripes — he went in to breakfast without his coat and vest, surprising Pearl in the act of pouring the coffee.

“Breakfast ready, pet?” he asked.

“It will be by the time you’re dressed,” his wife called attention to his departure from the accepted code.

And so this morning honors were about even.

Louis read the sports pages while he ate. with occasional glances at his cerise-striped sleeves. He was stimulated by the clash between the stripe and his crimson sleeve-garters. He had a passion for red, and it testified to the strength of the taboos of his ilk that he did not wear red neckties.

“How do you feel this morning, pet?” he asked after he had read what a reporter had to say about the champion’s next fight, and before he started on the account of the previous day’s ball games.

“All right.”

Pearl knew that to mention the headache would be to invite a display of superiority masked as sympathy, and perhaps an admonition to eat more beef, and certainly one to take more exercise; for Louis, never having experienced any of the ills to which the flesh is heir. was, naturally enough, of the opinion that even where such disorders were really as painful as their possessors’ manners would indicate, they could have been avoided by proper care.

Breakfast consumed, Louis lighted a cigar and addressed himself to another cup of coffee. With the lighting of the cigar Pearl brightened a little. Louis, out of consideration for his lungs, smoked without inhaling; and to Pearl this taking of smoke into the mouth and blowing it forth seemed silly and childish. Without putting it into words she had made this opinion known to her husband, and whenever he smoked at home she watched him with a quiet interest which, of all her contrivances, was the most annoying to him. But that it would have been so signal an admission of defeat, he would have given up smoking at home.

The sports sheets read — with the exceptions of the columns devoted to golf and tennis — Louis left the table, put on his vest, coat, and hat, kissed his wife, and. with his consciously buoyant step, set out for his shop. He always walked downtown in the morning, covering the twenty blocks in twenty minutes — a feat to which he would allude whenever the opportunity arose.

Louis entered his shop with a feeling of pride in no wise lessened by six years of familiarity, To him the shop was as wonderful, as beautiful, as it had been when first opened. The row of green and white automatic chairs, with white-coated barbers bending over the shrouded occupants; the curtained alcoves in the rear with white-gowned manicurists in attendance; the table laden with magazines and newspapers; the clothes-trees; the row of white enameled chairs, at this hour holding no waiting customers; the two Negro boot-blacks in their white jackets; the clusters of colored bottles; the smell of tonics and soaps and steam; and around all, the sheen of spotless tiling, porcelain and paint and polished mirrors. Louis stood just within the door and basked in all this while he acknowledged his employees’ greetings. All had been with him for more than a year now. and they called him “Lou” in just the correct tone of respectful familiarity — a tribute both to his position in their world and his geniality.

He walked the length of the shop, trading jests with his barbers — pausing for a moment to speak to George Fielding, real estate, who was having his pink face steamed preparatory to his bi-weekly massage — and then gave his coat and hat to Percy, one of the bootblacks, and dropped into Fred’s chair for his shave. Around him the odor of lotions and the hum of mechanical devices rose soothingly. Health and this... where did those pessimists get their stuff?

The telephone in the front of the shop rang, and Emil, the head-barber, called out, “Your brother wants to talk to you, Lou.”

“Tell him I’m shaving. What does he want?”

Emil spoke into the instrument; then, “He wants to know if you can come over to his office some time this morning.”

“Tell him all right!”

“Another shipment of bootleg?” Fielding asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Louis replied, in accordance with the traditional wit of barbers.

Fred gave a final pat to Louis’s face with a talcumed towel. Percy a final pat to his glowing shoes, and the proprietor stepped from the chair to hide the cerise stripes within his coat again.

“I’m going over to see Ben,” he told Emil. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Ben Stemler, the eldest of four brothers, of which Louis was the third, was a round, pallid man, always out of breath — as if he had just climbed a long flight of steps. He was district sales-manager for a New York manufacturer, and attributed his moderate success, after years of struggling, to his doggedness in refusing to accept defeat. Chronic nephritis, with which he had been afflicted of late years, was more truly responsible for his increased prosperity, however. It had puffed out his face around his protuberant, fishy eyes, subduing their prominence, throwing kindly shadows over their fishiness, and so giving to him a more trustworthy appearance.

Ben was dictating pantingly to his stenographer when Louis entered the office. “Your favor of the... would say... regret our inability to comply... your earliest convenience.” He nodded to his brother and went on gasping. “Letter to Schneider... are at a loss to understand... our Mr. Rose... thirteenth instant... if consistent with your policy... would say... in view of the shortage of materials.”

The dictation brought to a wheezing end, he sent the stenographer on an errand, and turned to Louis.

“Hows everything?” Louis asked.

“Could be worse, Lou, but I don’t feel so good.”

“Trouble is you don’t get enough exercise. Get out and walk; let me take you down to the gym; take cold baths.”

“I know, I know,” Ben said wearily. “Maybe you’re right. But I got something to tell you — something you ought to know — but I don’t know how to go about telling you. I... that is—”

“Spit it out!” Louis was smiling. Ben probably had got into trouble of some sort.

“It’s about Pearl!” Ben was gasping now, as if he had come from an unusually steep flight of steps.

“Well?” Louis had stiffened in his chair, but the smile was still on his face. He wasn’t a man to be knocked over In the first blow he met. He had never thought of Pearl’s being unfaithful before, but as soon as Ben mentioned her name he knew that that was it. He knew it without another word from Ben; it seemed so much the inevitable thing that he wondered at his never having suspected it.

“Well?” he asked again.

Unable to hit upon a way of breaking the news gently. Ben panted it out hurriedly, anxious to have the job off his hands. “I saw her night before last! At the movies! With a man! Norman Becker! Sells for Litz & Aulitz! They left together! In his ear! Bertha was with me! She saw ’em too!”

He closed with a gasp of relief and relapsed into wheezes.

“Night before last,” Louis mused. “I was down to the fights — Kid Breen knocked out O’Toole in the second round — and I didn’t get home until after one.”

From Ben’s office to Louis’s home was a distance of twenty-four blocks. Mechanically timing himself, he found it had taken him thirty-one minutes — much of the way lay uphill — pretty good time at that. Louis had elected to walk home, he told himself, because he had plenty of time, not because he needed time to think the situation over, or anything of that sort. There was nothing to think over. This was a crystal-clear, tangible condition. He had a wife. Another man had encroached, or perhaps only attempted to, on his proprietorship. To a red-blooded he-man the solution was obvious. For these situations men had fists and muscles and courage. For these emergencies men ate beef, breathed at open windows, held memberships in athletic clubs, and kept tobacco smoke out of their lungs. The extent of the encroachment determined, the rest would be simple.

Pearl looked up in surprise from the laundering of some silk things at Louis’ entrance.

“Where were you night before last?” Mis voice was calm and steady.

“At the movies.” Pearl’s voice was too casual. The casual was not the note she should have selected — but she knew what was coming anyway.

“Who with?”

Recognizing the futility of any attempt at deception. Pearl fell back upon the desire to score upon the other at any cost — the motive underlying all their relations since the early glamour of mating had worn off.

“With a man! I went there to meet him. I’ve met him places before. He wants me to go away with him. lie reads things besides the sporting-page. He doesn’t go to prizefights. He likes the movies. He doesn’t like burlesque shows. He inhales cigarette smoke. He doesn’t think muscle’s everything a man ought to have.” Her voice rose high and shrill, with a hysterical note.

Louis cut into her tirade with a question. He was surprised by her outburst, but he was not a man to be unduly excited by his wife’s display of nerves.

“No, not yet. but if I want to I will,” Pearl answered the question with scarcely a break in her high-pitched chant. “And if I want to. I’ll go away with him. He doesn’t want beef for every meal. Me doesn’t take cold baths. He can appreciate tilings that aren’t just brutal. Me doesn’t worship his body. He—”

As Louis closed the door behind him he heard his wife’s shrill voice still singing her wooer’s qualities.

“Is Mr. Becker in?” Louis asked the undersized boy behind a railing in the sales-office of Litz. & Aulitz.

“That’s him at the desk back in the corner.”

Louis opened the gate and walked down the long office between two rows of mathematically arranged desks — two flat desks, a typist, two flat desks, a typist. A rattle of typewriters, a rustling of papers, a drone of voices dictating: “Your favor of... our Mr. Hassis... would say...” Walking with his consciously buoyant step, Louis studied the man in the corner. Built well enough, but probably flabby and unable to stand up against body blows.

He stopped before Beckers desk and the younger man looked up at Louis through pale, harassed eyes.

“Is this Mr. Becker?”

“Yes, sir. Won’t you have a seat?”

“No,” Louis said evenly, “what I’m going to say ought to be said standing up” He appreciated the bewilderment in the salesman’s eyes. “I’m Louis Slender!”

“Oh! yes,” said Becker. Obviously he could think of nothing else to say. He reached for an order blank, but with it in his hand he was still at sea.

“I’m going to teach you,” Louis said, “not to fool around with other men’s wives.”

Beckers look of habitual harassment deepened. Something foolish was going to happen. One could see he had a great dread of being made ridiculous, and yet knew that was what this would amount to.

“Oh! I say!” he ventured.

“Will you get up?” Louis was unbuttoning his coat.

In the absence of an excuse for remaining seated, Becker got vaguely to his feet. Louis stepped around the corner of the desk and faced the salesman.

“I’m giving you an even break,” Louis said, shoulders stiffened. left foot advanced, eyes steady on the embarrassed ones before him.

Becker nodded politely.

The barber shifted his weight from right to left leg and struck the younger man on the mouth, knocking him back against the wall. The confusion in Becker’s face changed to anger. So this was what it was to be! He rushed at Louis, to be met by blows that shook him, forced him back, battered him down. Blindly he tried to hold the barbers arms, but the arms writhed free and the fists crashed into his face and body again and again. Becker hadn’t walked twenty blocks in twenty minutes, hadn’t breathed deeply at open windows, hadn’t twisted and lowered and raised and bent his body morning after morning, hadn’t spent hours in gymnasiums building up sinew. Such an emergency found him wanting.

Men crowded around the combatants, separating them, holding them apart, supporting Becker, whose legs were sagging.

Louis was breathing easily. He regarded the salesman’s bloody face with calm eyes, and said: “After this I guess you won’t bother my wife any. If I ever hear of you even saying ‘how do’ to her again I’ll come back and finish the job. Get me?”

Becker nodded dumbly.

Louis adjusted his necktie and left the office.

The matter was cleanly and effectually disposed of. No losing his wife, no running into divorce courts, no shooting or similar cheap melodrama, and above all, no getting into the newspapers as a deceived husband — but a sensible, manly solution of the problem.

He would cat downtown tonight and go to a burlesque show afterward, and Pearl’s attack of nerves would have subsided by the time he got home. He would never mention the events of this day, unless some extraordinary emergency made it advisable, but his wife would know that it was always in his mind, and that he had demonstrated his ability to protect what was his.

He telephoned Pearl. Her voice came quietly over the wire. The hysteria had run its course, then. She asked no questions and made no comment upon his intention of remaining downtown for the evening meal.

It was long after midnight when he arrived home. After the show he had met “Dutch” Spreel, the manager of “Oakland Kid McCoy, the most promising lightweight since the days of Young Terry Sullivan,” and had spent several hours in a lunchroom listening to Spreel’s condemnation of the guile whereby the Kid had been robbed of victory in his last battle — a victory to which the honest world unanimously conceded his right.

Louis let himself into the apartment quietly and switched on the light in the vestibule. Through the open bed-room door he saw that the bed was unoccupied and its surface unruffled. Where was Pearl, then? he thought; surely she wasn’t sitting up in the dark. He went through the rooms, switching on the lights.

On the dining-room table he found a note.

I never want to see you again, you brute! It was just like you — as if beating Norman would do any good. I have gone away with him.

Louis leaned against the table while his calm certitude ran out of him. So this was the world! He had given Becker his chance; hadn’t taken the advantage of him to which he had been entitled; had beaten him severely — and this was the way it turned out. Why, a man might just as well be a weakling!

The Road Home

Black Mask, December 1922, as Peter Collinson

“You’re a fool to pass it up! You’ll get just as much credit and reward for taking back proof of my death as you will for taking me back. And I got papers and stuff buried back near the Yunnan[1] border that you can have to back up your story; and you needn’t be afraid that I’ll ever show up to spoil your play.”

The gaunt man in faded khaki frowned with patient annoyance and looked away from the blood-shot brown eyes in front of him, over the teak side of the jahaz to where the wrinkled snout of a muggar broke the surface of the river. When the small crocodile submerged again, Hagedom’s gray eyes came back to the pleading ones before him, and he spoke wearily, as one who has been answering the same arguments again and again.

“I can’t do it, Barnes. I left New York two years ago to get you, and for two years I’ve been in this damned country — here and in Yunnan — hunting you. I promised my people I’d stay until I found you, and I kept my word. Lord! man,” with a touch of exasperation, “after all I’ve gone through you don’t expect me to throw them down now — now that the job’s as good as done!”

The dark man in the garb of a native smiled an oily, ingratiating smile and brushed away his captor’s words with a wave of his hand.

“I ain’t offering you a dinky coupla thousand dollars; I’m offering you your pick out of one of the richest gem beds in Asia — a bed that was hidden by the Mran-ma[2] when the British jumped the country. Come back up there with me and I’ll show you rubies and sapphires and topazes that’ll knock your eye out. All I’m asking you is to go back up there with me and take a look at ’em. If you don’t like ’em you’ll still have me to take back to New York.”

Hagedorn shook his head slowly.

“You’re going back to New York with me. Maybe man-hunting isn’t the nicest trade in the world but it’s all the trade I’ve got, and this jewel bed of yours sounds phoney to me. I can’t blame you for not wanting to go back — but just the same I’m taking you.”

Barnes glared at the detective disgustedly.

“You’re a fine chump! And it’s costing me and you thousands of dollars! Hell!”

He spat over the side insultingly — native-like — and settled himself back on his corner of the split-bamboo mat.

Hagedorn was looking past the lateen sail, down the river — the beginning of the route to New York — along which a miasmal breeze was carrying the fifty-foot boat with surprising speed. Four more days and they would be aboard a steamer for Rangoon; then another steamer to Calcutta, and in the end, one to New York — home, after two years!

Two years through unknown country, pursuing what until the very day of the capture had never been more than a vague shadow. Through Yunnan and Burma, combing wilderness with microscopic thoroughness — a game of hide-and-seek up the rivers, over the hills and through the jungles — sometimes a year, sometimes two months and then six behind his quarry. And now successfully home! Betty would be fifteen — quite a lady.

Barnes edged forward and resumed his pleading, with a whine creeping into his voice.

“Say, Hagedorn, why don’t you listen to reason? There ain’t no sense in us losing all that money just for something that happened over two years ago. I didn’t mean to kill that guy, anyway. You know how it is; I was a kid and wild and foolish — but I wasn’t mean — and I got in with a bunch. Why, I thought of that hold-up as a lark when we planned it! And then that messenger yelled and I guess I was excited, and my gun went off the first thing I knew. I didn’t go to kill him; and it won’t do him no good to take me back and hang me for it. The express company didn’t lose no money. What do they want to hound me like this for? I been trying to live it down.”

The gaunt detective answered quietly enough but what kindness there had been in his dry voice before was gone now.

“I know — the old story! And the bruises on the Burmese woman you were living with sure show that there’s nothing mean about you. Cut it, Barnes, and make up your mind to face it — you and I are going back to New York.”

“The hell we are!”

Barnes got slowly to his feet and backed away a step.

“I’d just as leave—”

Hagedorn’s automatic came out a split second too late; his prisoner was over the side and swimming toward the bank. The detective caught up his rifle from the deck behind him and sprang to the rail. Barnes’ head showed for a moment and then went down again, to appear again twenty feet nearer shore. Upstream the man in the boat saw the blunt, wrinkled noses of three muggars, moving toward the shore at a tangent that would intercept the fugitive. He leaned against the teak rail and summed up the situation.

“Looks like I’m not going to take him back alive after all — but my job’s done. I can shoot him when he shows again, or I can let him alone and the muggars will get him.”

Then the sudden but logical instinct to side with the member of his own species against enemies from another wiped out all other considerations, and sent his rifle to his shoulder to throw a shower of bullets into the muggars.

Barnes clambered up the bank of the river, waved his hand over his head without looking back, and plunged into the jungle.

Hagedorn turned to the bearded owner of the jahaz, who had come to his side, and addressed him in his broke Burmese.

“Put me ashore — yu nga apau mye — and wait — thaing — until I bring him back — thu yughe.”

The captain wagged his black beard protestingly.

“Mahok! In the jungle here, sahib a man is as a leaf. Twenty men might find him in a week, or a month, it may take five years. I cannot wait that long.”

The gaunt white man gnawed at his lower lip and looked down the river — the road to New York.

“Two years,” he said aloud to himself, “it took to fin him when he didn’t know I was hunting for him. Now-Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewel of his.”

He turned to the boatman.

“I go after him. You wait three hours,” pointing over head, “until noon — ne apomha. If I am not back then do not wait — malotu thaing, thwa. Thi?”

The captain nodded.

“Hokhe!”

For five hours the captain kept the jahaz at anchor, and then, when the shadows of the trees on the west bank were creeping out into the river, he ordered the lateen sail hoisted, and the teak craft vanished around a bend in the river.

The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody

Brief Stories, February 1923, as Peter Collinson; (aka: Wages of Crime, 1962)

“Come along without any fuss and there won’t be trouble,” said the tall man with the protruding lower lip.

“And remember, anything you say will—” the fat man under the stiff straw hat warned, the rest of the prescribed caution dying somewhere within the folds of his burly neck.

A frown of perplexed interrogation reduced the none too ample area between Tom Doody’s eyebrows and the roots of his hair. He cleared his throat uneasily and asked, “But what’s it for?”

The protruding lower lip overlapped the upper in a smile that tempered derision with indulgence. “You ought to be able to guess — but it ain’t a secret. You’re arrested for stealing sixty-five thousand dollars from the National Marine Bank. We found the dough where you hid it, and now we got you.”

“That’s what,” the fat man corroborated.

Tom Doody leaned across the plain table in the visitors’ room and bent his beady eyes on the tired, middle-aged eyes of the woman from the Morning Bulletin.

“Miss Envers, I have served three and a half years here and I’ve got nearly ten more to do, taking in account what I expect to get off for good behavior. A long time, I guess you think; but I’m telling you that I don’t regret a minute of it.” He paused to let this startling assertion sink in, and then leaned forward again over hands that lay flat, palms down, fingers spread, on the top of the table.

“I came in here, Miss Envers, a safe-burglar that had been caught for the first and only time in fifteen years of crime. I am going out of here completely reformed, and with only one aim in my life; and that’s to do all I can to keep other people from following in my footsteps. I’m studying, and the chaplain is helping me, so that when I get out I can talk and write so as to get my message across. I used to be pretty good at reciting and making speeches when I was a kid in school, and I guess it’ll come back to me all right. I’m going from one end of the country to the other, if I have to ride freights, telling of my experiences as a criminal, and the light that busted — burst on me here in prison. I know what it is, and lots of people that maybe wouldn’t listen to a preacher or anybody else will pay attention to me. They’ll know that I know what I am talking about, that I’ve been through it, that I’m the man who robbed the National Marine Bank and lots of others.”

“You were very nearly acquitted, weren’t you?” Evelyn Envers asked.

“Yes, nearly,” the convict said, “and as truly as I’m sitting here, Miss Envers, I thank God that I was convicted!”

He stopped and tried to read surprise in the faded grey eyes across the table. Then he went on. “But for that — the chance for self-knowledge and thought that this place has gave — has given me — I might have gone on and on, might never have come to an understanding of what it means to be a Christian and know the difference between right and wrong. Here in prison I found for the first time in my life, liberty — yes, liberty! — freedom from the bonds of vice and crime and self-destruction!” With this paradox, he rested.

“Have you made any other plans for your career after leaving here?” the woman asked.

“No. That’s too far ahead. But I am going to spend the rest of my life spreading the truth about crime as I know it, if I have to sleep in gutters and live on stale bread!”

“He’s a fraud, of course,” Evelyn Envers told her typewriter as she slid a sheet of paper into it, “but he’ll make as good a story as anything else.”

So she wrote a column about Tom Doody and his high resolves, and because the thought behind his reformation was so evident to her, she took special pains with the story, gilding the shabbier of his mouthings and garnishing the man himself with no inconsiderable appeal.

For several days after the story’s appearance, letters came to the Morning Bulletin Readers’ Forum, commenting on Tom Doody and tendering suggestions of various sorts.

The Rev. Randall Gordon Rand made Tom Doody the subject of one of his informal Sunday talks.

And then John J. Kelleher, 1322 Britton Street, was crushed to death by a furniture van after pushing little Fern Bier, five-year-old daughter to Louis Bier, 1304 Britton Street, to safety; and it developed that Kelleher had been convicted of burglary several years before, and was out on parole at the time of the accident.

Evelyn Envers wrote a column about Kelleher and his dark-eyed little wife, and with doubtful relevance brought Tom Doody into the last paragraph. The Chronicle and the Intelligencer printed editorials in which Kelleher’s death was adduced as demonstrative of the parole system’s merit.

On the afternoon before the next regular meeting of the State Parole Board, the football team of the state university — three members of the board were ardent alumni — turned a defeat into victory in the last quarter.

Tom Doody was paroled.

From his room on the third floor of the Chapham Hotel, Tom Doody could see one of the posters. Red and black letters across a fifteen-by-thirty field of glaring white gave notice that Tom Doody, a reformed safe-burglar of considerable renown, would talk at the Lyric Theatre each night for one week on the wages of sin.

Tom Doody tilted his chair forward, rested his elbows on the sill, and studied the poster with fond eyes. That billboard was all right — though he had thought perhaps his picture would be on it. But Fincher had displayed no enthusiasm when a suggestion to that effect had been made, and whatever Fincher said went. Fincher was all right. There was the contract Fincher had given him — a good hundred dollars more a week than he had really expected. And then there was that young fellow Fincher had hired to put Tom Doody’s lecture in shape. There was no doubt that the lecture was all right now.

The lecture began with his childhood in the bosom of a loving family, carried him through the usual dance-hall and pool-room introductions to gay society, and then rose in a crescendo of vague but nevertheless increasingly vicious crime to a smashing climax with the burglary of the National Marine Bank’s $65,000, the resultant arrest and conviction, and the new life that had dawned as he bent one day over his machine in the prison jute-mill. Then a tapering off with a picture of the criminal’s inherent misery and the glory of standing four-square with the world. But the red meat of it was the thousand and one nights of crime — that was what the audience would come to hear.

The young fellow who had been hired to mould and polish the Doody epic had wanted concrete facts — names and dates and amounts — about the earlier crimes; but Tom Doody had drawn the line there, protesting that such a course would lay him open to arrest for felonies with which the police had heretofore been unable to connect him, and Fincher had agreed with him. The truth of it was that there were no crimes prior to the National Marine Bank burglary — that unexpected conviction was the only picturesque spot in Tom Doody’s life. But he knew too much to tell Fincher that. At the time of his arrest the newspapers and the police — who, for quite perceptible reasons, pretend to see in every apprehended criminal an enormously adept and industrious fellow — had brought to light hundreds of burglaries, and even a murder or two, in which this Tom Doody might have been implicated. He felt that these fanciful accusations had helped expedite his conviction, but now the fanfare was to be of value to him — as witness the figure on his contract. As a burglar with but a single crime to his credit he would have been a poor attraction on the platform, but with the sable and crimson laurels the police and the press had hung upon him, that was another matter.

For at least a year these black and red and white posters would accompany him wherever he went. His contract covered that period, and perhaps he could renew it for many years. Why not? The lecture was all right, and he knew he could deliver it creditably. He had rehearsed assiduously and Fincher had seemed pleased with his address. Of course he’d probably be a little nervous tomorrow night, when he faced an audience for the first time, but that would pass and he would soon feel at home in this new game. There was money in it — the ticket sales had been large, so Fincher said. Perhaps after a while...

The door opened violently, and Fincher came into the room — an apoplectic Fincher, altogether unlike the usual smiling, mellow manager of Fincher’s International Lecture Bureau.

“What’s up?” Tom Doody asked, consciously keeping his eyes from darting furtively towards the door.

“What’s up?” Fincher repeated the words, but his voice was a bellow. “What’s up?” He brandished a rolled newspaper shillelagh-wise in Tom Doody’s face. “I’ll show you what’s up!” He seemed to be lashing himself into more vehement fury with reiterations of the ex-convict’s query, as lions were once said to do with their tails.

He straightened out the newspaper, smoothed a few square inches of its surface, and thrust it at Tom Doody’s nose, with one lusty forefinger laid like an indicator on the center of the sheet.

Tom Doody leaned back until his eyes were far enough away to focus upon the print around his manager’s finger.

...by the police, Tom Doody, who was paroled several days ago after serving nearly four years for the theft of $65,000 from the National Marine Bank, has been completely exonerated of that crime by the deathbed confession of Walter Beadle, who...

“That’s what’s up!” Fincher shouted, when Tom Doody had shifted his abject eyes from the paper to the floor. “Now I want that five hundred dollars I advanced to you!”

Tom Doody went through his pockets with alacrity that poorly masked his despair and brought out some bills and a handful of silver. Fincher grabbed the money from the ex-convict’s hands and counted it rapidly.

“Two hundred and thirty-one dollars and forty cents,” he announced. “Where’s the rest?”

Tom Doody tried to say something, but only muttered.

“Mumbling won’t do any good,” Fincher snarled. “I want my five hundred dollars. Where is it?”

“That’s all I’ve got,” Tom Doody whined. “I spent the rest, but I’ll pay every cent of it back, if you’ll only give me time.”

“I’ll give you time, you dirty crook, I’ll give you time!” Fincher stamped to the telephone. “I’ll give you till the police get here, and if you don’t come across, I’m going to swear out a warrant for obtaining money under false pretences!”

The Joke on Eloise Morey

Brief Stories, Vol. 8, No. 4, June 1923

“But, good God, Eloise, I love you!”

“But, good God, Dudley, I hate you!”

The cold malevolence of her mimicry brought a quiver to his sensitive lips, as she had known it would, and his pale, tortured face went altogether bloodless. These not unfamiliar, and in this case anticipated, indications of pain infuriated her even as they pleased her. From her advantage of perhaps two inches in height she let her hard gray eyes — twin points of steel in a beautiful, selfish face — range with studied insult from the wave of chestnut brown hair that swept over his forehead to the toes of his small shoes, and then up again to his suffering red-brown eyes.

“What are you?” she asked with frigid bitterness. “You’re not a man; are you a child? or an insect? or what? You know I don’t want you — you’ll never be anything. I’ve certainly made that clear enough. And vet you won’t give me my liberty. I wish I never had seen you — that I’d never married you — that you were dead!”

Her voice — she usually took pains to keep it carefully modulated — rose high and shrill under the pressure of her wrath.

Her husband blenched, cringed under the lash of each acrid word, but said nothing. He could not say anything. His was far too sensitive, too delicate, a mechanism to permit of any of the answers he might have made. Where a cruder nature would have met the woman on her own ground, and hammered its way to victory, or at least an even distribution of the honors, he was helpless. As always, his silence, his helplessness, the evident fact that he did not know what to do or say, spurred her on to greater cruelties.

“An artist!” she derided, making the phrase heavy with contempt. “You were a genius; you were going to be famous and wealthy and God knows what all! And I fell for it and married you: a milk-and-water nincompoop who’ll never be anything. An artist! An artist who paints pictures that nobody will look at, much less buy. Pictures that arc supposed to be delicate. Delicate! Weak and wishy-washy daubs of color that arc like the fool who paints them. A silly fool smearing paint on canvas — too fine for commercial art — too fine for anything! Twelve years you’ve spent learning to paint and can’t turn out a picture anybody will look at twice! Great! You’re great now: a great big fool!”

She paused to consider the effect of her tirade. It was indeed worthy of her oratory. Dudley Morey’s knees shook, his head hung, his abject eyes were on the floor, and tears coursed down his pale checks.

“Get out!” she cried. “Get out of my room, before I kill you!”

He turned and stumbled blindly through the doorway.

Alone, she raged up and down the room with the lethal, cushioned step of some great forest cat. Her lips were drawn back, revealing small, even teeth; her fists were clenched; her eyes burned with an intensity more eloquent than the tears that never came to them could have been. For fifteen minutes she paced the room. Then she flung open a closet door, caught up the first coat that came to her hand, a hat, and left the room, the confines of which seemed too small to hold her anger.

The maid was in the hall, dusting the balustrade; she looked at her mistress’ passionate face with stupid surprise. Eloise passed her without a word, hardly seeing her, and descended the stairs. At the front door Eloise stopped suddenly. She remembered that when she had passed the library door she had seen a desk drawer standing open; and it had been the drawer in which Dudley’s revolver was kept. She went back to the library. The revolver was gone.

She bit her lip thoughtfully. Dudley must have taken the revolver. Would he really kill himself? He always had been morbidly sensitive, and he had courage enough, if it came down to that, even if he was such a failure — such a fool at puddling with his paints. His inability to encompass success of one sort or another was the result of inordinate sensitiveness rather than anything else; and, taunted sufficiently, that sensitiveness could easily drive him to self-destruction. Suppose he did? What then? Wouldn’t she— But, no! As likely as not he would bungle it somehow, as he had bungled everything else, and there would be a lot of unpleasant publicity, with her name displayed in not too flattering a light. Then, too, it would be hard upon her to think that she had driven him to it; though, of course, his failure with his work was more directly responsible. Still— She decided to go to his studio at once. That was the only thing to do. She couldn’t telephone; he had no telephone in the studio. If she arrived in time she would stop him; and perhaps his attempt, or the bare intent, could be made to win the divorce he had refused her. Lawyers were clever at twisting things like that around to their clients’ advantage. And if she arrived too late — well, she would have done her part. She knew her husband too well to doubt that she would find him in his studio.

She left the house and boarded a street car. The line ran past the building in which he had his studio, and she would get there sooner than if she called a taxicab.

She left the car at the corner above the studio and found herself running toward the building. The studio was on the fourth floor and there was not an elevator. She became excited as she climbed and her breath came with difficulty. The stairs seemed interminable. Finally she reached the top floor and turned down the corridor that led to Dudley’s room. She was trembling now, and moisture stood out on her face and in the palms of her hands. She tried not to think of what she might see when she opened her husband’s door. She came to the door and stopped, listening. No sound. Then she pushed the door open.

Her husband stood in the middle of the room, under the skylight with his back to the door. His right arm was raised in an awkward position: the elbow level with his shoulder, his forearm bent stiffly toward his head. Even as she divined the import of the pose, and screamed, “Dudley!” the air vibrated with the force of the explosion. Dudley Morey rocked slowly, once forward, once backward, and then crumpled face down upon the bare floor.

Eloise crossed the room slowly; she felt surprisingly calm now that it was all over. Beside her husband she stopped; but she did not bend to touch the body; it was too repulsive in death for that. A hole gaped in one temple — ringed by a dark, burnt area. The revolver had fallen over against the wall, under a window.

She turned away with a feeling of disgust: the sight sickened her. She went to a chair and sat down. It was all over now.

On the table before her she saw an envelope addressed to her in Dudley’s tiny handwriting. She tore it open and read the inclosed letter.

Dear Eloise—

You are right, I suppose, about my being a failure. I can’t give you up while I live — so I am doing the best I can for you. Between losing you and never succeeding in finding what I want in my painting I can’t think of anything to live for anyway. Don’t think that I am hitter, or that I blame you for anything, dear.

I love you,

Dudley.

She read it through twice, her face flushing with chagrin. How like Dudley to leave this note to brand her as the cause of his death! Why could he not have shown some thought, some consideration of her position? It was fortunate that she had found it: what an idea it would have given anyone else! And then it would have got into the newspapers. As if she were responsible for his death!

She went to the little iron stove in the corner, in which a feeble coal fire burned, and thrust the letter in. Then she remembered the envelope and consigned it to the flames, too.

Several men and an old woman — apparently a charwoman — were at the door, turning curious glances from the man on the floor to the woman beyond. They edged into the room, grew bolder, and crowded around Dudley’s body. Some of them mentioned his name as if recognizing him. A man whom Eloise knew — Marker, an illustrator and a friend of her husband’s — came in, savagely routed the group around the dead man, and knelt beside him. Marker looked up and saw

Eloise for the first time. He got to his feet, took her by the arm with gentle force, and led her to his studio, on the floor below. He made her lie on the couch, spread a blanket over her, and left her. He returned in a few minutes and sat silently in a chair across the room, sucking at a great calabash pipe, and staring at the floor. She sat up, but he would not let her talk about her husband, for which she was grateful. She sat on the edge of the couch looking with cold, inscrutable eyes at her hands clasped about a handkerchief in her lap.

Some one knocked on the door and Harker called, “Come in.”

A heavy, middle-aged man with a florid face and a bellicose black mustache came in. He did not seem to think it necessary to remove his hat, but his manner was polite enough, in a stolid way. He introduced himself as detective-sergeant Murray, and questioned Eloise.

She told him that her husband had been worrying over his lack of success with his painting; that he had seemed especially distraught that morning; that after he had gone she found his revolver was missing; that, fearing the worst, she had come to his studio, arriving just as he shot himself.

The detective asked further questions in his callous, albeit not unkindly, tone. She answered truthfully on the whole, though she told rather less than the complete truth here and there. Murray made no comment, and then turned his attention to Harker.

Harker had heard the shot, but was too engrossed with his work to pay immediate attention to it. Then the thought had intruded that the noise, which might have been made by something falling, had come from the vicinity of Morey’s studio, and he had gone up to investigate. I le said that Morey had seemed increasingly worried of late, but had never talked of himself or his affairs.

Murray left the room and returned after a few minutes accompanied by a man whom lie introduced as “Byerly of the bureau.”

“You’ll have to go down to headquarters, Mrs. Morey,” Murray said with a deprecatory gesture. “Byerly’ll show you what to do. Just red tape. Only take a few minutes.”

Eloise left the building with Byerly. As he turned toward the corner past which the street-car line ran she suggested a taxicab. He telephoned from the corner drug store; and a few minutes later they were climbing the gray steps of the City Hall. Byerly led her through a door marked “Pawn-Shop Detail” and gave her a chair.

“Just wait a couple minutes here,” he said. “I’ll see if I can hurry things up.”

Time dragged past. Half an hour. An hour. Two hours.

The door opened and Murray came in, followed by Byerly and a little fat man with a sparse handful of white hair spread over a broad pink scalp. Byerly called the fat man “Chief” when he pulled up a chair for him. The fat man and Byerly sat on chairs facing Eloise. Murray sat on a desk.

“Have you got anything to say?” Murray asked carelessly.

Her eyebrows went up. “I beg your pardon?”

“All right,” Murray said without emotion. “Eloise Morey, you’re arrested for the murder of your husband, and anything you say may be used against you.”

“Murder!” she exclaimed, startled out of her poise.

“Exactly,” Murray said.

Some measure of her assurance came back to her. She wanted to laugh, but instead she said haughtily, “Why, that’s ridiculous!”

Murray leaned forward. “Is it?” he asked imperturbably. “Now listen. You and your husband ain’t been on good terms for some time. This morning you had a peach of a battle. You said you wished he was dead, and you threatened him. Your servant girl heard you. Then after he left she saw you rush out, all worked up, and she saw you go to the drawer where the gun was kept. And she looked in the drawer after you was gone and the gun was gone, too. Two people saw you going up toward your husband’s studio looking pretty wild, and they heard a womans voice — an angry voice — just before the shot. And you admit yourself that you were in the room when your husband died. How is that? Still ridiculous?”

She had the sensation of a heavy net, sinuous, clammy, inescapable, closing about her.

“But people don’t kill each other every time they have a little family quarrel — even if all you say were true. Murder is Supposed to require a stronger urge than that, isn’t it? And I told you about finding the revolver gone, and trying to get to his studio in time to save him, didn’t I?”

Murray shook his head.

“Oh, I’ve got the ‘strong urge’ all right, Mrs. Eloise Morey. I found a batch of hot love letters, signed Joe, in your room, and some of ’em arc dated as recent as yesterday. And I find that your husband was a Catholic, the same as I am, and I guess maybe just as set against divorces. And I also find that he’s got a tidy bit of life insurance and an income of three or four thousand a year that you’d come into. I got enough motive all right.”

Eloise struggled to keep her face composed — everything appeared to hinge upon that — but the threatening net seemed closer, and now it was not so much a net as a great smothering blanket. She closed her eyes for an instant, but it was not to be escaped that way. Rage burned within her. She stood up and her eyes glared into the three alert, impassionately complacent faces before her.

“You fools!” she cried, “You—”

She remembered the letter Dudley had left behind; the letter that would have told the truth unmistakably; the letter that would have cleared her in a twinkling, the letter she had burned in the little iron stove.

She swayed, tears of despair came to the hard grey eyes. Detective-sergeant Murray left his scat and caught her as she fell.

The Vicious Circle

Black Mask, June 15, 1923, as Peter Collinson; (aka: The Man Who Stood In the Way, 1951)

I

The Senator was a massive man. The spacious leather chair in which he sat seemed scarcely adequate for its task; bulky shoulders and arms bulged over its sides with a suggestion of overflowing.

The Senator’s head under his crisp mane of iron-grey hair was massive, too, and his features were large, cragged, and graven with the lines that indicate power.

When he arose presently and crossed the library to get whiskey and cigars for his guest the immense room seemed to dwindle in an abrupt shrinking of wall and ceiling; and the polished floor threatened each instant to creak under the trend of his heavy feet, though it was far too genteel — as befit a floor in a Dupont Circle home — ever actually to creak. The vacated chair gaped wide, appeared as the great upholstered cavern it really was, to lose its dignity immediately the Senator dropped into it again.

In marked contrast with the Senator was the man who sat stiffly upright on the edge of one of the room’s least comfortable chairs and, ignoring the allure of the imported cigars his host had set at his elbow, employed a gnarled thumb to cram black nigger-wool tobacco into a yellow-grey corn-cob pipe.

He looked sixty-five, though he may have been ten years younger, and the years had served to parch rather than to mellow him. His unkempt hair, to the extent that it had survived, was a dingy yellow-white which had probably been sandy in its youth; a mustache of the same hue except where tobacco had stained it a richer shade, straggled over withered lips. His forehead was low, narrow, and of an almost reptilian flatness; his nose was long and pinched and drooping below flat, lusterless eyes of faded, unrecognizable color; his chin was frankly receding.

In his thick-soled boots he would have stood less than five and a half feet — say, just a trifle above the Senator’s shoulder — and the beam of scales set at a hundred and five pounds would have been undisturbed by his presence. He wore a baggy suit of a once-snuff color, and a soft black hat lay on the floor beside his chair.

The pipe loaded, he turned to the table, filled a glass from the bottle, and drained it with neither the shudder nor the appreciative grimace which usually accompanies the drinking of straight whiskey. Then, disregarding the matches on the stand beside him, he felt in the pockets of his vest, brought out a match with the common brown head so seldom seen nowadays, ignited it sputteringly on the sole of a boot, and lighted, the pipe.

His glance never for an instant rested on any of the furnishings of the luxurious room; it ranged from the Senator to the pipe, to the hat on the floor occasionally, and then back to the Senator.

Obviously unused to the elegance among which he found himself, that little man was not comfortable, not at home; hut his attitude was certainly not one of awe — rather he seemed to disapprove of the sybaritic apartment, and, disapproving, to ignore it altogether, as something unworthy of a man’s attention.

The Senator chewed a cigar, frowned at his feet, and talked. He was counted in political circles a reticent man, one who expressed himself crisply and concisely, with a great economy of words. But his conversation now was at variance with that reputation.

He talked desultorily, letting his sentences lose themselves half-formed, their logical endings being replaced by irrelevancies or not at all. The little man answered now and then with drawled monosyllables in a dry, reedy voice; he was plainly not engrossed by his host’s words. It was clear that the Senator had not sent for him to discuss crops and the political situation in Sudlow County.

The Senator wasted three-quarters of an hour in this nervous dalliance. Then he threw his cold cigar into the fire-place and slid his chair forward to within a foot of his guest’s. He leaned still closer, the lines between his eyebrows deepening.

“But all this isn’t what I wanted to see you for, Inch,” he said, his deep voice impressive even in its half-whisper. “I am in trouble. I need a man’s help.”

Gene Inch nodded his head slightly, waiting.

“Can I count on you?” And then, as the meaningless nod came again, “You know I pardoned Tom when I was governor.”

It was true enough that the impetus behind that pardoning had been political expediency; but what of it? He had pardoned Tom Inch!

Gene Inch took the pipe from his mouth and said:

“Yeah, I know you pardoned Tom. You don’t have to remind a Inch of his debts.”

“You’ll help me, then?” the Senator insisted.

“Uh-huh. Who do you want killed?”

The Senator quailed and his eyes widened.

“Killed?” he repeated in a tone of horror. “Killed?”

Inch bared his stained and broken teeth in an evil grin.

“I hope it ain’t no worse than that,” he said. “But supposing you tell me what’s what.”

The Senator laid an unsteady hand on the other’s bony knee.

“I’m being blackmailed. It has been going on for years, since shortly after I came to Sudlow County. All the years I was in the State legislature, when I was governor, and now since I have been senator, I have been paying — paying more and more every year. And now... now I’ve got to stop it. Inch, I have made a lot of friends since I have been here in Washington, and they are talking of running me for the presidency in 1924. But I can’t go ahead unless I shake this blackmailer off. I must shake him off, or I am stopped! The more prominent I become, the more insolent he is — it strengthens his hand just that much more — and if I should he elected president of this country... I can’t try unless I get rid of him!”

Inch’s face hadn’t lighted up at mention of either the blackmailer or the Senator’s presidential hopes, and his eyes were as void of fire as ever.

“Where’ll I find this fellow?” he asked laconically.

“Wait, Gene,” the Senator said. “We must be careful. There must be no scandal or my position will be even worse than now. I want you to fix it so he won’t bother me, but I don’t want anything done that will bring on worse trouble.”

Inch let a shade of his contempt for this nicety show in the lift of his lips, and then he said:

“Well, I reckon you better tell me more about it, then.”

The Senator’s eyes narrowed. He spoke aloud, but more to himself than to his guest:

“I pardoned your boy Tom when he was serving life for killing Dick Haney... All right!

“I came to Sudlow County nearly twenty years ago, remember? Well, I came there after escaping from the California State prison at San Quentin. I got in a fight in Oakland one night and killed a man. I wasn’t know in Oakland and I gave a false name when I was arrested. I took my real name again after I escaped — I don’t know of anybody else who ever did it from there. I was sentenced to thirty years, but after a year and a half I escaped. About two years after I had settled in Sudlow County a man who had been in San Quentin with me recognized me. Frank McPhail was his name, but he goes by the name of Henry Bush now. I’ve been paying him every cent I could scrape together ever since.”

Inch twisted the end of his long nose between a scrawny thumb and finger, reflectively.

“Any chance of facing it down? I mean, can he prove anything?”

“The fingerprints — they are still on file at San Quentin.”

“Do you reckon there’s anybody in on it besides this Bush?”

The Senator shook his head.

“I am reasonably certain that he hasn’t told anyone else” — bitterly — “or I should have heard from them, too.”

“Where does this Bush live at? And what does he look like?”

“Wait, Gene!” the Senator pleaded. “You can’t walk up and shoot him. He is well known here in Washington, and he is known for a friend of mine — he has boasted enough of our intimacy! No matter how careful you were, if you killed him something would leak out, and I’d be worse off than I am now. And, besides, I can’t stomach murder!”

Inch tweaked his nose thoughtfully again and focused his flat eyes on the dirty bowl of bis pipe.

“What’s the next nearest city to here?” he asked.

“Baltimore is only forty miles away.”

“Do you reckon this Bush is known much in Baltimore?”

“I don’t think he is. Why?”

Inch thrust the pipe into his pocket and picked up his hat.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

II

The following evening Gene Inch called upon the Senator again. He stayed but a few minutes, talking to the Senator in the reception hall.

“You tell this Bush you want him to come see you tomorrow in Baltimore; that you’ll be waiting for him in room 411 at the Strand hotel between ten and eleven at night; that he’s to come right up to the room and not ask for you at the desk, because you ain’t going to be registered under you own name. Can you make him swallow it?”

“I think so,” the Senator said hesitantly, “but he’ll be suspicious and come prepared for trouble. What are you going to do, Gene? You aren’t doing to—”

“You leave me be,” Inch said querulously. “I’m going to fix this thing. Do as I tell you. It don’t make no difference what he thinks, or how suspicious he is, get him over there and I’ll get you out of your troubles.”

The Senator’s muscular hand shook as he opened the door for his caller; the skinny hand that pulled Inch’s black hat down on his head was as steady as a Sudlow County boulder.

III

A dim light from the corridor entered room 411 through the transom; through the closed window came a faint glow from the street lights; the two diluted the darkness in the room to an artificial, bluish twilight.

Gene Inch sat on a chair in a corner near the door, facing the door. He wore a suit of coarse, heavy underwear, which bulged in ill-fitting folds here and there over his angular figure. Clamped between his teeth was the stem of a cold pipe; a battered and scratched revolver of heavy caliber hung from one hand. His bare feet were flat on the carpeted floor in an attitude of patient ease.

A clock somewhere struck ten. Twenty minutes passed. Then the knob of the unlocked door turned, the door opened, and a burly figure stood in the doorway. A black pistold held high against the figure’s chest pointed into the room.

The muzzle of Inch’s revolver slid forward and nudged the side of the burly man. The latter’s muscles jumped suddenly, but his feet did not move. Slowly his right hand opened and the automatic thudded dully on the floor.

Inch stepped back and said:

“Come in and close the door behind you.”

Then he motioned his captive to a chair and himself sat on the edge of the bed.

“You’re Bush, I reckon.”

“Yes, and if you think—”

“Shut your mouth and listen!”

Bush subsided before the menace in the reedy voice of this queer little man in ridiculous habit who squinted wickedly at him in the dusk over the barrel of the enormous revolver.

“Take off your coat.”

Bush obeyed.

“Throw it on the foot of the bed.”

Bush hesitated. It might be possible to fling the coat at this old man’s head and close with him. But, his eyes now accustomed to the dim light, he saw that the withered finger around the trigger held it back against the grip — the cocked hammer was restrained only by the pressure of the thumb. That pressure removed, the hammer would fall. Gently Bush tossed his coat to the bed. Inch went through the pockets with his left hand, removing everything. Then he threw the coat on the floor.

“Turn out your other pockets.”

Bush emptied the pockets of his trousers and waistcoat: a knife, some keys, a few coins, a roll of paper money, a watch, a handkerchief.

“This suit is tailor-made, huh?” Inch said. “Then there had ought to be labels on the pants and vest as well as the coat. Take the knife and rip ’em all out, and make a neat job of it. Give me your hat.”

While the puzzled blackmailer — not yet suspecting his captor’s intention — removed all the markings from his clothes Inch examined the hat. No initials were in it.

“Put on your coat and hat,” he ordered. “Now put all them things back in your pockets except them bills, and your watch. You can drop the labels on the floor. Now stand back against the wall.”

Inch picked up the roll of paper money and put it in the pocket of his trousers, which hung over the back of a chair. The watch, the cloth labels, and the things he had taken from Bush’s coat he rolled in a handkerchief and put in his ancient valise.

“Say—” Bush began.

“Shut your mouth, damn you!” Inch snapped irritably, shaking his revolver at the blackmailer.

Then the old man looked carefully around the room and chuckled with sour satisfaction. He backed to the bed and pulled the covers down with his free hand and got into the bed, the revolver still menacing the other. He pulled the white covers up across his chest, half-sitting, half-lying against the pillows. Then slowly he drew the revolver back toward his body. The muzzle cleared the edge of the covers and slid out of sight.

Bush’s mouth hung slack, bewilderment filled his face. As the weapon disappeared beneath the covers he contracted his leg muscles in the first move of springs. Before he could bend his knees in the second movement the room shook with a heavy explosion. A smoldering hole appeared on the white surface of the top sheet and grew rapidly larger. Bush toppled to the floor with blood seeping from a hole in his left breast. The room reeked with the blended odors of gunpowder and burning cloth.

Inch scrambled out of bed, took a flashlight and a homemade black mask from a dresser drawer, and dropped them beside the dead man. Then he kicked the automatic pistol, which lay near the door, over near one lifeless hand.

Fifteen minutes later the hotel detective and a policeman were examining the remains of Henry Bush, and listening to Gene Inch’s story of retiring early, waking to see a man bending over the chair on which his closers hung, carefully drawing his revolver from under the pillow, being surprised in that act by the burglar, and having to shoot through the bed-covers.

The detective and the patrolman finished their examination and conferred.

“Nothing to identify him by at all.”

“No; not even a watch or anything we could trace.”

“No use trying to trace the gun; you never can. Burglars don’t get ’em that way.”

The policeman turned to Inch.

“Come down to headquarters in the morning — about ten o’clock.”

And then, admiringly:

“You sure-God hit him pretty for having to shoot through them bed-clothes!”

IV

“The Senator is not in,” said the girl in the outer office.

“Now, sister, you tell him Gene Inch wants to see him.”

“But he—”

“Run along and tell him, sister.”

The Senator came to the door of his private office to receive Inch and to usher him in. The Senator’s face was palling and he seemed to be having trouble with his breathing. The eyes that met Inch’s held a strange mixture of hope and fear, eagerness and reluctance.

When they were alone in the private office Inch nodded with cool assurance.

“It’s all done. Everything is all right.”

“And he—”

“I seen by the papers where a unidentified burglar was killed trying to rob a farmer in a Baltimore hotel.”

The Senator relaxed into a chair with a sobbing intake of breath, and the color began to flow back in his face.

“Are you positive, Gene, that there can be no slip-up?”

Inch clucked scornfully.

“Ain’t nothing can happen! Everything is all right!”

The Senator got to his feet and stretched out both hands to his savior.

“I can’t ever pay you in full for what you have done, Gene, but no matter—”

Inch turned his rounded back upon the other’s gratitude and walked to the door. With one hand on the knob he turned, leered malevolently at the Senator, and said:

“I’ll expect a check on the first of every month; and I hope you get to be president — it’ll mean a lot to me.”

For a long space the Senator stood staring dumbly into the little man’s flat, lifeless eyes. Then comprehension came to him. His knees sagged and he crumpled into his chair.

“But, Gene—”

“But hell!” Inch snarled. “The first of every month!”

Holiday

The New Pearsons, July 1923

Paul left the post-office carrying his monthly compensation cheque in its unmistakable narrow manila envelope with the mocking bold-faced instructions to postmasters should the addressee have died meanwhile, and hurried hack along the wooden walk to his ward, intent upon catching the physician in charge before he left for the morning. The ward surgeon, a delicately plump man in khaki, with a mouth permanently puckered, perhaps by its habit of framing a mild, prolonged “oh” whenever, as not infrequently happened, he could not find the exactly adequate words, was just leaving his office.

“I’d like to go to town this afternoon,” Paul said.

The doctor went hack to his desk and reached for a pad of pass blanks. This was a matter of routine; suitable words came easily. “Have you been out this week?”

“No, sir.”

The physicians pen scratched across paper and Paul turned away waving in the air — to dry the ink, there never was a blotter at hand — the slip which permitted Hetherwick, Paul, to be absent from the United States Public Health Service Hospital No. 64 from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. for the purpose of going to San Diego.

In the city he went first to a bank and exchanged the cheque for eight ten-dollar hills; then he filled his pockets with cigarettes and cigars and bought a racing program, studying it carefully, together with some figures in a memorandum book, while he ate luncheon.

He rode to Tijuana on the rear scat of an automobile stage, tightly wedged between a hatchet-faced tout who chewed gum unrestingly all the way and a large, perspiring, too-pink-and-yellow woman under a wide, limp hat. For a brief moment just beyond National City the savory fragrance of citrous fruits came into the car; for the rest of the trip his nostrils were busy with the unblending odors of spearmint, a heavy strawberry-like perfume from the woman beside him, burning oil, and the hot dust that scorched his throat and lungs and kept him coughing his sharp, barking cough.

He hurried through the gate at the race track and reached the betting ring just in time to place his bets on the first race: five dollars on “Step At a Time” to win and five to place. He watched the race from the rail in front of the paddock, leaning forward to peer nearsightedly at the horses. “Step At a Time” won easily and at the paying booths Paul received thirty-six dollars and some silver for his two colored tickets. He had not been especially stirred by either the race or the result: he had thought the horse would win without difficulty.

At the grandstand bar he drank a glass of whisky, then, consulting the penciled notes on his program, he bet ten dollars on Beauvis to win the second race. Beauvis finished second. Paul was not disappointed; that had been pretty close. His selection in the third race finished far in the rear; he won twenty-some dollars on the fourth, won again on the fifth, plunged a little on the sixth and lost. Between races he drank whisky at the grandstand bar, being served liquor of the same quality that was procurable north of the border and paying the same prices.

He had fourteen dollars in his pockets when he left the race track. The Casino was closed; he got into a dusty jitney and was driven to the Old Town.

He walked the length of the dingy street — a street that no mood of esthetic yea-saying could ever gild — and entered a saloon far down on the left-hand side, one that he had never visited before. A large, heavily muscled woman — she could easily, he thought, have been a blood relative of the woman in the automobile — broke off the song she was shouting to the nearly empty bar, linked a powerful arm through one of his, and said, “Come on over and sit down with me, honey; I want to talk to you.”

He let her lead him to a booth — feeling a perverse delight in her utter coarseness — where she sat leaning heavily against him, one hand on his knee. He wondered what it would be like to lie in the arms of such a monster: middle-aged, bull-throated, grotesquely masked even under her tawdry garniture, manifestly without sex.

“You stick with me, dearie,” she was saying, the words rolling out with a mechanical volubility and an absence of any attempt at glibness that testified to their too-frequent employment, “and I’ll treat you right. You’ll be a lot better off than you’d be fooling around with some of them sluts up the road.”

He smiled and nodded politely. A sub-harlot, he decided, holding out false promises of her monstrous body to bring about that stimulation of traffic in liquor for which she was employed: a paradox, a sort of burlesque perhaps on a more familiar feminine attitude. The liquor he had drunk had fuddled him pleasantly, had clouded his never keen sight — though his eyes glowed brighter than usual — and had softened his speech. He bought several more drinks, amused by the keenness with which she watched the waiter, making sure that she received her metal tokens — upon which her commission was computed — for each order of drinks, and the naked greed with which she seized whatever change the waiter laid on the table.

He wondered after a while how much money he had left; it couldn’t be much, and he must save from this enormity sufficient to buy a drink or two for the girl with the amazing red hair at the Palace. He motioned the waiter away.

“I’m flat,” he told the woman. “They took me down the line at the track.”

“Tough luck,” she said, with facial sympathy, and began to grow restless.

“Run along and let me finish my drink,” he suggested.

She grew confidential. “I’d like to, but once we girls start drinking with a man the boss makes us stay with him until he leaves.”

He chuckled with joyful appreciation — he called that a neat arrangement — and got just a little unsteadily to his feet. She went to the door with him. “Be sure and come see me next time.” He chuckled again at that, and then he felt an obscure shame: not at having squandered his few remaining dollars upon her, hut at letting her think him so easily taken in.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” he assured her, seriously. “I don’t mind letting you take me for a ten or so when it’s all I’ve got. Ten isn’t much money one way or the other. But don’t think I’m coming down here with a roll to let you—” Suddenly he saw himself standing in the doorway trying to justify himself to this monstrosity. He broke off with a clear, ringing laugh and walked away.

The girl with the red hair was dancing with a fat youth in tweeds to the achievements of a ferocious three-man orchestra when Paul entered the Palace. He waited, buying a drink for himself and one for a girl in soiled brown silk who had come over to his side and who kept saying over and over: “This is too good to be true! I been here a week and I can’t believe it yet. Think of all this!” Her arm took in all the bottles behind which one wall was hidden.

The fat youth in tweeds disappeared presently and the girl with the red hair saw Paul, waited for his beckoning nod, and joined him.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

They drank and he motioned toward the change the bartender had put before him. She took it with a casual thanks.

“How’s the game go?” he asked.

“Pretty soft! And with you?”

“Not so good,” he cheerfully complained. “The track knocked me over for most of what I had this afternoon.”

She smiled sympathetically and they stood drinking slowly, close together but not touching, not talking very much, but smiling now and then with a certain definite delight each into the other’s face. The clamor of the place, its garishness, were softened, nearly shut off from him by the pinkish alcoholic haze through which he regarded the world. But the girl’s face, hair, figure, were clear enough to him.

He was filled with a strange affection for her: an affection that, though it was personal enough, had nothing of desire in it. Drunk as he undoubtedly was he did not want her physically. For all her beauty and pull upon his heart she was a girl who “hustled drinks” in a border town. That she might be a virgin — there wasn’t anything impossible about that unlikely hypothesis: her profession didn’t preclude it, even compelled continence during working hours — made no difference. It wasn’t even so much that she was tainted by the pawing of strange hands — she had a freshness that had withstood that — as that in some obscure way the desires of too many men had rendered her no longer quite desirable. If he ever turned to a woman of this particularly sordid world it would be to some such monster as the one down the street. Given a certain turn of temper, there would be a savage, ghoulish joy in her.

He signalled the bartender again. They emptied their glasses, and he told her, “Well, I’m going to run along. I’ve got just about the price of a meal left.”

“Won’t you dance with me before you go?”

“No,” he said, a warm feeling of renunciation flooding him, “you run along and get a live one.”

“I don’t care whether you’ve got any money or not,” she said gravely. And then, resting one hand lightly on his sleeve, “Let me lend—”

He backed away shaking his head. “So long!” He turned toward the door.

The girl in soiled brown silk called out to him as he passed the end of the bar where she stood drinking with two men, “It’s too good to be true!” He smiled courteous agreement and went out into the street.

He stood for a moment beside the door, leaning against the wall, looking at the hazy figures around him — servicemen from San Diego in the uniforms of three branches, tourists, thieves, people who defied classification, the Mexicans (special policemen, all of them, rumor said) standing along the curb, the dogs — tasting a melancholy disgust at the tawdriness of this place which he thought could so easily be a gay play-spot.

From the doorway of the saloon he had just left, a pale girl spoke listlessly: “Come on in and get happy.”

He raised an arm in a doubtful gesture. “Look at ’em,” he ordered sadly, “a flock of—” He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and walked down the street grinning. He’d make a damned fool of himself yet!

A rack of picture post cards in the window of a curio shop caught his eye. He went in and bought half a dozen. Five of them he sent to friends in Philadelphia and New York. Over the sixth he pondered for some time: he could think of lots of people to send it to but he couldn’t remember their addresses. Finally he sent it to a former casual acquaintance whom he hadn’t seen since before the war but whose address he remembered because it was 444 Fourth Avenue. He penciled the same message on all six cards. “They tell me the States have gone dry.”

In the street again he searched his pockets and counted his resources: eighty-five cents in silver and two return tickets: one from Tijuana to San Diego and the other from there to the hospital.

A husky voice whined at his elbow: “Say, buddy, can you give me the price of a cup of coffee?”

Paul laughed. “Fifty-fifty.” he cried. “I got eighty-five cents. You get forty and we match for the odd nickel.” He spun a coin in the air and was elated to find he had won. In an alley entrance across the street a San Diego stage was loading: he went over to it and sat beside the driver. He slumped down in the scat, half dozing through the ride back to the city, while behind him a girl with an undeveloped body and too-finely-drawn features sang a popular song in a thin, plaintive voice, and her companions — two sailors from the Pacific fleet — argued loudly some question having to do with gun-pointing.

Leaving the stage at its terminus, Paul walked up the side of the plaza to Broadway and turned toward a lunchroom where his forty-five cents would buy him a meal of sorts. Passing the entrance of the Grant Hotel he found himself in the center of a cluster of people and looking into the most beautiful face he had ever seen. He did not know he was staring until the beautiful face’s escort in the uniform of a petty officer whispered to him, with peculiar, threatening emphasis: “Like her looks?”

Paul went on down the street slowly, turning the query over in his mind, wondering just what would be the mental processes of a man who under those conditions would ask that question in just that tone. He thought of turning around, finding the couple, and staring at the woman again to see what the petty officer would say then. But, looking hack, he could not see them, so he went on to the lunch-room.

He found a cigar in his pocket after he had eaten, and smoked it during the ride back to the hospital. The fog-laden air rushing into the automobile chilled him and kept him coughing almost continuously. He wished he had brought an overcoat.

The Crusader

The Smart Set, August 1923; as Mary Jane Hammett

Bert Pirtle fidgeted impatiently with his newspaper until the last loose thread had been severed by his wife’s little sharp teeth, and with a gesture of finality she had taken off her thimble; then he bore the robe off to the bedroom.

Drawing it down over his head and shoulders before the bureau glass, he perceived that a miracle had taken place: suddenly, as the folds of the garment had settled, Bert Pirtle had been whisked away, was gone from this room wherein every night for seven years he had slept with his wife. In the place where he had been stood a stranger, though perhaps not a strange man, for the newcomer seemed rather a spirit, a symbol, than a thing of frail bone and flesh. The figure within the white robe — if figure it really was — loomed larger and taller than the vanished Bert Pirtle had ever been, and was for all its shapelessness more pronouncedly existent. Out of twin holes — neatly finished with button-hole stitching — in the peaked hood eyes burned with an almost ineffable glow of holy purpose. It was not a man that stood before the mirror now, but a spirit: the spirit of a nation, even a race.

As he stood there, not moving, Bert Pirtle saw a vision. In one of his old school-books had been a picture of a Crusader, a white surcoat bearing a large cross worn over his armor. He remembered the picture now, not only remembered it but faced it across the oak top of the bureau. For the first time he visualized that Crusader, realized the wonderful pageantry of the Crusades, really saw the flower of Christendom — separate identities lost within iron helms even as his own selfness was lost behind white sheeting — moving in a strangely clear white light toward Jerusalem.

Beyond the lone figure in the foreground the glass held long marching columns, massive phalanxes of men who were iron under their snowy robes with emblazoned scarlet crosses going out to meet the Saracen; sunlight glinting on weapons and trappings of gold and silver and on plumes and banners of green and crimson and purple; dust swirling behind and overhead. And somewhere in one of those sacred regiments was he who had once been Bert Pirtle but who now was simply — with an almost divine simplicity — a knight.

He was unused to dreams of such intensity — the Bert Pirtle who stood in front of the bureau mirror — his body quivered, he breathed gulpingly, perspiration started from his pores. Never had he known such exaltation, not even at the initiation the night before, when he had stood on Nigger Hill among a white-shrouded throng, grotesque in the light of a gigantic bonfire, listening to and repeating a long, strange, inspiring, and not easily comprehensible oath.

Presently the swirling dust blotted out the files of men in the mirror and then out of the saffron cloud came a single rider all in white upon a white charger — another who rode in a Cause. A second school-day memory came to the man who dreamed; under the white hood his mouth muttered a name. “Galahad!”

The bedroom door opened. A baby tripped over the sill, thudded in a heap on the floor, rolled into the room, and bounced to its feet with awkward lightness. The child’s eyes widened at the sight of the figure before the bureau, two pink palms beat the air, a shriek of pure ecstasy came from its mouth. It tottered across the floor toward the man, gurgling joyously:

“Peekaboo! Papa play peekaboo!”

The Green Elephant

The Smart Set, October 1923

I

Joe Shupe stood in the doorway of the square-faced office building — his body tilted slantwise so that one thin shoulder, lodged against the gray stone, helped his crossed legs hold him up — looking without interest into the street.

He had stepped into the vestibule to roll a cigarette out of reach of the boisterous wind that romped along Riverside avenue, and he had remained there because he had nothing better to do. In fact, he had nothing else to do just now. Tomorrow he would revisit the employment offices — a matter of a few blocks’ walk along Main and Trent avenues, with brief digressions into one or two of the intersecting streets — for the fifth consecutive day; perhaps to be rewarded by a job, perhaps to hear reiterations of the now familiar “nothing in your line today.” But the time for that next pilgrimage to the shrines of Industry, through which he might reach the comparative paradise of employment, was still some twenty hours away; so Joe Shupe loitered in the doorway, and dull thoughts began to crawl around in his little round head.

He thought of the Swede first, with distaste. The Swede — he was a Dane, but the distinction was too subtle for Joe — had come down to the city from a Lost Creek lumber camp with money in his pockets and faith in his fellows. When the men came together and formed their brief friendship only fifty dollars remained of the Swedes tangible wealth. Joe got that by a crude and hoary subterfuge with which even a timber-beast from Lost Creek should have been familiar. What became of the swindled Swedes faith is not a matter of record. Joe had not given that a thought; and had his attention been called to it he probably would have been unable to see in it anything but further evidence of the Swedes unfitness for the possession of money.

But what was vital to Joe Shupe was that, inspired by the ease with which he had gained the fifty dollars, he had deserted the polished counter over which for eight hours each day he had shoved pics and sandwiches and coffee, and had set out to live by his wits. But the fifty dollars had soon dribbled away, the Swede had had no successors; and now Joe Shupe was beset with the necessity of finding employment again.

Joe’s fault, as Doc Haire had once pointed out, was that he was an unskilled laborer in the world of crime, and therefore had to content himself with stealing whatever came to hand — a slipshod and generally unsatisfactory method. As the same authority had often declared: “Making a living on the mace ain’t duck soup! Take half these guys you hear telling the world what wonders they are at puffing boxes, knocking over joints, and the rest of the lays — not a half of ’em makes three meals a day at it! Then what chance has a guy that ain’t got no regular racket, but’s got to trust to luck, got? Huh?”

But Joe Shupe had disregarded this advice, and even the oracle’s own example. For Doc Haire, although priding himself upon being the most altogether efficient house-burglar in the Northwest, was not above shipping out into the Coeur d’Alenes now and then to repair his finances by a few weeks’ work in the mines. Joe realized that Doc had been right; that he himself was not equipped to dig through the protecting surfaces with which mankind armored its wealth; that the Swede’s advent had been a fortuitous episode, and a recurrence could not be expected. He blamed the Swede now...

A commotion in the street interrupted Joe Shupe’s unaccustomed introspection.

Across the street two automobiles were twisting and turning, backing and halting, in clumsy dance figures. Men began to run back and forth between them. A tall man in a black overcoat stood up in one of the cars and began shooting with a small-caliber pistol at indeterminate targets. Weapons appeared in the other automobiles, and in the hands of men in the street between the two machines. Spectators scrambled into doorways. From down the street a policeman was running heavily, tugging at his hip, and trying to free his wrist from an entangling coat-tail. A man was running across the street toward Joe’s doorway, a black gladstone bag swinging at his side. As the man’s foot touched the curb he fell forward, sprawling half in the gutter half on the sidewalk. The bag left his hand and slid across the pavement — balancing itself as nicely as a boy on skates — to Joe’s feet.

The wisdom of Doc Haire went for nothing. With no thought for the economics of thievery, the amenities of specialization, Joe Shupe followed his bent. He picked up the bag, passed through the revolving door into the lobby of the building. turned a corner, followed a corridor, and at length came to a smaller door, through which he reached an alley. The alley gave to another street and a street-car that had paused to avoid a truck. Joe climbed into the car and found a seat.

Thus far Joe Shupe had been guided by pure instinct, and — granting that to touch the bag at all were judicious — had acted deftly and with beautiful precision. But now his conscious brain caught up with him as it were, and resumed its dominion over him. He began to wonder what he had let himself in for, whether his prize were worth the risk its possession had entailed, just how great that risk might be. He became excited, his pulse throbbed, singing in his temples, and his mouth went dry. He had a vision of innumerable policemen, packed in taxicabs like pullets in crates, racing dizzily to intercept him.

He got to the street four blocks from where he had boarded the street car, and only a suspicion that the conductor was watching him persuaded him to cling to the bag. He would have preferred leaving it inconspicuously between the seats, to be found in the car barn. He walked rapidly away from the car line, turning thankfully each corner the city put in his path, until he came to another row of car tracks. He stayed on the second car for six blocks, and then wound circuitously through the streets again, finally coming to the hotel in which he had his room.

A towel covering the keyhole, the blind down over the one narrow window, Joe Shupe put the bag on his bed and set about opening it. It was securely locked, but with his knife he attacked a leather side, making a ragged slit through which he looked into depths of green paper.

“Holy hell!” his gasping mouth exclaimed. “All the money in the world!”

II

He straightened abruptly, listening, while his small brown eyes looked suspiciously around the room. Tiptoeing to the door, he listened again; unlocked the door quickly and flung it open; searched the dark hall. Then he returned to the black bag. Enlarging the opening, be dumped and raked bis spoils out on the bed: a mound of gray-green paper — a bushel of it — neatly divided into little soft, paper-gartered bricks. Thousands, hundreds, tens, twenties, fifties! For a long minute he stood open-mouthed, spellbound, panting; then he hastily covered the pile of currency with one of the shabby gray blankets on the bed, and dropped weakly down beside it.

Presently the desire to know the amount of his loot penetrated Joe’s stupefaction and he set about counting the money. He counted slowly and with difficulty, taking one package of bills out of its hiding place at a time and stowing it under another blanket when he had finished with it. He counted each package he handled, bill by bill, ignoring the figures printed on the manilla wrappers. At fifty thousand he stopped, estimating that he had handled one-third of the pile. The emotional seething within him, together with the effort the unaccustomed addition required of his brain, had by then driven his curiosity away.

His mind, freed of its mathematical burden, was attacked by an alarming thought. The manager of the hotel, who was his own clerk, had seen Joe come in with the bag; and while the bag was not unusual in appearance, nevertheless, any black bag would attract both eyes and speculation after the evening papers were read. Joe decided that he would have to get out of the hotel, after which the bag would have to be disposed of.

Laboriously, and at the cost of two large blisters, he hacked at the bag with his dull knife and bent it until, wrapped in an old newspaper, it made a small and unassuming bundle. Then he distributed the money about his person, stuffing his pockets and even putting some of the bills inside his shirt. He looked at his reflection in the mirror when he had finished, and the result was very unsatisfactory: he presented a decidedly and humorously padded appearance.

That would not do. He dragged his battered valise from under the bed and put the money into it, under his few clothes.

There was no delay about his departure from the hotel: it was of the type where all bills arc payable in advance. He passed four rubbish cans before he could summon the courage to get rid of the fragments of the bag, but he boldly dropped them into the fifth; after which he walked — almost scuttled — for ten minutes, turning corners and slipping through alleys, until he was positive he was not being watched.

At a hotel across the city from his last home he secured a room and went up to it immediately. Behind drawn blinds, masked keyhole, and closed transom, he took the money out again. He had intended finishing his counting — the flight across the city having rekindled his desire to know the extent of his wealth — but when he found that he had bunched it, had put already counted with uncounted, and thought of the immensity of the task, he gave it up. Counting was a “tough job,” and the afternoon papers would tell him how much he had.

He wanted to look at the money, to feast his eyes upon it, to caress his fingers with it, but its abundance made him uneasy, frightened him even, notwithstanding that it was safe here from prying eyes. There was too much of it. It unnerved him. A thousand dollars, or perhaps even ten thousand, would have filled him with wild joy, but this bale... Furtively, he put it back in the valise.

For the first time now he thought of it not as money, — a thing in itself, — but as money — potential women, cards, liquor, idleness, everything! It took his breath for the instant — the thought of the things the world held for him now! And he realized that he was wasting time, that these things were abroad, beckoning, while he stood in his room dreaming of them. He opened the valise and took out a double handful of the bills, cramming them into his pockets.

On the steps descending from the office to the street he halted abruptly. A hotel of this sort — or any other — was certainly no place to leave a hundred and fifty thousand dollars unguarded. A fine chump he would be to leave it behind and have it stolen!

He hurried back to his room and, scarcely pausing to renew his former precautions, sprang to the valise. The money was still there. Then he sat down and tried to think of some way by which the money could be protected during his absence. He was hungry — he had not eaten since morning — but he could not leave the money. He found a piece of heavy paper, wrapped the money in it and lashed it securely, making a large but inconspicuous bundle — laundry, perhaps.

On the street newsboys were shouting extras. Joe bought a paper, folded it carefully so that its headlines were out of sight, and went to a restaurant on First avenue. He sat at a table back in one corner, with his bundle on the floor and his feet on the bundle. Then with elaborate nonchalance he spread the paper before him and read of the daylight holdup in which $250,000 had been taken from an automobile belonging to the Fourth National Bank. $250,000! He grabbed the bundle from the floor, knocking his forehead noisily against the table in his haste, and put it in his lap. Then he reddened with swift self-consciousness, paled apprehensively, and yawned exaggeratedly. After assuring himself that none of the other men in the restaurant had noted his peculiar behavior, he turned his attention to the newspaper again and read the story of the robbery.

Five of the bandits had been caught in the very act. the paper said, and two of them were seriously wounded. The bandits, who, according to the paper, must have had information concerning the unusually large shipment from some friend on the inside, had bungled their approach, bringing their own automobile to rest too far from their victim’s for the greatest efficiency. Nevertheless, the sixth bandit had made away with the money. As was to be expected, the bandits denied that there was a sixth, but the disappearance of the money testified irrefragably to his existence.

From the restaurant Joe went to a saloon on Howard Street, bought two bottles of white liquor, and took them to his room. He had decided that he would have to remain indoors that night: he couldn’t walk around with $250,000 under his arm. Suppose some flaw in the paper should suddenly succumb to the strain upon it? Or he should drop the bundle? Or someone should bump heavily into it?

He fidgeted about the room for hours, pondering his problem with all the concentration of which his dull mind was capable. He opened one of the bottles that he had brought, but he set it aside untasted: he could not risk drinking until he had safeguarded the money. It was too great a responsibility to be mixed with alcohol. The temptations of women and cards and the rest did not bother him now; time enough for them when the money was safe. He couldn’t leave the money in his room, and he couldn’t carry it to any of the places he knew, or to any place at all, for that matter.

III

He slept little that night, and by morning had made no headway against his problem. He thought of banking the money, but dismissed the thought as absurd: he couldn’t walk into a bank a day or so after a widely advertised robbery and open an account with a bale of currency. He even thought of finding some secluded spot where he could bury it; but that seemed still more ridiculous. A few shovels of dirt was not sufficient protection. He might buy or rent a house and conceal the money on his own premises; but there were fires to consider, and what might serve as a hiding place for a few hundred dollars wouldn’t do for many thousands. He must have an absolutely safe plan, one that would be safe in every respect and would admit of no possible loophole through which the money could vanish. He knew half a dozen men who could have told him what to do; but which of them could he trust where $250,000 was concerned?

When he was giddy from too much smoking on an empty stomach, he packed his valise again and left the hotel. A day of uneasiness and restlessness, with the valise ever in his hand or under his foot, brought no counsel. The gray-green incubus that his battered bag housed benumbed him, handicapped by his never-agile imagination. His nerves began to send little fluttering messages — forerunners of panic — to his brain.

Leaving a restaurant that evening he encountered Doc Haire himself.

“Hello, Joe! Going away?”

Joe looked down at the valise in his hand.

“Yes,” he said.

That was it! Why hadn’t he thought of it before! In another city, at some distance from the scene of the robbery, none of the restrictions that oppressed him in Spokane would be present. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the East!

Although he had paid for a berth, Joe Shupe did not occupy it; but sat all night in a day coach. At the last moment he had realized that the ways of sleeping-cars were unknown to him — perhaps one was required to surrender one’s hand baggage. Joe did not know, but he did know that the money in his valise was not going to leave his hands until he had found a securer place for it. So he dozed uncomfortably through the ride over the Cascades, sprawled over two seats in the smoking-car, leaning against the valise.

In Seattle he gained no more liberty than he had had in Spokane. He had purposed to open an account with each bank in the city, distributing his wealth widely in cautious amounts; and for two days he tried to carry out his plan. But his nervous legs simply would not carry him through the door of a bank. There was something too austere, too official, too all-knowing, about the very architecture of these financial institutions, and there was no telling what complications, what questioning, awaited a man inside.

A fear of being bereft of his wealth by more cunning thieves — and he admitted frankly now that there might be many such — began to obsess him, and kept him out of dance-hall, pool-room, gambling-house, and saloon. From anyone who addressed even the most casual of sentences to him he fled headlong. On his first day in Seattle he bought a complete equipment of bright and gaudy clothes, but he wore them for only half an hour. He felt that they gave him an altogether too affluent appearance, and would certainly attract the attention of thieves in droves; so he put them away in his valise, and thereafter wore his old clothes.

At night now he slept with the valise in bed beside him, one of his arms bent over it in a protecting embrace that was not unlike a bridegroom’s, waking now and then with the fear that someone was tugging at it. And every night it was a different hotel. He changed his lodgings each day, afraid of the curiosity his habit of always carrying the valise might arouse it he stayed too long in any one hotel.

Such intelligence as he was ordinarily in possession of was by this time completely submerged beneath the panic in which he lived. He went aimlessly about the city, a shabby man with the look of a harried rabbit in his furtive eyes, destinationless, without purpose, filled with forebodings that were now powerless except to deepen the torpor in his head.

A senseless routine filled his days. At eight or eight-thirty in the morning he would leave the hotel where he had slept, eat his breakfast at a nearby lunch-room, and then walk — down Second to Yessler Way, to Fourth, to Pike — or perhaps as far as Stewart — to Second, to Yessler Way, to Fourth... Sometimes he would desert his beat to sit for an hour or more on one of the green iron benches around the totem in Pioneer Square, staring vacantly at the street, his valise either at his side or beneath his feet. Presently, goaded by an obscure disquietude, he would get up abruptly and go back to his promenade along Yessler Way to Fourth, to Pike, to Second, to Yessler Way, to... When he thought of food he ate meagerly at the nearest restaurant, but often he forgot to cat all day.

His nights were more vivid; with darkness his brain shook off some of its numbness and became sensitive to pain. Lying in the dark, always in a strange room, he would be filled with wild fears whose anarchic chaos amounted to delirium. Only in his dreams did he see things clearly. His brief and widely spaced naps brought him distinct, sharply etched pictures in which invariably he was robbed of his money, usually to the accompaniment of physical violence in its most unlovely forms.

The end was inevitable. In a larger city Joe Shupe might have gone on until his mentality had wasted away entirely and he collapsed. But Seattle is not large enough to smother the identities of its inhabitants: strangers’ faces become familiar: one becomes accustomed to meeting the man in the brown derby somewhere in the vicinity of the post office, and the red-haired girl with the grapes on her hat somewhere along Pine Street between noon and one o’clock; and looks for the slim youth with the remarkable mustache, expecting to pass him on the street at least twice during the course of the day. And so it was that two Prohibition enforcement officers came to recognize Joe Shupe and his battered valise and his air of dazed fear.

They didn’t take him very seriously at first, until, quite by accident, they grew aware of his custom of changing his address each night. Then one day, when they had nothing special on hand and when the memory of reprimands they had received from their superiors for not frequently enough “showing results” was fresh, they met Joe on the street. For two hours they shadowed him — up Fourth to Pike, to Second, to Yessler Way... On the third round-trip, confusion and chagrin sent the officers to accost Joe.

“I ain’t done nothing!” Joe told them, hugging the valise to his body with both arms. “You leave me be!”

One of the officers said something that Joe did not understand — he was beyond comprehending anything by now — but tears came from his red-rimmed eyes and ran down the hollows of his cheeks.

“You leave me be!” he repeated.

Then, still clasping the valise to his bosom, he turned and ran down the street. The officers easily overtook him.

Joe Shupe’s story of how he had come into possession of the stolen quarter-million was received by everyone — police, press and public — with a great deal of merriment. But, now that the responsibility for the money’s safety rested with the Seattle police, he slept soundly that night, as well as those that followed; and when he appeared in the courtroom in Spokane two weeks later, to plead futilely that he was not one of the men who held up the Fourth National Bank’s automobile, he was his normal self again, both physically and mentally.

The Dimple

Saucy Stories, October 15,1923; (aka: In the Morgue, 1962)

Walter Dowe took the last sheet of the manuscript from his typewriter, with a satisfied sigh, and leaned back in his chair, turning his face to the ceiling to ease the stiffened muscles of his neck. Then he looked at the clock: three-fifteen. He yawned, got to his feet, switched off the lights, and went down the hall to his bedroom.

In the doorway of the bedroom, he halted abruptly. The moonlight came through the wide windows to illuminate an empty bed. He turned on the lights, and looked around the room. None of the things his wife had worn that night were there. She had not undressed, then; perhaps she had heard the rattle of his typewriter and had decided to wait downstairs until he had finished. She never interrupted him when he was at work, and he was usually too engrossed by his labors to hear her footsteps when she passed his study door.

He went to the head of the stairs and called:

“Althea!”

No answer.

He went downstairs, into all the rooms, turning on the lights; he returned to the second story and did the same. His wife was not in the house. He was perplexed, and a little helpless. Then he remembered that she had gone to the theater with the Schuylers. His hands trembled as he picked up the telephone.

The Schuylers’ maid answered his call... There had been a fire at the Majestic theater; neither Mr. nor Mrs. Schuyler had come home. Mr. Schuylers father had gone out to look for them, but had not returned yet. The maid understood that the fire had been pretty bad... Lots of folks hurt...

Dowe was waiting on the sidewalk when the taxicab for which he had telephoned arrived. Fifteen minutes later he was struggling to get through the fire lines, which were still drawn about the theater. A perspiring, red-faced policeman thrust him back.

“You’ll find nothing here! The building’s been cleared. Everybody’s been taken to the hospitals.”

Dowe found his cab again and was driven to the City Hospital. He forced his way through the clamoring group on the grey stone steps. A policeman blocked the door. Presently a pasty-faced man, in solid white, spoke over the policeman’s shoulder:

“There’s no use waiting. We’re too busy treating them now to either take their names, or let anybody in to see them. We’ll try to have a list in the late morning edition; but we can’t let anybody in until later in the day.”

Dowe turned away. Then he thought: Murray Bornis, of course! He went back to the cab and gave the driver Bornis’ address.

Bornis came to the door of his apartment in pajamas. Dowe clung to him.

“Althea went to the Majestic tonight, and hasn’t come home. They wouldn’t let me in at the hospital. Told me to wait; and I can’t! You’re a police commissioner; you can get me in!”

While Bornis dressed, Dowe paced the floor, talking, babbling. Then he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and stood suddenly still. The sight of his distorted face and wild eyes shocked him back into sanity. He was on the verge of hysterics. He must take hold of himself. He must not collapse before he found Althea. Deliberately, he made himself sit down; made himself stop visualizing Altheas soft, white body charred and crushed. He must think about something else: Bornis, for instance... But that brought him back to his wife in the end. She had never liked Bornis. His frank sensuality, and his unsavory reputation for numerous affairs with numerous women, had offended her strict conception of morality. To be sure, she had always given him all the courtesy due her husband’s friend; but it was generally a frigid giving. And Bornis, understanding her attitude, and perhaps a little contemptuous of her narrow views, had been as coolly polite as she. And now she was lying somewhere, moaning in agony, perhaps already cold...

Bornis caught up the rest of his clothes and they went down to the street. He finished dressing in the taxicab.

They went to the City Hospital first, where the police commissioner and his companion were readily admitted. They walked down long rooms, between rows of groaning and writhing bodies; looking into bruised and burned faces, seeing no one they knew. Then to Mercy Hospital, where they found Sylvia Schuyler. She told them that the crush in the theater had separated her from her husband and Althea, and she had not seen them afterward. Then she lapsed into unconsciousness again.

When they got back to the taxicab, Bornis gave directions to the driver in an undertone, but Dowe did not have to hear them to know what they were: “To the morgue.” There was no place else to go.

Now they walked between row s of bodies that were mangled horribly; denuded, discolored, and none the less terrible because they could not scream. Dowe had exhausted his feelings: he felt no pity, no loathing now. He looked into a face; it was not Althea’s; then it was nothing; he passed on to the next.

Bornis’ fingers closed convulsively around Dowe’s arm.

“There! Althea!”

Dowe turned. A face that stampeding leather heels had robbed of features; a torso that was battered and blackened and cut, and from which the clothing had been torn. All that was human of it were the legs; they had somehow escaped disfigurement.

“No! No!” Dowe cried.

He would not have this begrimed, mangled thing his exquisite white Althea!

Through the horror that for the moment shut Dowe off from the world, Bornis’s vibrant, anguished voice penetrated — a shriek:

“I tell you it is!” Flinging out a hand to point at one smooth knee. “See! The dimple!”

The Second-Story Angel

The Black Mask, November 15, 1923

Carter Brigham — Carter Webright Brigham in the tables of contents of various popular magazines — woke with a start, passing from unconsciousness into full awareness too suddenly to doubt that his sleep had been disturbed by something external.

The moon was not up and his apartment was on the opposite side of the building from the street — lights; the blackness about him was complete — he could not see so far as the foot of his bed.

Holding his breath, not moving after that first awakening start, he lay with straining eyes and ears. Almost at once a sound — perhaps a repetition of the one that had aroused him — came from the adjoining room: the furtive shuffling of feet across the wooden floor. A moment of silence, and a chair grated on the floor, as if dislodged by a careless shin. Then silence again, and a faint rustling as of a body scraping against the rough paper of the wall.

Now Carter Brigham was neither a hero nor a coward, and he was not armed. There was nothing in his rooms more deadly than a pair of candlesticks, and they — not despicable weapons in an emergency — were on the far side of the room from which the sounds came.

If he had been awakened to hear very faint and not often repeated noises in the other room — such rustlings as even the most adept burglar might not avoid — the probabilities are that Carter would have been content to remain in his bed and try to frighten the burglar away by yelling at him. He would not have disregarded the fact that in an encounter at close quarters under these conditions every advantage would lie on the side of the prowler.

But this particular prowler had made quite a lot of noise, had even stumbled against a chair, had shown himself a poor hand at stealthiness. That an inexpert burglar might easily be as dangerous as an adept did not occur to the man in the bed.

Perhaps it was that in the many crook stories he had written, deadliness had always been wedded to skill and the bunglers had always been comparatively harmless and easily overcome, and that he had come to accept this theory as a truth. After all, if a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.

Anyhow, Carter Brigham slid his not unmuscular body gently out from between the sheets and crept on silent bare feet toward the open doorway of the room from which the sounds had come. He passed from his bed to a position inside the next room, his back against the wall beside the door during an interlude of silence on the intruder’s part.

The room in which Carter now stood was every bit as black as the one he had left; so he stood motionless, waiting for the prowler to betray his position.

His patience was not taxed. Very soon the burglar moved again, audibly; and then against the rectangle of a window — scarcely lighter than the rest of the room — Carter discerned a man-shaped shadow just a shade darker coming toward him. The shadow passed the window and was lost in the enveloping darkness.

Carter, his body tensed, did not move until he thought the burglar had had time to reach a spot where no furniture intervened. Then, with clutching hands thrown out on wide — spread arms, Carter hurled himself forward.

His shoulder struck the intruder and they both crashed to the floor. A forearm came up across Carter’s throat, pressing into it. He tore it away and felt a blow on his cheek. He wound one arm around the burglar’s body, and with the other fist struck back. They rolled over and over across the floor until they were stopped by the legs of a massive table, the burglar uppermost.

With savage exultance in his own strength, which the struggle thus far had shown to be easily superior to the other’s, Carter twisted his body, smashing his adversary into the heavy table. Then he drove a fist into the body he had just shaken off and scrambled to his knees, feeling for a grip on the burglar’s throat. When he had secured it he found that the prowler was lying motionless, unresisting. Laughing triumphantly, Carter got to his feet and switched on the lights.

The girl on the floor did not move.

Half lying, half hunched against the table where he had hurled her, she was inanimate. A still, twisted figure in an austerely tailored black suit — one sleeve of which had been torn from the shoulder — with an unended confusion of short chestnut hair above a face that was linen-white except where blows had reddened it. Her eyes were closed. One arm was outflung across the floor, the other lay limply at her side; one silken leg was extended, the other folded under her.

Into a corner of the room her hat, a small black toque, had rolled; not far from the hat lay a very small pinch-bar, the jimmy with which she had forced an entrance.

The window over the fire escape — always locked at night — was wide-open. Its catch hung crookedly.

Mechanically, methodically — because he had been until recently a reporter on a morning paper, and the lessons of years are not unlearned in a few weeks — Carter’s eyes picked up these details and communicated them to his brain while he strove to conquer his bewilderment.

After a while his wits resumed their functions and he went over to kneel beside the girl. Her pulse was regular, but she gave no other indications of life. He lifted her from the floor and carried her to the leather couch on the other side of the room. Then he brought cold water from the bathroom and brandy from the bookcase. Generous applications of the former to her temples and face and of the latter between her lips finally brought a tremor to her mouth and a quiver to her eyelids.

Presently she opened her eyes, looked confusedly around the room, and endeavored to sit up. He pressed her head gently down on the couch.

“Lie still a moment longer — until you feel all right.”

She seemed to see him then for the first time, and to remember where she was. She shook her head clear of his restraining hand and sat up, swinging her feet down to the floor.

“So I lose again,” she said, with an attempt at nonchalance that was only faintly tinged with bitterness, her eyes meeting his.

They were green eyes and very long, and they illuminated her face which, without their soft light, had seemed of too sullen a cast for beauty, despite the smooth regularity of the features.

Carter’s glance dropped to her discolored cheek, where his knuckles had left livid marks.

“I’m sorry I struck you,” he apologized. “In the dark I naturally thought you were a man. I wouldn’t have—”

“Forget it,” she commanded coolly. “It’s all in the game.”

“But I—”

“Aw, stop it!” Impatiently. “It doesn’t amount to anything. I’m all right.”

“I’m glad of that.”

His bare toes came into the range of his vision, and he went into his bedroom for slippers and a robe. The girl watched him silently when he returned to her, her face calmly defiant.

“Now,” he suggested, drawing up a chair, “suppose you tell me all about it.”

She laughed briefly. “It’s a long story, and the bulls ought to be here any minute now. There wouldn’t be time to tell it.”

“The police?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I didn’t send for them! Why should I?”

“God knows!” She looked around the room and then abruptly straight into his eyes. “If you think I’m going to buy my liberty, brother” — her voice was icy insolent — “you’re way off!”

He denied the thought. Then: “Suppose you tell me about it.”

“All primed to listen to a sob story?” she mocked. “Well, here goes: I got some bad breaks on the last couple of jobs I pulled and had to lay low — so low that I didn’t even get anything to eat for a day or two. I figured I’d have to pull another job for getaway money — so I could blow town for a while. And this was it! I was sort of giddy from not eating and I made too much noise; but even at that” — with a scornful laugh — “you’d never have nailed me if I’d had a gun on me!”

Carter was on his feet.

“There’s food of some sort in the icebox. We’ll eat before we do any more talking.”

A grunt came from the open window by which the girl had entered. Both of them wheeled toward it. Framed in it was a burly, red-faced man who wore a shiny blue serge suit and a black derby hat. He threw one thick leg over the sill and came into the room with heavy, bearlike agility.

“Well, well” — the words came complacently from his thick-lipped mouth, under a close-clipped gray moustache — “if it ain’t my old friend Angel Grace!”

“Cassidy!” the girl exclaimed weakly, and then relapsed into sullen stoicism.

Carter took a step forward.

“What—”

“’S all right!” the newcomer assured him, displaying a bright badge. “Detective-Sergeant Cassidy. I was passin’ and sported somebody makin’ your fire escape. Decided to wait until they left and nab ’em with the goods. Got tired of waitin’ and came up for a look-see.”

He turned jovially to the girl.

“And here it turns out to be the Angel herself! Come on, kid, let’s take a ride.”

Carter put out a detaining hand as she started submissively toward the detective.

“Wait a minute! Can’t we fix this thing up? I don’t want to prosecute the lady.”

Cassidy leered from the girl to Carter and back, and then shook his head.

“Can’t be done! The Angel is wanted for half a dozen jobs. Don’t make no difference whether you make charges against her or not — she’ll go over for plenty anyways.”

The girl nodded concurrence.

“Thanks, old dear,” she told Carter, with an only partially successful attempt at nonchalance, “but they want me pretty bad.”

But Carter would not submit without a struggle. The gods do not send a real flesh-and-blood feminine crook into a writer’s rooms every evening in the week. The retention of such a gift was worth contending for. The girl must have within her, he thought, material for thousands, tens of thousands, of words of fiction. Was that a boon to be lightly surrendered? And then her attractiveness was in itself something; and a still more potent claim on his assistance — though not perhaps so clearly explainable — was the mottled area his fists had left on the smooth flesh of her cheek.

“Can’t we arrange it somehow?” he asked. “Couldn’t we fix it so that the charges might be — er — unofficially disregarded for the present?”

Cassidy’s heavy brows came down and the red of his face darkened.

“Are you tryin’ to—”

He stopped, and his small blue eyes narrowed almost to the point of vanishing completely.

“Go ahead! You’re doin’ the talkin’.”

Bribery, Carter knew, was a serious matter, and especially so when directed toward an officer of the law. The law is not to be lightly set aside, perverted, by an individual. To fling to this gigantic utensil a few bits of green-engraved paper, expecting thus to turn it from its course, was, to say the least, a foolhardy proceeding.

Yet the law as represented by this fat Cassidy in baggy, not too immaculate garments, while indubitably the very same law, seemed certainly less awe-inspiring, less unapproachable. Almost it took on a human aspect — the aspect of a man who was not entirely without his faults. The law just now, in fact, looked out through little blue eyes that were manifestly greedy, for all their setting in a poker face.

Carter hesitated, trying to find the words in which his offer would be most attractively dressed; but the detective relieved him of the necessity of broaching the subject.

“Listen, mister,” he said candidly. “I get you all right! But on the level, I don’t think it’d be worth what it’d cost you.”

“What would it cost?”

“Well, there’s four hundred in rewards offered for her that I know of — maybe more.”

Four hundred dollars! That was considerably more than Carter had expected to pay. Still, he could get several times four hundred dollars’ worth of material from her.

“Done!” he said. “Four hundred it is!”

“Woah!” Cassidy rumbled. “That don’t get me nothin’! What kind of chump do you think I am? If I turn her in I get that much, besides credits for promotion. Then what the hell’s the sense of me turnin’ her loose for that same figure and runnin’ the risk of bein’ sent over myself if it leaks out?”

Carter recognised the justice of the detective’s stand.

“Five hundred,” he bid.

Cassidy shook his head emphatically.

“On the level, I wouldn’t touch it for less’n a thousan’ — and you’d be a sucker to pay that much! She’s a keen kid all right, but the world’s full of just as keen ones that’ll come a lot cheaper.”

“I can’t pay a thousand,” Carter said slowly; he had only a few dollars more than that in his bank.

His common sense warned him not to impoverish himself for the girl’s sake, warned him that the payment of even five hundred dollars for her liberty would be a step beyond the limits of rational conduct.

He raised his head to acknowledge his defeat, and to tell Cassidy that he might take the girl away; then his eyes focused on the girl. Though she still struggled to maintain her attitude of ironic indifference to her fate, and did attain a reckless smile, her chin quivered and her shoulders were no longer jauntily squared.

The dictates of reason went for nothing in the face of these signs of distress.

Without conscious volition, Carter found himself saying, “The best I can do is seven hundred and fifty.”

Cassidy shook his head briskly, but he caught one corner of his lower lip between his teeth, robbing the rejecting gesture of its finality.

The girl, stirred into action by the detective-sergeant’s indecision, put an impulsive hand on his arm and added the weight of her personality to the temptation of the money.

“Come on, Cassidy,” she pleaded. “Be a good guy — give me a break! Take the seven fifty! You got rep enough without turning me in!”

Cassidy turned abruptly to Carter. “I’m makin’ a sap o” myself, but give me the dough!”

At the sight of the check book that Carter took from a desk drawer, Cassidy balked again, demanding cash. Finally they persuaded him to accept a check made payable to “Cash.”

At the door he turned and wagged a fat finger at Carter.

“Now remember,” he threatened, “if you try any funny business on this check I’m going to nail you if I have to frame you to do it!”

“There’ll be no funny business,” Carter assured him.

There was no doubt of the girl’s hunger; she ate ravenously of the cold beef, salad, rolls, pastry, and coffee that Carter put before her. Neither of them talked much while she ate. The food held her undivided attention, while Carter’s mind was busy planning how his opportunity might be utilised to the utmost.

Over their cigarettes the girl mellowed somewhat, and he persuaded her to talk of herself. But clearly she had not accepted him without many reservations, and she made no pretence of lowering her guard.

She told him her story briefly, without going into any details.

“My old man was named John Cardigan, but he was a lot better known as Taper-Box John, from his trick of carrying his tools around in an unsuspicious-looking shoebox. If I do say it myself, he was as slick a burglar as there was in the grift! I don’t remember Ma very well. She died or left or something when I was a little kid and the old man didn’t like to talk about her.

“But I had as good a bringing up, criminally speaking, as you ever heard of. There was the old man, a wizard in his line; and my older brother Frank — he’s doing a one-to-fourteen-year stretch in Deer Lodge now — who wasn’t a dub by any means with a can opener — safe-ripping, you know. Between them and the mobs they ran with, I got a pretty good education along certain lines.

“Everything went along fine, with me keeping house for the old man and Frank, and them giving me everything I wanted, until the old man got wiped out by a night watchman in Philly one night. Then, a couple weeks later, Frank got picked up in some burg out in Montana — Great Falls. That put me up against it. We hadn’t saved much money — easy come, easy go — and what we had I sent out to Frank’s mouthpiece — a lawyer — to try to spring him. But it was no go — they had him cold, and they sent him over.

“After that I had to shift for myself. It was a case of either cashing in on what the old man and Frank had taught me or going on the streets. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to go on the streets actually — there were plenty of guys who were willing to take me in — it’s just that it’s a rotten way of making a living. I don’t want to be owned!

“Maybe you think I could have got a job somewhere in a store or factory or something. But in the first place, a girl with no experience has a hard time knocking down enough jack to live on; and then again, half the dicks in town know me as the old man’s daughter, and they wouldn’t keep it a secret if they found me working any place — they’d think I was getting a job lined up for some mob.

“So, after thinking it all over, I decided to try the old man’s racket. It went easy from the first. I knew all the tricks and it wasn’t hard to put them into practice. Being a girl helped, too. A couple times, when I was caught cold, people took my word for it that I had got into the wrong place by mistake.

“But being a girl had its drawbacks, too. As the only she-burglar in action, my work was sort of conspicuous, and it wasn’t long before the bulls had a line on me. I was picked up a couple times, but I had a good lawyer, and they couldn’t make anything stick, so they turned me loose; but they didn’t forget me.

“Then I got some bad breaks, and pulled some jobs that they knew they could tie on me; and they started looking for me proper. To make things worse, I had hurt the feelings of quite a few guys who had tried to get mushy with me at one time or another, and they had been knocking me — saying I was up-stage and so on — to everybody, and that hadn’t helped me any with the people who might have helped me when I was up against it.

“So besides hiding from the dicks I had to dodge half the guns in the burg for fear they’d put the finger on me — turn me up to the bulls. This honour among thieves stuff doesn’t go very big in New York!

“Finally it got so bad that I couldn’t even get to my room, where my clothes and what money I had were. I was cooped up in a hang-out I had across town, peeping out at dicks who were watching the joint, and knowing that if I showed myself I was a goner.

“I couldn’t keep that up, especially as I had no food there and couldn’t get hold of anybody I could trust; so I took a chance tonight and went over the roof, intending to knock over the first likely-looking dump I came to for the price of some food and a ducat out of town.

“And this was the place I picked, and that brings my tale up to date.”

They were silent for a moment, she watching Carter out of the corners of her eyes, as if trying to read what was going on in his mind, and he turning her story around in his head, admiring its literary potentialities.

She was speaking again, and now her voice held the slightly metallic quality that it had before she had forgotten some of her wariness in her preoccupation with her story.

“Now, old top, I don’t know what your game is; but I warned you right off the reel that I wasn’t buying anything.”

Carter laughed. “Angel Grace, your name suits you — heaven must have sent you here,” he said, and then added, a little self-consciously, “My name is Brigham — Carter Webright Brigham.”

He paused, half expectantly, and not in vain.

“Not the writer?”

Her instantaneous recognition caused him to beam on her — he had not reached the stage of success when he might expect everyone to be familiar with his name.

“You’ve read some of my stuff?” he asked.

“Oh, yes! ‘Poison for One’ and ‘The Settlement’ in Warner’s Magazine, ‘Nemesis, Incorporated’ in the National, and all your stories in Cody’s!”

Her voice, even without the added testimony of the admiration that had replaced the calculation in her eyes, left no doubt in his mind that she had indeed liked his stories.

“Well, that’s the answer,” he told her. “That money I gave Cassidy was an investment in a gold mine. The things you can tell me will fairly write themselves and the magazines will eat ’em up!”

Oddly enough, the information that his interest had been purely professional did not seem to bring her pleasure; on the contrary, little shadows appeared in the clear green field of her eyes.

Seeing them, Carter, out of some intuitive apprehension, hastened to add: “But I suppose I’d have done the same even if you hadn’t promised stories — I couldn’t very well let him carry you off to jail.”

She gave him a sceptical smile at that, but her eyes cleared.

“That’s all very fine,” she observed, “as far as it goes. But you mustn’t forget that Cassidy isn’t the only sleuth in the city that’s hunting for me. And don’t forget that you’re likely to get yourself in a fine hole by helping me.”

Carter came back to earth.

“That’s right! We’ll have to figure out what is the best thing to do.”

Then the girl spoke: “It’s a cinch I’ll have to get out of town! Too many of them are looking for me, and I’m too well-known. Another thing: you can trust Cassidy as long as he hasn’t spent that money, but that won’t be long. Most likely he’s letting it go over a card table right now. As soon as he’s flat he’ll be back to see you again. You’ll be safe enough so far as he’s concerned — he can’t prove anything on you without giving himself away — but if I’m where he can find me he’ll pinch me unless you put up more coin; and he’ll try to find me through you. There’s nothing to it but for me to blow town.”

“That’s just what we’ll do,” Carter cried. “We’ll pick out some safe place not far away, where you can go today. Then I’ll meet you there tomorrow and we can make some permanent arrangements.”

It was late in the morning before their plans were completed.

Carter went to his bank as soon as it was open and withdrew all but sufficient money to cover the checks he had out, including the one he had given the detective-sergeant. The girl would need money for food and fare, and even clothing, for her room, she was confident, was still watched by the police.

She left Carter’s apartment in a taxicab, and was to buy clothes of a different colour and style from those she was wearing and whose description the police had. Then she was to dismiss the taxicab and engage another to drive her to a railroad station some distance from the city — they were afraid that the detectives on duty at the railroad stations in the city, and at the ferries, would recognise her in spite of the new clothes. At the distant station she would board a train for the upstate town they had selected for their rendezvous.

Carter was to join her there the following day.

He did not go down to the street door with her when she left, but said goodbye in his rooms. At the leave-taking she shed her coating of worldly Cynicism and tried to express her gratitude.

But he cut her short with an embarrassed mockery of her own earlier admonition: “Aw, stop it!”

Carter Brigham did not work that day. The story on which he had been engaged now seemed stiff and lifeless and altogether without relation to actuality. The day and the night dragged along, but no matter how slowly, they did pass in the end, and he was stepping down from a dirty local train in the town where she was to wait for him.

Registering at the hotel they had selected, he scanned the page of the book given over to the previous day’s business. “Mrs. H. H. Moore,” the name she was to have used, did not appear thereon. Discreet inquiries revealed that she had not arrived.

Sending his baggage up to his room, Carter went out and called at the two other hotels in the town. She was at neither. At a newsstand he bought an armful of New York papers. Nothing about her arrest was in them. She had not been picked up before leaving the city, or the newspapers would have made much news of her.

For three days he clung obstinately to the belief that she had not run away from him. He spent the three days in his New York rooms, his ears alert for the ringing of the telephone bell, examining his mail frantically, constantly expecting the messenger, who didn’t come. Occasionally he sent telegrams to the hotel in the upstate town — futile telegrams.

Then he accepted the inescapable truth: she had decided — perhaps had so intended all along — not to run the risk incidental to a meeting with him, but had picked out a hiding place of her own; she did not mean to fulfil her obligations to him, but had taken his assistance and gone.

Another day passed in idleness while he accustomed himself to the bitterness of this knowledge. Then he set to work to salvage what he could. Fortunately, it seemed to be much. The bare story that the girl had told him over the remains of her meal could with little effort be woven into a novelette that should be easily marketed. Crook stories were always in demand, especially one with an authentic girl-burglar drawn from life.

As he bent over his typewriter, concentrating on his craft, his disappointment began to fade. The girl was gone. She had treated him shabbily, but perhaps it was better that way. The money she had cost him would come back with interest from the sale of the serial rights of this story. As for the personal equation: she had been beautiful, fascinating enough — and friendly — but still she was a crook...

For days he hardly left his desk except to eat and sleep, neither of which did he do excessively.

Finally the manuscript was completed and sent out in the mail. For the next two days he rested as fully as he had toiled, lying abed to all hours, idling through his waking hours, replacing the nervous energy his work always cost him.

On the third day a note came from the editor of the magazine to which he had sent the story, asking if it would be convenient for him to call at two-thirty the next afternoon.

Four men were with the editor when Carter was ushered into his office. Two of them he knew: Gerald Gulton and Harry Mack, writers like himself. He was introduced to the others: John Deitch and Walton Dohlman. He was familiar with their work, though he had not met them before; they contributed to some of the same magazines that bought his stories.

When the group had been comfortably seated and cigars and cigarettes were burning, the editor smiled into the frankly curious faces turned toward him.

“Now we’ll get down to business,” he said. “You’ll think it a queer business at first, but I’ll try to mystify you no longer than necessary.”

He turned to Carter. “You wouldn’t mind telling us, Mr. Brigham, just how you got hold of the idea for your story ‘The Second-Story Angel,’ would you?”

“Of course not,” Carter said. “It was rather peculiar. I was roused one night by the sound of a burglar in my rooms and got up to investigate. I tackled him and we fought in the dark for a while. Then I turned on the lights and—”

“And it was a woman — a girl!” Gerald Fulton prompted hoarsely.

Carter jumped.

“How did you know?” he demanded.

Then he saw that Fulton, Mack, Deitch, and Dohlman were all sitting stiffly in their chairs and that their dissimilar faces held for the time identical expressions of bewilderment.

“And after a while a detective came in?”

It was Mack’s voice, but husky and muffled.

“His name was Cassidy!”

“And for a price things could be fixed,” Deitch took up the thread.

After that there was a long silence, while the editor pretended to be intrigued by the contours of a hemispherical glass paperweight on his desk, and the four professional writers, their faces beet-red and sheepish, all stared intently at nothing.

The editor opened a drawer and took out a stack of manuscripts.

“Here they are,” he said. “I knew there was something wrong when within ten days I got five stories that were, in spite of the differences in treatment, unmistakably all about the same girl!”

“Chuck mine in the wastebasket,” Mack instructed softly, and the others nodded their endorsement of that disposition. All but Dohlman, who seemed to be struggling with an idea. Finally he addressed the editor.

“It’s a pretty good story, at that, isn’t it, all five versions?”

The editor nodded.

“Yes, I’d have bought one, but five—”

“Why not buy one? We’ll match coins—”

“Sure, that’s fair enough,” said the editor.

It was done. Mack won.

Gerald Fulton’s round blue eyes were wider than ever with a look of astonishment. At last he found words.

“My God! I wonder how many other men are writing that same story right now!”

But in Garter’s mind an entirely different problem was buzzing around.

Lord! I wonder if she kissed this whole bunch, too!

Laughing Masks

Action Stories, November 1923; (aka: When Luck’s Running Good, 1962)

A shriek, unmistakably feminine, and throbbing with terror, pierced the fog. Phil Truax, hurrying up Washington street, halted in the middle of a stride, and became as motionless as the stone apartment buildings that flanked the street. The shriek swelled, with something violin-like in it, and ended with a rising inflection. Half a block away the headlights of two automobiles, stationary and oddly huddled together, glowed in the mist. Silence, a guttural grunt, and the shriek again! But now it held more anger than fear, and broke off suddenly.

Phil remained motionless. Whatever was happening ahead was none of his business, and he was a meddler in other peoples affairs only when assured of profit therefrom. And, too, he was not armed. Then he thought of the four hundred dollars in his pocket: his winnings in the poker game he had just left. He had been lucky thus far tonight; mightn’t his luck carry him a little further if he gave it the opportunity? He pulled his hat down firmly on his head and ran towards the lights.

The fog aided the headlights in concealing from him whatever was happening in the machines as he approached them, but he noticed that the engine of at least one was running. Then he skirted one of them, a roadster, cheeking his momentum by catching hold of a mudguard. For a fraction of a second he hung there, while dark eyes burned into his from a white face half hidden under a brawny hand.

Phil hurled himself on the back of the man to whom the hand belonged; his fingers closed around a sinewy throat. A white flame seared his eyeballs; the ground went soft and billowy under his feet, as if it were part of the fog. Everything — the burning eyes, the brawny hand, the curtains of the automobile-rushed toward him—

Phil sat up on the wet paving and felt his head. His fingers found a sore, swelling area running from above the left ear nearly to the crown. Both automobiles were gone. No pedestrians were in sight. Lights were shining through a few windows; forms were at many windows; and curious voices were calling questions into the fog. Mastering his nausea, he got unsteadily to his feet, though his desire was to lie down again on the cool, damp street. Hunting for his hat. he found a small handbag and thrust it into his pocket. He recovered his hat from the gutter, tilted it to spare the bruise, and set out for home, ignoring the queries of the pajamaed spectators.

Dressed for bed, and satisfied that the injury to his head was superficial, Phil turned his attention to the souvenir of his adventure. It was a small bag of black silk, trimmed with silver beads, and still damp from its contact with the street. He dumped its contents out on the bed. and a bundle of paper money caught his eye. He counted the bills and found they aggregated three hundred and fifty-five dollars. Pushing the bills into the pocket of his bath-robe, he grinned. “Four hundred I win and three hundred and fifty I get for a tap on the head — a pretty good night!”

He picked up the other articles, looked at them, and returned them to the bag. A gold pencil, a gold ring with an opal set in it, a woman’s handkerchief with a gray border and an unrecognizable design in one corner, a powder-box, a small mirror, a lip-stick, some hairpins, and a rumpled sheet of note-paper covered with strange, exotic characters. He smoothed out the paper and examined it closely, but could make nothing out of it. Some Asiatic language, perhaps. He took the ring from the bag again and tried to estimate its value. His knowledge of gems was small, but he decided that the ring could not be worth much — not more than fifty dollars at the most. Still, fifty dollars is fifty dollars. He put the ring with the money, lit a cigarette, and went to bed.

Chapter II

The Mysterious Advertisement

Phil awoke at noon. His head was still tender to the touch, but the swelling had gone. He walked downtown, bought early editions of the afternoon papers, and read them while he ate breakfast. He found no mention of the struggle on Washington street, and the Lost and Found columns held nothing pertaining to the bag. That night be played poker until daylight and won two hundred and forty-some dollars. In an all-night lunch-room he read the morning papers. Still nothing of the struggle, but in the classified section of the Chronicle:

LOST — Early Tuesday morning, Lady’s black silk bag trimmed with silver, containing money, ring, gold pencil, letter, etc. Finder may keep money if other articles are retuned to CHRONICLE OFFICE.

He grinned, then frowned, and stared speculatively at the advertisement. It had a queer look to it, this offer! The ring couldn’t be worth three hundred dollars. He took it from his pocket, shielding it with his hand from the chance look of anyone in the lunch-room. No; fifty dollars would be a big price. The pencil, powder-box, and lip-stick case were of gold; but a hundred and fifty dollars, say, would more than replace everything in the bag. The undecipherable letter remained — that must be some important item! A struggle between a woman and some men at four in the morning, nothing about it in the newspapers, a lost bag containing a paper covered with foreign characters, and then this generous offer — it might mean almost anything! Of course, the wisest plan would be either to disregard the advertisement and keep what he had found, or to accept this offer and send everything but the money to the Chronicle. Either way would be playing it safe; but when a man’s luck is running good he should crowd it to the limit. Times come, as every gambler knows, when a man gets into a streak of luck, when everything he touches proves fruitful; and his play then is to push his luck to a fare-you-well — make a killing while the fickle goddess is smiling. He thought of the men he had known who had paid for their timidity in the face of Chance’s favor — men who had won dollars where they might have won thousands, men who were condemned to be pikers all their lives through lack of courage to force their luck when it ran strong, an inability to rise with their stars. “And my luck’s running good,” he whispered to the ring in his hand. “A thousand smacks in two days, after the long dry spell I’ve been through.”

He returned the ring to his pocket and reviewed the chain of incidents leading up to the advertisement. Two facts that had lurked in his subconsciousness came out to face him: the shrieking voice had been musical even in its terror, and the eyes that had burned into his had been very beautiful, though he did not know what their owners other features might be like. Two influencing elements; but the question at hand was whether the monetary reward in keeping with any danger that might ensue could be expected. He made up his mind as he finished his coffee.

“I’ll sit in this racket, whatever it is, for a little while, anyway; and see what I can get myself.”

Chapter III

Matching Wits

At ten o’clock that morning Phil telephoned the office of the Chronicle, told the girl to whom he talked that he had found the bag but would return it to no One but its owner, and went back to bed. At two o’clock he got up and dressed. He returned the ring to the bag, with everything except the money, and went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. He usually went out for his meals, but today he wanted to be sure that he would not miss whoever might telephone or call. He had scarcely finished his meal then the door-bell rang.

“Mr. Truax?”

Phil nodded and invited the caller in. The man who entered the flat was about forty years old, nearly as tall as Phil, and perhaps twenty-five pounds heavier. He was fastidiously groomed in clothes of a European cut, and a walking-stick was crooked over one arm.

He accepted a chair with a polite smile, and said, “I shall take but a moment of your time. It is about the bag that I have come. The newspaper informed me you had found it. He betrayed his foreignness more by the precision of his enunciation than by any accent.

“It is your bag?”

The caller’s red lips parted in a smile, baring twin rows of even white teeth.

“It is my niece’s, but I can describe it. A black silk bag of about this size” — indicating with his small, shapely hands — “trimmed with silver, and holding between three and four hundred dollars, a gold pencil, a ring — an opal ring — a letter written in Russian, and the powder and rouge accessories that one would expect to find in a young woman’s bag. Perhaps a handkerchief with her initial in Russian on it. That is the one you found?”

“It might be, Mr.—”

“Pardon me, sir!” The visitor extended a card. “Kapaloff, Boris Kapaloff.”

Phil took the card and pretended to scrutinize it while he marshaled his thoughts. He was far from certain that he cared to force himself into this man’s affairs. The man’s whole appearance — the broad forehead slanting down from the roots of the crisp black hair to bulge a little just above the brows; the narrow, widely spaced eves of cold hazel; the aquiline nose with a pronounced flare to the nostrils; the firm, too-red lips; the hard line of chin and jaw — evidenced a nature both able and willing to hold its own in any field. And while Phil considered himself second to no man in guile, he knew that his intrigues had heretofore been confined to the world of tin-horn gamblers, ward-heelers, and such small fry. Small schooling for a game with this man whose voice, appearance and poise proclaimed a denizen of a greater, more subtle world. Of course, if some decided advantage could be gained at the very outset...

“Where was the bag lost?” Phil asked.

The Russian’s poise remained undisturbed.

“That would be most difficult to say,” he replied in his cultured. musical voice. “My niece had been to a dance, and she carried several friends to their homes before returning to hers. The bag may have dropped from the car anywhere along the way.” A temptation to speak of the struggle on Washington street came to Phil but he put it aside. Kapaloff might have been present that morning but it was obvious that he did not recognize Phil. The bag could have been found by someone who passed the spot later. Phil decided to leave Kapaloff in doubt on that point for as long as possible, in hope that some advantage would come out of it; and he was further urged to postpone the clash that might ensure by a faint fear of coming to a show-down with this suave Russian. Nothing would be lost by waiting...

Kapaloff allowed a gentle impatience to tinge his manner. “Now about the bag?”

“The three hundred and fifty-five dollars is reward?” Phil asked.

Kapaloff sighed ruefully.

“I am sorry to say it is. Ridiculous, of course, but perhaps you know something of young women. My niece was very fond of the opal ring — a trinket, worth but little. Yet no sooner did she discover her loss than she telephoned the newspaper office and offered the money as reward. Ridiculous! A hundred dollars would be an exaggerated value to place upon everything in the bag. But having made the offer, we shall have to abide by it.”

Phil nodded dumbly. Kapaloff was lying — no doubt of that — but he wasn’t the sort that one baldly denounces. Phil fidgeted and found himself avoiding his visitor’s eyes. Then a wave of self-disgust flooded him. “Here I am,” be thought, “letting this guy bluff me in my own flat, just because be has a classy front.” He looked into Kapaloff’s hazel eyes and asked with perfect casualness, keeping every sign of what was going on in his brain out of his poker-player’s face: “And how did the scrap in the automobiles come out? I didn’t see the end of it.”

“I am so glad you said that!” Kapaloff cried, bis face alight with joyous relief. “So very glad! Now I can offer my apologies for my childish attempts at deception. You see, I wasn’t sure that you had seen the unfortunate occurrence — you could have found the bag later — although I was told that someone had tried to interfere. You were not injured seriously?” His voice was weighted with solicitude.

None of the bewilderment, chagrin, recognition of defeat that raged in Phil’s brain showed in his face. He tried to match the other’s blandness. “Not at all. A slight headache next morning, a sore spot for a few hours. Nothing to speak of!”

“Splendid!” Kapaloff exclaimed. “Splendid! And I want to thank you for your attempt to assist my niece, even though I must assure you it was most fortunate you were unsuccessful. We certainly owe you an explanation — my niece and I — and if you will bear with me I shall try not to take up too much of your time with it. We are Russians — my niece and I — and when the tsar’s government collapsed our place in our native land was gone. Kapaloff was not our name then; but what is a title after the dynasty upon which it depends and the holdings accruing to it are gone? What we endured between the beginning of the revolution and our escape from Russia I pray may never come to another!” A cloud touched his face with anguish, but he brushed it away with a gesture of one delicate hand. “My niece saw her father and her fiance struck down within ten minutes. For months after that the real world did not exist for her. She lived in a nightmare. We watched her night and day for fear that she would succeed in her constant efforts to destroy herself. Then, gradually, she came back to us. For six months she has been, we thought, well. The alienists assured us that she was permanently cured. And then, late Monday night, she found between the pages of an old book a photograph of Kondra — he was her betrothed — and the poor child’s mind snapped again. She fled from the house, crying that she must go back to Petrograd, to Kondra. I was out, but my valet and my secretary followed her, caught her somewhere in the city, and returned with her. The roughness with which your gallantry was met — for that I must beg your forgiveness. Serge and Mikhail have not yet learned to temper their zeal. To them I am still ‘His Excellency,’ in whose service anything may be done.”

Kapaloff stopped, as if waiting for Phil’s comment, but Phil was silent. His brain was telling him, over and over, “This bird has got you licked! The generosity of the reward isn’t accounted for by this tale, but it will be before he’s through. This bird has got you licked!”

His genial eyes still on Phil’s, Kapaloff fulfilled the prophesy. “After my niece was safely home and I heard what had happened, I had the advertisement put in the paper. It seemed the most promising way of learning the extent of the injury to the man who had tried to aid my niece. If he were unhurt and had found the bag, he would turn it over to the Chronicle, and the three hundred and fifty dollars would be little enough reward for his trouble. On the other hand, if he were seriously injured he would use the advertisement to get in touch with me and I could take further steps to provide for him. If the bag were found by someone else I would remain in ignorance; but you will readily understand that I had no desire to have my niece’s distressing plight paraded before the public in the newspapers.”

He paused, waiting again.

When the pause had become awkward Phil shifted in his chair and asked, “And your niece — how is she now?”

“Apparently well again. I called a physician as soon as she returned, she was given an opiate and awoke that afternoon as if nothing unusual had happened. It may be that she will never be troubled again.”

Phil started to get up from his chair to get the bag. There seemed to be no tangible reason for doubting the Russian’s story — except that be did not want to believe it. But was the story flawless? He relaxed in the chair again. If the tale were true, would Kapaloff have dictated the advertisement so that the bag would be delivered to the Chronicle? Wouldn’t he have wanted to interview the finder? The Russian was waiting for Phil to speak, and Phil had nothing to say. He wanted time to think this affair over carefully, away from the glances of the hazel eyes that were lancet-keen for all their blandness.

“Mr. Kapaloff,” he said, hesitantly, “here is how all this stands with me: I saw the bag’s owner and found it under — well — funny circumstances. Not,” he interjected quickly, as Kapaloff’s eyebrows rose coldly, “that your explanation is hard to believe; but I want to be sure I’m doing the right thing. So I’ll have to ask you either to let me deliver the bag to your niece, or to go to the police, tell our stories, and let them straighten it out.”

Kapaloff appeared to turn the offers over in his mind. Then he objected: “Neither alternative is inviting. The first would subject my niece to an embarrassing interview, and so soon after her trouble. The second — you should appreciate my distaste for the publicity that would follow the police’s entry into the affair.”

“I’m sorry, but—” Phil began, but Kapaloff cut him short by rising to his feet, smiling genially, with out-stretched hand.

“Not at all, Mr. Truax. You arc a man of judgment. In your position I should probably act in like manner. Can you accompany to call upon my niece now?”

Phil stood up and grasped the dainty hand extended to him, and though the Russian’s grip was light enough Phil could feel the swell of powerful muscles under the soft skin.

“I’m sorry,” Phil lied, “but I have an engagement within half an hour. Perhaps you and your niece will be in the neighborhood within a few days and will find it convenient to call for it?” He did not intend dealing with this man on alien ground.

“That will do nicely. Shall we say, at three tomorrow?”

Phil repeated, “At three tomorrow,” and Kapaloff bowed himself out.

Alone, Phil sat down and tried to torture his brain into giving him the solution of this puzzle; but he made little headway. Except in two minor instances the Russian’s story had been impregnable. And those two details — the fact that he did not want the police dragged into the affair, and that he had worded the advertisement so as to retain his anonymity behind the screen of the newspaper — were not, upon close examination, very conclusive. On the other hand, insanity was notorious as a mask for villainy. How many crimes had been committed by use of the pretext that the victim, or the witnesses, were insane! Kapaloff’s manner had been candid enough; and his poise had survived every twist of the situation, but... It was upon this last that Phil hung his doubts. “If that bird had contradicted me just once I’d believe him, maybe; but he was too damned agreeable!”

Chapter IV

Unwelcomed Visitors

Phil returned home early that night. The cards had failed to hold him, now that his mind was occupied with what threatened to be a larger, more intricate game. He puzzled over the letter in Russian, but its characters meant nothing to his eyes. He tried to think of someone who could translate it tor him; but the only Russian he knew was not a man to be trusted under any circumstances. He tried to read a magazine, but soon gave it up and crawled into bed, to toss about, smoke numerous cigarettes, and finally drop off to sleep.

The least expert of burglars would have laughed at the difficulty and resultant noise with which the two men opened the door of Phil’s flat; but not the most desperate of criminals would have found anything laughable in their obvious determination. They were bent upon getting into the flat, and the racket incidental to their bungling attacks on the lock disconcerted them not at all. It was evident they would force an entrance even if it were necessary to batter the door down. Finally the lock succumbed, but by that time Phil was flattened behind his bath-room door, with a pistol in his hand and a confident grin on his face. The crudeness of the work on the lock precluded whatever doubts of his ability to take care of himself be might ordinarily have had.

The outer door swung open but no light came through. The hall light had been extinguished. The hinges creaked a little, but Phil, peering through the slit between the bathroom door and the jamb, could see nothing. A whisper and an answer told him that there were at least two burglars. However noisy the men had been with the door, they were silent enough now. A slight rustling and then silence. Not knowing where the men were, Phil did not move. A faint click sounded in the bedroom, and a weak, brief reflection from a flash-light showed an empty passage-way. Phil moved soundlessly toward the bedroom. As he reached the door the flash-light went on again and stayed on, its beam fixed upon the empty bed. Phil snapped on the lights.

The two men standing beside the bed, one on either side, wheeled in unison and took a step forward, to halt before the menace of the weapon in Phil’s hand. The men were very similar in appearance; the same bullet beads, the same green eyes under tangled brows, the same sullen mouths and high, broad cheek-bones. But the one who held a blackjack in a still uplifted hand was heavier and broader than the other, and the bridge of his nose was dented by a dark scar that ran from cheek to cheek, just under his eyes. For perhaps two seconds the men stood thus. Then the larger man shrugged his enormous shoulders and grunted a syllable to his companion. The momentary confusion left their faces, to be replaced by mated looks of resolve as they advanced toward Phil.

His brain was racing. Kapaloff’s “secretary and valet,” of course; and as their indifference to the noises they had made at the door testified to their determination to do what they had come to do at any cost, so now did their indifference to the pistol in Phil’s hand. Close upon him as they were, he could hardly expect to drop both of them; but even if he did — the whole story would be bound to come out in the police investigation that must follow, and his chance of getting greater profit out of the affair would be blasted.

As the two men, working together like twin parts of a machine, contracted their muscles to spring, Phil hit on a way out. He leaped backward through the bedroom door, whirled, and jumped into the hall, shouting: “Help! Police!”

There was a snarling at the door, a scuffling, and the noise of two men running through the dark hall toward the front door. The laughter that welled up in Phil’s throat silenced his shouts; he fired his pistol into the floor and returned to his bedroom. He laid a chair gently on its side and swept some books and papers from the table to the floor. Then he turned with a wide-eyed semblance of excitement to welcome the callers in various degrees of negligee who came in answer to his bellowing. After a while a policeman came and Phil told his story.

“A noise woke me up and I saw a man in the room. I grabbed my gun and yelled at him, but I forgot to take the safety catch off the gun.” With sham sheepishness: “I guess I was kind of scared. He ran out in the hall with me after him. I remembered the safety, then, and took a shot at him, but it was too dark to see whether I hit him. I looked through my stuff and don’t think he got anything, so I guess no harm’s done.”

After the last question had been answered and the last caller had gone, Phil bolted the door and shook hands with himself. “Well, that fixes Mr. Kapaloff’s story. And you’ve got him faded to date, my boy, so don’t let me catch you letting him run a bluff on you again.”

Chapter V

Forcing His Luck

At five minutes past three Thursday afternoon the Kapaloffs arrived. Romaine Kapaloff acknowledged her uncle’s introduction in easy and faultless English, and thanked Phil warmly for his efforts in her behalf Tuesday morning. Phil found himself holding her hand and straining his self-possession to the utmost to keep from gaping and stammering. The girl — she couldn’t have been more than nineteen — was looking up through brown eyes that glowed now with friendliness and gratitude into Phil’s grey ones, and asking: “And you really weren’t hurt?”

To Phil she seemed the loveliest creature he had ever seen. His attempts at extortion seemed mean and sordid. Because he was bitterly ashamed of his attempt to wring profits from her uncle, and was badly rattled, he answered almost gruffly; and in his effort to keep the chaos within him from his face he made it a mask of stupidity.

“Not at all. Really! It was nothing.”

Kapaloff stood watching them with the smile of one who sees his difficulties dissipated. Finally their hands fell apart and they sought chairs. There was an awkward pause. Phil knew that though they sat there until nightfall he could not bring up the question of the girl’s sanity, demand the corroboration of her uncle’s story, which was the excuse for the meeting. Kapaloff said nothing, sat smiling benignly upon girl and boy. The girl glanced at her uncle, as if expecting him to open the conversation, but when he ignored her silent appeal she turned impulsively to Phil, putting out her hand.

“Uncle Boris told you about my — about the trouble?”

Phil nodded, started to reach for the extended hand, thought better of it, and twined his fingers together between his knees.

“Then you know how fortunate it was that your gallantry wasn’t successful. I can’t understand why you didn’t laugh at Uncle Boris’ story — it must have sounded fantastic to you. But— Oh, it is horrible! I can never trust myself again, no matter what the doctors say!”

Phil found that he was holding her hand, after all. He looked at Kapaloff, who was smiling sympathetically. Phil and the girl stood up, and for an instant her eyes held a baffling undertone of pleading. Then it was gone, and she was turning to her uncle. Phil had but one idea in his mind now: to hand over the bag, get rid of these people, and be alone with his shame and disgust. He moved toward the door. “I’ll get the bag,” he said in a tired, weak voice.

A silver purse that dangled from the girl’s wrist clattered to the floor. As Phil turned his head at the sound, Kapaloff bent to pick up the purse, and Romaine Kapaloff’s eyes met Phil’s. For an infinitesimal part of a second her eyes burned into his as they had Tuesday morning, and stark terror wiped out the smooth young beauty of her face. Then her uncle was holding out the purse, her face was composed again, and Phil was walking toward his bedroom door with blood pounding in his temples. He sat on the top of his trunk, gnawed a thumb-nail, and thought desperately. Then he took the bag from the trunk and thrust it under his coat and returned to his guests.

“It is gone.”

Kapaloff’s urbanity seemed about to desert him. His face darkened and he took a swift step forward. Then he was master of himself again, and was asking pleasantly, “Are you positive?”

“You may look it you like.”

Phil went to the telephone and a few seconds later was talking to the desk sergeant at the district police station.

“A burglar got in here last night. One of your men was in afterward, and I told him I hadn’t missed anything. Now I find that a lady’s handbag is gone. All right.”

He turned from the telephone to the Kapaloffs.

“I woke up some time this morning and found two burglars in the room. They escaped, and I thought everything was safe. I forgot about the bag, and didn’t look to see if it was still here. I am sorry.”

Neither of the Kapaloffs gave any indication of previous knowledge of the burglary. Boris Kapaloff said evenly, “Very unfortunate, but the bag and its contents were not so valuable that we should worry unduly over the loss.”

“I am going to the police station this afternoon to give a description of the bag. Shall I tell them that it is your property and have them turn it over to you?”

“If you will be so kind. Our address is, La Jolla Avenue, Burlingame.”

Conversation lagged. Several times Kapaloff seemed about to speak, but each time he restrained himself. The girl’s eyes, when Phil met them, held a question which he made no attempt to answer. The Kapaloffs departed. Phil shook hands with both of them, answering the girl’s unspoken question with a quick pressure.

When they were gone, he withdrew the bag from under his vest, counted three hundred and fifty-five dollars from the bills in his pocket, and put the money in the bag. Then he drew a deep breath. That was the end of three years of searching for an “easy living.” Since his discharge from the army he had been drifting, finding himself at odds with the world, gambling, doing chores for political factors — never doing anything very vicious, perhaps, but steadily becoming more and more enmeshed in the underworld. As he looked back now, with the memory of his shame and self-disgust of a few minutes ago still fresh, he thought that he would not feel quite so worthless if there had been some outstanding crime in his past, instead of a legion of petty deeds. Well, that was past! After this tangle came to an end he would get a job and go back to the ways he had known before the war interrupted his aspirations.

He wrapped the bag in heavy paper, tied it, and sealed it securely. Then he took it downtown and turned it over to the friendly proprietor of a poolroom to be put in the safe.

For two days Phil kept to his rooms — days in which he sprang to the telephone at the first tingling of the bell. He tried to reach Romaine Kapaloff by telephone, got her house, and was told by a harsh voice in broken English that she was not at home. Three times he tried it, but the results were the same. Then he tried to talk to her uncle, and got the same answer. On the second night he slept hardly at all. He would doze and then spring into wakefulness, imagining that the bell had sounded, race to the telephone, to be asked, “What number are you calling?”

Then he decided to wait no longer. When a man’s luck is running good he should force the issue — not wait in idleness until his fortunes turn.

Chapter VI

“Flashing, Dripping Jaws”

In Burlingame Phil easily found the Kapaloffs’ house. At the first garage where he inquired, the name was unknown, but they knew where “the Russians” lived. Even in the dark he had no difficulty in recognizing the house from the garage-man’s description. He drove past it, left his borrowed car in the darkest shadow he could find, and returned afoot. The building loomed immense in the night, a great gray structure set in a park, ringed about by a tall iron fence overgrown with hedging. The nearest house was at least half a mile away.

No light came from the house, and Phil found the front gate locked. He crossed the road and squatted under a tree some two hundred feet away. His plan involved nothing further than waiting in the vicinity until he saw Romaine, found some means of communicating with her, or found an avenue through which his luck could carry him toward a solution of whatever mystery existed in the house across the road. The chances were that Romaine was a prisoner; otherwise she would have got word to him before this. His watch registered 10:15.

He waited.

When his watch said 1:30 his youth and his faith in his luck overcame his patience. A man might as well be home in bed as sitting out here waiting for something to turn up. When a man’s luck is running good... He skirted the hedge-grown fence until he found a tree with a branch that grew over the barrier. He climbed the tree, crawled out on the overhanging limb, swung for a minute, and dropped. He landed on hands and knees in soft, moist loam. Carefully he moved forward, keeping a cluster of bushes between himself and the house. When he reached the bushes he halted. Nothing that might serve to conceal him was between the bushes and the building, and he was afraid to trust himself out in the pale starlight. He sat on his heels and waited.

Three-quarters of an hour passed, and then he heard the sound of metal scraping against wood. He could see nothing. The sound came again and he identified it: someone was opening a shutter, cautiously, stopping at each sound the bolt made. A babel of dogs’ voices broke out at the rear of the house, and around the corner swept a pack of great hounds, to throw themselves frenziedly against one of the lower windows. Phil heard the shutter slam sharply. In the wake of the dogs a man stumbled. The shutter opened and Kapaloff leaned out to speak to the man in the yard. Above the men’s words Phil heard Romaine Kapaloff’s voice, raised in anger. In the rectangle of light shining from the window six wolfhounds were twisting and leaping — not the sedate, finely bred borzois of my lady’s promenade; but great, shaggy wolf-killers of the steppes, over half a man’s height from ground to shoulder, and more than a hundred pounds each of fighting machinery. Phil held his breath, shrunk behind his screen, and prayed that what he had heard somewhere of these wolfhounds hunting by sight and not by scent be true, that his presence escape their noses. Kapaloff withdrew his head and closed the shutter. The man in the yard shouted at the dogs. They followed him to the rear of the house. A door closed, shutting off the dogs’ voices. Phil was damp with perspiration, but he knew that the dogs were kept indoors.

From an upper story came a muffled scream and a sound of something falling against a shutter. Then silence. The sound had come from the front of the house, Phil decided; the corner room on the third floor, at a guess.

For a moment Phil was tempted to leave the place and enlist the services of the police; but he was not used to allying himself with the police — on the few occasions when he had had dealings with the law he had found it on the other side. Then, too, would not the glib Kapaloff have the advantage of his aristocratic manner, his standing as a property holder, and his seemingly secure position in the world? Against all this Phil would have but his bare word and a vague story, backed by three years of living without what the police call “visible means of support.” He could imagine what the outcome would be. He would have to play this hand out alone. Well, then...

He left the protecting bush and crept to the front of the house. Around the corner he paused to scan the building. So far as he could determine in the dark every window was fitted with a shutter. He was afraid to try the shutters on the first floor; but it was unlikely that one of them would have been left unbolted, anyway. The upper windows held out the best promise of an entrance. He crept up on the porch, removed his shoes, and stuck them in his hip pockets. Mounting the porch-rail, he encircled a pillar with arms and legs and pulled himself up until his fingers Caught the edge of the porch-roof. Silently he drew himself up and lay face down on the shingles. No sound came from house or grounds. On hands and knees he went to each of the four windows and tried the shutters. All were securely fastened.

He sat up and studied the third-story windows. The window on the extreme left should open into the room from which the last noises had come — Romaine Kapaloff’s room, if his reasoning was correct. A rainspout ran up the corner of the house, within arm’s length of the window. If the spout would support him, he could reach the window and risk a signal to the girl. He crawled over and inspected the spout, testing it with his hands. It shook a little but he decided to risk it.

He found a niche for the stockinged toes of one foot, drew himself up, reached for a higher hold on the spout with his hands, and felt for a support for the other foot. There was a tearing noise, a rattle of tin, and Phil thumped to the roof of the porch with a length of pipe in his hands. He rolled over, let go the spout, and caught at the roof in time to keep from going over the edge. The released piece of tin hit the roof with a clang and rolled over the edge to clatter madly on the paved walk.

The night was suddenly filled with the snarling of hounds. The pack careened around the corner, flung themselves against the porch, tore up and down the yard — lithe, evil shapes in the starlight, with flashing, dripping jaws. Peeping over the edge of the roof, Phil saw a man following the dogs, a gleam of metal in his hands.

A sound came from behind Phil. A second-story shutter was being opened. He wormed his way to it and lay on his back under it, close to the wall. The shutter swung open and a man leaned out — the man with the scarred face. Phil lay motionless, not breathing, his body tense, a forefinger tight around the trigger of his pistol, the pistol’s muzzle not six inches from the body slanting over him. The man called a question to the one in the yard. The front door opened, and Kapaloff’s easy voice sounded. The man at the window and the man in the yard called to Kapaloff in Russian; he answered. Then the man at the window withdrew, his footsteps receded, and a door closed within the room. The window remained open. Phil was over the sill in an instant, and in the dark room. As his feet touched the floor he sensed something amiss, heard a grunt, and lunged blindly forward. The room filled with dancing lights, and there was a roaring in his ears...

Chapter VII

The Third Degree

Phil awoke with his nostrils stinging from ammonia administered by the man with the scarred face. Phil tried to push the bottle away, but his hands were lashed. His feet, too, were tied. He looked around, turning his head from side to side. He was lying on a bed in a luxuriously furnished chamber, fully clothed except for coat and shoes. Kapaloff stood across the room, looking on with a smile of mild mockery. On one side of the bed stood the man with the scar; on the opposite side, the other man who had entered Phil’s flat. At a word from Kapaloff this man assisted Phil to a sitting position.

Phil’s head ached cruelly and his stomach felt queerly empty, but taking his cue from Kapaloff, he tried to keep his face composed, as if he found nothing disconcerting in his position. Kapaloff came over to the bed and asked solicitously: “You are not seriously injured this time either, I trust?”

“I don’t think so. But if these hired men of yours keep it up they’ll wear my head away,” Phil said lightly.

Kapaloff exhibited his teeth in an affable smile. “You are the fortunate possessor of a tough head. But I hope it will not prove as little amenable to persuasion as it has been to force.”

Phil said nothing. Every iota of his will was needed to keep his face calm. The pain in his head was unbearable. Kapaloff went on talking, his voice a mixture of friendliness and banter.

“Your tenacity in clinging to the bag would, under other circumstances, be admirable; but really it must be terminated. I must insist that you tell me where it is.”

“Suppose my head stays tough on the inside, too?” Phil suggested.

“That would be most unfortunate. But you are going to be reasonable, aren’t you? When you stumbled into this affair you saw, or suspected, much that did not appear on the surface-being an extremely perspicacious young man — and thought you could unearth whatever was hidden and exact a little — well — not blackmail, perhaps, though a crude intellect might call it that. Now, you must see that I have the advantage; and assuredly you are enough the sportsman to acknowledge defeat, and make what terms you can.”

“And what are the terms?”

“Turn the bag over to me and sign a few papers.”

“Papers for what?”

“Oh! the papers are unimportant. Merely a precaution. You will not know what they contain exactly — just a few statements supposedly made by you: confessions to certain crimes, perhaps — to insure me that you will not trouble the police afterward. I am frank. I do not know where you have put the bag. After you so obligingly entered the window that Mikhail left open for you, Mikhail and Serge visited your rooms again. They found nothing. So I offer terms. The bag, your signature, and you receive five hundred dollars, exclusive of the money that was in the bag.”

“Suppose I don’t like the terms?”

“That would be most unfortunate,” Kapaloff protested. “Serge” — motioning toward the man who had helped Phil sit up — “is remarkably adept with a heated knife; and remembering the ludicrous manner in which you put him and Mikhail to rout. I fancy he would relish having you as a subject for his play.”

Phil turned his head and pretended to look at Serge, but he scarcely saw the man. He was trying to convince himself that this threat was a bluff, that Kapaloff would not dare resort to torture; but his success was slight. If his ability to read men was of any value at all then this Russian was one who would stop at nothing to attain his ends. Phil decided he would not submit to any excruciating pain to save the bag. In the first place, he did not know how valuable the paper might be; secondly, he seemed to be the girl’s only ally, and he flattered himself that he was more valuable an aid than a letter could be. However, he would fight to the last inch — bluff until the final moment.

“I can’t make terms until I talk with your niece.”

Kapaloff expostulated gently but firmly. “That is not possible. I am sorry, but you must understand that my position is very delicate, and I cannot permit it to become more complicated.”

“No talk, no terms,” Phil said flatly.

Kapaloff let his distress furrow his brow. “Think it over. You must know that I shall not be pleased by the necessity of making you suffer. In fact” — with a whimsical smile — “Serge will be the only participant who enjoys it.”

“Bring on the knife,” Phil said coolly. “No talk, no terms.”

Kapaloff nodded to Serge, who left the room.

“There is no hurry — a few minutes’ delay doesn’t matter,” Kapaloff urged. “Consider your position. Think! Under Serge’s skilled hands you will tell — do not doubt it — but then you lose the extra five hundred dollars, besides causing me no little anguish — to say nothing of your own plight.”

Phil’s smile matched Kapaloff’s for affability. “It would be just wasting time. If I can’t see Miss Kapaloff I’ll stand pat.”

Serge returned with an alcohol-lamp and a small poniard. He set the lamp on the table, lit it, and held the blade in the flame. Phil watched the preparations with a face that was tranquil. He noticed, suddenly, that the hand holding the poniard trembled, and, raising his eyes, he saw tiny globules of moisture glistening on Serge’s forehead. His face was haggard, with white lines around the mouth. Mikhail put Phil down on the bed again, gripping his ankles firmly. Phil said nothing. He was beginning to enjoy himself — knowing that he could stop the whole thing with a word. Serge’s knees were trembling noticeably now; and Mikhail’s fingers around Phil’s ankles jerked and were moist with perspiration.

Phil grinned and spoke banteringly to Kapaloff: “You should rehearse these men of yours. I bet their torturing is not better than their burglary.”

Kapaloff chuckled good-naturedly. “But you must consider that a bungling torturer may obtain effects that are beyond a skilled one.”

Then Serge came to the bed, the poniard glowing in his shaking hand.

Phil spoke casually: “If you don’t mind, I’d like to sit up and watch this.”

“Certainly!” Kapaloff assisted him to a sitting position. “Is there anything else I can do to make it more bearable?”

“Thanks, no. I can manage nicely now.”

Serge was extending the heated dagger toward the soles of Phil’s feet, from which Mikhail had removed the stockings. The blade was wavering in the man’s nervous hands; his eves were bulging, and his face was wet with perspiration. Mikhail’s fingers were pressing into Phil’s ankles, grinding the flesh painfully; both of Kapaloff’s assistants were breathing hoarsely. Phil forced himself to disregard the pain of Mikhail’s grip, and smiled derisively. The point of the poniard was within an inch of his feet. Then Serge let it fall to the floor, and shrank back from the bed. Kapaloff spoke to him. Slowly Serge stooped for the poniard, and went to the lamp to reheat it, his body quivering as with ague.

He came to the bed again, his teeth clenched behind taut, bloodless lips. He bent over the bed, and Phil felt the heat of the approaching blade. Lazily he glanced at Kapaloff, carrying his acting to its pinnacle just before surrendering. Then, with a choking cry, Serge flung the poniard from him and dropped on his knees before Kapaloff, pleading pitifully. Kapaloff answered with exaggerated gentleness, as one would speak to an infant. Serge got to his feet slowly, and backed away, his head hanging. One of Kapaloff’s hands came out of his pocket, holding a pistol. The pistol spat flame. Serge caught both hands to his body, and crumpled to the floor.

Kapaloff walked unhurriedly to where the man had fallen, put the toe of one trim shoe under Serge’s shoulder, and turned him over on his back. Then, the pistol hanging loosely at his side, he sent four bullets into Serge’s face, wiping out the features in a red smear.

Kapaloff turned and looked, with eyes that held nothing but polite expectation, at Mikhail. Mikhail had released Phil’s ankles at the first shot, and now stood erect, his hands at his sides. His chest was moving jerkily and the scar across his face was crimson; but his eyes were fixed upon the wall and his face was wooden. For a full minute Kapaloff looked at Mikhail, and then turned hack to the figure at his feet. A drop of blood glistened on the toe of the shoe with which he had turned the man over. Carefully he rubbed the foot against the dead man’s side until the blood was gone. Then he spoke to Mikhail, who lifted the lifeless form in his powerful arms and left the room.

Kapaloff pocketed his pistol, and a courteously apologetic smile appeared on his face; as if he were a housewife who had been compelled to rebuke a maid in the presence of a guest. Phil was sick and giddy with horror, but he forced himself to accept the challenge of the smile, and said with a fair semblance of amusement: “You shouldn’t have misinformed me about Serge’s love for the hot knife.”

Kapaloff chuckled. “The persuasion is postponed until tomorrow. I am afraid I shall have to leave you bound. Ordinarily I should simply leave Mikhail to guard you; but I am not sure that I can trust him now. Serge was his brother.”

He picked up the lamp and the poniard.

“The distressing scene you have just seen should at least convince you of my earnestness.” Then he left the room and the key turned in the lock.

Chapter VIII

Double-Crossed

Phil rolled over and buried his face in the bed; giving away to the sickness he had fought down in Kapaloff’s presence. He lay there and sobbed, not thinking, weak and miserable. But he was too young for this to last long; and his first thought was a buoying one: the torturing had been interrupted at the last moment, almost miraculously! His luck held!

He worked himself into a sitting position and attempted to loosen the cords around his wrists and ankles. But he only drove them deeper into the flesh, so he gave it up. He wormed his way to the floor and slowly, laboriously went over the room in the dark, hunting for something that would serve to free him, but he found nothing. The shutters were bolted and padlocked; the door was massive, He returned to the bed.

Time passed — hours he had no means of counting — and then the door opened and Mikhail came in, with a tray of food in his hands, followed by Kapaloff who went to a window and stood with his back to it while Mikhail set the tray on the table and untied Phil.

Kapaloff gestured toward the table. “I am sorry I cannot offer you greater hospitality, but my household is disorganized. I trust you will find my humble best not too uninviting.”

Phil drew a chair to the table and ate. His appetite was poor, but he forced himself to eat with every appearance of enjoyment. When the food was disposed of he lighted one of the cigarettes on the tray and smiled his thanks.

“Unless you have reconsidered,” the Russian said, “I regret that you will have to sleep tied. I am sorry, but I find myself in a position where I must not let my regard for you and my sense of what is due a guest outweigh the necessity of protecting my interests.”

Phil shrugged. The food had heartened him, and he was too young not to meet the challenge of his captors manner.

“I’m tough. Mind if I stretch my legs first?”

“No, no! I want you to be as comfortable as may be. Walk about the room and smoke. You will sleep the better for it.”

Phil left the table and slowly paced up and down the room, turning over in his mind the latest development in this game. Kapaloff had entered the room behind Mikhail, had kept his right hand in his jacket pocket, and had not allowed his servant to get out of the range of his vision for an instant. If Kapaloff couldn’t trust Mikhail, perhaps Phil could. The man was standing across the room from Kapaloff. His face showed nothing.

Kapaloff was asking: “You are still obdurate, then; and will not make terms?”

“I’m willing to make terms; but not to accept the ones you have made.”

Passing the table, Phil’s glance fell on the knife with which he had cut his meat. It was silver, and of little value as a weapon, but it would serve to cut the cords with which he had been bound. He reached the wall and turned. The cigarette between his lips was but a stub now. He went to the table and selected a fresh cigarette. Reaching for a match, he placed his body between Kapaloff and the tray. Mikhail, on the other side of the room, could see every movement of Phil’s hands. Fumbling with the matches, he picked up the knife with his left hand and slid it up his sleeve. Mikhail’s face was expressionless. Phil turned with the lighted cigarette in his mouth and resumed his pacing, thrusting his hands in his trouser pockets and allowing the knife to slide down into one of them. He reached the end of the room and started to turn. His elbows were seized, and he looked over his shoulder into Mikhail’s stolid face. Mikhail drew the knife from the pocket, returned it to the tray, and went back to his post by the wall.

Kapaloff spoke approvingly to Mikhail in Russian, and then said to Phil: “I did not see you get it. But, behold, you cannot put faith even in the disloyalty of my servitors!”

Phil felt tired and spent — he had counted on the scarred man’s help. He went to the bed and Mikhail bound him. Then the lights were turned off and he was left alone.

Chapter IX

A Break for Freedom

The sound of a key being turned slowly, cautiously, in the door awakened Phil from the fitful sleep into which he had fallen. The noise stopped. He could see nothing. Something touched the sole of one bare foot and he jumped convulsively, shaking the bed.

“Sh-h-h!”

A cool, soft hand touched his cheek, and he whispered: “Romaine?”

“Yes. Be still while I cut the cords.”

Her hands passed down his arms, and his hands were freed. A little more fumbling in the dark and his feet were loose. He sat up suddenly and their faces bumped in the dark, and quite without thought he kissed her. For an instant she clung to him. Then she retreated a few inches, and said: “But first we must hurry.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “What do we do next?”

“Go downstairs to the front of the house, and wait until we hear the dogs in the rear. Mikhail will call them back there under some pretext, and hold them until we get out of the yard.”

She pressed a heavy revolver into Phil’s hand.

“But aren’t the dogs kept locked up?”

“No.”

“They were last night,” Phil insisted, “or I never would have made it.”

“Oh, yes! Uncle Boris expected you, and kept them in the garage until after you arrived.”

“Oh!” So he had done what was expected of him! “Well, if Mikhail’s with us, why not slip down and grab your uncle and wind this thing up?”

“No! Mikhail wouldn’t help us do that. Even when his brother was killed before his eyes he would do nothing. For generations his people have been serfs, slaves, of uncle’s — and he hasn’t the courage to defy him. If he’s to help at all it must he secretly. If it comes to a point where he must choose, he will be with uncle.”

“All right, let’s go!” His bare feet touched the floor and he laughed. “I haven’t seen my shoes since I came through the window. I’m going to have a lot of fun running around on my naked tootsies!”

She took his hand and led him to the door. They listened but heard nothing. They crept out into the hall and toward the stairs. An electric light over the stairs gave a dim glow. They halted while Phil mounted the balustrade and unscrewed the bulb, shrouding the steps into darkness. At the foot of the flight they halted again, and Phil darkened the light there. Then she guided him toward the front door.

Somewhere in the night behind them a door opened. A noise of something sliding across the floor. Kapaloff’s mellow tones:

“Children, you had best return to your rooms. There really is nothing else to do. If you move toward the door, you will show up in the moonlight that is shining through there. On the other hand, I have thoughtfully pushed a chair a little way down the hall from where I am, so that even if you could creep silently upon me you must inevitably collide with the chair and give me an inkling of where to send my bullets. So there is really nothing else to do but return to your rooms.”

Huddled against the wall, Phil and Romaine said nothing, hut in the hearts of each a desperate hope was born. Kapaloff chuckled and he killed their hopes.

“You need expect nothing from Mikhail. Your escape meant nothing to him, but he trusted you to exact the vengeance that he is too much the serf to take himself. So he supplied you with a weapon, I suppose, and sent you down into the hall. Then he pretended to hear a noise — thinking that I would rush out here to fall before your bullets. Happily, I know something of the peasant mind. So when he started and pretended to hear something that my keener ears missed I knocked him down with my pistol, and came out here knowing about what to expect. Now I must ask that you return to your rooms.”

Phil pressed the girl down until she lay flat on the floor, close to the wall. He stretched out in front of her, his eyes trying to dissolve the darkness. Kapaloff was lying on the floor somewhere ahead; but which wall was he clinging to? In a room something of his position could have been learned from his voice, but in this narrow passage all sense of direction was lost. The sounds simply came out of the night.

The Russian’s cultured voice reached them again. “You know, we are on the verge of making ourselves ridiculous. This reclining in the dark would be well enough except that I fancy we are both exceptionally patient beings. Hence, it is likely to be prolonged to an absurd length.”

With the hand that was not occupied with the revolver Phil felt in his pockets. In a vest pocket he found several coins. He tossed one of them down the hall; it hit a wall and fell to the floor.

Kapaloff laughed. “I was thinking of that, too; but it isn’t easy to imitate the sound of a person in motion.”

Phil cursed under his breath. “ There must be some way out of this hole!” Toward the front the hall was too light, as Kapaloff had said; and there seemed to be no other exits except by the stairs, or past the Russian. He might chance a volley — but there was the girl to consider. He never questioned that Kapaloff would shoot. Romaine crawled to his side.

“If we go upstairs,” she whispered, “we are trapped.”

“Can you think of anything?”

“No!” And then she added naively: “But here with you I am not afraid.” She clutched his arm. “I believe he has gone. It feels as if no one else was here.”

“What would that mean?”

“The dogs, maybe!”

He thought of the sinewy bodies and dripping jaws he had seen in the yard, and shuddered.

“You wait here,” he ordered, and started crawling silently toward the rear of the hall. After it seemed that he must have gone a hundred feet his hand touched the chair of which Kapaloff had spoken. He moved it aside carefully, and went on. His fingers touched a door-frame — the end of the hall.

He whispered to the girl, “He’s gone,” and she joined him.

“Shall we make a break for it?” he asked.

“Yes. Better try the back.”

She pushed past him, took his hand, and led him through the room beyond.

Chapter X

“My Hands Will Be Steady”

Three steps they took into the darkness, and then the lights clicked on and Phil found himself helpless, his arms pinned in Mikhail’s powerful embrace. Kapaloff plucked the revolver from Phil’s hand and smiled into his face.

“The variable Mikhail — whom you see allied with me again — has a tough head, and I feared that my blow would not quiet him for long. You can imagine in what an unenviable position I found myself out in the hall: with you ahead and my erratic compatriot behind. When I could stand it no longer I came back and resuscitated him, enlisting him on my side again.”

Mikhail released Phil and stepped back. Kapaloff went on, with a gay mockery of plaintiveness:

“You will readily understand, Mr. Truax, that I cannot go on this way. A few more days of this and I shall be a wreck. I am a simple soul and cannot bear this distraction. You have seen Romaine. Do you accept my terms?”

Phil shook off the feeling of disgust with himself for having been so easily recaptured; and decided to play the same game he had played before: bluff until the actual pain came. He smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid we’ll never agree.”

Kapaloff sighed. “I shall attend to the rites myself this time; so do not expect an outburst of tenderness to halt them. Though my heart bleeds for you my hands will be steads.”

Then the girl spoke. Her voice was tense, vibrant. Both men turned toward her. She was speaking to Mikhail, in Russian. Her voice gradually sank lower and lower until it was but a murmur, and took on an urgent, pleading tone. Mikhail’s lips were pressing together with increasing tension, and his carriage became rigid. His eves fixed on a spot on the opposite wall. Phil shot a puzzled look at Kapaloff and saw that he was watching his niece and servant with dancing eves. The girl’s voice crooned on, and the moisture came out on Mikhail’s face. His mouth was a thin, straight line, now, and the skin over the knuckles of his clenched hands seemed about to split from the strain. Still Romaine talked and, as she mentioned Serge’s name, suddenly it came to Phil what was happening. She was making an open appeal to Mikhail, reminding him of his brother’s death, goading him into desperation! The man’s eves were distended and the scar across his nose was a vivid gash — it might have been made yesterday. The muscles of his forehead, jaws, and neck stood out like welts; his breath hissed through quivering nostrils. Still the girl’s voice went on. Phil looked at Kapaloff again. A sardonic smile of amused expectancy was on his face. He spoke softly, mockingly, a few words, but neither the girl nor Mikhail heeded him. Her voice droned on: a monotonous chant now. Mikhail’s great fists opened and drops of blood ran down his fingers from where his nails had bitten into the palms. Slowly he turned and met his master’s eyes. For a second the eyes held, but Mikhail’s heritage of servility was too strong within him. His eyes dropped and he shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

The girl gave him no rest. The syllables came from her lips in a torrent, and her voice went abruptly high and sharp. Despite his unfamiliarity with the language, Phil felt his pulse drumming under the beat of her tone. Mikhail’s shoulders swayed slowly and a white froth appeared in the corners of his mouth. Then his face lost every human quality. A metallic snarl rasped from deep in his chest. Without turning, without looking, he sprang upon the man who had killed his brother. There was no interval the eye could discern. He was standing, swaying, looking at the floor with bulging, bloodshot eyes. Then he was upon Kapaloff and they were rolling on the floor. There was no appreciable passage!

Kapaloff discharged his pistol once, hut Phil could not see where the bullet hit. Over and over they rolled — Mikhail a brute gone mad, blindly fumbling for a grip on his enemy’s throat; Kapaloff fighting with every trick in his cool head, and as little disturbed as if it were a game. His eyes met Phil’s over Mikhail’s shoulder, and he made a grimace of distaste. Then Kapaloff twisted free, whirled to his feet, dashed a foot into the face of his rising assailant, and vanished into the dark of the hall. The kick carried Mikhail over backward, but he was up immediately, bellowing and plunging after Kapaloff.

Phil picked up the weapon Kapaloff had dropped — the revolver he had taken from Phil — and turned to the girl. Her hands were over her face and she was trembling violently. He shook her.

“Where’s the phone?”

She tried twice, and finally spoke: “In the next room.”

He patted her cheek. “You phone the police and wait for me here.”

She clung to him protestingly for a moment, then pulled herself together, smiled with a great show of courage, and went into the next room.

Phil moved to the hall door and listened. A scuffling sound and Kapaloff’s mocking chuckle came from somewhere on the stairs. A shot thundered. Mikhail bellowed. Phil felt his way to the foot of the stairs and started up. From above came the noise of a struggle, and Mikhail’s rasping breath. Two shots. A body fell, sliding down the steps. Phil had gained the second floor and was climbing toward the third. The sliding body came toward him. He recognized it as Mikhail by the gibbering snarls it emitted. Kapaloff’s laugh came from the head of the stairs. As he braced his legs to halt Mikhail’s descent, Phil raised his revolver and fired into the darkness above. Streaks of orange flame darted down at him; a bullet burned his cheek; others hit around him. Then the man at his feet was dragging him down with grim fingers that felt for his throat. He screamed into Mikhail’s ear, trying to bring comprehension to the man that his enemy was above, that he was attacking an ally. But the crushing fingers felt their way higher and higher up Phil’s chest, closed about his throat. He felt his breath going. With a desperate summoning of his failing strength he drove his pistol into the face he could not see in the dark, and wrenched himself away. The fingers slipped, clutched at him, missed, and Phil was stumbling up the steps ahead of something that had been a man, but was now a rabid thing clambering through the night, with death in its heart and no understanding of the difference between friend and enemy.

Phil reached the top of the stairs and, not knowing it in the dark, reached for the next step, stumbled, and fell forward in the hall. As he fell Kapaloff’s pistol spat, bringing down a shower of plaster. At the head of the stairs Mikhail was snarling. Phil rolled, jerking himself to one side, and pressed against the wainscoting, just in time to let the madman charge past. Two more shots rang out, but Mikhail’s broad body held all but a feeble reflection of the flashes from Phil. Then a bestial voice rose in a bellow of insane triumph, a scuffle, a groan so faint that it might have been a sigh, heavy bodies falling... silence.

Phil got to his feet and advanced warily up the hall. His legs touched a body. Something liquid, warm and sticky, was under his bare feet. He stumbled on and opened the first door he reached. He found the light button and pressed it. Then he turned and looked down the hall in the light that came through the open doorway...

He closed his eyes and groped his way to the stairs, down to the room where he had left the girl.

Chapter XI

The Death Letter

The girl ran to him. “Your face! You are hurt!”

“Just a scratch. I had forgotten it.”

She drew his head down and dabbed at this torn cheek with a handkerchief.

“The others?” she asked.

“Dead! Did you get the police?”

She said, “Yes,” and then could no longer withstand the weakness that tugged at her. She drooped into his arms, sobbing. He carried her to a couch and knelt beside her, stroking her hands and soothing her.

When she had mastered her weakness sufficiently to sit up, he asked her, more to take her mind from the gruesome termination of the affair than because his curiosity was so pressing, “Now, what’s this all about?”

As she talked she gradually regained her composure, and the dread that the night’s events had stirred within her subsided. Her voice grew steadier, her words more coherent, and some measure of color returned to her cheeks.

Her father had been a Russian nobleman, her mother an American woman. Her mother had died when she was still a child. Later the little girl had been sent to a convent in the United States, in accordance with her mother’s desire. When the war broke out in Europe she had returned to Russia, despite her father’s orders, with the childish thought that she would be near him. She had seen him twice before his death. He was reported “killed in action” shortly before the revolution. His brother Boris had been appointed her guardian and administrator of the estate. Then the revolution came. Her uncle had foreseen the uprising and had converted much of the girl’s wealth — he had no personal means — into money, which he had deposited in English and French banks. When they were forced to leave their native land they had considerable wealth at their disposal. For the next few years they had moved from place to place. Her uncle had seemed filled with a strange uneasiness, and would seldom stay long in one city or country. He had taken the name of Kapaloff and had persuaded the girl to do likewise, though he had given no reason for the change. Finally they came to the United States, lived in various cities, and then came to Burlingame. Since their departure from Russia her uncle had been withdrawing more and more from society, and frowning upon Romaine’s desire for friends. In the United States she had made no new acquaintances. He had selected the most isolated house he could find in Burlingame and had had the windows fitted with heavy shutters, and massive doors and bolts installed. She had wondered at the change in him but had never questioned him. His manner toward her was, as always, affectionate, protecting and generous. Except in the matter of making new acquaintances — and he was not crudely insistent there — he allowed her to indulge every whim.

Then, late the preceding Monday night, she had found the letter that was in the bag. She had found it on the library floor, had picked it up carelessly to lay it on the table, from which she supposed it had blown. Her eyes had fallen upon the word murder, in Russian, heavily underscored. She had read the next few words, and then feverishly read the letter from beginning to end. It had been written to her uncle by someone who apparently had been very intimate with him in Russia, and boldly threatened that unless Boris paid the money he had promised the truth about his brothers murder would be published.

She could not miss the import of the letter. It could mean but one thing: that Boris, whose own means had been dissipated, had had his brother killed that he might gain control of the estate until the child became of age. Dazed and bewildered, she went to her room, carrying the letter with her, and threw herself across the bed. But she had something to do. She knew of but one person to whom she could turn: a prominent Los Angeles attorney, the father of one of her schoolmates. She took what money she had, left the house, got in her roadster, and started for the city, intending to take the first train to Los Angeles. But she had wasted too much time. Her uncle had missed the letter and, fearing the worst, had gone to her room. Not finding her there, he had come downstairs just as she drove away. He had sent Mikhail and Serge in another machine to bring her back. They had done so, but the bag had been lost in the scuffle on Washington Street.

She had been imprisoned in her room until the afternoon, when she was taken to call on Phil. Her uncle had coached her carefully and she feared him too much to risk open defiance, but she had mastered her fright sufficiently to drop her purse and signal Phil. Then she had been brought back to the house and locked in. She had made one attempt to escape but had been caught at the window.

Phil tried to keep his mind on her story but he missed great stretches of it, watching her face, which, with youthful resilience, was regaining its bloom. The shadows that lingered under the eyes enhanced their beauty.

When she had finished they were silent for a moment. Phil wondered how much of the story he had missed. He cleared his throat and said, “You’ll probably have to stay in Burlingame for a day or two until the police get through with their investigating. But if you’ll give me that fellow’s address — the Los Angeles lawyer — I’ll wire him to come up if he can and take you back with him when it’s all over.”

She looked puzzled. “But everything is all right now. I won’t have to bother him.”

“You’ll need him. There’ll be lots of trouble straightening out your affairs and your uncle’s; and you’ll have to have somebody to take care of you.”

“But you are—” She stopped and the blood flooded her face.

Phil shook his head emphatically. “Listen! I would—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. “We are going to do this different. You arc going to have this lawyer made your legal guardian. If you don’t, the courts will probably appoint some old bum who happens to be a friend of the judge’s. Then I’m going to convince him that I’m — that I’m not too tough an egg. And then we’ll see.”

A strange speech for one whose creed was: When your luck runs good, force it!

The girl frowned. “But—”

“Now don’t argue! I haven’t got what you might call a spotless record. Nothing so terrible, maybe, but plenty that’s bad enough. And another thing: you’ve got money, and I — well, when the cards run right I have enough to eat regular; when they run wrong... Anyway, we’ll see. I’ll do my talking to this lawyer fellow after he’s made your guardian.”

The doorbell forestalled the girl’s answer. Phil went to the door, where four uniformed policemen stood, using their nightsticks to keep the hounds at bay. Phil led them back to the room where the girl was waiting and told his story briefly. The grizzled sergeant in charge stared with round eyes from the girl to the youth with bloodstained bare feet, but he made no comment. Leaving one man with Phil and Romaine, he led the others upstairs.

Fifteen minutes later he returned.

“I thought you said the dead men were in the hall?”

“That’s right,” Phil said.

The sergeant shook his head. “They’re both dead, all right; and one of ’em is in the hall with half a dozen bullets in him. But we found the other one in one of the rooms — all mangled up — leaning over a sort of desk, with this under his arm.”

He held out a sheet of notepaper to Phil. In a small, firm, regular handwriting, but thickly besmeared with blood, was written:

My dear Romaine—

Leaving you, I want to extend to both you and your new-found champion my heartiest wish that joy and happiness attend you.

My only regret is that so little of your heritage remains — but I was always careless with money! I advise you to cling to Mr. Truax — never have I seen a more promising young man. And he has at least three hundred and fifty dollars!

There is much that I would write, hut my strength is going and I fear that my pen will waver. And I who have never shown a sign of weakness in my life am vain enough to desire that I leave this gentle world with that record intact.

Affectionately,

UNCLE BORIS.

The Man Who Killed Dan Odams

Black Mask, January 15, 1924

When the light that came through the barred square foot of the cell’s one high window had dwindled until he could no longer clearly make out the symbols and initials his predecessors had scratched and penciled on the opposite wall, the man who had killed Dan Odams got up from the cot and went to the steel-slatted door.

“Hey, chief!” he called, his voice rumbling within the narrow walls.

A chair scraped across a floor in the front of the building, deliberate footsteps approached, and the marshal of Jingo came into the passage between his office and the cell.

“I got something I want to tell you,” the man in the cell said.

Then the marshal was near enough to see in the dim light the shiny muzzle of a short, heavy revolver threatening him from just in front of the prisoner’s right hip.

Without waiting for the time-honored order the marshal raised his hands until their palms were level with his ears.

The man behind the bars spoke in a curt whisper.

“Turn around! Push your back against the door!”

When the marshal’s back pressed against the bars a hand came up under his left armpit, pulled aside his unbuttoned vest, and plucked his revolver from its holster. “Now unlock this here door!”

The prisoner’s own weapon had disappeared and the captured one had taken its place. The marshal turned around, lowered one hand, keys jingled in it, and the cell door swung open.

The prisoner backed across the cell, inviting the other in with a beckoning flip of the gun in his hand. “Flop on the bunk, face-down.”

In silence the marshal obeyed. The man who had killed Dan Odams bent over him. The long black revolver swept down in a swift arc that ended at the base of the prone official’s head.

His legs jerked once, and he lay still.

With unhurried deftness the prisoner’s fingers explored the other’s pockets, appropriating money, tobacco, and cigarette papers. He removed the holster from the marshal’s shoulder and adjusted it to his own. He locked the cell door behind him when he left.

The marshal’s office was unoccupied. Its desk gave up two sacks of tobacco, matches, an automatic pistol, and a double handful of cartridges. The wall yielded a hat that sat far down on the prisoner’s ears, and a too-tight, too-long, black rubber slicker.

Wearing them, he essayed the street.

The rain, after three days of uninterrupted sovereignty, had stopped for the time. But Jingo’s principal thoroughfare was deserted — Jingo ate between five and six in the evening.

His deep-set maroon eyes — their animality emphasized by the absence of lashes — scanned the four blocks of wooden-sidewalked street. A dozen automobiles were to be seen, but no horses.

At the first corner he left the street and half a block below turned into a muddy alley that paralleled it. Under a shed in the rear of a poolroom he found four horses, their saddles and bridles hanging near by. He selected a chunky, well-muscled roan — the race is not to the swift through the mud of Montana — saddled it, and led it to the end of the alley.

Then he climbed into the saddle and turned his back on the awakening lights of Jingo.

Presently he fumbled beneath the slicker and took from his hip pocket the weapon with which he had held up the marshal: a dummy pistol of molded soap, covered with tinfoil from cigarette packages. He tore off the wrapping, squeezed the soap into a shapeless handful, and threw it away.

The sky cleared after a while and the stars came out. He found that the road he was traveling led south. He rode all night, pushing the roan unrelentingly through the soft, viscid footing.

At daylight the horse could go no farther without rest. The man led it up a coulee — safely away from the road — and hobbled it beneath a clump of cottonwoods.

Then he climbed a hill and sprawled on the soggy ground, his lashless red eyes on the country through which he had come: rolling hills of black and green and gray, where wet soil, young grass, and dirty snow divided dominion — the triple rule trespassed here and there by the sepia ribbon of county road winding into and out of sight.

He saw no man while he lay there, but the landscape was too filled with the marks of man’s proximity to bring any feeling of security. Shoulder-high wire fencing edged the road, a footpath cut the side of a near-by hill, telephone poles held their short arms stiffly against the gray sky.

At noon he saddled the roan again and rode on along the coulee. Several miles up he came to a row of small poles bearing a line of telephone wire. He left the coulee bottom, found the ranch house to which the wire ran, circled it, and went on.

Late in the afternoon he was not so fortunate.

With lessening caution — he had seen no wires for more than an hour — he rode across a hill to stumble almost into the center of a cluster of buildings. Into the group, from the other side, ran a line of wire.

The man who had killed Dan Odams retreated, crossed to another hill, and as he dropped down, on the far side, a rifle snapped from the slope he had just quit.

He bent forward until his nose was deep in the roan’s mane, and worked upon the horse with hand and foot. The rifle snapped again.

He rolled clear of the horse as it fell, and continued to roll until bunch grass and sagebrush screened him from behind. Then he crawled straight away, rounded the flank of a hill, and went on.

The rifle did not snap again. He did not try to find it.

He turned from the south now, toward the west, his short, heavy legs pushing him on toward where Tiger Butte bulked against the leaden sky like a great crouching cat of black and green, with dirty white stripes where snow lay in coulee and fissure.

His left shoulder was numb for a while, and then the numbness was replaced by a searing ache. Blood trickled down his arm, staining his mud-caked hand. He stopped to open coat and shirt and readjust the bandage over the wound in his shoulder — the fall from the horse had broken it open and started it bleeding again. Then he went on.

The first road he came to bent up toward Tiger Butte. He followed it, plowing heavily through the sticky, clinging mud.

Only once did he break the silence he had maintained since his escape from the Jingo jail. He stopped in the middle of the road and stood with legs far apart, turned his bloodshot eyes from right to left and from ground to sky, and without emotion but with utter finality cursed the mud, the fence, the telephone wires, the man whose rifle had set him afoot, and the meadow larks whose taunting flutelike notes mocked him always from just ahead.

Then he went on, pausing after each few miles to scrape the ever-accumulating mud from his boots, using each hilltop to search the country behind for signs of pursuit.

The rain came down again, matting his thin, clay-plastered hair — his hat had gone with his mount. The ill-fitting slicker restricted his body and flapped about his ankles, impeding his progress, but his wounded shoulder needed its protection from the rain.

Twice he left the road to let vehicles pass — once a steaming Ford, once a half-load of hay creeping along behind four straining horses.

His way was still through fenced land that offered scant concealment. Houses dotted the country, with few miles between them; and the loss of his horse was ample evidence that the telephone wires had not been idle. He had not eaten since noon of the previous day but — notwithstanding the absence of visible pursuit — he could not forage here.

Night was falling as he left the road for the slope of Tiger Butte. When it was quite dark he stopped. The rain kept up all night. He sat through it — his back against a boulder, the slicker over his head.

The shack, unpainted and ramshackle, groveled in a fork of the coulee. Smoke hung soddenly, lifelessly above its roof, not trying to rise, until beaten into nothingness by the rain. The structures around the chimneyed shack were even less lovely. The group seemed asprawl in utter terror of the great cat upon whose flank it found itself.

But to the red eyes of the man who had killed Dan Odams — he lay on his belly on the crest of the hill around which the coulee split — the lack of telephone wires gave this shabby homestead a wealth of beauty beyond reach of architect or painter.

Twice within the morning hour that he lay there a woman came into view. Once she left the shack, went to one of the other sheds, and then returned. The other time she came to the door, to stand a while looking down the coulee. She was a small woman, of age and complexion indeterminable through the rain, in a limp, grayish dress.

Later, a boy of ten or twelve came from the rear of the house, his arms piled high with kindling, and passed out of sight.

Presently the watcher withdrew from his hill, swung off in a circle, and came within sight of the shack again from the rear.

Half an hour passed. He saw the boy carrying water from a spring below, but he did not see the woman again.

The fugitive approached the building stealthily, his legs carrying him stiffly, their elasticity gone. Now and then his feet faltered under him. But under its layers of clay and three-day beard his jaw jutted with nothing of weakness.

Keeping beyond them, he explored the outbuildings — wretched, flimsy structures, offering insincere pretenses of protection to an abject sorrel mare and a miscellaneous assortment of farm implements, all of which had come off second-best in their struggle with the earth. Only the generous, though not especially skillful, application of the material which has given to establishments of this sort the local sobriquet “hay-wire outfit” held the tools from frank admission of defeat.

Nowhere did the ground hold the impression of feet larger than a small woman’s or a ten- or twelve-year-old boy’s.

The fugitive crossed the yard to the dwelling, moving with wide-spread legs to offset the unsteadiness of his gait. With the unhurried, unresting spacing of clock-ticks, fat drops of blood fell from the fingers of his limp left hand to be hammered by the rain into the soggy earth.

Through the dirty pane of a window he saw the woman and boy, sitting together on a cot, facing the door.

The boy’s face was white when the man threw the door open and came into the unpartitioned interior, and his mouth trembled; but the woman’s thin, sallow face showed nothing — except, by its lack of surprise, that she had seen him approaching. She sat stiffly on the cot, her hands empty and motionless in her lap, neither fear nor interest in her faded eyes.

The man stood for a time where he had halted — just within the door to one side — a grotesque statue modeled of mud. Short, sturdy-bodied, with massive sagging shoulders. Nothing of clothing or hair showed through his husk of clay, and little of face and hands. The marshal’s revolver in his hand, clean and dry, took on by virtue of that discordant immaculateness an exaggerated deadliness.

His eyes swept the room: two cots against the undressed board side walls, a plain deal table in the center, rickety kitchen chairs here and there, a battered and scratched bureau, a trunk, a row of hooks holding an indiscriminate assembly of masculine and feminine clothing, a pile of shoes in a corner, an open door giving access to a lean-to kitchen.

He crossed to the kitchen door, the woman’s face turning to follow.

The lean- to was empty. He confronted the woman.

“Where’s your man?”

“Gone.”

“When’ll he be back?”

“Ain’t coming back.”

The flat, expressionless voice of the woman seemed to puzzle the fugitive, as had her lack of emotion at his entrance. He scowled, and turned his eyes — now redder than ever with flecks of blood — from her face to the boy’s and back to hers.

“Meaning what?” he demanded.

“Meaning he got tired of homesteading.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. Then he went to the corner where the shoes were piled. Two pairs of men’s worn shoes were there — dry and without fresh mud.

He straightened, slipped the revolver back into its holster, and awkwardly took off the slicker. “Get me some grub.”

The woman left the cot without a word and went into the kitchen. The fugitive pushed the boy after her, and stood in the doorway while she cooked coffee, flapjacks, and bacon. Then they returned to the living-room. She put the food on the table and with the boy beside her resumed her seat on the cot.

The man wolfed the meal without looking at it — his eyes busy upon door, window, woman, and boy, his revolver beside his plate. Blood still dripped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them.

His hunger appeased, he rolled and lit a cigarette, his left hand fumbling stiffly through its part.

For the first time the woman seemed to notice the blood. She came around to his side. “You’re bleeding. Let me fix it.”

His eyes — heavy now with the weights of fatigue and satisfied hunger — studied her face suspiciously. Then he leaned back in his chair and loosened his clothes, exposing the week-old bullet-hole.

She brought water and cloths, and bathed and bandaged the wound. Neither of them spoke again until she had returned to the cot.

Then: “Had any visitors lately?”

“Ain’t seen nobody for six or seven weeks.”

“How far’s the nearest phone?”

“Nobel’s — eight miles up the coulee.”

“Got any horses besides the one in the shed?”

“No.”

He got up wearily and went to the bureau, pulling the drawers out and plunging his hands into them. In the top one he found a revolver, and pocketed it. In the trunk he found nothing. Behind the clothes on the wall he found a rifle. The cots concealed no weapons.

He took two blankets from one of the cots, the rifle, and his slicker. He staggered as he walked to the door.

“I’m going to sleep a while,” he said thickly, “out in the shed where the horse is at. I’ll be turning out every now and then for a look around, and I don’t want to find nobody missing. Understand?”

She nodded, and made a suggestion.

“If any strangers show up, I guess you want to be woke up before they see you?”

His sleep-dull eyes became alive again, and he came unsteadily back to thrust his face close to hers, trying to peer behind the faded surfaces of her eyes.

“I killed a fellow in Jingo last week,” he said after a while, talking slowly, deliberately, in a monotone that was both cautioning and menacing. “It was fair shooting. He got me in the shoulder before I downed him. But he belonged in Jingo and I don’t. The best I could expect is the worst of it. I got a chance to get away before they took me to Great Falls, and I took it. And I ain’t figuring on being took back there and hung. I ain’t going to be here long, but while I am—”

The woman nodded again.

He scowled at her and left the shack.

He tied the horse in one corner of the hut with shortened rope and spread his blankets between it and the door. Then, with the marshal’s revolver in his hand, he lay down and slept.

The afternoon was far gone when he woke, and the rain was still falling. He studied the bare yard carefully, and reconnoitered the house before reentering it.

The woman had swept and tidied the room; had put on a fresh dress, which much washing had toned down to a soft pink; had brushed and fluffed her hair. She looked up at his entrance from the sewing that occupied her, and her face, still young in spite of the harshness that work had laid upon it, was less sallow than before.

“Where’s the kid?” the man snapped.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

“Up on the hill. I sent him up to watch the coulee.”

His eyes narrowed and he left the building. Studying the hill through the rain, he discerned the outline of the boy, lying face-down under a stunted red cedar, looking toward the east. The man returned indoors.

“How’s the shoulder?” she asked.

He raised an experimental arm.

“Better. Pack me some grub. I’m moving on.”

“You’re a fool,” she said without spirit as she went into the kitchen. “You’d do better to stay here until your shoulder’s fit to travel.”

“Too close to Jingo.”

“Ain’t nobody going to fight all that mud to come after you. A horse couldn’t get through, let alone a car. And you don’t think they’d foot it after you even if they knew where to find you, do you? And this rain ain’t going to do your shoulder no good.”

She bent to pick up a sack from the floor. Under the thin pink dress the line of back and hips and legs stood out sharply against the wall.

As she straightened she met his gaze, her lids dropped, her face flushed, her lips parted a little.

The man leaned against the jamb of the door and caressed the muddy stubble of his chin with a thick thumb.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

She put away the food she had been bundling, took a galvanized pail from the corner, and made three trips to the spring, filling an iron tub that she had set on the stove. He stood in the doorway watching.

She stirred the fire, went into the living-room, and took a suit of underwear, a blue shirt, and a pair of socks from the bureau, a pair of gray trousers from one of the hooks, and a pair of carpet slippers from the pile of footwear. She put the clothing on a chair in the kitchen.

Then she returned to the living-room, closing the connecting door.

As the man undressed and bathed, he heard her humming softly. Twice he tiptoed to the connecting door and put an eye to the crack between it and the jamb. Each time he saw her sitting on the cot, bending over her sewing, her face still flushed.

He had one leg in the trousers she had given him when the humming stopped suddenly.

His right hand swept up the revolver from a convenient chair, and he moved to the door, the trousers trailing across the floor behind the ankle he had thrust through them. Flattening himself against the wall, he put an eye to the crack.

In the front door of the shack stood a tall youth in a slicker that was glistening with water. In the youth’s hands was a double-barreled shotgun, the twin muzzles of which, like dull, malignant eyes, were focused on the center of the connecting door.

The man in the kitchen swung his revolver up, his thumb drawing back the hammer with the mechanical precision of the man who is accustomed to single-action pistols.

The lean-to’s rear door slammed open. “Drop it!”

The fugitive, wheeling with the sound of the door’s opening, was facing this new enemy before the order was out.

Two guns roared together.

But the fugitive’s feet, as he wheeled, had become entangled in the trailing trousers. The trousers had tripped him. He had gone to his knees at the very instant of the two guns’ roaring.

His bullet had gone out into space over the shoulder of the man in the doorway. That one’s bullet had driven through the wall a scant inch over the falling fugitive’s head.

Floundering on his knees, the fugitive fired again.

The man in the door swayed and spun half around.

As he righted himself, the fugitive’s forefinger tightened again around the trigger—

From the connecting doorway a shotgun thundered.

The fugitive came straight up on his feet, his face filled with surprise, stood bolt upright for a moment, and wilted to the floor.

The youth with the shotgun crossed to the man who leaned against the door with a hand clapped to his side. “Did he get you, Dick?”

“Just through the flesh, I reckon — don’t amount to nothing. Reckon you killed him, Bob?”

“I reckon I did. I hit him fair!”

The woman was in the lean-to. “Where’s Buddy?”

“The kid’s all right, Mrs. Odams,” Bob assured her. “But he was all in from running through the mud, so Ma put him to bed.”

The man who lay still on the floor made a sound then, and they saw that his eyes were open.

Mrs. Odams and Bob knelt beside him, but he stopped them when they tried to move him to examine the wreckage the shotgun had made of his back.

“No use,” he protested, blood trickling thinly from the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “Let me alone.”

Then his eyes — their red savageness glazed — sought the woman’s.

“You — Dan — Odams’s — woman?” he managed.

There was something of defiance — a hint that she felt the need of justification — in her answer. “Yes.”

His face — thick-featured and deep-lined without the mud — told nothing of what was going on in his mind.

“Dummy,” he murmured to himself presently, his eyes flickering toward the hill on whose top he had seen what he had believed to be a reclining boy.

She nodded.

The man who had killed Dan Odams turned his head away and spat his mouth empty of blood. Then his eyes returned to hers.

“Good girl,” he said clearly — and died.

Itchy

Brief Stories, January 1924; (aka: Itchy the Debonair, 1962)

I

DEBONAIR BANDIT ROBS OAKLAND BANK

LOCKS OFFICIALS IN VAULT

ESCAPES WITH $2500

Shortly after the Bay City State Bank of Oakland opened its doors for business this morning, an unmasked bandit, locking officials and employees in the vault, fled with the contents of the money drawer.

No depositors were in the bank at the time, the front door having been unlocked but a few minutes before. The robber came in quietly from the street, whipped out a revolver, and drove Milton Beecroft, president, James K. Kirkbride, cashier, and Miss Marcella Redgray, stenographer, into the vault, politely assuring them that they would not be harmed if they did as they were told. After locking the door upon them the bandit walked out of the bank with about $2500 in bills of various denominations. $300 in silver in the same drawer was not taken, and a large amount of money in the vault at the time was overlooked.

Half an hour later Beecroft released himself and his employees by removing the inside combination plate with a screwdriver kept in the vault for that purpose, and notified the police. It is believed that the bandit left in an automobile seen standing in the neighborhood at the time of the robbery. He is described as about 30 years of age, short and muscular, and dressed in a dark rough suit, dark cap, and khaki shirt. Police inspectors assigned to the case are of the opinion that this clothing may have been worn to lead suspicion astray, as the bandit’s manner was that of a man of culture and refinement.

“What the hell, Itchy?” Pete Judge demanded. “You must of put on the high hat for them guys! What’s a debonair?”

“That’s a lot of bunk!” Itchy protested with warmth. “I didn’t make no cracks that that kind of stuff could be got out of. I went in there and flashed the rod, and said, ‘Get in there, all of you,’ pointing to the box. The stenog — one of them goofy kids — has me worried for a minute. I’m afraid she’s going to try to be funny, or let out a squawk, or something: she’s got that kind of look in her eye. So I tell her, sharp, ‘Now you run along with ’em, sister, I don’t want to have to hurt you.’ She goes, I slain the door on them, make the till, and duck out to you. That’s all there was to it. It’s these newspapers! Like making it twenty-five centuries, when eighteen hundred was all we got.”

Pete’s mouth widened in a grin at the earnestness of this defense, a grin which, for all its breadth, did not tighten his lips appreciably, or give them the least semblance of resilience.

“You ought to get yourself some spats and one of these here monocles. Ain’t no use of doing things half-way. Funny I never rapped to it that I was throwing in with a dude!”

Itchy scowled at his partner and picked up another paper. In this one also the robbery held a place of honor on an outside sheet that was a shade paler pink than the one he had just read aloud, but nothing was said here of the bandit’s comity. So Itchy read it to Pete, and then the third version, — against a background of green, this one, — likewise devoid of objectionable adjectives.

But Pete was not to be denied his humor.

“I guess I better shake up the scoffings, Mister Maker,” he said as he carried the packages he had brought in with the afternoon papers over to the gas stove in a corner of the room. “You oughtn’t to spoil your lily-white hands with cooking. It ain’t debonair.”

Itchy returned his stockinged feet to the window sill, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cigarette with a pretense of vast indifference to the witticisms that came over his partner’s shoulder between the rattling of pans. He was sorry he hadn’t laughed with Pete at first. No use giving Pete a chance to ride him: Pete would make a song of it. But it was too late now.

Those damn reporters, twisting things around, trying to be funny! “Debonair,” whatever that was, “politely,” “culture,” “refinement.” He’d show them! Next time he’d dent somebody’s skull, and let them see what they could make out of that. And as for Pete, — who had by now discarded “Mister” Maker in favor of “Debonair” Maker, — if Pete kept this up he was going to get smacked. That was all!

II

In a touring car stolen that morning, Itchy and Pete caught up with the automobile they had trailed from broom factory, to bank, and now half-way back to factory. They drew abreast of it, slackened their own to its pace, and edged over toward it, forcing it against the curb. There was a moment of hesitancy on the part of the three men in the factory car, then obedience, and a bag of money, meant until now to cover a payroll, changed cars. Nothing remained to the robbery except the escape.

Itchy, however, did not immediately give the word for Pete to drive on. He remembered his self-given promise to slug somebody next time, that his reputation might be redeemed from the calumny of gentility. He could easily swing the weapon in his left hand into the scared fat face of the nearest factory employee — maybe knock some of his teeth out.

He screwed around in his seat a little, for better leverage, and Pete’s breath rasped in his ear. Pete was a partner to be trusted without stint: no matter how badly frightened Pete might be he would hold up his end, wouldn’t dog it in a pinch. But Pete was always scared. He was without joy in his vocation. He knew nothing of exaltation in the power of a crooked forefinger to take what it wanted from the world. Robbery was to him — exclusive of the money involved, and even that was powerless to stimulate him during the actual operation — no more pleasant than to his prey. And to Pete this lingering to no purpose when the work was done was agony.

Itchy, in the pride of his own imperturbable subnormality, found inspiration in the hoarse panting beside him. Pete had ridden him ragged about the Oakland job, had he? Had called him a dude, had he? Called him “Itchy the debonair”? He’d give Pete a bellyful this time!

“I regret exceedingly,” Itchy told the factory employees, “the necessity of having to do this” — hazy remembrance of a letter he had once received from a collecting agency carried him this far — “and I hope — I trust you boys won’t do nothing you’ll be sorry for.”

Pete had enough. He bent over the wheel, and they shot up Mission Street, Itchy leaning out to call back: “I bid you good-day!”

How did Pete like that?

But Pete didn’t say whether he liked it or no. He said nothing about it, even when they were safely at home again. Toward evening he went out for groceries, and did not come back. He had his share of the loot. He and Itchy had been together for nearly a year: seven or eight months on the road, and the last few “jungling up” in this housekeeping room on Ellis Street. Pete liked Itchy, and in association with him had prospered as never before. But Pete had had experience with partners who became swollen with success, and he did not intend being involved in the ensuing wreckage this time.

Itchy waited an hour, and then went down to the corner for food and the afternoon papers. He understood now why Pete hadn’t raised a row over the hold-up. Well, if Pete didn’t like his style, all right. He could find another partner, or perhaps he’d be better off working alone. He had done all the real work anyway, — the actual going up against the gun, — though Pete had been handy with a car.

Itchy read the afternoon papers before he cooked his meal. They were unanimous now: the paler pink and the green anxious to make up for their oversight of the previous month, and the deeper pink secure in the confirmation of its original stand. The bandit, they agreed, was the same who had robbed the Oakland bank, and he was a gentleman crook, a brother to those suave dandies of fiction who so easily confound the best policing brains of the several continents.

Fiction, Itchy knew, meant stories, books. He had never thought of stories having any connection with actuality, any relation with life; but it seemed that they did, and not only with life but with him personally. Books had been written about men like him; that was what the newspapers were getting at.

III

There is a stratum of American criminal society whose constituents — almost without exception either bandits or burglars; the latter, once predominant, now a dwindling minority — are primarily hoboes. They have all the caste consciousness of those wanderers, all their contempt for the niceties of gentler modes of life. You will find them in the cities often, but they bring with them all their pride in their hardness, in their independence, in their ability to do for themselves whatever needs to be done.

The tawdry resort of the town criminal seldom sees them: even before Prohibition came they preferred to buy their liquor in the form of pure alcohol, which they could dilute to their taste; they affect a fine disesteem for women, and their contacts with them are infrequent and brief. Their ideal abode in a city is a house in some shoddy suburban quarter, or, if that is not practicable, a flat, or a room with a stove, where they may live free of traffic with cooks and other devices of civilisation. In short, they are outcasts and that is their pride. And they like to treat a city as if it were not a city at all, but merely another sort of countryside.

Itchy — idling now most of the days in his room, rereading the three coloured clippings and mulling over the phrase, “gentlemen crooks of fiction” — was of this tribe. And his place among them, he boasted, was second to none. He was as tough as any, as independent of the comforts of less hardy existences, as able to take care of himself.

But it wasn’t as if he had been born to that life. If you came right down to it, his people were as good as the best. Hadn’t his old man been a letter carrier for twenty-five years? No, his people weren’t riff-raff by any means. And he had been given a good education before he slipped away on his own account: he had gone through the seventh grade of grammar school. So if he was a “stiff” it was from choice, not because — like Pete, for instance — he wasn’t fit for anything else. He could do other things if he wanted to. And maybe he would want to. There might be something in this gentleman crook stuff. People had written books about them...

In a downtown bookstore a saleswoman told Itchy that she did have gentleman crook stories, and she sold him five of them.

At the outset he found them disappointing, meaningless. They hadn’t anything to do with life after all. Four of them he put aside with their initial chapters only partly read, but on the fifth he got the swing of the thing, read it through, went back to the others, read them, and returned to the bookstore for more.

The books weren’t on the whole satisfactory. In the first place, most of them had to do with house-burglars. And, although these fellows were undoubtedly a very superior breed, with their elegant clothes and manners, their brilliant repartee, and their daring audacity, Itchy couldn’t spare them a large measure of the contempt he felt for house-burglars. Then, in many of the stories, the thief was revealed, toward the end, as a detective going deviously, foolishly, and with much trouble to himself, about his hunt for the missing jewels, or one thing or another. And, if really a crook, he was more than likely to reform in the last few chapters; but as he usually bettered his financial condition by this “going queer,” he wasn’t to be blamed so much for that.

The girls with whom these fellows soon or late became involved Itchy found to his liking. Their very difference from anything he had ever known made them more plausible to him. The women with whom he had come in contact from time to time certainly hadn’t been very wonderful, even discounting his tribal pose of misogyny. But these were different. More like — the girl in the bookstore was something on their order...

Still, say what you would about these men in the books, — neglecting the most simple precautions, always being surprised at work, showing themselves unnecessarily gullible, and only succeeding through the miraculous favors of chance, — they did have something. They made big hauls, they enjoyed themselves, people wrote stories about them... Take, for example, that one who told the detective: “I’m tired of you. You bore me. You weary me. You exasperate me. Now get out.” That wasn’t a bad line at all. Imagine the look on an “elbow’s” face if you told him that! Naturally, though, you’d want to be sure you were sitting pretty before you made a crack like that.

Of course, you couldn’t go around pulling jobs as these fellows did: they were no good in a practical way. But a man who knew his business through and through might, by copying their manners, their dress, and their talk, not only increase his profits by being able to get into places from which less polish would bar him, but have a lot of fun in the bargain. The newspapers liked that kind of stuff, too. Look what a fuss they raised over those two jobs of his, and he hadn’t even tried to make them fancy.

Another visit to the bookstore exhausted its stock of gentleman crook fiction, but he learned that w hat he wanted could be found on the screen now and then and in the magazines often.

He was in earnest now. His hair was carefully parted and weighted down with a thick gummy substance that he bought in large jars; he spent time in the barber’s chair, and even submitted his hands to a manicure. Nor had he neglected tailor, haberdasher, hatter, and booter.

He read aloud to himself in his room at night, and felt that his language was being improved thereby. Every day or two he visited the bookstore, ostensibly to enquire for new books, but actually for the sake of the saleswoman’s conversation. The books could give him the right words and the correct combinations, but they didn’t give him the right pronunciations. The saleswoman could, however, and not only the pronunciations but the right sort of accent. She formed her words high in the roof of her mouth, and they came out roundly and clearly in what he knew instinctively for the correct form. After he had returned to his room he would repeat everything she had said, painstakingly aping each trick of enunciation.

He was going to stick up the bookstore some day, he decided. There wouldn’t be much money in the damper (he must remember to say cash register if he spoke of it), and, in the center of the shopping district, the store was unfavorably located for a quick get-away. But the saleswoman was the only person he knew whom he thought capable of unerringly judging the false from the true, and by her attitude he would know the degree of his success. But he wouldn’t do it for a while yet; he wasn’t quite ready for so severe a testing, and, besides, she would be getting new books in from time to time, and there was no use closing that source of supply.

Another month passed before Itchy ordered evening clothes. But all the books had insisted upon them, — dinner jackets were indicated also, — so he finally came to it. He didn’t, however, buy a dinner suit. He felt that since he was taking this step forward he might as well make it a decisive one, and waste nothing on the compromise between formality and informality which the dinner suit offered.

He wore the new dress suit every night from the first, which necessitated his remaining indoors for a while, until he became accustomed to the new garments. But he usually kept to his room in the evenings, anyway. He had no desire for the society of his familiars. He knew how they would greet this new Itchy, with his silk shirts and hose, his carefully tended face and hands, his glossy hair, his natty clothes. For those who dressed as he did now — the gaudy city breed — he had lost none of his old Contempt. Thus he spent much time by himself.

He became, at about this time, unpleasantly aware of his nickname. He had grown accustomed to it, had come to think of it more natural a part of him than the baptismal Floyd; but now, considering it in terms of his new development, he found it distasteful. He had acquired it five or six years before, sitting with a group of his fellows around a fire in the “jungles” outside of Fresno one night. He had been digging savagely at the flea-bites with which he was covered at the time, and some old “stiff” had flung the name across the flames at him. He had laughed with the others, and the name had stuck. Itchy Maker. What difference did it make? One name was as good as another. But now one name was not necessarily so good as another. And while the chances were that he would never mingle again with those who knew him by it, still the name might crop up at the most unexpected times to embarrass him. If he found new associates now — as he undoubtedly would before long — he meant to see to it that they knew him as “Debonair” Maker. That was a lot better than Itchy — had a fine sound, in fact.

Another fortnight, and Itchy was wearing his correct evening clothes on the streets and into the lobbies of the better hotels, where he would loiter for hours, gazing condescendingly on those whose more common garb did night and day duty. And, as his familiarity with them increased, the new clothes began to tempt him to wear them on a robbery. But he resisted that, for a while.

Within the next two months he held up a small jewelry store and the office of a laundry company. He was sure of himself in his new role now, and he enlivened both banditries with copious quotations from the books he had read, and even extemporized a trifle. In the laundry office he was fortunate enough to encounter two girls who were addicted to the same sort of literature, and their appreciation of his manner was gratifying. And even more gratifying was the warmth with which the press accepted the girls’ stories, polishing them, gilding them, and setting them out at great length for the world to see. Itchy had column after column of type devoted to him now — even editorials.

IV

The lobby of A theater just before the box office closed one night was the scene of the dress suit’s baptism. The top hat he had, of course, finally left at home; there was no use overdoing the thing. His grammar had improved by now until the double negative was rare, though tenses still puzzled him, and his accents were worth all the imitative labors they had cost him.

His light overcoat drooping to each side, exposing the full chiaroscuro of his immaculate costuming, he smiled at the girl behind the grille and wrought beautifully with what he knew of the graces of speech. And the girl, once she had become relatively accustomed to the sight of the pistol in his hand, enjoyed the robbery perhaps as much as he.

Nevertheless she gave the alarm as soon as he left.

It happened there were only two other men in dress clothes on the streets of San Francisco that night, and one of them was very old and the other was very tall. And thus, though the police went astray once at the corner of Powell and Geary Streets, and again, momentarily, at Mason and Sutter, they still arrived at Itchy’s quarters — he had an apartment now, on California Street — only a few minutes behind him.

There was a broken door, a bullet that went wild, a blow or two, and Itchy was taken.

V

In a barely furnished room in the Hall of Justice Itchy sat ringed by detectives.

“So, my pretty boy,” one of them grinned down at the slightly rumpled black and white of the prisoner’s clothes, “we got you.”

Itchy’s glance ran coolly along the circling line of faces until it rested upon the speakers, and there was utter nonchalance in the crossing of Itchy’s legs.

“I’m tired of you,” he said. “You weary me. You bore me. You exasperate me. You... you’re a big slob!”

Ester Entertains

Brief Stories, February 1924

He shouldn’t (he thought) have come. These four hours, if so applied, would have disposed all the incidentals to his departure tomorrow, sending him away with no loose ends to be taken care of later. But her voice had come over the wire so alluringly; and no doubt she really had missed him, not seeing him for two weeks. And to have excused himself tonight would have been to prolong that fortnight to nearly two months, since his trip would cover six weeks at the least. Perhaps he could leave an hour early, get away at eleven-thirty or forty-five without seeming anxious to go.

“You know I did, dear. If you had waited another ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside, I’d have been calling you up.”

He had almost called her “honey”: an endearment for which she professed aversion, finding it reminiscent, possibly, of some former lover who had been disappointing. Southerners, he believed, were addicted to the word; and she came from somewhere in the Carolinas.

“Not a thing except work.”

She didn’t look so well tonight. Her gown was less than becoming; and her hair, dressed in this new manner, was also at fault, accentuating the slenderness of her throat: a slenderness that was on the point of aging into scrawniness. She must be getting along in years. Even in this light, diluted and tinted to friendliness, she failed to appear quite young. Her figure, too, was less youthfully slim now than merely thin. Her eyes were good, though, and they saved her: she would never be unattractive while they held their beauty. If only she wouldn’t maneuver them with so little subtlety, with so obvious a consciousness: pulling them around like fat blue puppets beneath the heavy dark fringe of her lashes: lashes edging lids that slid down and up on occasion with all the smooth precision of well-handled drop-curtains.

“Sit still, baby, ill get them.”

If he didn’t light his cigarette, she would, and pass it to him limp and hot from the excessive draught she had applied, its end sodden with saliva, and he would have to smoke it with a pretense of extra enjoyment. Of course, that would happen once or twice before the evening was over; but by exercising a reasonable amount of alertness, and keeping the cigarettes near him, he could prevent its too frequent occurrence.

“I did. You know, or you should, without my telling you.”

It was peculiar, how he was invariably disappointed in her. It wasn’t, either, that he had any illusions. He would leave tonight — as he had left the last time and the several times before that — to hardly think of her again until he had an evening whose emptiness promised to be irksome, or until he heard from her. Such vagrant thoughts as came to him meanwhile would not draw him toward her. Yet, between the time when his engagements were made and the time for their keeping, he was somehow filled with inflated notions of her charm and appeal — an anticipation of vague ecstacies. Not consciously; but that he always experienced this disappointment testified to the existence of some such process of delusion.

“Yes, much nicer.”

It was nicer. The light at their feet, a mellow glow, tilted upward the shadows on her face, softened the texture of her skin, lent her an appearance of girlishness — almost. She was, for that matter, girlish, in a way. Arrested development you could call it if you liked, but it went well with her smallness; and, now that the only illumination came slanting up from the gas log, you could believe in her youngness, or very nearly.

“Utterly.”

He would be utterly comfortable if only she wouldn’t fidget so much, tickling his face with her hair; and if she wouldn’t call him “dearest” or that ridiculous “most beloved boy.” Superlatives were weak, almost cheap. Furthermore, superlatives carried with them the postulant that there were others in the speaker’s mind. To call him dearest was to think of one who was dear and another who was dearer; though it was unlikely that it worked out that way — that she had anyone else in her mind at the time. But the inference, the suggestion, was there. Not that he cared, really, how many others there might he; but it was nevertheless faulty technic. The pleasurableness of these evenings depended upon the maintenance of certain illusions whose very high artificiality made them delicate and all the more vulnerable to the least discordance.

“I wasn’t thinking at all. I don’t when I am with you. There’s nothing to think about. It’s all here. This afternoon there may have been a world — I’m not quite sure. Tomorrow there may be another, or even a continuation of the same one; with business and things in it, and scheming and conniving to he done. But now there’s nothing anywhere but you and me, and the aim of existence is to sit still, like this, close to you, doing nothing, neither remembering nor imagining — just sitting still with you.”

More than a hit silly, but it would at least keep her from jumping up and turning on that damned talking machine for a while. She needn’t, however, have received it with so much rapture. The Lord knew he had made the same speech, or one of its variants, often enough before. She would know by now that it didn’t have any particular meaning, that it was just one of the things you say. She did know it, of course, but she should also know that he was aware of her knowledge. Her antics threw a spotlight on the speech, gave it a prominence that was never meant for it and that made it seem sillier than ever. And why did women always want to know what you were thinking about? And if, as was probable, they didn’t, why did they ask? The sort of answers they got would become monotonous after a while.

...It was easier to kiss than to talk, and more satisfying. She did kiss well. Even the solemnity, with its insistence upon an equal seriousness on his part, which she brought to the business failed to mar it; though it would have been more thoroughly enjoyable without this alien reverence. She surely didn’t expect him to believe that she held these kisses, embraces, caresses, so sacred as she pretended. That was the worst side of her: she not only invested her amours with all the trappings of the theater, but she went to the amateur theater for her properties.

...There it was again. It was as if there were hidden and not very sophisticated spectators to be satisfied. A kiss wasn’t, properly, a sacrament; nor was she any more deeply stirred than he, for instance, himself. It could all have been done just as neatly and a whole lot more enjoyably without the burning glances, the shivers and sighs, the devout emotion with which she embellished it — sometimes caricatured it. He must be careful not to smile, though, not even when she reached her highest histrionic altitude; or she would sulk, and that was a nuisance. True enough, her sulkiness seldom endured for longer than it took him to light a cigarette, hut even that was sufficient to irritate him and make him feel rather sullen himself. Now and then, when a smile wouldn’t be repressed, he could hit upon the right thing to say — something without flippancy but at the same time whimsical — and pass it off; but she didn’t as a rule like trivialities of any sort when her emotions were rampant.

...That was safer: a smile before it had twisted itself into view could he buried beneath another kiss. And she did kiss well; she was undeniably delectable in spite of her gestures, her dramatics, and her italicized fervors. After all, the difference between her acting and his was only one of degree. But that made the flaw a matter of crudity, which was bad. Still—

...Funny — the similarity of women’s faces remembered in dim lights on nights like this: the same leanness of cheek, the same shininess of eye, the same deepened lines spreading from between the eyes down and out around the mouth. It was as if something — some same thing behind all of them — was looking out through their faces: some aboriginal — but that was fantastic!

...If only for a little while she would put away that posturing. This wasn’t a mass. If only— But it was possible that he was being hypercritical; it was possible that she wasn’t exaggerating so much as he thought. She was an impulsive, high-keyed little thing: she might be nearly in earnest — or even quite. Sincere or affected, she was devilishly fascinating, nevertheless.

...If only she—

...By Jove, she was glorious!

The New Racket

Black Mask, February 15, 1924; (aka: The Judge Laughed Last,1944)

“The trouble with this country,” Old Man Covey unexpectedly exploded, emphasizing his words with repeated beats of a gnarled forefinger on the newspaper he had been reading, “is that the courts have got a stranglehold on it! Law? There ain’t no law! There’s courts and there’s judges, and this thing you call the law is a weapon they use to choke human enterprise — to discourage originality and progress!” The portion of the morning paper upon which the old man’s assault was concentrated, I saw with difficulty, held the report of a decision of the Supreme Court in connection with some labor difficulties in the West. Old Man Covey, I knew, couldn’t be personally interested in either side of the dispute. He had as little to do with capital as with labor, which was very little. For eight years now — since the day when a street preacher had turned “Big-dog” Covey from the ways of crime, to become plain John Covey and, later, Old Man Covey — he had subsisted upon the benevolence of a son-in-law.

His interest in this case was, then, purely academic. But his attitude was undoubtedly tinged by his earlier experience with the criminal courts, which had been more than superficial, and I suspected that some especially bitter memory had engendered this outburst.

So I rolled another cigarette and led him gently along the road of argumentation — the most direct path, I had learned, to the interior of his contrary old mind.

“Being a beak,” I said, using the vernacular term for judge in an attempt to do all I could to stir up the portions of his remembrance that had to do with his days of youth and lawlessness, “is a tough job. Laws are complicated and puzzling, and it isn’t easy to straighten them out so that they fit particular cases. Most of the beaks do very well, I think.”

“You think so, do you?” the old scoundrel snarled at me. “Well, let me tell you, sonny, you don’t know a damned thing about it! I could tell you stories about beaks and their ways that would knock your eye out!”

I put all the skepticism I could summon into a smile, confident now that I had him. “You look at things from your own side,” I replied, “and in those days you were on the wrong side. Now I don’t say that judges don’t make mistakes now and then. They do. They’re only human. But I never heard of a case where you could say that a judge had positively twisted the law around to—”

That turned the trick. He cursed and snorted and glared at me, and I grinned my insincere doubts, and the story finally came out.

“Me and ‘Flogger’ Rork was on the road together some years ago, with a gun apiece and a couple big handkerchiefs to hide our mugs behind when we needed to. All-night grease-joints was our meat, and we done ourselves pretty well. We’d knock over a couple a night some nights. We’d drift into them separate at three or four in the morning, not letting on we knew each other, and stall over coffee and sinkers until we was alone with the guy behind the counter. Then we’d flash the rods on him, take what was in the damper, and slide on. No big hauls, you understand, but a steady, reliable income.

“We work that way for a few months, and then I get an idea for a new racket — and it’s a darb! Flogger — he’s an unimaginative sort of jobbie — can’t see it at first. But I keep jawing at him until he gives in and agrees to take a whirl at it.

“You never seen Flogger Rork, did you? I thought not. Well, he’s a good guy — what ‘Limey’ Pine used to call a ‘bene cove’ — but he ain’t no flower to look at. I seen a cartoon of a burglar once in a newspaper during one of these crime waves, and that’s the only time I ever seen a face like Flogger’s. A good guy — but we had to be careful how we moved around, because bulls had a habit of picking us up just on account of his face. Me — nobody hadn’t ever took me for a lamb, myself; though alongside of Flogger I look pretty sweet.

“These mugs of ours had been handicaps to us so far, but now under my new scheme we’re going to cash in on them.

“We was in the Middle West at the time. We blow into the next burg on our list, look the main drag over, and go to work. Our guns are ditched down under a pile of rocks near the jungle.

“We make a drugstore. There’s two nice little boys in it. I plant myself in front of one of them, with one hand in my coat pocket, and Flogger does the same with the other.” ‘Come through,’ we tells ’em.

“Without a squawk, one of ’em pushes down the ‘No Sale’ key of the damper, scoops out every nickel that’s in it, and passes it over to Flogger.

“ ‘Lay down behind the counter and don’t be too much in a hurry about getting up,’ we tell them next.

“They do as they’re told, and me and Flogger go on out and about our business.

“The next day we push over two more stores and move on to the next town. Every town we hit we give our new racket a couple of whirls, and it goes nice. Having an ace up our sleeves, we can take chances that otherwise would have been foolish — we can pull a couple or even three jobs a day without waiting for the rumpus from the first one to die down. “Pickings were pretty them days!

“Then, one afternoon in a fresh burg, we push over a garage, a pawnshop and a shoe store, and we get picked up.

“The bulls that nabbed us was loaded for bear, but — outside of running until we saw it was no use — we went along with them as nice as you please. When they frisked us they found the money from that day’s jobs, but that was all. The rest was cached where we knew it would be when we wanted it. And our guns was still under that pile of stones three. States away. We didn’t have no use for them any more.

“The guys we had stuck up that afternoon came in to look us over, and they all identified us right away. As one of ’em said there was no forgettin’ our faces. But we sat tight and said nothing. We knew where we stood and we were satisfied.

“After a couple days they let us have a mouthpiece. We picked out a kid whose diploma hadn’t been with him long enough to collect any dust yet, but he looked like he wouldn’t throw us down; and he didn’t have to know much law for us. Then we laid around and took jail life easy.

“A few days of that, and they yank us into court. We let things run along for a while without fightin’ back, until the right time came. Then our kid mouthpiece gets up and springs our little joker on them.

“His clients, he says, meaning me and Flogger, are perfectly willing to plead guilty to begging. But there is nothing to hold them for robbery on. They were in need of funds, and they went into three business establishments and asked for money. They had no weapons. The evidence doesn’t show that they made any threats. Whatever motives may have prompted the persons in the stores to hand over the contents of the various cash registers to oblige them — the kid says — has no bearing on the matter. The evidence is plain. His clients asked for money and it was given to them. Begging, certainly — and so his clients are liable to sentences of 30 days or so in the county jail for vagrancy. But robbery — no!

“Well, son, it was a riot! I thought the beak was going to bust something. He’s a big bloated hick with a red face and a pair of nose-pinchers. His face turns purple now, and the cheaters slide down his nose three times in five minutes. The district attorney does a proper war dance with the whoops and all. But we had ’em!”

The old man stopped with an air of finality. I waited a while, but he didn’t resume the story, if there were, indeed, any more to it; so I prodded him.

“I don’t see where that proves your contention,” I said. “There’s no using of the law as a weapon there.”

“Wait, sonny, wait,” he promised. “You’ll see before I’m through... They put their witnesses back on the stand again, then. But there was nothing to it. None of ’em had seen any weapons, and none of ’em couldn’t say we had threatened ’em. They said things about our looks, but it ain’t a crime to be ugly.

“They shut up shop for the day, then, and chased me and Flogger back to the jail. And we went back as happy a pair as you ever seen. We had the world by the tail with a downhill pull, and we liked it. Thirty days, or even sixty, in the county jail on a vag charge didn’t mean nothing to us. We’d had that happen to us before, and got over it.

“We were happy — but that came from the ignorance of our trustin’ natures. We thought maybe a court was a place where justice was done after all; where right was right; and where things went accordin’ to the law. We’d been in trouble with the law before, plenty, but this was different — we had the law on our side this time; and we counted on it stickin’ with us. But—”

“Well, anyway, they take us back over to court after a few more days. And as soon as I get a slant at the beak and the district attorney I get sort of a chill up my back. They got mean lights in their eyes, like a coupla kids that had put tacks on a chair and was a-waiting for somebody to sit on them. Maybe, I think, they’ve rigged things up so’s they can slip us two or three, or even six, months on vag charges. But I didn’t suspect half of it!

“Say, you’ve heard this chatter about how slow the courts are, haven’t you? Well, let me tell you, nothing in the world ever moved any faster than that court that morning. Before we had got fixed in our chairs, almost, things was humming.

“Our kid mouthpiece is bouncing up and down continuous, trying to get a word in. But not a chance! Every time he opens his mouth the beak cracks down on him and shuts him up; even threatening to throw him out and fine him in the bargain if he don’t keep quiet. “The man we’d gone up against in the garage was the proprietor, but the ones in the hock shop and the shoe store were just hirelings. So they leave the garage man out of the game. But they put the other two in the dock, charged with grand larceny, have ’em plead guilty, sentence ’em to five years apiece, and suspend the sentences before you could shift a chew from one cheek to the other. “ ‘If,’ the beak says in answer to our mouthpiece’s squawk, ‘your clients simply asked for the money and these men gave it to them, then these two men are guilty of theft, since the money belonged to their employers. There is nothing for the court to do, therefore but to find them guilty of grand larceny and sentence them to five years each in the state prison. But the evidence tends to show that these men were actuated simply by an overwhelming desire to help two of their fellow men; that they were induced to steal the money simply by an ungovernable impulse to charity. And the court, therefore, feels that it is justified in exercising its legal privilege of leniency, and suspending their sentences.’

“Me and Flogger don’t understand what’s being done to us right away, but our mouthpiece does, and as soon as I get a look at him I know it’s pretty bad. He’s sort of gasping.

“The rest of the dirty work takes longer, but there’s no stopping it. This old buzzard of a judge has our charges changed to ‘receiving stolen property’ — a felony in that state; we are convicted on two counts, and he slips us ten years in the big house on each, the hitches to run end to end.

“And does that old buzzard feel that the court should exercise its legal privilege of leniency and suspend our sentences? Fat chance! Me and Flogger goes over!”

Afraid of a Gun

Black Mask, March 1, 1924

Owen Sack turned from the stove as the door of his cabin opened to admit “Rip” Yust, and with the hand that did not hold the coffeepot Owen Sack motioned hospitably toward the table, where food steamed before a ready chair.

“Hullo, Rip! Set down and go to it while it’s hot. ‘Twon’t take me but a minute to throw some more together for myself.”

That was Owen Sack, a short man of compact wiriness, with round china-blue eyes and round ruddy cheeks, and only the thinness of his straw-colored hair to tell of his fifty-odd years, a quiet little man whose too-eager friendliness at times suggested timidity.

Rip Yust crossed to the table, but he paid no attention to its burden of food. Instead, he placed two big fists on the tabletop, leaned his weight on them, and scowled at Owen Sack. He was big, this Rip Yust, barrel-bodied, slope-shouldered, thick-limbed, and his usual manner was a phlegmatic sort of sullenness. But now his heavy features were twisted into a scowl.

“They got ‘Lucky’ this morning,” he said after a moment, and his voice wasn’t the voice of one who brings news. It was accusing.

“Who got him?”

But Owen Sack’s eyes swerved from the other’s as he put the question, and he moistened his lips nervously. He knew who had got Rip’s brother.

“Who do you guess?” with heavy derision. “The Prohis! You know it!”

The little man winced.

“Aw, Rip! How would I know it? I ain’t been to town for a week, and nobody never comes past here any more.”

“Yeah, I wonder how you would know it.”

Yust walked around the table, to where Owen Sack — with little globules of moisture glistening on his round face — stood, caught him by the slack of his blue shirt bosom and lifted him clear of the floor. Twice Yust shook the little man — shook him with a lack of vehemence that was more forcible than any violence could have been — and set him down on his feet again.

“You knowed where our cache was at,” he accused, still holding the looseness of the shirt bosom in one muscular hand, “and nobody else that ain’t in with us did. The Prohis showed up there this morning and grabbed Lucky. Who told ’em where it was? You did, you rat!”

“I didn’t, Rip! I didn’t! I swear to—”

Yust cut off the little man’s whimpering by placing a broad palm across his mouth.

“Maybe you didn’t. To tell the truth, I ain’t exactly positive yet that you done it — or I wouldn’t be talking to you.” He flicked his coat aside, baring for a suggestive half-second the brown butt of a revolver that peeped out of a shoulder holster. “But it looks like it couldn’t of been nobody else. But I ain’t aiming to hurt nobody that don’t hurt me, so I’m looking around a while to make sure. But if I find out that you done it for sure—”

He snapped his big jaws together. His right hand made as if to dart under his coat near the left armpit. He nodded with slow emphasis, and left the cabin.

For a while Owen Sack did not move. He stood stiffly still, staring with barren blue eyes at the door through which his caller had vanished; and Owen Sack looked old now. His face held lines that had not been there before; and his body, for all its rigidity, seemed frailer.

Presently he shook his shoulders briskly, and turned back to the stove with an appearance of having put the episode out of his mind; but immediately afterward his body drooped spiritlessly. He crossed to the chair, dropped down on it, and pushed the cooling meal back a way, to pillow his head upon his forearms.

He shuddered now and his knees trembled, just as he had shuddered and his knees had trembled when he had helped carry Cardwell home. Cardwell, so gossip said, had talked too much about certain traffic on the Kootenai River. Cardwell had been found one morning in a thicket below Dime, with a hole in the back of his neck where a bullet had gone in and another and larger hole in front where the bullet had come out. No one could say who had fired the bullet, but gossip in Dime had made guesses, and had taken pains to keep those guesses from the ears of the Yust brothers.

If it hadn’t been for Cardwell, Owen knew that he could have convinced Rip Yust of his own innocence. But he saw the dead man again whenever he saw one of the Yusts; and this afternoon, when Rip had come into his cabin and hurled that accusing “They got Lucky this morning” across the table, Cardwell had filled Owen Sack’s mind to the exclusion of all else — filled it with a fear that had made him talk and act as if he had in fact guided the Prohibition enforcement officers to the Yusts’ cache. And so Yust had gone away more than half convinced that his suspicions were correct.

Rip Yust was, Owen Sack knew, a fair man according to his lights. He would do nothing until he was certain that he had the right man. Then he would strike with neither warning nor mercy.

An eye for an eye was the code of the Rip Yusts of the world, and an enemy was one to be removed without scruple. And that Yust would not strike until he had satisfied himself that he had the right man was small comfort to Owen Sack.

Yust was not possessed of the clearest of minds; he was not fitted, for all his patience and deliberation, to unerringly sift the false from the true. Many things that properly were meaningless might, to him, seem irrefragable evidence of Owen Sack’s guilt — now that Owen Sack’s fears had made him act the part of a witness against himself.

And some morning Owen Sack’s body would be found as Cardwell’s had been found. Perhaps Cardwell had been unjustly suspected too.

Owen Sack sat up straight now, squaring his shoulders and tightening his mouth in another halfhearted attempt to pull himself together. He ground his fists into his temples, and for a moment pretended to himself that he was trying to arrive at a decision, to map out a course of action. But in his heart he knew all the time that he was lying to himself. He was going to run away again. He always did. The time for making a stand was gone.

Thirty years ago he might have done it.

That time in a Marsh Market Space dive in Baltimore, when a dispute over a reading of the dice had left him facing a bull-dog pistol in the hands of a cockney sailor. The cockney’s hand had shaken; they had stood close together; the cockney was as frightened as he. A snatch, a blow — it would have been no trick at all. But he had, after a moment’s hesitancy, submitted; he had let the cockney not only run him out of the game but out of the city.

His fear of bullets had been too strong for him. He wasn’t a coward (not then); a knife, which most men dread, hadn’t seemed especially fearful in those days. It traveled at a calculable and discernible rate of speed; you could see it coming; judge its speed; parry, elude it; or twist about so that its wound was shallow. And even if it struck, went deep, it was sharp and slid easily through the flesh, a clean, neat separation of the tissues.

But a bullet, a ball of metal, hot from the gases that propelled it, hurtling invisibly toward you — nobody could say how fast — not to make a path for itself with a fine keen edge, but to hammer out a road with a dull blunt nose, driving through whatever stood in its way. A lump of hot lead battering its irresistible tunnel through flesh and sinew, splintering bones! That he could not face.

So he had fled from the Maryland city to avoid the possibility of another meeting with the cockney sailor and his bull-dog pistol.

And that was only the first time.

No matter where he had gone, he had sooner or later found himself looking into the muzzle of a threatening gun. It was as if his very fear attracted the thing he feared. A dog, he had been told as a boy, would bite you if he thought you were afraid of him. It had been that way with guns.

Each repetition had left him in worse case than before; until now the sight of a menacing firearm paralyzed him, and even the thought of one blurred his mind with terror.

In those earlier days he hadn’t been a coward, except where guns were concerned; but he had run too often; and that fear, growing, had spread like the seepage from some cancerous growth, until, little by little, he had changed from a man of reasonable courage with one morbid fear to a man of no courage at all with fears that included most forms of physical violence.

But, in the beginning, his fear hadn’t been too great to have been outfaced. He could have overcome it that time in Baltimore. It would have required an enormous effort, but he could have overcome it. He could have overcome it the next time, in New South Wales, when, instead, he had gone riding madly to Bourke, across a hundred-mile paddock, away from a gun in the hands of a quarrelsome boundary rider — a desperate flight along a road whose ruts stood perversely up out of the ground like railway tracks, with frightened rabbits and paddy-mellons darting out of the infrequent patches of white-bearded spear grass along his way.

Nor would it have been too late three months after that, in north Queensland. But he had run away again. Hurrying down to Cairns and the Cooktown boat, this time, away from the menace of a rusty revolver in the giant black hand of a Negro beside whom he had toiled thigh-deep in the lime-white river of the Muldiva silver fields.

After that, however, he was beyond recovery. He could not then by any effort have conquered his fear. He was beaten and he knew it. Henceforth, he had run without even decent shame in his cowardice, and he had begun to flee from other things than guns.

He had, for instance, let a jealous half-caste garimpeiro drive him out of Morro Velho, drive him away from his job with the British São João del Rey Mining Company and Tita. Tita’s red mouth had gone from smiling allure to derision, but neither the one nor the other was strong enough to keep Owen Sack from retreating before the flourish of a knife in the hand of a man he could have tied in knots, knife and all. Out of the Bakersfield oil fields he had been driven by the bare fists of an undersized rigger. And now from here....

The other times hadn’t, in a way, been so bad as this. He was younger then, and there was always some other place to attract him — one place was as good as another. But now it was different.

He was no longer young, and here in the Cabinet Mountains he had meant to stop for good. He had come to look upon his cabin as his home. He wanted but two things now: a living and tranquillity, and until now he had found them here. In the year 1923 it was still possible to wash out of the Kootenai enough dust to make wages — good wages. Not wealth, certainly, but he didn’t want wealth; he wanted a quiet home, and for six months he had had it here.

And then he had stumbled upon the Yusts’ cache. He had known, as all Dime knew, that the Kootenai River — winding down from British Columbia to spend most of its four hundred miles in Montana and Idaho before returning to the province of its birth to join the great Columbia — was the moving road along which came much liquor, to be relayed to Spokane, not far away. That was a matter of common knowledge, and Owen Sack of all men had no desire for more particular knowledge of the river traffic.

Why, then, had his luck sent him blundering upon the place where that liquor was concealed until ready for its overland journey? And at a time when the Yusts were there to witness his discovery? And then, as if that were not enough in itself, the Prohibition enforcement officers had swooped down on that hiding-place within a week.

Now the Yusts suspected him of having informed; it was but a matter of time before their stupid brains would be convinced of that fact; then they would strike — with a gun. A pellet of metal would drive through Owen Sack’s tissues as one had driven through Cardwell’s....

He got up from the chair and set about packing such of his belongings as he intended taking with him — to where? It didn’t matter. One place was like another — a little of peace and comfort, and then the threat of another gun, to send him elsewhere. Baltimore, New South Wales, north Queensland, Brazil, California, here — thirty years of it! He was old now and his legs were stiff for flight, but running had become an integral part of him.

He packed a little breathlessly, his fingers fumbling clumsily in their haste.

Dusk was thickening in the valley of the Kootenai when Owen Sack, bent beneath the blanketed pack across his shoulders, tramped over the bridge into Dime. He had remained in his cabin until the last minute, so that he might catch the stage which would carry him to the railroad just before it left, avoiding farewells or embarrassing meetings. He hurried now.

But, again, luck ran against him.

As he turned the corner of the New Dime Hotel toward the stage terminus — two doors beyond Henny Upshaw’s soft-drink parlor and poolroom — he spied Rip Yust coming down the street toward him. Yust’s face, he could see, was red and swollen, and Yust’s walk was a swagger. Yust was drunk.

Owen Sack halted in the middle of the sidewalk, and realized immediately that that was precisely the wrong thing to do. Safety lay — if safety lay anywhere now — in going on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, cursing himself for this open display of his desire to avoid the other, but nevertheless unable to keep his legs from hurrying him across the dusty roadway. Perhaps, he thought, Rip Yust’s whisky-clouded eyes would not see him hurrying toward the stage depot with a pack on his back. But even while the hope rose in him he knew it for a futile, childish one.

Rip Yust did see him, and came to the curb on his own side of the street, to bellow:

“Hey, you! Where you going?”

Owen Sack became motionless, a frightened statue. Fear froze his mind — fear and thoughts of Cardwell.

Yust grinned stupidly across the street, and repeated:

“Where you going?”

Owen Sack tried to answer, to say something — safety seemed to lie in words — but, though he did achieve a sound, it was inarticulate, and would have told the other nothing, even if it had traveled more than ten feet from the little man’s throat.

Yust laughed boomingly. He was apparently in high good humor.

“Now, you mind what I told you this afternoon,” he roared, wagging a thick forefinger at Owen Sack. “If I find that you done it—”

The thick forefinger flashed back to tap the left breast of his coat.

Owen Sack screamed at the suddenness of the gesture — a thin, shrill scream of terror, which struck amusingly upon the big man’s drunken fancy.

Laughter boomed out of his throat again, and his gun came into his hand. His brother’s arrest and Owen Sack’s supposed part in that arrest were, for the time, forgotten in his enjoyment of the little man’s ridiculous fright.

With the sight of the gun, Owen Sack’s last shred of sanity departed. Terror had him fast. He tried to plead, but his mouth could not frame the words. He tried to raise both his hands high above his head in the universal posture of submission, a posture that had saved him many times before. But the strap holding his pack hampered him. He tried to loosen the strap, to fling it off.

To the alcohol-muddled eyes and brain of the man across the street Owen Sack’s right hand was trying to get beneath his coat on the left side. Rip Yust could read but one meaning into that motion — the little man was going for his gun.

The weapon in Yust’s hand spat flame!

Owen Sack sobbed. Something struck him heavily on one side. He fell, sat down on the sidewalk, his eyes wide and questioning and fixed upon the smoking gun across the street.

Somebody, he found, was bending over him. It was Henny Upshaw, in front of whose establishment he had fallen. Owen Sack’s eyes went back to the man on the opposite curb, who, cold sober now, his face granite, stood awaiting developments, the gun still in his hand.

Owen Sack didn’t know whether to get up, to remain still, or to lie down. Upshaw had struck him aside in time to save him from the first bullet; but suppose the big man fired again?

“Where’d he get you?” Upshaw was asking.

“What’s that?”

“Now take it easy,” Upshaw advised. “You’ll be all right. I’ll get one of the boys to help me with you.”

Owen Sack’s fingers wound into one of Upshaw’s sleeves.

“Wh-what happened?” he asked.

“Rip shot you, but you’ll be all right. Just lay—”

Owen Sack released Upshaw’s sleeve, and his hands went feeling about his body, exploring. One of them came away red and sticky from his right side, and that side — where he had felt the blow that had taken him off his feet — was warm and numb.

“Did he shoot me?” he demanded in an excited screech.

“Sure, but you’re all right,” Upshaw soothed him, and beckoned to the men who were coming slowly into the street, drawn forward by their curiosity, but retarded in their approach by the sight of Yust, who still stood, gun in hand, waiting to see what happened next.

“My God!” Owen Sack gasped in utter bewilderment. “And it ain’t no worse than that!”

He bounded to his feet — his pack sliding off — eluded the hands that grasped at him, and ran for the door of Upshaw’s place. On a shelf beneath the cash register he found Upshaw’s black automatic, and, holding it stiffly in front of him at arm’s length, turned back to the street.

His china-blue eyes were wide with wonder, and from out of his grinning mouth issued a sort of chant:

“All these years I been running,

And it ain’t no worse than that!

All these years I been running,

And it ain’t no worse than that!”

Rip Yust, crossing the roadway now, was in the middle when Owen Sack popped out of Upshaw’s door.

The onlookers scattered. Rip’s revolver swung up, and roared. A spray of Owen Sack’s straw-colored hair whisked back.

He giggled, and fired three times, rapidly. None of the bullets hit the big man. Owen Sack felt something burn his left arm. He fired again, and missed.

“I got to get closer,” he told himself aloud.

He walked across the sidewalk — the automatic held stiffly before him — stepped down into the roadway, and began to stride toward where pencils of fire sprang to meet him from Yust’s gun.

And as the little man strode he chanted his silly chant, and fired, fired, fired... Once something tugged at one of his shoulders, and once at his arm — above where he had felt the burn — but he did not even wonder what it was.

When he was within ten feet of Rip Yust, that man turned as if to walk away, took a step, his big body curved suddenly in a grotesque arc, and he slid down into the sand of the roadway.

Owen Sack found that the weapon in his own hand was empty, had been empty for some time. He turned around. Dimly he made out the broad doorway of Upshaw’s place. The ground clung to his feet, trying to pull him down, to hold him back, but he gained the doorway, gained the cash register, found the shelf, and returned the automatic to it.

Voices were speaking to him, arms were around him. He ignored the voices, shook off the arms, reached the street again. More hands to be shaken off. But the air lent him strength. He was indoors again, leaning over the firearm showcase in Jeff Hamline’s store.

“I want the two biggest handguns you got, Jeff, and a mess of cartridges. Fix ’em up for me and I’ll be back to get ’em in a little while.”

He knew that Jeff answered him, but he could not separate Jeff’s words from the roaring in his head.

The warmer air of the street once more. The ankle-deep dust of the roadway pulling at his feet. The opposite sidewalk. Doc Johnstone’s door. Somebody helping him up the narrow stairs. A couch or table under him; he could see and hear better now that he was lying down.

“Fix me up in a hurry, Doc! I got a lot of things to tend to.”

The doctor’s smooth professional voice:

“You’ve nothing to attend to for a while except taking care of yourself.”

“I got to travel a lot, Doc. Hurry!”

“You’re all right, Sack. There’s no need of your going away. I saw Yust down you first from my window, and half a dozen others saw it. Self-defense if there ever was a case of it!”

“ ’Tain’t that!” A nice man was Doc, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. “I got a lot of places to go to, a lot of men I got to see.”

“Certainly. Certainly. Just as soon as you like.”

“You don’t understand, Doc!” The doc was talking to him like he was a child to be humored, or a drunk. “My God, Doc! I got to back-track my whole life, and I ain’t young no more. There’s men I got to find in Baltimore, and Australia, and Brazil, and California, and God knows where-all. And some of ’em will take a heap of finding. I got to do a lot of shootin’. I ain’t young no more, and it’s a mighty big job. I got to get going! You got to hurry me up, Doc! You got to...”

Owen Sack’s voice thickened to a mumble, to a murmur, and subsided.

Nightmare Town

Argosy All-Star Weekly, December 27, 1924

A Ford — whitened by desert travel until it was almost indistinguishable from the dust-clouds that swirled around it — came down Izzard’s Main Street. Like the dust, it came swiftly, erratically, zigzagging the breadth of the roadway.

A small woman — a girl of twenty in tan flannel — stepped into the street. The wavering Ford missed her by inches, missing her at all only because her backward jump was bird-quick. She caught her lower lip between white teeth, dark eyes flashed annoyance at the rear of the passing machine, and she essayed the street again.

Near the opposite curb the Ford charged down upon her once more. But turning had taken some of its speed. She escaped it this time by scampering the few feet between her and the sidewalk ahead.

Out of the moving automobile a man stepped. Miraculously he kept his feet, stumbling, sliding, until an arm crooked around an iron awning-post jerked him into an abrupt halt. He was a large man in bleached khaki, tall, broad, and thick-armed; his gray eyes were bloodshot; face and clothing were powdered heavily with dust. One of his hands clutched a thick, black stick, the other swept off his hat, and he bowed with exaggerated lowness before the girl’s angry gaze.

The bow completed, he tossed his hat carelessly into the street, and grinned grotesquely through the dirt that masked his face — a grin that accented the heaviness of a begrimed and hair-roughened jaw.

“I beg y’r par’ on,” he said. “ ’F I hadn’t been careful I believe I’d a’most hit you. ’S unreli’ble, tha’ wagon. Borr’ed it from an engi... eng’neer. Don’t ever borrow one from eng’neer. They’re unreli’ble.”

The girl looked at the place where he stood as if no one stood there, as if, in fact, no one had ever stood there, turned her small back on him, and walked very precisely down the street.

He stared after her with stupid surprise in his eyes until she had vanished through a doorway in the middle of the block. Then he scratched his head, shrugged, and turned to look across the street, where his machine had pushed its nose into the red-brick side wall of the Bank of Izzard and now shook and clattered as if in panic at finding itself masterless.

“Look at the son-of-a-gun,” he exclaimed.

A hand fastened upon his arm. He turned his head, and then, though he stood a good six feet himself, had to look up to meet the eyes of the giant who held his arm.

“We’ll take a little walk,” the giant said.

The man in bleached khaki examined the other from the tips of his broad-toed shoes to the creased crown of his black hat, examined him with a whole-hearted admiration that was unmistakable in his red-rimmed eyes. There were nearly seven massive feet of the speaker. Legs like pillars held up a great hogshead of a body, with wide shoulders that sagged a little, as if with their own excessive weight. He was a man of perhaps forty-five, and his face was thick-featured, phlegmatic, with sunlines around small light eyes — the face of a deliberate man.

“My God, you’re big!” the man in khaki exclaimed when he had finished his examination; and then his eyes brightened. “Let’s wrestle. Bet you ten bucks against fifteen I can throw you. Come on!”

The giant chuckled deep in his heavy chest, took the man in khaki by the nape of the neck and an arm, and walked down the street with him.

Steve Threefall awakened without undue surprise at the unfamiliarity of his surroundings as one who has awakened in strange places before. Before his eyes were well open he knew the essentials of his position. The feel of the shelf-bunk on which he lay and the sharp smell of disinfectant in his nostrils told him that he was in jail. His head and his mouth told him that he had been drunk; and the three-day growth of beard on his face told him he had been very drunk.

As he sat up and swung his feet down to the floor details came back to him. The two days of steady drinking in Whitetufts on the other side of the Nevada-California line, with Harris, the hotel proprietor, and Whiting, an irrigation engineer. The boisterous arguing over desert travel, with his own Gobi experience matched against the American experiences of the others. The bet that he could drive from Whitetufts to Izzard in daylight with nothing to drink but the especially bitter white liquor they were drinking at the time. The start in the grayness of imminent dawn, in Whiting’s Ford, with Whiting and Harris staggering down the street after him, waking the town with their drunken shouts and roared-out mocking advice, until he had reached the desert’s edge. Then the drive through the desert, along the road that was hotter than the rest of the desert, with— He chose not to think of the ride. He had made it, though — had won the bet. He couldn’t remember the amount of the latter.

“So you’ve come out of it at last?” a rumbling voice inquired.

The steel-slatted door swung open and a man filled the cell’s door. Steve grinned up at him. This was the giant who would not wrestle. He was coatless and vestless now, and loomed larger than before. One suspender strap was decorated with a shiny badge that said MARSHAL.

“Feel like breakfast?” he asked.

“I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted.

“All right. But you’ll have to gulp it. Judge Denvir is waiting to get a crack at you, and the longer you keep him waiting, the tougher it’ll be for you.”

The room in which Tobin Denvir, J.P., dealt justice was a large one on the third floor of a wooden building. It was scantily furnished with a table, an ancient desk, a steel engraving of Daniel Webster, a shelf of books sleeping under the dust of weeks, a dozen uncomfortable chairs, and half as many cracked and chipped china cuspidors.

The judge sat between desk and table, with his feet on the latter. They were small feet, and he was a small man. His face was filled with little irritable lines, his lips were thin and tight, and he had the bright, lidless eyes of a bird.

“Well, what’s he charged with?” His voice was thin, harshly metallic. He kept his feet on the table.

The marshal drew a deep breath, and recited:

“Driving on the wrong side of the street, exceeding the speed limit, driving while under the influence of liquor, driving without a driver’s license, endangering the lives of pedestrians by taking his hands off the wheel, and parking improperly — on the sidewalk up against the bank.”

The marshal took another breath, and added, with manifest regret:

“There was a charge of attempted assault, too, but that Vallance girl won’t appear, so that’ll have to be dropped.”

The justice’s bright eyes turned upon Steve.

“What’s your name?” he growled.

“Steve Threefall.”

“Is that your real name?” the marshal asked.

“Of course it is,” the justice snapped. “You don’t think anybody’d be damn fool enough to give a name like that unless it was his, do you?” Then to Steve: “What have you got to say — guilty or not?”

“I was a little—”

“Are you guilty or not?”

“Oh, I suppose I did—”

“That’s enough! You’re fined a hundred and fifty dollars and costs. The costs are fifteen dollars and eighty cents, making a total of a hundred and sixty-five dollars and eighty cents. Will you pay it or will you go to jail?”

“I’ll pay it if I’ve got it,” Steve said, turning to the marshal. “You took my money. Have I got that much?”

The marshal nodded his massive head.

“You have,” he said, “exactly — to the nickel. Funny it should have come out like that — huh?”

“Yes — funny,” Steve repeated.

While the justice of the peace was making out a receipt for the fine, the marshal restored Steve’s watch, tobacco and matches, pocket-knife, keys, and last of all the black walking-stick. The big man weighed the stick in his hand and examined it closely before he gave it up. It was thick and of ebony, but heavy even for that wood, with a balanced weight that hinted at loaded ferrule and knob. Except for a space the breadth of a man’s hand in its middle, the stick was roughened, cut and notched with the marks of hard use — marks that much careful polishing had failed to remove or conceal. The unscarred hand’s-breadth was of a softer black than the rest — as soft a black as the knob — as if it had known much contact with a human palm.

“Not a bad weapon in a pinch,” the marshal said meaningly as he handed the stick to its owner. Steve took it with the grasp a man reserves for a favorite and constant companion.

“Not bad,” he agreed. “What happened to the flivver?”

“It’s in the garage around the corner on Main Street. Pete said it wasn’t altogether ruined, and he thinks he can patch it up if you want.”

The justice held out the receipt.

“Am I all through here now?” Steve asked.

“I hope so,” Judge Denvir said sourly.

“Both of us,” Steve echoed. He put on his hat, tucked the black stick under his arm, nodded to the big marshal, and left the room.

Steve Threefall went down the wooden stairs toward the street in as cheerful a frame of mind as his body — burned out inwardly with white liquor and outwardly by a day’s scorching desert-riding — would permit. That justice had emptied his pockets of every last cent disturbed him little. That, he knew, was the way of justice everywhere with the stranger, and he had left the greater part of his money with the hotel proprietor in Whitetufts. He had escaped a jail sentence, and he counted himself lucky. He would wire Harris to send him some of his money, wait here until the Ford was repaired, and then drive back to Whitetufts — but not on a whisky ration this time.

“You will not!” a voice cried in his ear.

He jumped, and then laughed at his alcohol-jangled nerves. The words had not been meant for him. Beside him, at a turning of the stairs, was an open window, and opposite it, across a narrow alley, a window in another building was open. This window belonged to an office in which two men stood facing each other across a flat-topped desk.

One of them was middle-aged and beefy, in a black broadcloth suit out of which a white-vested stomach protruded. His face was purple with rage. The man who faced him was younger — a man of perhaps thirty, with a small dark mustache, finely chiseled features, and satiny brown hair. His slender athlete’s body was immaculately clothed in gray suit, gray shirt, gray and silver tie, and on the desk before him lay a Panama hat with gray band. His face was as white as the other’s was purple.

The beefy man spoke — a dozen words pitched too low to catch.

The younger man slapped the speaker viciously across the face with an open hand — a hand that then flashed back to its owner’s coat and flicked out a snub-nosed automatic pistol.

“You big lard-can,” the younger man cried, his voice sibilant; “you’ll lay off or I’ll spoil your vest for you!”

He stabbed the protuberant vest with the automatic, and laughed into the scared fat face of the beefy man — laughed with a menacing flash of even teeth and dark slitted eyes. Then he picked up his hat, pocketed the pistol, and vanished from Steve’s sight. The fat man sat down.

Steve went on down to the street.

Steve unearthed the garage to which the Ford had been taken, found a greasy mechanic who answered to the name of Pete, and was told that Whiting’s automobile would be in condition to move under its own power within two days.

“A beautiful snootful you had yesterday,” Pete grinned.

Steve grinned back and went on out. He went down to the telegraph office, next door to the Izzard Hotel, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk to look at a glowing, cream-colored Vauxhall-Velox roadster that stood at the curb — as out of place in this grimy factory town as a harlequin opal in a grocer’s window.

In the doorway of the telegraph office Steve paused again, abruptly.

Behind the counter was a girl in tan flannel — the girl he had nearly run down twice the previous afternoon — the “Vallance girl” who had refrained from adding to justice’s account against Steve Threefall. In front of the counter, leaning over it, talking to her with every appearance of intimacy, was one of the two men he had seen from the staircase window half an hour before — the slender dandy in gray who had slapped the other’s face and threatened him with an automatic.

The girl looked up, recognized Steve, and stood very erect. He took off his hat, and advanced smiling.

“I’m awfully sorry about yesterday,” he said. “I’m a crazy fool when I—”

“Do you wish to send a telegram?” she asked frigidly.

“Yes,” Steve said; “I also wish to—”

“There are blanks and pencils on the desk near the window,” and she turned her back on him.

Steve felt himself coloring, and since he was one of the men who habitually grin when at a loss, he grinned now, and found himself looking into the dark eyes of the man in gray.

That one smiled back under his little brown mustache, and said:

“Quite a time you had yesterday.”

“Quite,” Steve agreed, and went to the table the girl had indicated. He wrote his telegram:

Henry Harris

Harris Hotel, Whitetufts:

Arrived right side up, but am in hock. Wire me two hundred dollars. Will be back Saturday.

Threefall. T.

But he did not immediately get up from the desk. He sat there holding the piece of paper in his fingers, studying the man and girl, who were again engaged in confidential conversation over the counter. Steve studied the girl most.

She was quite a small girl, no more than five feet in height, if that; and she had that peculiar rounded slenderness which gives a deceptively fragile appearance. Her face was an oval of skin whose fine whiteness had thus far withstood the grimy winds of Izzard; her nose just missed being upturned, her violet-black eyes just missed being too theatrically large, and her black-brown hair just missed being too bulky for the small head it crowned; but in no respect did she miss being as beautiful as a figure from a Monticelli canvas.

All these things Steve Threefall, twiddling his telegram in sun-brown fingers, considered and as he considered them he came to see the pressing necessity of having his apologies accepted. Explain it as you will — he carefully avoided trying to explain it to himself — the thing was there. One moment there was nothing, in the four continents he knew, of any bothersome importance to Steve Threefall; the next moment he was under an unescapable compulsion to gain the favor of this small person in tan flannel with brown ribbons at wrists and throat.

At this point the man in gray leaned farther over the counter, to whisper something to the girl. She flushed, and her eyes flinched. The pencil in her hand fell to the counter, and she picked it up with small fingers that were suddenly incongruously awkward. She made a smiling reply, and went on with her writing, but the smile seemed forced.

Steve tore up his telegram and composed another:

I made it, slept it off in the cooler, and I am going to settle here a while. There are things about the place I like. Wire my money and send my clothes to hotel here. Buy Whiting’s Ford from him as cheap as you can for me.

He carried the blank to the counter and laid it down.

The girl ran her pencil over it, counting the words.

“Forty-seven,” she said, in a tone that involuntarily rebuked the absence of proper telegraphic brevity.

“Long, but it’s all right,” Steve assured her. “I’m sending it collect.”

She regarded him icily.

“I can’t accept a collect message unless I know that the sender can pay for it if the addressee refuses it. It’s against the rules.”

“You’d better make an exception this time,” Steve told her solemnly, “because if you don’t you’ll have to lend me the money to pay for it.”

“I’ll have—?”

“You will,” he insisted. “You got me into this jam, and it’s up to you to help me get out. The Lord knows you’ve cost me enough as it is — nearly two hundred dollars! The whole thing was your fault.”

“My fault?”

“It was! Now I’m giving you a chance to square yourself. Hurry it off, please, because I’m hungry and I need a shave. I’ll be waiting on the bench outside.” And he spun on his heel and left the office.

One end of the bench in front of the telegraph office was occupied when Steve, paying no attention to the man who sat there, made himself comfortable on the other. He put his black stick between his legs and rolled a cigarette with thoughtful slowness, his mind upon the just completed scene in the office.

Why, he wondered, whenever there was some special reason for gravity, did he always find himself becoming flippant? Why, whenever he found himself face to face with a situation that was important, that meant something to him, did he slip uncontrollably into banter — play the clown? He lit his cigarette and decided scornfully — as he had decided a dozen times before — that it all came from a childish attempt to conceal his self-consciousness; that for all his thirty-three years of life and his eighteen years of rubbing shoulders with the world — its rough corners as well as its polished — he was still a green boy underneath — a big kid.

“A neat package you had yesterday,” the man who sat on the other end of the bench remarked.

“Yeah,” Steve admitted without turning his head. He supposed he’d be hearing about his crazy arrival as long as he stayed in Izzard.

“I reckon old man Denvir took you to the cleaner’s as usual?”

“Uh-huh!” Steve said, turning now for a look at the other.

He saw a very tall and very lean man in rusty brown, slouched down on the small of his back, angular legs thrust out across the sidewalk. A man past forty, whose gaunt, melancholy face was marked with lines so deep that they were folds in the skin rather than wrinkles. His eyes were the mournful chestnut eyes of a basset hound, and his nose was as long and sharp as a paper-knife. He puffed on a black cigar, getting from it a surprising amount of smoke, which he exhaled upward, his thin nose splitting the smoke into two gray plumes.

“Ever been to our fair young city before?” this melancholy individual asked next. His voice held a monotonous rhythm that was not unpleasant to the ear.

“No, this is my first time.”

The thin man nodded ironically.

“You’ll like it if you stay,” he said. “It’s very interesting.”

“What’s it all about?” Steve asked, finding himself mildly intrigued by his benchmate.

“Soda niter. You scoop it up off the desert, and boil and otherwise cook it, and sell it to fertilizer manufacturers, and nitric acid manufacturers, and any other kind of manufacturers who can manufacture something out of soda niter. The factory in which, for which, and from which you do all this lies yonder, beyond the railroad tracks.”

He waved a lazy arm down the street, to where a group of square concrete buildings shut out the desert at the end of the thoroughfare.

“Suppose you don’t play with this soda?” Steve asked, more to keep the thin man talking than to satisfy any thirst for local knowledge. “What do you do then?”

The thin man shrugged his sharp shoulders.

“That depends,” he said, “on who you are. If you’re Dave Brackett” — he wiggled a finger at the red bank across the street — “you gloat over your mortgages, or whatever it is a banker does; if you’re Grant Fernie, and too big for a man without being quite big enough for a horse, you pin a badge on your bosom and throw rough-riding strangers into the can until they sober up; or if you’re Larry Ormsby, and your old man owns the soda works, then you drive trick cars from across the pond” — nodding at the cream Vauxhall — “and spend your days pursuing beautiful telegraph operators. But I take it that you’re broke, and have just wired for money, and are waiting for the more or less doubtful results. Is that it?”

“It is,” Steve answered absent-mindedly. So the dandy in gray was named Larry Ormsby and was the factory owner’s son.

The thin man drew in his feet and stood up on them.

“In that case it’s lunchtime, and my name is Roy Kamp, and I’m hungry, and I don’t like to eat alone, and I’d be glad to have you face the greasy dangers of a meal at the Finn’s with me.”

Steve got up and held out his hand.

“I’ll be glad to,” he said. “The coffee I had for breakfast could stand company. My name’s Steve Threefall.”

They shook hands, and started up the street together. Coming toward them were two men in earnest conversation; one of them was the beefy man whose face Larry Ormsby had slapped. Steve waited until they had passed, and then questioned Kamp casually:

“And who are those prominent-looking folks?”

“The little round one in the checkered college-boy suit is Conan Elder, real estate, insurance, and securities. The Wallingford-looking personage at his side is W. W. himself — the town’s founder, owner, and whatnot — W. W. Ormsby, the Hon. Larry’s papa.”

The scene in the office, with its slapping of a face and flourish of a pistol, had been a family affair, then; a matter between father and son, with the son in the more forcible rôle. Steve, walking along with scant attention just now for the words Kamp’s baritone voice was saying, felt a growing dissatisfaction in the memory of the girl and Larry Ormsby talking over the counter with their heads close together.

The Finn’s lunchroom was little more than a corridor squeezed in between a poolroom and a hardware store, of barely sufficient width for a counter and a row of revolving stools. Only one customer was there when the two men entered. “Hello, Mr. Rymer,” said Kamp.

“How are you, Mr. Kamp?” the man at the counter said, and as he turned his head toward them, Steve saw that he was blind. His large blue eyes were filmed over with a gray curtain which gave him the appearance of having dark hollows instead of eyes.

He was a medium-sized man who looked seventy, but there was a suggestion of fewer years in the suppleness of his slender white hands. He had a thick mane of white hair about a face that was crisscrossed with wrinkles, but it was a calm face, the face of a man at peace with his world. He was just finishing his meal, and left shortly, moving to the door with the slow accuracy of the blind man in familiar surroundings.

“Old man Rymer,” Kamp told Steve, “lives in a shack behind where the new fire house is going to be, all alone. Supposed to have tons of gold coins under his floor — thus local gossip. Some day we’re going to find him all momicked up. But he won’t listen to reason. Says nobody would hurt him. Says that in a town as heavy with assorted thugs as this!”

“A tough town, is it?” Steve asked.

“Couldn’t help being! It’s only three years old — and a desert boom town draws the tough boys.”

Kamp left Steve after their meal, saying he probably would run across him later in the evening, and suggesting that there were games of a sort to be found in the next-door poolroom.

“I’ll see you there then,” Steve said, and went back to the telegraph office. The girl was alone. “Anything for me?” he asked her.

She put a green check and a telegram on the counter and returned to her desk. The telegram read:

Collected bet. Paid Whiting two hundred for Ford. Sending balance six hundred forty. Shipping clothes. Watch your step.

Harris.

“Did you send the wire collect, or do I owe—”

“Collect.” She did not look up.

Steve put his elbows on the counter and leaned over; his jaw, still exaggerated by its growth of hair, although he had washed the dirt from it, jutted forward with his determination to maintain a properly serious attitude until he had done this thing that had to be done.

“Now listen, Miss Vallance,” he said deliberately. “I was all kinds of a damned fool yesterday, and I’m sorrier than I can say. But, after all, nothing terrible happened, and—”

“Nothing terrible!” she exploded. “Is it nothing to be humiliated by being chased up and down the street like a rabbit by a drunken man with a dirty face in a worse car?”

“I wasn’t chasing you. I came back that second time to apologize. But, anyway” — in the uncomfortable face of her uncompromising hostility his determination to be serious went for nothing, and he relapsed into his accustomed defensive mockery — “no matter how scared you were you ought to accept my apology now and let bygones be bygones.”

“Scared? Why—”

“I wish you wouldn’t repeat words after me,” he complained. “This morning you did it, and now you’re at it again. Don’t you ever think of anything to say on your own account?”

She glared at him, opened her mouth, shut it with a little click. Her angry face bent sharply over the papers on the desk, and she began to add a column of figures.

Steve nodded with pretended approval, and took his check across the street to the bank.

The only man in sight in the bank when Steve came in was a little plump fellow with carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper whiskers hiding nearly all of a jovial round face except the eyes — shrewd, friendly eyes.

This man came to the window in the grille, and said: “Good afternoon. Can I do something for you?”

Steve laid down the telegraph company’s check. “I want to open an account.”

The banker picked up the slip of green paper and flicked it with a fat finger. “You are the gentleman who assaulted my wall with an automobile yesterday?”

Steve grinned. The banker’s eyes twinkled, and a smile ruffled his whiskers. “Are you going to stay in Izzard?”

“For a while.”

“Can you give me references?” the banker asked.

“Maybe Judge Denvir or Marshal Fernie will put in a word for me,” Steve said. “But if you’ll write the Seaman’s Bank in San Francisco they’ll tell you that so far as they know I’m all right.”

The banker stuck a plump hand through the window in the grille.

“I’m very glad to make your acquaintance. My name is David Brackett, and anything I can do to help you get established — call on me.”

Outside of the bank ten minutes later, Steve met the huge marshal, who stopped in front of him. “You still here?” Fernie asked.

“I’m an Izzardite now,” Steve said. “For a while, anyhow. I like your hospitality.”

“Don’t let old man Denvir see you coming out of a bank,” Fernie advised him, “or he’ll soak you plenty next time.”

“There isn’t going to be any next time.”

“There always is — in Izzard,” the marshal said enigmatically as he got his bulk in motion again.

That night, shaved and bathed, though still wearing his bleached khaki, Steve, with his black stick beside him, played stud poker with Roy Kamp and four factory workers. They played in the poolroom next door to the Finn’s lunchroom. Izzard apparently was a wide-open town. Twelve tables given to craps, poker, red dog, and twenty-one occupied half of the poolroom, and white-hot liquor was to be had at the cost of fifty cents and a raised finger. There was nothing surreptitious about the establishment; obviously its proprietor — a bullet-headed Italian whose customers called him “Gyp” — was in favor with the legal powers of Izzard.

The game in which Steve sat went on smoothly and swiftly, as play does when adepts participate. Though, as most games are, always potentially crooked, it was, in practice, honest. The six men at the table were, without exception, men who knew their way around — men who played quietly and watchfully, winning and losing without excitement or inattention. Not one of the six — except Steve, and perhaps Kamp — would have hesitated to favor himself at the expense of honesty had the opportunity come to him; but where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed honesty not infrequently prevails.

Larry Ormsby came into the poolroom at a little after eleven and sat at a table some distance from Steve. Faces he had seen in the street during the day were visible through the smoke. At five minutes to twelve the four factory men at Steve’s table left for work — they were in the “graveyard” shift — and the game broke up with their departure. Steve, who had kept about even throughout the play, found that he had won something less than ten dollars; Kamp had won fifty-some.

Declining invitations to sit in another game, Steve and Kamp left together, going out into the dark and night-cool street, where the air was sweet after the smoke and alcohol of the poolroom. They walked slowly down the dim thoroughfare toward the Izzard Hotel, neither in a hurry to end their first evening together; for each knew by now that the unpainted bench in front of the telegraph office had given him a comrade. Not a thousand words had passed between the two men, but they had as surely become brothers-in-arms as if they had tracked a continent together.

Strolling thus, a dark doorway suddenly vomited men upon them.

Steve rocked back against a building front from a blow on his head, arms were around him, the burning edge of a knife blade ran down his left arm. He chopped his black stick up into a body, freeing himself from encircling grip. He used the moment’s respite this gave him to change his grasp on the stick; so that he held it now horizontal, his right hand grasping its middle, its lower half flat against his forearm, its upper half extending to the left.

He put his left side against the wall, and the black stick became a whirling black arm of the night. The knob darted down at a man’s head. The man threw an arm up to fend the blow. Spinning back on its axis, the stick reversed — the ferruled end darted up under warding arm, hit jaw-bone with a click, and no sooner struck than slid forward, jabbing deep into throat. The owner of that jaw and throat turned his broad, thick-featured face to the sky, went backward out of the fight, and was lost to sight beneath the curbing.

Kamp, struggling with two men in the middle of the sidewalk, broke loose from them, whipped out a gun; but before he could use it his assailants were on him again.

Lower half of stick against forearm once more, Steve whirled in time to take the impact of a blackjack-swinging arm upon it. The stick spun sidewise with thud of knob on temple — spun back with loaded ferrule that missed opposite temple only because the first blow had brought its target down on knees. Steve saw suddenly that Kamp had gone down. He spun his stick and battered a passage to the thin man, kicked a head that bent over the prone, thin form, straddled it; and the ebony stick whirled swifter in his hand — spun as quarter-staves once spun in Sherwood Forest. Spun to the clicking tune of wood on bone, on metal weapons; to the duller rhythm of wood on flesh. Spun never in full circles, but always in short arcs — one end’s recovery from a blow adding velocity to the others stroke. Where an instant ago knob had swished from left to right, now weighted ferrule struck from right to left — struck under upthrown arms, over low-thrown arms — put into space a forty-inch sphere, whose radii were whirling black flails.

Behind his stick that had become a living part of him, Steve Threefall knew happiness — that rare happiness which only the expert ever finds — the joy in doing a thing that he can do supremely well. Blows he took — blows that shook him, staggered him — but he scarcely noticed them. His whole consciousness was in his right arm and the stick it spun. A revolver, tossed from a smashed hand, exploded ten feet over his head, a knife tinkled like a bell on the brick sidewalk, a man screamed as a stricken horse screams.

As abruptly as it had started, the fight stopped. Feet thudded away, forms vanished into the more complete darkness of a side street; and Steve was standing alone — alone except for the man stretched out between his feet and the other man who lay still in the gutter.

Kamp crawled from beneath Steve’s legs and scrambled briskly to his feet.

“Your work with a bat is what you might call adequate,” he drawled.

Steve stared at the thin man. This was the man he had accepted on an evening’s acquaintance as a comrade! A man who lay on the street and let his companion do the fighting for both. Hot words formed in Steve’s throat.

“You—”

The thin man’s face twisted into a queer grimace, as if he were listening to faint, far-off sounds. He caught his hands to his chest, pressing the sides together. Then he turned half around, went down on one knee, went over backward with a leg bent over him.

“Get — word — to—”

The fourth word was blurred beyond recognition. Steve knelt beside Kamp, lifted his head from the bricks, and saw that Kamp’s thin body was ripped open from throat to waistline.

“Get — word — to—” The thin man tried desperately to make the last word audible.

A hand gripped Steve’s shoulder.

“What the hell’s all this?” The roaring voice of Marshal Grant Fernie blotted out Kamp’s words.

“Shut up a minute!” Steve snapped, and put his ear again close to Kamp’s mouth.

But now the dying man could achieve no articulate sound. He tried with an effort that bulged his eyes; then he shuddered horribly, coughed, the slit in his chest gaped open, and he died.

“What’s all this?” the marshal repeated.

“Another reception committee,” Steve said bitterly, easing the dead body to the sidewalk, and standing up. “There’s one of them in the street; the others beat it around the corner.”

He tried to point with his left hand, then let it drop to his side. Looking at it, he saw that his sleeve was black with blood.

The marshal bent to examine Kamp, grunted, “He’s dead, all right,” and moved over to where the man Steve had knocked into the gutter lay.

“Knocked out,” the marshal said, straightening up; “but he’ll be coming around in a while. How’d you make out?”

“My arm’s slashed, and I’ve got some sore spots, but I’ll live through it.”

Fernie took hold of the wounded arm.

“Not bleeding so bad,” he decided. “But you better get it patched up. Doc MacPhail’s is only a little way up the street. Can you make it, or do you want me to give you a lift?”

“I can make it. How do I find the place?”

“Two blocks up this street, and four to the left. You can’t miss it — it’s the only house in town with flowers in front of it. I’ll get in touch with you when I want you.”

Steve Threefall found Dr. MacPhail’s house without difficulty — a two-story building set back from the street, behind a garden that did its best to make up a floral profusion for Izzard’s general barrenness. The fence was hidden under twining virgin’s bower, clustered now with white blossoms, and the narrow walk wound through roses, trillium, poppies, tulips, and geraniums that were ghosts in the starlight. The air was heavily sweet with the fragrance of saucerlike moon flowers, whose vines covered the doctor’s porch.

Two steps from the latter Steve stopped, and his right hand slid to the middle of his stick. From one end of the porch had come a rustling, faint but not of the wind, and a spot that was black between vines had an instant before been paler, as if framing a peeping face.

“Who is—” Steve began, and went staggering back.

From the vine-blackened porch a figure had flung itself on his chest.

“Mr. Threefall,” the figure cried in the voice of the girl of the telegraph office, “there’s somebody in the house!”

“You mean a burglar?” he asked stupidly, staring down into the small white face that was upturned just beneath his chin.

“Yes! He’s upstairs — in Dr. MacPhail’s room!”

“Is the doctor up there?”

“No, no! He and Mrs. MacPhail haven’t come home yet.”

He patted her soothingly on a velvet-coated shoulder, selecting a far shoulder, so that he had to put his arm completely around her to do the patting.

“We’ll fix that,” he promised. “You stick here in the shadows, and I’ll be back as soon as I have taken care of our friend.”

“No, no!” She clung to his shoulder with both hands. “I’ll go with you. I couldn’t stay here alone; but I won’t be afraid with you.”

He bent his head to look into her face, and cold metal struck his chin, clicking his teeth together. The cold metal was the muzzle of a big nickel-plated revolver in one of the hands that clung to his shoulder.

“Here, give me that thing,” he exclaimed; “and I’ll let you come with me.”

She gave him the gun and he put it in his pocket.

“Hold on to my coat-tails,” he ordered; “keep as close to me as you can, and when I say ‘Down,’ let go, drop flat to the floor, and stay there.”

Thus, the girl whispering guidance to him, they went through the door she had left open, into the house, and mounted to the second floor. From their right, as they stood at the head of the stairs, came cautious rustlings.

Steve put his face down until the girl’s hair was on his lips.

“How do you get to that room?” he whispered.

“Straight down the hall. It ends there.”

They crept down the hall. Steve’s outstretched hand touched a doorframe.

“Down!” he whispered to the girl.

Her fingers released his coat. He flung the door open, jumped through, slammed it behind him. A head-sized oval was black against the gray of a window. He spun his stick at it. Something caught the stick overhead; glass crashed, showering him with fragments. The oval was no longer visible against the window. He wheeled to the left, flung out an arm toward a sound of motion. His fingers found a neck — a thin neck with skin as dry and brittle as paper.

A kicking foot drove into his shin just below the knee. The paperish neck slid out of his hand. He dug at it with desperate fingers, but his fingers, weakened by the wound in his forearm, failed to hold. He dropped his stick and flashed his right hand to the left’s assistance. Too late. The weakened hand had fallen away from the paperish neck, and there was nothing for the right to clutch.

A misshapen blot darkened the center of an open window, vanished with a thud of feet on the roof of the rear porch. Steve sprang to the window in time to see the burglar scramble up from the ground, where he had slid from the porch roof, and make for the low back fence. One of Steve’s legs was over the sill when the girl’s arms came around his neck.

“No, no!” she pleaded. “Don’t leave me! Let him go!”

“All right,” he said reluctantly, and then brightened.

He remembered the gun he had taken from the girl, got it out of his pocket as the fleeing shadow in the yard reached the fence; and as the shadow, one hand on the fence top, vaulted high over it, Steve squeezed the trigger. The revolver clicked. Again — another click. Six clicks, and the burglar was gone into the night.

Steve broke the revolver in the dark, and ran his fingers over the back of the cylinder — six empty chambers.

“Turn on the lights,” he said brusquely.

When the girl had obeyed, Steve stepped back into the room and looked first for his ebony stick. That in his hand, he faced the girl. Her eyes were jet-black with excitement and pale lines of strain were around her mouth. As they stood looking into each other’s eyes something of a bewilderment began to show through her fright. He turned away abruptly and gazed around the room.

The place had been ransacked thoroughly if not expertly. Drawers stood out, their contents strewn on the floor; the bed had been stripped of clothing, and pillows had been dumped out of their cases. Near the door a broken wall-light — the obstruction that had checked Steve’s stick — hung crookedly. In the center of the floor lay a gold watch and half a length of gold chain. He picked them up and held them out to the girl.

“Dr. MacPhail’s?”

She shook her head in denial before she took the watch, and then, examining it closely, she gave a little gasp. “It’s Mr. Rymer’s!”

“Rymer?” Steve repeated, and then he remembered. Rymer was the blind man who had been in the Finn’s lunchroom, and for whom Kamp had prophesied trouble.

“Yes! Oh, I know something has happened to him!”

She put a hand on Steve’s left arm.

“We’ve got to go see! He lives all alone, and if any harm has—”

She broke off, and looked down at the arm under her hand.

“Your arm! You’re hurt!”

“Not as bad as it looks,” Steve said. “That’s what brought me here. But it has stopped bleeding. Maybe by the time we get back from Rymer’s the doctor will be home.”

They left the house by the back door, and the girl led him through dark streets and across darker lots. Neither of them spoke during the five-minute walk. The girl hurried at a pace that left her little breath for conversation, and Steve was occupied with uncomfortable thinking.

The blind man’s cabin was dark when they reached it, but the front door was ajar. Steve knocked his stick against the frame, got no answer, and struck a match. Rymer lay on the floor, sprawled on his back, his arms outflung.

The cabin’s one room was topsy-turvy. Furniture lay in upended confusion, clothing was scattered here and there, and boards had been torn from the floor. The girl knelt beside the unconscious man while Steve hunted for a light. Presently he found an oil lamp that had escaped injury, and got it burning just as Rymer’s filmed eyes opened and he sat up. Steve righted an overthrown rocking-chair and, with the girl, assisted the blind man to it, where he sat panting. He had recognized the girl’s voice at once, and he smiled bravely in her direction.

“I’m all right, Nova,” he said; “not hurt a bit. Someone knocked at the door, and when I opened it I heard a swishing sound in my ear — and that was all I knew until I came to to find you here.”

He frowned with sudden anxiety, got to his feet, and moved across the room. Steve pulled a chair and an upset table from his path, and the blind man dropped on his knees in a corner, fumbling beneath the loosened floor boards. His hands came out empty, and he stood up with a tired droop to his shoulders. “Gone,” he said softly.

Steve remembered the watch then, took it from his pocket, and put it into one of the blind man’s hands.

“There was a burglar at our house,” the girl explained. “After he had gone we found that on the floor. This is Mr. Threefall.”

The blind man groped for Steve’s hand, pressed it, then his flexible fingers caressed the watch, his face lighting up happily.

“I’m glad,” he said, “to have this back — gladder than I can say. The money wasn’t so much — less than three hundred dollars. I’m not the Midas I’m said to be. But this watch was my father’s.”

He tucked it carefully into his vest, and then, as the girl started to straighten up the room, he remonstrated.

“You’d better run along home, Nova; it’s late, and I’m all right. I’ll go to bed now, and let the place go as it is until to-morrow.”

The girl demurred, but presently she and Steve were walking back to the MacPhails’ house, through the black streets; but they did not hurry now. They walked two blocks in silence, Steve looking ahead into dark space with glum thoughtfulness, the girl eyeing him covertly.

“What is the matter?” she asked abruptly.

Steve smiled pleasantly down at her.

“Nothing. Why?”

“There is,” she contradicted him. “You’re thinking of something unpleasant, something to do with me.”

He shook his head.

“That’s wrong, wrong on the face of it — they don’t go together.”

But she was not to be put off with compliments. “You’re... you’re—” She stood still in the dim street, searching for the right word.

“You’re on your guard — you don’t trust me — that’s what it is!”

Steve smiled again, but with narrowed eyes. This reading of his mind might have been intuitive, or it might have been something else.

He tried a little of the truth:

“Not distrustful — just wondering. You know you did give me an empty gun to go after the burglar with, and you know you wouldn’t let me chase him.”

Her eyes flashed, and she drew herself up to the last inch of her slender five feet.

“So you think—” she began indignantly. Then she drooped toward him, her hands fastening upon the lapels of his coat. “Please, please, Mr. Threefall, you’ve got to believe that I didn’t know the revolver was empty. It was Dr. MacPhail’s. I took it when I ran out of the house, never dreaming that it wasn’t loaded. And as for not letting you chase the burglar — I was afraid to be left alone again. I’m a little coward. I... I... Please believe in me, Mr. Threefall. Be friends with me. I need friends. I—”

Womanhood had dropped from her. She pleaded with the small white face of a child of twelve — a lonely, frightened child. And because his suspicions would not capitulate immediately to her appeal, Steve felt dumbly miserable, with an obscure shame in himself, as if he were lacking in some quality he should have had.

She went on talking, very softly, so that he had to bend his head to catch the words. She talked about herself, as a child would talk.

“It’s been terrible! I came here three months ago because there was a vacancy in the telegraph office. I was suddenly alone in the world, with very little money, and telegraphy was all I knew that could be capitalized. It’s been terrible here! The town — I can’t get accustomed to it. It’s so bleak. No children play in the streets. The people are different from those I’ve known — cruder, more brutal. Even the houses — street after street of them without curtains in the windows, without flowers. No grass in the yards, no trees.

“But I had to stay — there was nowhere else to go. I thought I could stay until I had saved a little money — enough to take me away. But saving money takes so long. Dr. MacPhail’s garden has been like a piece of paradise to me, If it hadn’t been for that I don’t think I could have — I’d have gone crazy! The doctor and his wife have been nice to me; some people have been nice to me, but most of them are people I can’t understand. And not all have been nice. At first it was awful. Men would say things, and women would say things, and when I was afraid of them they thought I was stuck up. Larry — Mr. Ormsby — saved me from that. He made them let me alone, and he persuaded the MacPhails to let me live with them. Mr. Rymer has helped me, too, given me courage; but I lose it again as soon as I’m away from the sight of his face and the sound of his voice.

“I’m scared — scared of everything! Of Larry Ormsby especially! And he’s been wonderfully helpful to me. But I can’t help it. I’m afraid of him — of the way he looks at me sometimes, of things he says when he has been drinking. It’s as if there was something inside of him waiting for something. I shouldn’t say that — because I owe him gratitude for — But I’m so afraid! I’m afraid of every person, of every house, of every doorstep even. It’s a nightmare!”

Steve found that one of his hands was cupped over the white cheek that was not flat against his chest, and that his other arm was around her shoulders, holding her close.

“New towns are always like this, or worse,” he began to tell her. “You should have seen Hopewell, Virginia, when the Du Ponts first opened it. It takes time for the undesirables who come with the first rush to be weeded out. And, stuck out here in the desert, Izzard would naturally fare a little worse than the average new town. As for being friends with you — that’s why I stayed here instead of going back to Whitetufts. We’ll be great friends. We’ll—”

He never knew how long he talked, or what he said; though he imagined afterward that he must have made a very long-winded and very stupid speech. But he was not talking for the purpose of saying anything; he was talking to soothe the girl, and to keep her small face between his hand and chest, and her small body close against his for as long a time as possible.

So, he talked on and on and on—

The MacPhails were at home when Nova Vallance and Steve came through the flowered yard again, and they welcomed the girl with evident relief. The doctor was a short man with a round bald head, and a round jovial face, shiny and rosy except where a sandy mustache drooped over his mouth. His wife was perhaps ten years younger than he, a slender blond woman with much of the feline in the set of her blue eyes and the easy grace of her movements.

“The car broke down with us about twenty miles out,” the doctor explained in a mellow rumbling voice with a hint of a burr lingering around the r’s. “I had to perform a major operation on it before we could get going again. When we got home we found you gone, and were just about to rouse the town.”

The girl introduced Steve to the MacPhails, and then told them about the burglar, and of what they had found in the blind man’s cabin.

Dr. MacPhail shook his round naked head and clicked his tongue on teeth. “Seems to me Fernie doesn’t do all that could be done to tone Izzard down,” he said.

Then the girl remembered Steve’s wounded arm, and the doctor examined, washed, and bandaged it.

“You won’t have to wear the arm in a sling,” he said, “if you take a reasonable amount of care of it. It isn’t a deep cut, and fortunately it went between the supinator longus and the great palmar without injury to either. Get it from our burglar?”

“No. Got it in the street. A man named Kamp and I were walking toward the hotel to-night and were jumped. Kamp was killed. I got this.”

An asthmatic clock somewhere up the street was striking three as Steve passed through the MacPhails’ front gate and set out for the hotel again. He felt tired and sore in every muscle, and he walked close to the curb.

“If anything else happens to-night,” he told himself, “I’m going to run like hell from it. I’ve had enough for one evening.”

At the first cross-street he had to pause to let an automobile race by. As it passed him he recognized it — Larry Ormsby’s cream Vauxhall. In its wake sped five big trucks, with a speed that testified to readjusted gears. In a roar of engines, a cloud of dust, and a rattling of windows, the caravan vanished toward the desert.

Steve went on toward the hotel, thinking. The factory worked twenty-four hours a day, he knew; but surely no necessity of niter manufacturing would call for such excessive speed in its trucks — if they were factory trucks. He turned into Main Street and faced another surprise. The cream Vauxhall stood near the corner, its owner at the wheel. As Steve came abreast of it Larry Ormsby let its near door swing open, and held out an inviting hand.

Steve stopped and stood by the door.

“Jump in and I’ll give you a lift as far as the hotel.”

“Thanks.”

Steve looked quizzically from the man’s handsome, reckless face to the now dimly lighted hotel, less than two blocks away. Then he looked at the man again, and got into the automobile beside him.

“I hear you’re a more or less permanent fixture among us,” Ormsby said, proffering Steve cigarettes in a lacquered leather case, and shutting off his idling engine.

“For a while.”

Steve declined the cigarettes and brought out tobacco and papers from his pocket, adding, “There are things about the place I like.”

“I also hear you had a little excitement to-night.”

“Some,” Steve admitted, wondering whether the other meant the fight in which Kamp had been killed, the burglary at the MacPhails’, or both.

“If you keep up the pace you’ve set,” the factory owner’s son went on, “it won’t take you long to nose me out of my position as Izzard’s brightest light.”

Tautening nerves tickled the nape of Steve’s neck. Larry Ormsby’s words and tones seemed idle enough, but underneath them was a suggestion that they were not aimless — that they were leading to some definite place. It was not likely that he had circled around to intercept Steve merely to exchange meaningless chatter with him. Steve, lighting his cigarette, grinned and waited.

“The only thing I ever got from the old man, besides money,” Larry Ormsby was saying, “is a deep-rooted proprietary love for my own property. I’m a regular burgher for insisting that my property is mine and must stay mine. I don’t know exactly how to feel about a stranger coming in and making himself the outstanding black sheep of the town in two days. A reputation — even for recklessness — is property, you know; and I don’t feel that I should give it up — or any other rights — without a struggle.”

There it was. Steve’s mind cleared. He disliked subtleties. But now he knew what the talk was about. He was being warned to keep away from Nova Vallance.

“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled, “who thought he owned all of the Pacific south of the Tropic of Capricorn — and had papers to prove it. He’d been that way ever since a Maori bashed in his head with a stone mele. Used to accuse us of stealing our drinking water from his ocean.”

Larry Ormsby flicked his cigarette into the street and started the engine.

“But the point is” — he was smiling pleasantly — “that a man is moved to protect what he thinks belongs to him. He may be wrong, of course, but that wouldn’t affect the — ah — vigor of his protecting efforts.”

Steve felt himself growing warm and angry.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, with deliberate intent to bring this thing between them to a crisis, “but I’ve never had enough experience with property to know how I’d feel about being deprived of it. But suppose I had a — well, say — a white vest that I treasured. And suppose a man slapped my face and threatened to spoil the vest. I reckon I’d forget all about protecting the vest in my hurry to tangle with him.”

Larry laughed sharply.

Steve caught the wrist that flashed up, and pinned it to Ormsby’s side with a hand that much spinning of a heavy stick had muscled with steel.

“Easy,” he said into the slitted, dancing eyes; “easy now.”

Larry Ormsby’s white teeth flashed under his mustache.

“Righto,” he smiled. “If you’ll turn my wrist loose, I’d like to shake hands with you — a sort of ante-bellum gesture. I like you, Threefall; you’re going to add materially to the pleasures of Izzard.”

In his room on the third floor of the Izzard Hotel, Steve Threefall undressed slowly, hampered by a stiff left arm and much thinking. Matter for thought he had in abundance. Larry Ormsby slapping his father’s face and threatening him with an automatic; Larry Ormsby and the girl in confidential conversation; Kamp dying in a dark street, his last words lost in the noise of the marshal’s arrival; Nova Vallance giving him an empty revolver, and persuading him to let a burglar escape; the watch on the floor and the looting of the blind man’s savings; the caravan Larry Ormsby had led toward the desert; the talk in the Vauxhall, with its exchange of threats.

Was there any connection between each of these things and the others? Or were they simply disconnected happenings? If there was a connection — and the whole of that quality in mankind which strives toward simplification of life’s phenomena, unification, urged him to belief in a connection — just what was it? Still puzzling, he got into bed; and then out again quickly. An uneasiness that had been vague until now suddenly thrust itself into his consciousness. He went to the door, opened and closed it. It was a cheaply carpentered door, but it moved easily and silently on well-oiled hinges.

“I reckon I’m getting to be an old woman,” he growled to himself; “but I’ve had all I want to-night.”

He blocked the door with the dresser, put his stick where he could reach it quickly, got into bed again, and went to sleep.

A pounding on the door awakened Steve at nine o’clock the next morning. The pounder was one of Fernie’s subordinates, and he told Steve that he was expected to be present at the inquest into Kamp’s death within an hour. Steve found that his wounded arm bothered him little; not so much as a bruised area on one shoulder — another souvenir of the fight in the street.

He dressed, ate breakfast in the hotel café, and went up to Ross Amthor’s “undertaking parlor,” where the inquest was to be held.

The coroner was a tall man with high, narrow shoulders and a sallow, puffy face, who sped proceedings along regardless of the finer points of legal technicality. Steve told his story; the marshal told his, and then produced a prisoner — a thick-set Austrian who seemingly neither spoke nor understood English. His throat and lower face were swathed in white bandages.

“Is this the one you knocked down?” the coroner asked.

Steve looked at as much of the Austrian’s face as was visible above the bandages.

“I don’t know. I can’t see enough of him.”

“This is the one I picked out of the gutter,” Grant Fernie volunteered; “whether you knocked him there or not. I don’t suppose you got a good look at him. But this is he all right.”

Steve frowned doubtfully. “I’d know him,” he said, “if he turned his face up and I got a good look at him.”

“Take off some of his bandages so the witness can see him,” the coroner ordered. Fernie unwound the Austrian’s bandages, baring a bruised and swollen jaw.

Steve stared at the man. This fellow may have been one of his assailants, but he most certainly wasn’t the one he had knocked into the street. He hesitated. Could he have confused faces in the fight?

“Do you identify him?” the coroner asked impatiently.

Steve shook his head.

“I don’t remember ever seeing him.”

“Look here, Threefall” — the giant marshal scowled down at Steve — “this is the man I hauled out of the gutter — one of the men you said jumped you and Kamp. Now what’s the game? What’s the idea of forgetting?”

Steve answered slowly, stubbornly:

“I don’t know. All I know is that this isn’t the first one I hit, the one I knocked out. He was an American — had an American face. He was about this fellow’s size, but this isn’t he.”

The coroner exposed broken yellow teeth in a snarl, the marshal glowered at Steve, the jurors regarded him with frank suspicion. The marshal and the coroner withdrew to a far corner of the room, where they whispered together, casting frequent glances at Steve.

“All right,” the coroner told Steve when this conference was over; “that’s all.”

From the inquest Steve walked slowly back to the hotel, his mind puzzled by this newest addition to Izzard’s mysteries. What was the explanation of the certain fact that the man the marshal had produced at the inquest was not the man he had taken from the gutter the previous night? Another thought: the marshal had arrived immediately after the fight with the men who had attacked him and Kamp, had arrived noisily, drowning the dying man’s last words. That opportune arrival and the accompanying noise — were they accidental? Steve didn’t know; and because he didn’t know he strode back to the hotel in frowning meditation.

At the hotel he found that his bag had arrived from Whitetufts. He took it up to his room and changed his clothes. Then he carried his perplexity to the window, where he sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into the alley below, his forehead knotted beneath his tawny hair. Was it possible that so many things should explode around one man in so short a time, in a small city of Izzard’s size, without there being a connection between them — and between them and him? And if he was being involved in a vicious maze of crime and intrigue, what was it all about? What had started it? What was the key to it? The girl?

Confused thoughts fell away from him. He sprang to his feet.

Down the other side of the alley a man was walking — a thick-set man in soiled blue — a man with bandaged throat and chin. What was visible of his face was the face Steve had seen turned skyward in the fight — the face of the man he had knocked out.

Steve sprang to the door, out of the room, down three flights of stairs, past the desk, and out of the hotel’s back door. He gained the alley in time to see a blue trouser-leg disappearing into a doorway in the block below. Thither he went.

The doorway opened into an office building. He searched the corridors, upstairs and down, and did not find the bandaged man. He returned to the ground floor and discovered a sheltered corner near the back door, near the foot of the stairs. The corner was shielded from the stairs and from most of the corridor by a wooden closet in which brooms and mops were kept. The man had entered through the rear of the building; he would probably leave that way; Steve waited.

Fifteen minutes passed, bringing no one within sight of his hiding-place. Then from the front of the building came a woman’s soft laugh, and footsteps moved toward him. He shrank back in his dusky corner. The footsteps passed — a man and a woman laughing and talking together as they walked. They mounted the stairs. Steve peeped out at them, and then drew back suddenly, more in surprise than in fear of detection, for the two who mounted the stairs were completely engrossed in each other.

The man was Elder, the insurance and real-estate agent. Steve did not see his face, but the checkered suit on his round figure was unmistakable — “college-boy suit,” Kamp had called it. Elder’s arm was around the woman’s waist as they went up the stairs, and her cheek leaned against his shoulder as she looked coquettishly into his face. The woman was Dr. MacPhail’s feline wife.

“What next?” Steve asked himself, when they had passed from his sight. “Is the whole town wrong? What next, I wonder?”

The answer came immediately — the pounding of crazy footsteps directly over Steve’s head — footsteps that might have belonged to a drunken man, or to a man fighting a phantom. Above the noise of heels on wooden floor, a scream rose — a scream that blended horror and pain into a sound that was all the more unearthly because it was unmistakably of human origin.

Steve bolted out of his corner and up the steps three at a time, pivoted into the second-floor corridor on the newel, and came face to face with David Brackett, the banker.

Brackett’s thick legs were far apart, and he swayed on them. His face was a pallid agony above his beard. Big spots of beard were gone, as if torn out or burned away. From his writhing lips thin wisps of vapor issued.

“They’ve poisoned me, the damned—”

He came suddenly up on the tips of his toes, his body arched, and he fell stiffly backward, as dead things fall.

Steve dropped on a knee beside him, but he knew nothing could be done — knew Brackett had died while still on his feet. For a moment, as he crouched there over the dead man, something akin to panic swept Steve Threefall’s mind clean of reason. Was there never to be an end to this piling of mystery upon mystery, of violence upon violence? He had the sensation of being caught in a monstrous net — a net without beginning or end, and whose meshes were slimy with blood. Nausea — spiritual and physical — gripped him, held him impotent. Then a shot crashed.

He jerked erect — sprang down the corridor toward the sound; seeking in a frenzy of physical activity escape from the sickness that had filled him.

At the end of the corridor a door was labeled ORMSBY NITER CORPORATION, W. W. ORMSBY, PRESIDENT. There was no need for hesitancy before deciding that the shot had come from behind that label. Even as he dashed toward it, another shot rattled the door and a falling body thudded behind it.

Steve flung the door open — and jumped aside to avoid stepping on the man who lay just inside. Over by a window, Larry Ormsby stood facing the door, a black automatic in his hand. His eyes danced with wild merriment, and his lips curled in a tight-lipped smile. “Hello, Threefall,” he said. “I see you’re still keeping close to the storm centers.”

Steve looked down at the man on the floor — W. W. Ormsby. Two bullet-holes were in the upper left-hand pocket of his vest. The holes, less than an inch apart, had been placed with a precision that left no room for doubting that the man was dead. Steve remembered Larry’s threat to his father: “I’ll spoil your vest!”

He looked up from killed to killer. Larry Ormsby’s eyes were hard and bright; the pistol in his hand was held lightly, with the loose alertness peculiar to professional gunmen.

“This isn’t a — ah — personal matter with you, is it?” he asked.

Steve shook his head; and heard the trampling of feet and a confusion of excited voices in the corridor behind him.

“That’s nice,” the killer was saying; “and I’d suggest that you—”

He broke off as men came into the office. Grant Fernie, the marshal, was one of them.

“Dead?” he asked, with a bare glance at the man on the floor.

“Rather,” Larry replied.

“How come?”

Larry Ormsby moistened his lips, not nervously, but thoughtfully. Then he smiled at Steve, and told his story.

“Threefall and I were standing down near the front door talking, when we heard a shot. I thought it had been fired up here, but he said it came from across the street. Anyhow, we came up here to make sure — making a bet on it first; so Threefall owes me a dollar. We came up here, and just as we got to the head of the steps we heard another shot, and Brackett came running out of here with this gun in his hand.”

He gave the automatic to the marshal, and went on: “He took a few steps from the door, yelled, and fell down. Did you see him out there?”

“I did,” Fernie said.

“Well, Threefall stopped to look at him while I came on in here to see if my father was all right — and found him dead. That’s all there is to it.”

Steve went slowly down to the street after the gathering in the dead man’s office had broken up, without having either contradicted or corroborated Larry Ormsby’s fiction. No one had questioned him. At first he had been too astonished by the killer’s boldness to say anything; and when his wits had resumed their functions, he had decided to hold his tongue for a while.

Suppose he had told the truth? Would it have helped justice? Would anything help justice in Izzard? If he had known what lay behind this piling-up of crime, he could have decided what to do; but he did not know — did not even know that there was anything behind it. So he had kept silent. The inquest would not be held until the following day — time enough to talk then, after a night’s consideration.

He could not grasp more than a fragment of the affair at a time now; disconnected memories made a whirl of meaningless images in his brain. Elder and Mrs. MacPhail going up the stairs — to where? What had become of them? What had become of the man with the bandages on throat and jaw? Had those three any part in the double murder? Had Larry killed the banker as well as his father? By what chance did the marshal appear on the scene immediately after murder had been done?

Steve carried his jumbled thoughts back to the hotel, and lay across his bed for perhaps an hour. Then he got up and went to the Bank of Izzard, drew out the money he had there, put it carefully in his pocket, and returned to his hotel room to lie across the bed again.

Nova Vallance, nebulous in yellow crêpe, was sitting on the lower step of the MacPhails’ porch when Steve went up the flowered walk that evening. She welcomed him warmly, concealing none of the impatience with which she had been waiting for him. He sat on the step beside her, twisting around a little for a better view of the dusky oval of her face.

“How is your arm?” she asked.

“Fine!” He opened and shut his left hand briskly. “I suppose you heard all about to-day’s excitement?”

“Oh, yes! About Mr. Brackett’s shooting Mr. Ormsby, and then dying with one of his heart attacks.”

“Huh?” Steve demanded.

“But weren’t you there?” she asked in surprise.

“I was, but suppose you tell me just what you heard.”

“Oh, I’ve heard all sorts of things about it! But all I really know is what Dr. MacPhail, who examined both of them, said.”

“And what was that?”

“That Mr. Brackett killed Mr. Ormsby — shot him — though nobody seems to know why; and then, before he could get out of the building, his heart failed him and he died.”

“And he was supposed to have a bad heart?”

“Yes. Dr. MacPhail told him a year ago that he would have to be careful, that the least excitement might be fatal.”

Steve caught her wrist in his hand.

“Think now,” he commanded. “Did you ever hear Dr. MacPhail speak of Brackett’s heart trouble until to-day?”

She looked curiously into his face, and a little pucker of bewilderment came between her eyes.

“No,” she replied slowly. “I don’t think so; but, of course, there was never any reason why he should have mentioned it. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” he told her, “Brackett did not shoot Ormsby; and any heart attack that killed Brackett was caused by poison — some poison that burned his face and beard.”

She gave a little cry of horror.

“You think—” She stopped, glanced furtively over her shoulder at the front door of the house, and leaned close to him to whisper: “Didn’t... didn’t you say that the man who was killed in the fight last night was named Kamp?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the report, or whatever it was that Dr. MacPhail made of his examination, reads Henry Cumberpatch.”

“You sure? Sure it’s the same man?”

“Yes. The wind blew it off the doctor’s desk, and when I handed it back to him, he made some joke” — she colored with a little laugh — “some joke about it nearly being your death certificate instead of your companion’s. I glanced down at it then, and saw that it was for a man named Henry Cumberpatch. What does it all mean? What is—”

The front gate clattered open, and a man swayed up the walk. Steve got up, picked up his black stick, and stepped between the girl and the advancing man. The man’s face came out of the dark. It was Larry Ormsby; and when he spoke his words had a drunken thickness to match the unsteadiness — not quite a stagger, but nearly so — of his walk.

“Lis’en,” he said; “I’m dam’ near—”

Steve moved toward him. “If Miss Vallance will excuse us,” he said, “we’ll stroll to the gate and talk.”

Without waiting for a reply from either of them, Steve linked an arm through one of Ormsby’s and urged him down the path. At the gate Larry broke away, pulling his arm loose and confronting Steve.

“No time for foolishness,” he snarled. “Y’ got to get out! Get out o’ Izzard!”

“Yes?” Steve asked. “And why?”

Larry leaned back against the fence and raised one hand in an impatient gesture.

“Your lives are not worth a nickel — neither of you.”

He swayed and coughed. Steve grasped him by the shoulder and peered into his face.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Larry coughed again and clapped a hand to his chest, up near the shoulder.

“Bullet — up high — Fernie’s. But I got him — the big tramp. Toppled him out a window — down like a kid divin’ for pennies.” He laughed shrilly, and then became earnest again. “Get the girl — beat it — now! Now! Now! Ten minutes’ll be too late. They’re comin’!”

“Who? What? Why?” Steve snapped. “Talk turkey! I don’t trust you. I’ve got to have reasons.”

“Reasons, my God!” the wounded man cried. “You’ll get your reasons. You think I’m trying to scare you out o’ town b’fore th’ inquest.” He laughed insanely. “Inquest! You fool! There won’t be any inquest! There won’t be any to-morrow — for Izzard! And you—”

He pulled himself sharply together and caught one of Steve’s hands in both of his.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll give it to you, but we’re wasting time! But if you’ve got to have it — listen.

“Izzard is a plant! The whole damned town is queer. Booze — that’s the answer. The man I knocked off this afternoon — the one you thought was my father — originated the scheme. You make soda niter by boiling the nitrate in tanks with heated coils. He got the idea that a niter plant would make a good front for a moonshine factory. And he got the idea that if you had a whole town working together it’d be impossible for the game ever to fall down.

“You can guess how much money there is in this country in the hands of men who’d be glad to invest it in a booze game that was air-tight. Not only crooks, I mean, but men who consider themselves honest. Take your guess, whatever it is, and double it, and you still won’t be within millions of the right answer. There are men with— But anyway, Ormsby took his scheme east and got his backing — a syndicate that could have raised enough money to build a dozen cities.

“Ormsby, Elder, and Brackett were the boys who managed the game. I was here to see that they didn’t double-cross the syndicate; and then there’s a flock of trusty lieutenants, like Fernie, and MacPhail, and Heman — he’s postmaster — and Harker — another doctor, who got his last week — and Leslie, who posed as a minister. There was no trouble to getting the population we wanted. The word went around that the new town was a place where a crook would be safe so long as he did what he was told. The slums of all the cities of America, and half of ’em out of it, emptied themselves here. Every crook that was less than a step ahead of the police, and had car fare here, came and got cover.

“Of course, with every thug in the world blowing in here we had a lot of sleuths coming, too; but they weren’t hard to handle, and if worse came to worst, we could let the law take an occasional man; but usually it wasn’t hard to take care of the gumshoes. We have bankers, and ministers, and doctors, and postmasters, and prominent men of all sorts either to tangle the sleuths up with bum leads, or, if necessary, to frame them. You’ll find a flock of men in the state pen who came here — most of them as narcotics agents or prohibition agents — and got themselves tied up before they knew what it was all about.

“God, there never was a bigger game! It couldn’t flop — unless we spoiled it for ourselves. And that’s what we’ve done. It was too big for us! There was too much money in it — it went to our heads! At first we played square with the syndicate. We made booze and shipped it out — shipped it in carload lots, in trucks, did everything but pipe it out, and we made money for the syndicate and for ourselves. Then we got the real idea — the big one! We kept on making the hooch; but we got the big idea going for our own profit. The syndicate wasn’t in on that.

“First, we got the insurance racket under way. Elder managed that, with three or four assistants. Between them they became agents of half the insurance companies in the country, and they began to plaster Izzard with policies. Men who had never lived were examined, insured, and then killed — sometimes they were killed on paper, sometimes a real man who died was substituted, and there were times when a man or two was killed to order. It was soft! We had the insurance agents, the doctors, the coroner, the undertaker, and all the city officials. We had the machinery to swing any deal we wanted! You were with Kamp the night he was killed! That was a good one. He was an insurance company sleuth — the companies were getting suspicious. He came here and was foolish enough to trust his reports to the mail. There aren’t many letters from strangers that get through the post office without being read. We read his reports, kept them, and sent phony ones out in their places. Then we nailed Mr. Kamp, and changed his name on the records to fit a policy in the very company he represented. A rare joke, eh?

“The insurance racket wasn’t confined to men — cars, houses, furniture, everything you can insure was plastered. In the last census — by distributing the people we could count on, one in a house, with a list of five or six names — we got a population on the records of at least five times as many as are really here. That gave us room for plenty of policies, plenty of deaths, plenty of property insurance, plenty of everything. It gave us enough political influence in the county and state to strengthen our hands a hundred per cent, make the game safer.

“You’ll find street after street of houses with nothing in them out of sight of the front windows. They cost money to put up, but we’ve made the money right along, and they’ll show a wonderful profit when the clean-up comes.

“Then, after the insurance stunt was on its feet, we got the promotion game going. There’s a hundred corporations in Izzard that are nothing but addresses on letterheads — but stock certificates and bonds have been sold in them from one end of these United States to the other. And they have bought goods, paid for them, shipped them out to be got rid of — maybe at a loss — and put in larger and larger orders until they’ve built up a credit with the manufacturers that would make you dizzy to total. Easy! Wasn’t Brackett’s bank here to give them all the financial references they needed? There was nothing to it; a careful building-up of credit until they reached the highest possible point. Then, the goods shipped out to be sold through fences, and — bingo! The town is wiped out by fire. The stocks of goods are presumably burned; the expensive buildings that the out-of-town investors were told about are presumably destroyed; the books and records are burned.

“What a killing! I’ve had a hell of a time stalling off the syndicate, trying to keep them in the dark about the surprise we’re going to give them. They’re too suspicious as it is for us to linger much longer. But things are about ripe for the blow-off — the fire that’s to start in the factory and wipe out the whole dirty town — and next Saturday was the day we picked. That’s the day when Izzard becomes nothing but a pile of ashes — and a pile of collectable insurance policies.

“The rank and file in town won’t know anything about the finer points of the game. Those that suspect anything take their money and keep quiet. When the town goes up in smoke there will be hundreds of bodies found in the ruins — all insured — and there will be proof of the death of hundreds of others — likewise insured — whose bodies can’t be found.

“There never was a bigger game! But it was too big for us! My fault — some of it — but it would have burst anyway. We always weeded out those who came to town looking too honest or too wise, and we made doubly sure that nobody who was doubtful got into the post office, railroad depot, telegraph office, or telephone exchange. If the railroad company or the telegraph or telephone company sent somebody here to work, and we couldn’t make them see things the way we wanted them seen, we managed to make the place disagreeable for them — and they usually flitted elsewhere in a hurry.

“Then the telegraph company sent Nova here and I flopped for her. At first it was just that I liked her looks. We had all sorts of women here — but they were mostly all sorts — and Nova was something different. I’ve done my share of dirtiness in this world, but I’ve never been able to get rid of a certain fastidiousness in my taste for women. I — Well, the rest of them — Brackett, Ormsby, Elder, and the lot — were all for giving Nova the works. But I talked them out of it. I told them to let her alone and I’d have her on the inside in no time. I really thought I could do it. She liked me, or seemed to, but I couldn’t get any further than that. I didn’t make any headway. The others got impatient, but I kept putting them off, telling them that everything would be fine, that if necessary I’d marry her, and shut her up that way. They didn’t like it. It wasn’t easy to keep her from learning what was going on — working in the telegraph office — but we managed it somehow.

“Next Saturday was the day we’d picked for the big fireworks. Ormsby gave me the call yesterday — told me flatly that if I didn’t sew Nova up at once they were going to pop her. They didn’t know how much she had found out, and they were taking no chances. I told him I’d kill him if he touched her, but I knew I couldn’t talk them out of it. To-day the break came. I heard he had given the word that she was to be put out of the way to-night. I went to his office for a showdown. Brackett was there. Ormsby salved me along, denied he had given any order affecting the girl, and poured out drinks for the three of us. The drink looked wrong. I waited to see what was going to happen next. Brackett gulped his down. It was poisoned. He went outside to die, and I nailed Ormsby.

“The game has blown up! It was too rich for us. Everybody is trying to slit everybody else’s throat. I couldn’t find Elder — but Fernie tried to pot me from a window; and he’s Elder’s right-hand man. Or he was — he’s a stiff now. I think this thing in my chest is the big one — I’m about — But you can get the girl out. You’ve got to! Elder will go through with the play — try to make the killing for himself. He’ll have the town touched off to-night. It’s now or never with him. He’ll try to—”

A shriek cut through the darkness.

“Steve! Steve!! Steve!!!”

Steve whirled away from the gate, leaped through flower-beds, crossed the porch in a bound, and was in the house. Behind him Larry Ormsby’s feet clattered. An empty hallway, an empty room, another. Nobody was in sight on the ground floor. Steve went up the stairs. A strip of golden light lay under a door. He went through the door, not knowing or caring whether it was locked or not. He simply hurled himself shoulder-first at it, and was in the room. Leaning back against a table in the center of the room, Dr. MacPhail was struggling with the girl. He was behind her, his arms around her, trying to hold her head still. The girl twisted and squirmed like a cat gone mad. In front of her Mrs. MacPhail poised an uplifted blackjack.

Steve flung his stick at the woman’s white arm, flung it instinctively, without skill or aim. The heavy ebony struck arm and shoulder, and she staggered back. Dr. MacPhail, releasing the girl, dived at Steve’s legs, got them, and carried him to the floor. Steve’s fumbling fingers slid off the doctor’s bald head, could get no grip on the back of his thick neck, found an ear, and gouged into the flesh under it.

The doctor grunted and twisted away from the digging fingers. Steve got a knee free — drove it at the doctor’s face. Mrs. MacPhail bent over his head, raising the black leather billy she still held. He dashed an arm at her ankles, missed — but the down-crashing blackjack fell obliquely on his shoulder. He twisted away, scrambled to his knees and hands — and sprawled headlong under the impact of the doctor’s weight on his back.

He rolled over, got the doctor under him, felt his hot breath on his neck. Steve raised his head and snapped it back — hard. Raised it again, and snapped it down, hammering MacPhail’s face with the back of his skull. The doctor’s arms fell away and Steve lurched upright to find the fight over.

Larry Ormsby stood in the doorway grinning evilly over his pistol at Mrs. MacPhail, who stood sullenly by the table. The blackjack was on the floor at Larry’s feet.

Against the other side of the table the girl leaned weakly, one hand on her bruised throat, her eyes dazed and blank with fear. Steve went around to her.

“Get going, Steve! There’s no time for playing. You got a car?” Larry Ormsby’s voice was rasping.

“No,” Steve said.

Larry cursed bitterly — an explosion of foul blasphemies. Then:

“We’ll go in mine — it can outrun anything in the state. But you can’t wait here for me to get it. Take Nova over to blind Rymer’s shack. I’ll pick you up there. He’s the only one in town you can trust. Go ahead, damn you!” he yelled.

Steve glanced at the sullen MacPhail woman, and at her husband, now getting up slowly from the floor, his face blood-smeared and battered.

“How about them?”

“Don’t worry about them,” Larry said. “Take the girl and make Rymer’s place. I’ll take care of this pair and be over there with the car in fifteen minutes. Get going!”

Steve’s eyes narrowed and he studied the man in the doorway. He didn’t trust him, but since all Izzard seemed equally dangerous, one place would be as safe as another — and Larry Ormsby might be honest this time.

“All right,” he said, and turned to the girl. “Get a heavy coat.”

Five minutes later they were hurrying through the same dark streets they had gone through on the previous night. Less than a block from the house, a muffled shot came to their ears, and then another. The girl glanced quickly at Steve but did not speak. He hoped she had not understood what the two shots meant.

They met nobody. Rymer had heard and recognized the girl’s footsteps on the sidewalk, and he opened the door before they could knock.

“Come in, Nova,” he welcomed her heartily, and then fumbled for Steve’s hand. “This is Mr. Threefall, isn’t it?”

He led them into the dark cabin, and then lighted the oil lamp on the table. Steve launched at once into a hurried summarizing of what Larry Ormsby had told him. The girl listened with wide eyes and wan face; the blind man’s face lost its serenity, and he seemed to grow older and tired as he listened.

“Ormsby said he would come after us with his car,” Steve wound up. “If he does, you will go with us, of course, Mr. Rymer. If you’ll tell us what you want to take with you we’ll get it ready; so that there will be no delay when he comes — if he comes.” He turned to the girl. “What do you think, Nova? Will he come? And can we trust him if he does?”

“I–I hope so — he’s not all bad, I think.”

The blind man went to a wardrobe in the room’s other end.

“I’ve got nothing to take,” he said, “but I’ll get into warmer clothes.”

He pulled the wardrobe door open, so that it screened a corner of the room for him to change in. Steve went to a window, and stood there looking between blind and frame, into the dark street where nothing moved. The girl stood close to him, between his arm and side, her fingers twined in his sleeve.

“Will we—? Will we—?”

He drew her closer and answered the whispered question she could not finish.

“We’ll make it,” he said, “if Larry plays square, or if he doesn’t. We’ll make it.”

A rifle cracked somewhere in the direction of Main Street. A volley of pistol shots. The cream-colored Vauxhall came out of nowhere to settle on the sidewalk, two steps from the door. Larry Ormsby, hatless and with his shirt torn loose to expose a hole under one of his collar-bones, tumbled out of the car and through the door that Steve threw open for him.

Larry kicked the door shut behind him, and laughed.

“Izzard’s frying nicely!” he cried, and clapped his hands together. “Come, come! The desert awaits!”

Steve turned to call the blind man. Rymer stepped out from behind his screening door. In each of Rymer’s hands was a heavy revolver. The film was gone from Rymer’s eyes.

His eyes, cool and sharp now, held the two men and the girl.

“Put your hands up, all of you,” he ordered curtly.

Larry Ormsby laughed insanely.

“Did you ever see a damned fool do his stuff, Rymer?” he asked.

“Put your hands up!”

“Rymer,” Larry said, “I’m dying now. To hell with you!”

And without haste he took a black automatic pistol from an inside coat pocket.

The guns in Rymer’s hands rocked the cabin with explosion after explosion.

Knocked into a sitting position on the floor by the heavy bullets that literally tore him apart, Larry steadied his back against the wall, and the crisp, sharp reports of his lighter weapon began to punctuate the roars of the erstwhile blind man’s guns.

Instinctively jumping aside, pulling the girl with him, at the first shot, Steve now hurled himself upon Rymer’s flank. But just as he reached him the shooting stopped. Rymer swayed, the very revolvers in his hands seemed to go limp. He slid out of Steve’s clutching hands — his neck scraping one hand with the brittle dryness of paper — and became a lifeless pile on the floor.

Steve kicked the dead man’s guns across the floor a way, and then went over to where the girl knelt beside Larry Ormsby. Larry smiled up at Steve with a flash of white teeth.

“I’m gone, Steve,” he said. “That Rymer — fooled us all — phony films on eyes — painted on — spy for rum syndicate.”

He writhed, and his smile grew stiff and strained.

“Mind shaking hands, Steve?” he asked a moment later.

“You’re a good guy, Larry,” was the only thing he could think to say.

The dying man seemed to like that. His smile became real again.

“Luck to you — you can get a hundred and ten out of the Vauxhall,” he managed to say.

And then, apparently having forgotten the girl for whom he had given up his life, he flashed another smile at Steve and died.

The front door slammed open — two heads looked in. The heads’ owners came in.

Steve bounded upright, swung his stick. A bone cracked like a whip, a man reeled back holding a hand to his temple.

“Behind me — close!” Steve cried to the girl, and felt her hands on his back.

Men filled the doorway. An invisible gun roared and a piece of the ceiling flaked down. Steve spun his stick and charged the door. The light from the lamp behind him glittered and glowed on the whirling wood. The stick whipped backward and forward, from left to right, from right to left. It writhed like a live thing — seemed to fold upon its grasped middle as if spring-hinged with steel. Flashing half-circles merged into a sphere of deadliness. The rhythm of incessant thudding against flesh and clicking on bone became a tune that sang through the grunts of fighting men, the groans and oaths of stricken men. Steve and the girl went through the door.

Between moving arms and legs and bodies the cream of the Vauxhall showed. Men stood upon the automobile, using its height for vantage in the fight. Steve threw himself forward, swinging his stick against shin and thigh, toppling men from the machine. With his left hand he swept the girl around to his side. His body shook and rocked under the weight of blows from men who were packed too closely for any effectiveness except the smothering power of sheer weight.

His stick was suddenly gone from him. One instant he held and spun it; the next, he was holding up a clenched fist that was empty — the ebony had vanished as if in a puff of smoke. He swung the girl up over the car door, hammered her down into the car — jammed her down upon the legs of a man who stood there — heard a bone break, and saw the man go down. Hands gripped him everywhere; hands pounded him. He cried aloud with joy when he saw the girl, huddled on the floor of the car, working with ridiculously small hands at the car’s mechanism.

The machine began to move. Holding with his hands, he lashed both feet out behind. Got them back on the step. Struck over the girl’s head with a hand that had neither thought nor time to make a fist — struck stiff-fingered into a broad red face.

The car moved. One of the girl’s hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off — tore pieces from him — tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them. Then he fell into the car beside the girl.

Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced rifle emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert — white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed — was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.

Presently the girl slowed down, stopped.

“Are you all right?” Steve asked.

“Yes; but you’re—”

“All in one piece,” he assured her. “Let me take the wheel.”

“No! No!” she protested. “You’re bleeding. You’re—”

“No! No!” he mocked her. “We’d better keep going until we hit something. We’re not far enough from Izzard yet to call ourselves safe.”

He was afraid that if she tried to patch him up he would fall apart in her hands. He felt like that.

She started the car, and they went on. A great sleepiness came to him. What a fight! What a fight!

“Look at the sky!” she exclaimed.

He opened his heavy eyes. Ahead of them, above them, the sky was lightening — from blue-black to violet, to mauve, to rose. He turned his head and looked back. Where they had left Izzard, a monstrous bonfire was burning, painting the sky with jeweled radiance.

“Goodbye, Izzard,” he said drowsily, and settled himself more comfortably in the seat.

He looked again at the glowing pink in the sky ahead.

“My mother has primroses in her garden in Delaware that look like that sometimes,” he said dreamily. “You’ll like ’em.”

His head slid over against her shoulder, and he went to sleep.

Another Perfect Crime

Experience, February 1925

Although convicted of Boardman Bowlby Bunce’s murder, I did kill him. I forget why; I dare say there was something about the man I disliked. That is not important; but I feel that the attentiveness with which the public has read the interviews I did not give and looked at photographs of photographers’ personal friends entitles that public to know why, here in the death cell, I have made a new will, giving my fortune to the fiction department of the Public Library. (Before starting that, however, I wish to state that while I do not object to having been born in any of the other houses pictured in various newspapers, I must, in justice to my parents, repudiate the ice-house shown in Wednesdays Examiner.)

To get on with my story: when I determined, for doubtless sufficient if not clearly remembered reasons, to kill Boardman Bowlby Bunce, I planned the murder with the most careful attention to every detail. A life-long reader of literature dealing with the gaudier illegalities, I flattered myself that I of all men was equipped to commit the perfect crime.

I went to his office in the middle of the afternoon, when I knew his employees would be all present. In the outer office I attracted their attention to my presence and to the exact time by arguing heatedly that the clock there was a minute fast. Then I went into Bunce’s private office. He was alone. Out of m\ pockets I took the hammer and nails I had bought the day before from a hardware dealer who knew me, and, paving no attention to the astonished Bunce, nailed every window and door securely shut.

That done, I spit out the lozenge with which I had prepared my voice, and yelled loudly at him: “I hate you! You should be killed! I shall injure you!”

The surprise on his face became even more complete.

“Sit still,” I ordered in a low voice, taking a revolver from my pocket — a silver-mounted revolver with my initials engraved in it in four places.

Walking around behind him, carefully keeping the weapon too far away to leave the powder-marks that might make the wound seem self-inflicted, I shot him in the back of the head. While the door was being broken in I busied myself with the ink-pad on his desk, putting the prints of my fingers neatly and clearly on the butt of the revolver, the handle of the hammer, Bunce’s white collar, and some convenient sheets of paper; and hurriedly stuffed the dead man’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief into my pockets just as the door burst open.

After a while a detective came. I refused to answer his questions. Searching me, he found Bunce’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief. He examined the room — doors and windows nailed on the inside with my hammer, my monogrammed revolver beside the dead man, my finger-prints everywhere. He questioned Bunce’s employees. They told of my entrance, my passing into the office where Bunce was alone, the sound of hammering, my voice shouting threats, and the shot.

And then — then the detective arrested me!

It came out later that this would-be sleuth whose salary the property holders were paying had never read a detective story in his life, and so had not even suspected that the evidence had been too solidly against me for me to be anything but innocent.

Ber-Bulu

Sunset Magazine, March 1925; (aka: The Hairy One, 1947)

Say it happened on one of the Tawi Tawis. That would make Jeffol a Moro. It doesn’t really matter what he was. If lie had been a Maya or a Ghurka he would have laid Levison’s arm open with a machete or a kukri instead of a kris, but that would have made no difference in the end. Dinihari’s race matters as little. She was woman, complaisant woman, of the sort whose no always becomes yes between throat and teeth. You can find her in Nome, in Cape Town, and in Durham, and in skin of any shade; but, since the Tawi Tawis are the lower end of the Sulu Archipelago, she was brown this time.

She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became a part of her — a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn’t with Japanese brocade. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn’t belong to a man you were afraid of. That was when she was Levison’s.

She was Jeffol’s first. I don’t know where he got her. Her dialect wasn’t that of the village, but you couldn’t tell from that. There are any number of dialects down there — jumbles of Malay, Tagalog, Portuguese, and what not. Her sarong was a gold-threaded kain sungkit, so no doubt he brought her over from Borneo. He was likely to return from a fishing trip with anything — except fish.

Jeffol was a good Moro — a good companion in a fight or across a table. Tall for a Moro, nearly as tall as I am, he had a deceptive slimness that left you unprepared for the power in his snake-smooth muscles. His face was cheerful, intelligent and almost handsome, and he carried himself with a swagger. His hands went easily to the knives at his waist, and against his hide — sleeping or waking — he wore a sleeveless fighting-jacket with verses from the Koran on it. The jacket was his most prized possession, next to his anting-anting.

His elder brother was datto, as their father had been, but this brother had inherited little of either his father’s authority or his father’s taste for deviltry. The first had been diluted by the military government, and Jeffol had got most of the second. He ran as wild and loose as his pirate ancestors, until Langworthy got hold of him.

Langworthy was on the island when I came there. He hadn’t had much luck. Mohammedanism suited the Moros, especially in the loose form they practised. There was nothing of the solemn gangling horse-faced missionary about Langworthy. He was round-chested and meaty; he worked with dumb-bells and punching-bag before breakfast in the morning; and he strode round the island with a red face that broke into a grin on the least excuse. He had a way of sticking his chin in the air and grinning over it at you. I didn’t like him.

He and I didn’t hit if off very well from the first. I had reasons for not telling him where I had come from, and when he found I intended staying a while he got a notion that I wasn’t going to do his people — he called them that in spite of the little attention they paid him — any good. Later, he used to send messages to Bangao, complaining that I was corrupting the natives and lowering the prestige of the white man.

That was after I taught them to play blackjack. They gambled whenever they had anything to gamble for, and it was just as well that they should play a game that didn’t leave too much to luck. If I hadn’t won their money the Chinese would have, and anyway, there wasn’t enough of it to raise a howl over. As for the white man’s prestige — maybe I didn’t insist on being tuaned with every third word, but neither did I hesitate to knock the brown brothers round whenever they needed it; and that’s all there is to this keeping up the white man’s prestige at best.

A couple OF years earlier — in the late ’90s — Langworthy would have had no difficulty in getting rid of me, but since then the government had eased up a bit. I don’t know what sort of answers he got to his complaints, but the absence of official action made him all the more determined to chase me off.

“Peters,” he would tell me, “You’ve got to get off the island. You’re a bad influence and you’ve got to go.”

“Sure, sure,” I would agree, yawning. “But there’s no hurry.”

We didn’t get along together at all, but it was through my blackjack game that he finally made a go of his mission, though he wouldn’t be likely to admit it.

Jeffol went broke in the game one night — lost his fortune of forty dollars Mex — and discovered what to his simple mind was the certain cause of his bad luck. His anting-anting was gone, his precious luck-bringing collection of the-Lord-knows-what in a stinking little bag was gone from its string round his neck. I tried to buck him up, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. His security against all the evils of this world — and whatever other worlds there might be — was gone. Anything could happen to him now — anything bad. He went round the village with his head sagging down until it was in danger of being hit by a knee. In this condition he was ripe fruit for Langworthy, and Lang-worthy plucked him.

I saw Jeffol converted, although I was too far away to hear the talk that went with it. I was sitting under a cottonwood fixing a pipe. Jeffol had been walking up and down the beach for half an hour or more, his chin on his chest, his feet dragging. The water beyond him was smooth and green under a sky that was getting ready to let down more water. From where I sat, his round turban moved against the green sea like a rolling billiard-ball.

Then Langworthy came up the beach, striding stiff-kneed, as a man strides to a fight lie counts on winning. He caught up with Jeffol and said something to which the Moro paid no attention. Jeffol didn’t raise his head, just went on walking, though he was polite enough ordinarily. Langworthy fell in step beside him and they made a turn up and down the beach, the white man talking away at a great rate. Jeffol, so far as I could see, made no reply at all.

Facing each other, they suddenly stopped. Langworthy’s face was redder than ever and his jaw stuck out. Jeffol was scowling. He said something. Langworthy said something. Jeffol took a step back and his hand went to the ivory hilt of a kris in his belted sarong. He didn’t get the kris out. The missionary stepped in and dropped him with a hard left to the belly.

I got up and went away, reminding myself to watch that left hand if Langworthy and I ever tangled. I didn’t have to sit through the rest of the performance to know that he had made a convert. There are two things a Moro understands thoroughly and respects without stint — violence and a joke. Knock him round, or get a laugh on him, and you can do what you will with him — and he’ll like it. The next time I saw Jeffol he was a Christian.

In spite of the protests of the datto, a few of the Moros followed Jeffol’s example, and Langworthy’s chest grew an inch. He was wise enough to know that he could make better progress by cracking their heads together than by arguing the finer theological points with them, and after two or three athletic gospel-meetings he had his flock well in hand — for a while.

He lost most of them when he brought up the question of wives. Women were not expensive to keep down there and, although the Moros on that particular island weren’t rolling in wealth, nearly all of them could afford a couple of wives, and some were prosperous enough to take on a slave girl or two after they had the four wives their law allowed. Langworthy put his foot down on this. He told his converts they would have to get rid of all except the first wives. And of course all of his converts who had more than one wife promptly went back to Allah — except Jeffol.

He was in earnest, the only idea in his head being to repair the damage done by the loss of his anting-anting. He had four wives and two slaves, including Dinihari. He wanted to keep her and let the others go, hut the missionary said no. Jeffol’s number one wife was his only real wife — thus Langworthy. Jeffol almost bolted then, but the necessity of finding a substitute for his anting-anting was strong in him. They compromised. He was to give up his women, go to Bangao for a divorce from his first wife, and then Langworthy would marry him to Dinihari. Meanwhile the girl was turned over to the datto for safe keeping. The datto’s wife was a dish-faced shrew who had thus far prevented his taking another wife, so his household was considered a safe harbor for the girl.

Three mornings after Jeffol’s departure for Bangao we woke to find Levison among us. He had come in during the night, alone, in a power-yawl piled high with wooden cases.

Levison was a monster, in size and appearance. Six and a half feet high he stood and at a little distance you took him for a man of medium height. There were three hundreds pounds of him bulging his clothes if there was an ounce — not counting the hair, which was an item. He was black hair all over. It bushed out from above his low forehead to the nape of his neck, ran over his eyes in a straight thick bar, and sprouted from ears and great beaked nose. Below his half-hidden dark eyes, black hair bearded his face with a ten-inch tangle, furred his body like a bear’s, padded his shoulders and arms and legs, and lay in thick patches on fingers and toes.

He hadn’t many clothes on when I paddled out to the yawl to get acquainted, and what he had were too small for him. His shirt was split in a dozen places and the sleeves were gone. His pants-legs were torn off at the knees. He looked like a hair-mat-tress coming apart — only there was nothing limp or loose about the body inside of the hair. He was as agile as an acrobat. This was the first time I had seen him, although I recognized him on sight from what I had heard in Manila the year before. He bore a sweet reputation.

“Hello, Levison,” I greeted him as I came alongside. “Welcome to our little paradise.”

He scowled down at me, from hat to shoes and back, and then nodded his immense head.

“You are—”

“I’m not,” I denied, climbing over the side. “I never heard of the fellow, and I’m innocent of whatever he did. My name is Peters and I’m not even distantly related to any other Peters.”

He laughed and produced a bottle of gin.

The village was a double handful of thatched huts set upon piles where the water could wash under them when the tide was in, back in a little cove sheltered by a promontory that pointed towards Celebes. Levison built his house — a large one with three rooms — out near the tip of this point, beside the ruins of the old Spanish block-house. I spent a lot of time out there with him. He was a hard man to get along with, a thoroughly disagreeable companion, but he had gin — real gin and plenty of it — and I was tired of nipa and samshu. He thought I wasn’t afraid of him, and that error made it easier for me to handle him.

There was something queer about this Levison. He was as strong as three men and a vicious brute all the way through, but not with the honest brutality of a strong man. He was like a mean kid who, after being tormented by larger boss, suddenly finds himself among smaller ones. It used to puzzle me. For instance, old Muda stumbled against him once on the path into the jungle. You or I would simply have pushed the clumsy old beggar out of the way, or perhaps, if we happened to be carrying a grouch at the time, have knocked him out of the way. Levison picked him up and did something to his legs. Muda had to be carried back to his hut, and he never succeeded in walking after that.

The Moros called Levison the Hairy One (Ber-Bulu), and, because he was big and strong and tough, they were afraid of him and admired him tremendously.

It was less than a week after his arrival when he brought Dinihari home with him. I was in his house when they came in.

“Get out, Peters,” he said. “ This is my dam’ honeymoon.”

I looked at the girl. She was all dimples and crinkled nose — tickled silly.

“Go easy,” I advised the hairy man. “She belongs to Jeffol, and he’s a tough lad.”

“I know,” he sneered through his beard. “I’ve heard all about him. The hell with him!”

“You’re the doctor. Give me a bottle of gin to drink to you with and I’ll run along.”

I got the gin.

I was with Levison and the girl when Jeffol came back from Bangao. I was sprawled on a divan. On the other side of the room the hairy man was tilted back in a chair, talking. Dinihari sat on the floor at his feet, twisted round to look up into his face with adoring eyes. She was a happy brown girl. Why not? Didn’t she have the strongest man on the island — the strongest man in the whole archipelago? And in addition to his strength, wasn’t he as hairy as a wanderoo, in a land where men hadn’t much hair on face and body?

Then the door whipped open and Jeffol came in. His eyes were red over black. He wasn’t at home in Christianity yet, so he cursed Levison with Mohammedan curses. They are good enough up to a certain point, but the climax — usually pig — falls a bit flat on western ears. Jeffol did well. But he would have done better if he had come in with his knives in his hands instead of in his twisted sarong.

The hairy man’s chair came down square on its legs and he got across the room — sooner than you would think. Jeffol managed to loosen a kris and ripped one of Levison’s arms from elbow to wrist. Then the Moro was through. Levison was too big, too strong, for him — swept him up, cuffed weapons out of hand and sarong, took him by arm and thigh and chucked him out of the door.

Dinihari? Her former lord’s body hadn’t thudded on the ground below — a nasty drop with the tide out — before she was bending over Levison’s hairy arm, kissing the bleeding slit.

Jeffol was laid up for a week with a twisted shoulder and bruised back. I dropped in to see him once, but he wasn’t very cordial. He seemed to think I should have done something. His mother — old toothless Ca’bi — chased me out as soon as she saw me, so my visit didn’t last long. She was a proper old witch.

The village buzzed for a day or two, but nothing happened. If Jeffol hadn’t gone Christian there might have been trouble; but most of the Moros held his desertion of the faith against him, and looked on the loss of Dinihari as just punishment. Those who were still Christians were too tame a lot to help Jeffol. His brother the datto washed his hands of the affair, which was just as well, since he couldn’t have done anything anyway. He wasn’t any too fond of Jeffol — had always been a bit envious of him — and he decided that in giving up the girl at the missionary’s request, Jeffol had surrendered ownership, and that she could stay with Levison if she wished. Apparently she did so wish.

Langworthy went to see Levison. I heard of it a few minutes later and paddled like mad out to the house. If the missionary was going to be smeared up I wanted to see it. I didn’t like the man. But I was too late. He came out just as I got there, and he limped a little. I never found out what happened. I asked Levison, but if he had done all the things he told me the missionary wouldn’t have left standing up. The house wasn’t upset, and Levison didn’t have any marks that showed through his hair, so it couldn’t have been much of a row.

Jeffol’s faith in Christianity as a substitute for an anting-anting must have been weakened by this new misfortune, but Langworthy succeeded in holding him, though he had to work night and day to do it. They were together all of the time — Langworthy usually talking, Jeffol sulking.

“Jeffol’s up and about,” I told Levison one day. ‘‘Better watch your step. He’s shifty, and he’s got good pirate blood in him.”

“Pirate blood be damned!” said Levison. “He’s a nigger and I can handle a dozen of him.”

I let it go at that.

Those were good days in the house out on the point. The girl was a brown lump of happiness. She worshipped her big hair-matted beast of a man, made a god of him. She’d look at him for hour after hour with black eyes that had hallelujahs in them. If he was asleep when I went out there, she’d use the word beradu when she told me so — a word supposed to be sacred to the sleep of royalty.

Levison, swept up in this adoration that was larger than he, became almost mellow for days at a time; and even when he relapsed into normal viciousness now and then he was no crueler to her than a Moro would have been. And there were times when lie became almost what she thought of him. I remember one night: We were all three fairly drunk — Levison and I on gin, the girl, drunker than either of us, on love. She had reached up and buried her brown fists in his beard, a trick she was fond of.

“Hold on!” he cried, kicking his chair away and standing up.

He reared up his head, lifting her from the floor, and spun round, whirling her through the air like a kid swinging on a May-pole. Silly, maybe. But in the yellow lamplight, his beaked nose and laughing red mouth above the black beard to which her fists clung, her smooth brown body slanting through the air in a ripple of gay waist and sarong, there was a wild magnificence to them. He was a real giant that moment.

But it’s hard for me to remember him that way: my last picture of him is the one that sticks. I got it the night of Jeffol’s second call.

He came in late, popping through the door with a brand-new service Colt in one hand and a kris in the other. At his heels trotted old Ca’bi, his mother, followed by broken-nosed Jokanain and a mean little runt named Unga. The old woman carried a bundle of something tied up in nipa leaves, Jokanain swung a heavy barong, and Unga held an ancient blunderbuss.

I started up from where I was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Unga centered the blunderbuss on me.

“Diam dudok!”

I sat still. Blunderbusses are wicked, and Unga had lost twelve dollars Mex to me three nights before.

Levison had jerked to his feet, and then he stopped. The Colt in Jeffol’s hand was too large and too steady for even a monster like Levison to jump at. Dinihari was the only one of us who moved. She flung herself between Jeffol and Levison, hut the Moro swept her out of the way with his left arm, swept her over into a corner without taking eyes or gun from the hairs man.

Old Ca’bi hobbled across the floor and peeped into each of the other rooms.

“Mari,” she croaked from the sleeping-room door.

Step by step Jeffol drove Levison across the room and through that door, Ca’bi going in with them. The door closed and Unga, holding me with the gun, put his back against it.

Dinihari sprang up and dashed toward him. Jokanain caught her from behind and flung her into her corner again. Beyond the door Levison roared out oaths. Ca’bi’s voice cackled excitedly in answering oaths, and in orders to her son. Bind (ikat) and naked (telanjang) were the only words I could pick out of the din. Then Levison’s voice choked off into silence, and no sound at all came from the sleeping-room.

In our room there was no motion. Dinihari sat still in her corner, staring at her feet. Unga and Jokanain were two ugly statues against two doors. The chatter of flying foxes busy among the cottonwoods and the rustling of thatch in a breeze heavy with the stink of drying tripang were the only things you could hear.

I had a dull, end-of-the-road feeling. A Moro is a simple son of nature. When he finds himself so placed that he can kill, he usually kills. Otherwise, it runs in his head, of what use is the power? It’s a sort of instinct for economy. I suspected that Levison, gagged, was being cut, in the Moro fashion, into very small bits; and, while my death might be less elaborate, I didn’t doubt that it too was in the cards. You don’t last long among the Moros once you let them get the bulge on you. If not tonight, some young buck will cut you down tomorrow night, just because he knows he can do it.

Half an hour or more went by slower than you would think it could. My nerves began bothering me: fear taking the form of anger at the suspended activity of the trap I was in; impatience to see the end and get it over with.

I had a gun under my shirt. If I could snake it out and pot Unga, then I had a chance of shooting it out with Jeffol and Jokanain. If I wasn’t fast enough, Unga would turn loose the blunderbuss and blow me and the wall behind me into the Celebes Sea, all mixed up so you couldn’t say which was which. But even that was better than passing out without trying to take anybody with me.

However, there was still gin in the bottle beside me, and it would make the going easier if I could get it in me. I experimented with a slowly reaching hand. Unga said nothing, so I picked up the bottle and took a long drink, leaving one more in it — a stirrup cup, you might say. As I took the bottle down from my mouth, feet pattered in the next room, and old Ca’bi came squeezing out of the door, her mouth spread from ear to ear in a she-devil’s grin.

“Panggil orang-orang,” she ordered Jokanain, and he went out.

I put the last of the gin down my throat. If I were going to move, it would have to be before the rest of the village got here. I set the empty bottle down and scratched my chin, which brought my right hand within striking distance of my gun.

Then Levison bellowed out like a bull gone mad — a bellow that rattled the floor-timbers in their rattan lashings. Jeffol, without his Colt, came tumbling backward through the door, upsetting Unga. The blunderbuss exploded, blowing the roof wide open. In the confusion I got my gun out — and almost dropped it.

Levison stood in the doorway — but my God!

He was as big as ever — they hadn’t whittled any of him away — but he was naked, and without a hair on him anywhere. His skin, where it wasn’t blue with ropemarks, was baby-pink and chafed. They had shaved him clean.

My gaze went up to his head, and I got another shock. Every hair had been scraped off or plucked out, even to his eyebrows, and his naked head sat upon his immense body like a pimple. There wasn’t a quart of it. There was just enough to hold his big beaked nose and his ears, which stood out like palm leaves now that they weren’t supported by hair. Below his loose mouth, his chin was nothing but a sloping down into his burly throat, and the damned thing trembled like a hurt baby’s. His eyes, not shadowed now by shaggy brows, were weak and poppy. A gorilla with a mouse’s head wouldn’t have looked any funnier than Levison without his hair; and the anger that purpled him made him look sillier still. No wonder he had hidden himself behind whiskers!

Dinihari was the first to laugh — a rippling peal of pure amusement. Then I laughed, and Unga and Jeffol. But it wasn’t our laughter that beat Levison. We could only have goaded him into killing us. Old Ca’bi turned the trick. The laughter of an old woman is a thing to say prayers against, and Ca’bi was very old.

She pointed a finger at Levison and screeched over it with a glee that was hellish. Her shriveled gums writhed in her open mouth, as if convulsed with mirth of their own, her scrawny throat swelled and she hopped up and down on her bony feet. Levison forgot the rest of us, turned toward her, and stopped. Her thin body shuddered in frenzies of derision, and her voice laughed as sane people don’t. You could almost sec it — metal lashes of laughter that coiled round his naked body, cut him into raw strips, paralyzed his muscles.

His big body became limp, and he pawed his face with a hand that jerked away as if the touch of the beardless face had burnt it. His knees wobbled, moisture came into his eyes, and his tiny chin quivered. Ca’bi swayed from side to side and hooted at him — a hag gone mad with derision. He backed away from her, cringing back from her laughter like a dog from a whip. She followed him up — laughed him through the sleeping-room door, laughed him back to the far side of the sleeping-room, laughed him through the thin wall. A noise of rippling as he went through the thatch, and a splash of water.

Dinihari stopped laughing and wiped her wet face with her sleeve. Her eyes were soft under Jeffol’s cold gaze.

“Your slave (patek) rejoices,” she cooed, “that her master has recovered his anting-anting and is strong again.”

“Not so,” Jeffol said, and he unbent a little, because she was a woman to want, and because a Moro loves a violent joke. “But there is much in the book of the Christian (neserani kitab). There is a talc the missionary (tuan padri) told me of a hairy one named Sansão, who was strong against his enemies until shorn of his hair. Many other magics (tangkal) are in the book for all occasions.”

So that damned Langworthy was at the bottom of it!

I never saw him again. That night I left the island in Levison’s yawl with the pick of his goods. He was gone, I knew, even if not in one of the sharks that played round the point. His house would be looted before morning, and I had more right to his stuff than the Moros. Hadn’t I been his friend?

Ruffian’s Wife

Sunset Magazine, October 1925

Margaret Tharp habitually passed from slumber to clear-eyed liveliness without intermediate languor. This morning nothing was unusual in her awakening save the absence of the eight o’clock San Francisco boat’s sad hooting. Across the room the clock’s hands pointed like one long hand to a few minutes past seven. Margaret rolled over beneath the covers, putting her back to the sun-painted west wall, and closed her eyes again.

But drowsiness would not come. She was definitely awake to the morning excitement of the next-door chickens, the hum of an automobile going toward the ferry, the unfamiliar fragrance of magnolia in the breeze tickling her cheek with loose hair-ends. She got up, slid feet into soft slippers, shoulders into bathrobe, and went downstairs to start toast and coffee before dressing.

A fat man in black was on the point of leaving the kitchen.

Margaret cried out, catching the robe to her throat with both hands.

Red and crystal glinted on the hand with which the fat man took off his black derby. Holding the doorknob, he turned to face Margaret. He turned slowly, with the smooth precision of a globe revolving on a fixed axis, and he managed his head with care, as if it balanced an invisible burden.

“You — are — Mrs. — Tharp.”

Sighing puffs of breath spaced his words, cushioned them, gave them the semblance of gems nested separately in raw cotton. He was a man past forty, with opaquely glistening eyes whose blackness was repeated with variety of finish in mustache and hair, freshly ironed suit, and enameled shoes. The dark skin of his face — ball-round over a tight stiff collar — was peculiarly coarse, firm-grained, as if it had been baked. Against this background his tie was half a foot of scarlet flame.

“Your — husband — is — not — home.”

It was no more a question than his naming her had been, but he paused expectantly. Margaret, standing where she had stopped in the passageway between stairs and kitchen, was still too startled not to say “No.”

“You’re — expecting — him.”

There was nothing immediately threatening in the attitude of this man who should not have been in her kitchen but who seemed nowise disconcerted by her finding him there. Margaret’s words came almost easily. “Not just — I expect him, yes, but I don’t know exactly when he will come.”

Black hat and black shoulders, moving together, achieved every appearance of a bow without disturbing round head’s poise.

“You — will — so — kindly — tell — him — when — he — comes — I — am — waiting. I — await — him — at — the — hotel.” The spacing puffs prolonged his sentences interminably, made of his phrases thin-spread word-groups whose meanings were elusive. “You — will — tell — him — Leonidas — Doucas — is — waiting. He — will — know. We — are — friends — very — good — friends. You — will — not — forget — the — name — Leonidas — Doucas.”

“Certainly I shall tell him. But I really do not know when he will come.”

The man who called himself Leonidas Doucas nodded frugally beneath the unseen something his head supported. Darkness of mustache and skin exaggerated whiteness of teeth. His smile went away as stiffly as it came, with as little elasticity.

“You — may — expect — him. He — comes — now.”

He revolved slowly away from her and went out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.

Margaret ran tiptoe across the room to twist the key in the door. The lock’s inner mechanism rattled loosely, the bolt would not click home. The warmly sweet fragrance of magnolia enveloped her. She gave up the struggle with the broken lock and dropped down on a chair beside the door. Points of dampness were on her back. Under gown and robe her legs were cold. Doucas, not the breeze, had brought the breath of magnolia to her in bed. His unguessed presence in the bedroom had wakened her. He had been up there looking with his surface-shining eyes for Guy. If Guy had been home, asleep beside her? A picture came of Doucas bending over the bed, his head still stiffly upright, a bright blade in his jeweled fist. She shivered.

Then she laughed. Little silly! How conceivably could Guy — her hard-bodied, hard-nerved Guy, to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper — be harmed by a perfumed, asthmatic fat man? Whether Guy slept or Guy woke, if Doucas came as an enemy, then so much the worse for Doucas — a fleshbound house dog growling at her red wolf of a husband!

She jumped up from her chair and began to bustle with toaster and coffeepot. Leonidas Doucas was put out of her mind by the news he had brought. Guy was coming home. The fat man in black had said so, speaking with assurance. Guy was coming home to fill the house with boisterous laughter, shouted blasphemies, tales of lawlessness in strangely named places; with the odors of tobacco and liquor; with odds and ends of rover’s equipment that never could be confined to closet or room, but overflowed to litter the house from roof to cellar. Cartridges would roll underfoot; boots and belts would turn up in unexpected places; cigars, cigar ends, cigar ashes would be everywhere; empty bottles, likely as not, would get to the front porch to scandalize the neighbors.

Guy was coming home and there were so many things to be done in so small a house; windows and pictures and woodwork to be washed, furniture and floors to be polished, curtains to be hung, rugs to be cleaned. If only he did not come for two days, or even three.

The rubber gloves she had put aside as nuisances — had she put them in the hall closet or upstairs? She must find them. So much scrubbing to do, and her hands must not be rough for Guy. She frowned at the small hand raising toast to her mouth, accused it of roughness. She would have to get another bottle of lotion. If there was time after she finished her work, she might run over to the city for an afternoon. But first the house must be made bright and tidy, so Guy could tweak a stiff curtain and laugh, “A damned dainty nest for a bull like me to be stabled in!”

And perhaps tell of the month he had shared a Rat Island hut with two vermin-live Siwashes, sleeping three abed because their blankets were too few for division.

The two days Margaret had desired went by without Guy, another, others. Her habit of sleeping until the eight o’clock boat whistled up the hill was broken. She was dressed and moving around the house by seven, six, five-thirty one morning, repolishing already glowing fixtures, laundering some thing slightly soiled by yesterday’s use, fussing through her rooms ceaselessly, meticulously, happily.

Whenever she passed the hotel on her way to the stores in lower Water Street she saw Doucas. Usually he was in the glass-fronted lobby, upright in the largest chair, facing the street, round, black-clothed, motionless.

Once he came out of the hotel as she passed.

He looked neither at her nor away from her, neither claimed recognition nor avoided it. Margaret smiled pleasantly, nodded pleasantly, and went on down the street away from his hat raised in a jeweled hand, her small head high. The fragrance of magnolia, going a dozen steps with her, deepened her feeling of somewhat amused, though lenient, graciousness.

The same high-held kindliness went with her through the streets, into the shops, to call on Dora Milner, to her own street door to welcome Agnes Peppier and Helen Chase. She made proud sentences for herself while she spoke other sentences, or listened to them. Guy moves among continents as easily as Tom Milner from drug counter to soda fountain, she thought while Dora talked of guest-room linen. He carries his life as carelessly in his hands as Ned Peppier his brief case, she boasted to the tea she poured for Agnes and Helen, and sells his daring as Paul Chase sells high-grade corner lots.

These people, friends and neighbors, talked among themselves of “poor Margaret,” “poor little Mrs. Tharp,” whose husband was notoriously a ruffian, always off some distant where, up to any imaginable sort of scoundrelism. They pitied her, or pretended to pity her, these owners of docile pets, because her man was a ranging beast who could not be penned, because he did not wear the dull uniform of respectability, did not walk along smooth, safe ways. Poor little Mrs. Tharp! She put her cup to her mouth to check the giggle that threatened to break in rudely on Helen’s interpretation of a disputed bridge point.

“It really doesn’t matter, so long as everyone knows what rule is to be followed before the game starts,” she said into a pause that asked words of her, and went on with her secret thinking.

What, she wondered with smug assurance that it never could have happened to her, would it be like to have for husband a tame, housebroken male who came regularly to meals and bed, whose wildest flying could attain no giddier height than an occasional game of cards, a suburbanite’s holiday in San Francisco, or, at very most, a dreary adventure with some stray stenographer, manicurist, milliner?

Late on the sixth day that Margaret expected him, Guy came.

Preparing her evening meal in the kitchen, she heard the creaking halt of an automobile in front of the house. She ran to the door and peeped through the curtained glass. Guy stood on the sidewalk, his broad back to her, taking leather traveling bags out of the car that had brought him up from the ferry. She smoothed her hair with cold hands, smoothed her apron, and opened the door.

Guy turned from the machine, a bag in each hand, one under his arm. He grinned through a two-day stubble of florid beard and waved a bag as you would wave a handkerchief.

A torn cap was crooked on his tangled red hair, his chest bulged a corduroy jacket of dilapidated age, grimy khaki trousers were tight around knotted thighs and calves, once-white canvas shoes tried to enclose feet meant for larger shoes, and failed to the extent of a brown-stockinged big toe. A ruddy viking in beggar’s misfits. There would be other clothes in his bags. Rags were his homecoming affectation, a laborer-home-from-the-fields gesture. He strode up the walk, careless bags brushing geraniums and nasturtiums back.

Margaret’s throat had some swollen thing in it. Fog blurred everything but the charging red face. An unvoiced whimper shook her breast. She wanted to run to him as to a lover. She wanted to run from him as from a ravisher. She stood very still in her doorway, smiling demurely with dry, hot mouth.

His feet padded on steps, on porch. Bags fell away from him. Thick arms reached for her.

The odors of alcohol, sweat, brine, tobacco cut her nostrils. Bearded flesh scrubbed her cheek. She lost foothold, breath, was folded into him, crushed, bruised, bludgeoned by hard lips. Eyes clenched against the pain in them, she clung hard to him who alone was firmly planted in a whirling universe. Foul endearments, profane love names rumbled in her ear. Another sound was even nearer — a throaty cooing. She was laughing.

Guy was home.

The evening was old before Margaret remembered Leonidas Doucas.

She was sitting on her husband’s knees, leaning forward to look at the trinkets, Ceylonese spoils, heaped on the table before her. Cockleshell earrings half hid her ears, heavy gold incongruities above the starched primness of her housedress.

Guy — bathed, shaved, and all in fresh white — tugged beneath his shirt with his one free hand. A moneybelt came sluggishly away from his body, thudded on the table, and lay there thick and apathetic as an overfed snake. Guy’s freckled fingers worked at the belt’s pockets. Green banknotes slid out, coins rolled out to be bogged by the paper, green notes rustled out to bury the coins.

“Oh, Guy!” she gasped. “All that?”

He chuckled, jiggling her on his knees, and fluttered the green notes up from the table like a child playing with fallen leaves.

“All that. And every one of ’em cost a pint of somebody’s pink blood. Maybe they look cool and green to you, but I’m telling you every last one of ’em is as hot a red as the streets of Colombo, if you could only see it.”

She refused to shudder under the laugh in his red-veined eyes, laughed, and stretched a tentative finger to the nearest note.

“How much is there, Guy?”

“I don’t know. I took ’em moving,” he boasted. “No time for bookkeeping. It was bing, bang, get clear and step in again. We dyed the Yoda-ela red that one night. Mud under, darkness over, rain everywhere, with a brown devil for every raindrop. A pith helmet hunting for us with a flashlight that never found anything but a stiff-necked Buddha up on a rock before we put it out of business.”

The “stiff-necked Buddha” brought Doucas’s face to Margaret.

“Oh! There was a man here to see you last week. He’s waiting to see you at the hotel. His name is Doucas, a very stout man with—”

“The Greek!”

Guy Tharp put his wife off his knees. He put her off neither hastily nor roughly, but with that deliberate withdrawal of attention which is the toy’s lot when serious work is at hand.

“What else did he have to say?”

“That was all, except that he was a friend of yours. It was early in the morning, and I found him in the kitchen, and I know he had been upstairs. Who is he, Guy?”

“A fellow,” her husband said vaguely around the knuckle he bit. He seemed to attach no importance to, not even be interested by, the news that Doucas had come furtively into his house. “Seen him since then?”

“Not to talk to, but I see him every time I pass the hotel.”

Guy took the knuckle from between his teeth, rubbed his chin with a thumb, hunched his thick shoulders, let them fall lax, and reached for Margaret. Slumped comfortably in his chair, holding her tight to him with hard arms, he fell to laughing, teasing, boasting again, his voice a mellow, deep-bodied rumble under her head. But his eyes did not pale to their normal sapphire. Behind jest and chuckle an aloof thoughtfulness seemed to stand.

Asleep that night, he slept with the soundness of child or animal, but she knew he had been long going to sleep.

Just before daylight she crept out of bed and carried the money into another room to count it. Twelve thousand dollars were there.

In the morning Guy was merry, full of laughter and words that had no alien seriousness behind them. He had stories to tell of a brawl in a Madras street, or another in a gaming house in Saigon; of a Finn, met in the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, who was having a giant raft towed to a spot in mid-Pacific where he thought he could live with least annoyance from the noise of the earth’s spinning.

Guy talked, laughed, and ate breakfast with the heartiness of one who does not ordinarily know when he will eat again. The meal done, he lit a black cigar and stood up. “Reckon I’ll trot down the hill for a visit with your friend Leonidas, and see what’s on his mind.”

When he mauled her to his chest to kiss her, she felt the bulk of a revolver holstered under his coat. She went to a front window to watch him go away from the house. He swaggered carelessly down the hill, shoulders swinging, whistling, “Bang Away, My Lulu.”

Back in the kitchen, Margaret made a great to-do with the breakfast dishes, setting about cleaning them as if it were a difficult task attempted for the first time. Water splashed on her apron, twice the soap slipped from her hand to the floor, a cup’s handle came away in her fingers. Then dishwashing became accustomed work, no longer an occupation to banish unwanted thoughts. The thoughts came, of Guy’s uneasiness last night, of his laughter that had lacked honesty.

She fashioned a song that compared a fleshbound house dog with a red wolf; a man to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper, with a perfumed, asthmatic fat man. Repetition gave the unspoken chant rhythm, rhythm soothed her, took her mind from what might be happening in the hotel down the hill.

She had finished the dishes and was scouring the sink when Guy came back. She looked a brief smile up at him and bent her face to her work again, to hide the questions she knew her eyes held.

He stood in the doorway watching her.

“Changed my mind,” he said presently. “I’ll let him write his own ticket. If he wants to see me, he knows the way. It’s up to him.”

He moved away from the door. She heard him going upstairs.

Her hands rested on idle palms in the sink. The white porcelain of the sink was white ice. Its chill went through her arms into her body.

An hour later, when Margaret went upstairs, Guy was sitting on the side of the bed running a cloth through the barrel of his black revolver. She fidgeted around the room, pretending to be busy with this and that, hoping he would answer the questions she could not ask. But he talked of unrelated things. He cleaned and greased the revolver with the slow, fondling thoroughness of a chronic whittler sharpening his knife, and talked of matters that had no bearing on Leonidas Doucas.

The rest of the day he spent indoors, smoking and drinking the afternoon through in the living-room. When he leaned back, the revolver made a lump under his left armpit. He was merry and profane and boastful. For the first time Margaret saw his thirty-five years in his eyes, and in the individual clearness of each thick facial muscle.

After dinner they sat in the dining-room with no illumination but the light of fading day. When that was gone neither of them got up to press the electric button beside the portiered hall door. He was as garrulous as ever. She found speech difficult, but he did not seem to notice that. She was never especially articulate with him.

They were sitting in complete darkness when the doorbell rang.

“If that’s Doucas, show him in,” Guy said. “And then you’d better get upstairs out of the way.”

Margaret turned on the lights before she left the room, and looked back at her husband. He was putting down the cold cigar stub he had been chewing. He grinned mockingly at her.

“And if you hear a racket,” he suggested, “you’d better stick your head under the covers and think up the best way to get blood out of rugs.”

She held herself very erect going to the door and opening it.

Doucas’s round black hat came off to move with his shoulders in a counterfeit bow that swept the odor of magnolia to her.

“Your — husband — is — in.”

“Yes.” Her chin was uptilted so she could seem to smile on him, though he stood a head taller than she, and she tried to make her smile very sweetly gentle. “Come in. He is expecting you.”

Guy, sitting where she had left him, fresh cigar alight, did not get up to greet Doucas. He took the cigar from his mouth and let smoke leak between his teeth to garnish the good-natured insolence of his smile.

“Welcome to our side of the world,” he said.

The Greek said nothing, standing just inside the portiere.

Margaret left them thus, going through the room and up the back stairs. Her husband’s voice came up the steps behind her in a rumble of which she could pick no words. If Doucas spoke she did not hear him.

She stood in her dark bedroom, clutching the foot of the bed with both hands, the trembling of her body making the bed tremble. Out of the night questions came to torment her, shadowy questions, tangling, knotting, raveling in too swiftly shifting a profusion for any to be clearly seen, but all having something to do with a pride that in eight years had become a very dear thing.

They had to do with a pride in a man’s courage and hardihood, courage and hardihood that could make of thefts, of murder, of crimes dimly guessed, wrongs no more reprehensible than a boy’s apple-stealing. They had to do with the existence or nonexistence of this gilding courage, without which a rover might be no more than a shoplifter on a geographically larger scale, a sneak thief who crept into strangers’ lands instead of houses, a furtive, skulking figure with an aptitude for glamorous autobiography. Then pride would be silliness.

Out of the floor came a murmur, all that distance and intervening carpentry left of words that were being said down in her tan-papered dining-room. The murmur drew her toward the dining-room, drew her physically, as the questions drove her.

She left her slippers on the bedroom floor. Very softly, stockinged feet carried her down the dark front stairs, tread by tread. Skirts held high and tight against rustling, she crept down the black stairs toward the room where two men — equally strangers for the time — sat trafficking.

Beneath the portiere, and from either side, yellow light came to lay a pale, crooked U on the hall floor. Guy’s voice came through.

“...not there. We turned the island upside down from Dambulla all the way to the Kala-wewa, and got nothing. I told you it was a bust. Catch those limeys leaving that much sugar lay round under their noses!”

“Dahl — said — it — was — there.”

Doucas’s voice was soft with the infinitely patient softness of one whose patience is nearly at end.

Creeping to the doorway, Margaret peeped around the curtain. The two men and the table between them came into the opening. Doucas’s over-coated shoulder was to her. He sat straight up, hands inert on fat thighs, cocked profile inert. Guy’s white-sleeved forearms were on the table. He leaned over them, veins showing in forehead and throat, smaller and more vivid around the blue-black of his eyes. The glass in front of him was empty; the one before Doucas still brimmed with dark liquor.

“I don’t give a damn what Dahl says.” Guy’s voice was blunt, but somehow missed finality. “I’m telling you the stuff wasn’t there.”

Doucas smiled. His lips bared white teeth and covered them again in a cumbersome grimace that held as little of humor as of spontaneity.

“But — you — came — from — Ceylon — no — poorer — than — you — went.”

Guy’s tongue-tip showed flat between his lips, vanished. He looked at his freckled hands on the table. He looked up at Doucas.

“I didn’t. I brought fifteen thousand hard roundmen away with me, if it’s any of your business,” he said, and then robbed his statement of sincerity, made a weak blustering of it, with an explanation. “I did a thing a man needed done. It had nothing to do with our game. It was after that blew up.”

“Yes. I — choose — to — doubt — it.”

Soft, sigh-cushioned, the words had a concussive violence no shouted You lie! could have matched.

Guy’s shoulders bunched up, teeth clicked, blood pulsed in the veins that welted his face. His eyes flared purplishly at the dark baked mask before him, flared until the held breath in Margaret’s chest became an agony.

The flare went down in the purple eyes. The eyes went down. Guy scowled at his hands, at his knuckles that were round white knobs.

“Suit yourself, brother,” he said, not distinctly.

Margaret swayed behind her shielding curtain, reason barely checking the instinctive hand with which she clutched for steadiness at it. Her body was a cold damp shell around a vacancy that had been until to-day — until, despite awakening doubts, this very instant — eight years’ accumulation of pride. Tears wet her face, tears for the high-held pride that was now a ridiculous thing. She saw herself as a child going among adults, flaunting a Manila-paper bandeau, crying shrilly, “See my gold crown!”

“We — waste — time. Dahl — said — half — a — million — rupees. Doubtless — it — was — less. But — most — surely — half — that — amount — would — be — there.” The pad of breath before and after each word became by never-varying repetition an altogether unnatural thing. Each word lost association with each other word, became a threatening symbol hung up in the room. “Not — regarding — odd — amounts — my — portion — would — be — say — seventy-five — thousand — dollars. I — will — take — that.”

Guy did not look up from his hard white knuckles. His voice was sullen.

“Where do you expect to find it?”

The Greek’s shoulders moved the least fraction of an inch. Because he had for so long not moved at all that slight motion became a pronounced shrug.

“You — will — give — it — to — me. You — would — not — have — a — word — dropped — to — the — British — consul — of — one — who — was — Tom — Berkey — in — Cairo — not — many — yesterdays — back.”

Guy’s chair spun back from him. He lunged across the table.

Margaret clapped a palm to her mouth to stop the cry her throat had no strength to voice.

The Greek’s right hand danced jewels in Guy’s face. The Greek’s left hand materialized a compact pistol out of nothing.

“Sit — down — my — friend.”

Hanging over the table, Guy seemed to become abruptly smaller, as oncoming bodies do when stopped. For a moment he hung there. Then he grunted, regained his balance, picked up his chair, and sat down. His chest swelled and shrank slowly.

“Listen, Doucas,” he said with great earnestness, “you’re all wrong. I’ve got maybe ten thousand dollars left. I got it myself, but if you think you’ve got a kick coming, I’ll do what’s right. You can have half of the ten thousand.”

Margaret’s tears were gone. Pity for self had turned to hatred of the two men who sat in her dining-room making a foolish thing of her pride. She still trembled, but with anger now, and contempt for her boasted red wolf of a husband, trying to buy off the fat man who threatened him. The contempt she felt for her husband was great enough to include Doucas. She had a desire to step through the doorway, to show them that contempt. But nothing came of the impulse. She would not have known what to do, what to say to them. She was not of their world.

Only her pride had been in her husband’s place in that world.

“Five — thousand — dollars — is — nothing. Twenty — thousand — rupees — I — spent — preparing — Ceylon — for — you.”

Margaret’s helplessness turned contempt in on herself. The very bitterness of that contempt drove her to attempt to justify, recapture some fragment of, her pride in Guy. After all, what knowledge had she of his world? What standards had she with which to compute its values? Could any man win every encounter? What else could Guy do under Doucas’s pistol?

The futility of the self-posed questions angered her. The plain truth was she had never seen Guy as a man, but always as a half-fabulous being. The weakness of any defense she could contrive for him lay in his needing a defense. Not to be ashamed of him was a sorry substitute for her exultance in him. To convince herself that he was not a coward still would leave vacant the place lately occupied by her joy in his daring.

Beyond the curtain the two men bargained on across the table.

“...every — cent. Men — do — not — profitably — betray — me.”

She glared through the gap between portiere and frame, at fat Doucas with his pistol level on tabletop, at red Guy pretending to ignore the pistol. Rage filled her — weaponless, impotent rage. Or was it weaponless? The light-button was beside the door. Doucas and Guy were occupied with one another—

Her hand moved before the motive impulse was full-formed inside her. The situation was intolerable; darkness would change the situation, however slightly, therefore darkness was desirable. Her hand moved between portiere and doorframe, bent to the side as if gifted with sight, drove her finger into the button.

Roaring blackness was streaked by a thin bronze flame. Guy bellowed out, an animal noise without meaning. A chair slammed to the floor. Feet shuffled, stamped, scuffled. Grunts punctuated snarls.

Concealed by night, the two men and what they did became for the first time real to Margaret, physically actual. They were no longer figures whose substance was in what they did to her pride. One was her husband, a man who could be maimed, killed. Doucas was a man who could be killed. They could die, either or both, because of a woman’s vanity. A woman, she, had flung them toward death rather than confess she could be less than a giant’s wife.

Sobbing, she pushed past the portiere and with both hands hunted for the switch that had come so readily to her finger a moment ago. Her hands fumbled across a wall that shuddered when bodies crashed into it. Behind her, fleshed bone smacked on fleshed bone. Feet shuffled in time with hoarse breathing. Guy cursed. Her fingers fluttered back and forth, to and fro across wallpaper that was unbroken by electric fixture.

The scuffling of feet stopped. Guy’s cursing stopped in mid-syllable. A purring gurgle had come into the room, swallowing every other sound, giving density, smothering weight to the darkness, driving Margaret’s frenzied fingers faster across the wall.

Her right hand found the doorframe. She held it there, pressed it there until the edge of the wood cut into her hand, holding it from frantic search while she made herself form a picture of the wall. The light-switch was a little below her shoulder, she decided.

“Just below my shoulder,” she whispered harshly, trying to make herself hear the words above the purring gurgle. Her shoulder against the frame, she flattened both hands on the wall, moved them across it.

The purring gurgle died, leaving a more oppressive silence, the silence of wide emptiness.

Cold metal came under sliding palm. A finger found the button, fumbled too eagerly atop it, slid off. She clutched at the button with both hands. Light came. She whirled her back to the wall.

Across the room Guy straddled Doucas, holding his head up from the floor with thick hands that hid the Greek’s white collar. Doucas’s tongue was a bluish pendant from a bluish mouth. His eyes stood out, dull. The end of a red silk garter hung from one trouser-leg, across his shoe.

Guy turned his head toward Margaret, blinking in the light.

“Good girl,” he commended her. “This Greek was no baby to jump at in daylight.”

One side of Guy’s face was wet red under a red furrow. She sought escape in his wound from the implication of was.

“You’re hurt!”

He took his hands away from the Greek’s neck and rubbed one of them across the cheek. It came away dyed red. Doucas’s head hit the floor hollowly and did not quiver.

“Only nicked me,” Guy said. “I need it to show self-defense.”

The reiterated implication drove Margaret’s gaze to the man on the floor, and quickly away.

“He is—?”

“Deader than hell,” Guy assured her.

His voice was light, tinged faintly with satisfaction.

She stared at him in horror, her back pressed against the wall, sick with her own part in this death, sick with Guy’s callous brutality of voice and mien. Guy did not see these things. He was looking thoughtfully at the dead man.

“I told you I’d give him a bellyful if he wanted it,” he boasted. “I told him the same thing five years ago, in Malta.”

He stirred the dead Doucas gently with one foot. Margaret cringed against the wall, feeling as if she were going to vomit.

Guy’s foot nudged the dead man slowly, reflectively. Guy’s eyes were dull with distant things, things that might have happened five years ago in a place that to her was only a name on a map, vaguely associated with Crusades and kittens. Blood trickled down his cheek, hung momentarily in fattening drops, dripped down on the dead man’s coat.

The poking foot stopped its ghoulish play. Guy’s eyes grew wide and bright, his face lean with eagerness. He snapped fist into palm and jerked around to Margaret.

“By God! This fellow has got a pearl concession down in La Paz! If I can get down there ahead of the news of the killing, I can — Why, what’s the matter?”

He stared at her, puzzlement wiping animation from his face.

Margaret’s gaze faltered away from him. She looked at the overturned table, across the room, at the floor. She could not hold up her eyes for him to see what was in them. If understanding had come to him at once — but she could not stand there and look at him and wait for the thing in her eyes to burn into his consciousness.

She tried to keep that thing out of her voice.

“I’ll bandage your cheek before we phone the police,” she said.

The Nails in Mr. Cayterer

Black Mask, January 1926

I was experiencing, as one will, difficulty with the eighth line of a rondeau when Papa’s firm and not to be mistaken tread sounded outside my door. Now I did not like deception, no matter how mild, but neither did I like having Papa quarrel with me, and more forcible, if not actually greater, than my abhorrence of duplicity was Papa’s antipathy to my poetry, a prejudice which, I may be excused for believing, owed much of its vigor to the fact that he had never read, so far as I knew, a single line of my work.

In these circumstances I could not feel that it was altogether reprehensible of me to slip the unfinished poem under a pile of reward circulars on my desk while, with my other hand, I picked up the top circular, so that when Papa entered my office I was, at least so far as appearance went, studying the description of one Johnson Tobin, alias The Dis-and-Dat Kid, who had recently escaped from the lawn of the federal prison at Leavenworth.

“Up and at ’em, Robin! Got a job.”

Picking up my hat, I followed Papa out into the corridor, where he explained somewhat fancifully, as we stood waiting for an elevator, “Hop Cayterer’s been squirting tears in my ear over the phone. By the sound of his whining, somebody’s done him wrong for one of his millions.”

One who had not known Papa might have thought, witnessing his joviality of voice and demeanor, that he derived considerable satisfaction from Mr. Cayterer’s plight, but that notion, I need hardly say, would have been quite unjust. The truth was simply that Papa liked his work in its every aspect, and thus greeted each new task with a wealth of pleasurable anticipation which, it must be confessed, sometimes rendered him just a little callous to the anguish of those who brought their difficulties to him.

Our client’s offices were only a few blocks from ours in distance, but far from ours in appearance; ours were small and almost severely plain; Mr. Cayterer’s were large and elaborately furnished, and the largest and most luxurious was his private office, into which a neat, bright-eyed boy of perhaps fifteen ushered us.

Although this was not my first visit to the office (we had, the year before, performed some work for Mr. Cayterer in connection with a dubious cement contract), I was struck afresh by the room’s charming arrangement. It was a room whose length was perhaps twice its width, and in it there was nothing — from the stained glass of the wide windows to the old charts that covered the walls above time-darkened paneling — at which one could point a finger and say, “That does not become a place of business,” and neither was there — from the dull black of the richly carved desk at which Mr. Cayterer and his secretary sat to the wrought iron knob on the door behind us — a trace of the rigid angularity and hard shininess that make modern commercial furnishings so hideous.

Mr. Cayterer stood up to shake Papa’s hand and mine. He was a large man, nearly as large as Papa, and of about the same age, which was sixty-three, but smooth-shaven — Papa wore an irregular grey mustache — and without Papa’s ruddiness. One is inclined to expect an outdoor complexion of a mining engineer, but doubtless Mr, Cayterer’s sallowness could be defended on the grounds that he was more promoter than engineer.

“Sit down, Mr. Thin,” he said to Papa, and to me; and to his secretary: “That will be all now, Miss Brenham.”

“Yes, Mr. Cayterer.”

She had not looked at Papa and me when we came into the office, and. she did not look at us now as she gathered up letters, pencil and notebook and withdrew. She was a distinctly attractive young woman of not more than twenty years, with soft lemon-colored hair and singularly mild blue eyes.

Mr. Cayterer slid an open teak box that was really a trunk full of cigars across the desk toward us. Papa took a cigar while I smiled my thanks and my refusal.

“Thin,” the promoter said slowly to Papa when their cigars were burning, “some — is crucifying me.”

Papa moved his cigar from the right corner of his mouth to the left without the assistance of his fingers.

“Is, has or is trying to?”

Mr. Cayterer took his cigar from his mouth, and, turning it in his hand, studied it without visible satisfaction. The cigar was, I perceived, burning quite crookedly, a detail not without its significance.

“Well, he’s got two nails in me and his hammer’s up over the third.”

“So. Suppose we take a look at the couple you’ve got.”

“We’ll get around to that, Thin, Do you know anything about China? About Chinese affairs today?”

“Only that all those dinguses they sell in Chinatown don’t come from there.”

“That’s something to know,” the promoter replied gravely, and frowned again at his unevenly lighted cigar.

Clasping my hands in my lap, I repressed my impatience, my impulse to fidget. No one who had read, in The Jongleur, my appreciation of Danko’s poems could have accused me of being without sympathy for the primitive; hut I felt, none the less, listening to the casual metaphors, the jocular irrelevancies, with which Papa and Mr. Cayterer skirted around whatever business had brought us here, that these circumlocutions, these survivals of Indian council fire and bushman community hut, might well have been dispensed with in favor of modem conciseness and clarity.

“China’s got a central government,” the promoter approached the point of our conference at last, “but it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe tomorrow there’ll be a new president, dictator, emperor. It doesn’t make much difference if there is, or which. What power there is is in the hands of the tuchuns — the governors of the provinces. A real central government will come when one of the tuchuns is big enough to buy in or beat out the other tuchuns. I think I know who’ll be that one — and that’s what got me into this.

“Never mind his name, but he — this special tuchun — and I are old friends. We’ve done business together in the past and, what’s more, made a profit at it. Now look! The U.S. is the U.S., and China is China, but politics is politics and people are people. The leading candidates for the job of running China just now are Chang Tso-lin and Feng Yu-hsian, with a few weaker ones trailing them. They’ve been making their plays for some time, and they’ve got themselves nicely balanced. One wins here, the other wins there. Neither is strong enough to push the other out of the way — a stand-off.

“That sounds familiar, huh? Sounds like a good American presidential convention, doesn’t it? Well, what happens here when a couple of candidates get themselves balanced like that? I’ll tell you what happens. Somebody you haven’t thought of, but who has been doing some thinking on his own account, breaks loose and grabs the job. Well, the dark horse tuchun in this case is my friend. It’s a gamble. He’s got a good chance of putting it across, but he needs backing, good round dollars. If he wins there’ll be concessions — mines and maybe some oil. If he loses there’ll be nothing. It’s a plain gamble — put up your money and take your chances. But it’s a good gamble because I know my man and he’s on the level.

“I didn’t have the money to swing the deal by myself, and wouldn’t if I could. I’m a little bit too old to plunge into anything up to the hilt. So I formed a syndicate, took in four others who don’t mind risking something on a likely game. So each of us put up his share, and the money was waiting to be shipped to China — and then came the first nail.”

From a drawer of his desk Mr. Cayterer took a small white envelope which he handed to Papa. Standing up, I looked at it over Papa’s shoulder. It bore a Japanese stamp and a Kobe postmark, and was addressed in a somewhat heavy though irregular hand:

Hopkins F. Cayterer, Esq.,

1021 Seaman’s Bank Building,

San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A.

The letter it enclosed, in the same handwriting, read:

My dear Mr. Cayterer —

By the best of tuck I find myself in a position to be of great assistance to you. It is a near thing, but if you act quickly I can keep your arrangements with the Honorable K. from coming to the attention of the press.

The New York draft should be made payable to my order, but should be sent to Mr. B. J. Randall, General Delivery, Los Angeles, California. — This letter should be in your Hands by the tenth of the month and the draft should reach Mr. Randall by the fifteenth at the very latest. Trusting that you will not endanger your Asiatic plans by incautious actions, I am,

Most respectfully yours,

FITZMAURICE THROGMORTON.

P. S. Ten thousand dollars will be sufficient. T.

“So.” Papa rolled the cigar in his mouth and laid the letter on the desk. “Know him?”

“Never heard of him before.” And then Mr. Cayterer said a most astounding thing: “I sent him the ten thousand.”

Papa expressed his astonishment in three words that I need not repeat here. My own amazement was fully as great as my parent’s; it seemed preposterous that a man of Mr. Cayterer’s caliber should have submitted to so brazen a demand.

“You see he’s got me,” Mr. Cayterer defended his folly. “Maybe he doesn’t really know anything, is just guessing. It’s a cinch he can’t prove anything. But that’s no good. One hint and the game’s up. The State Department wouldn’t do a thing to me if they got wise! And then there are the rival tuchuns, the Japanese, the Russians and British, and even my man’s own supporters. They would all pile on him like a ton of bricks if they smelled the game before he’s ready to pull the trigger.

“If he wins we won’t have to worry about what howling these parties do. The gravy will be ours, and they can yap their heads off for all the good it’ll do them. But a suspicion now would ruin us. What else could I do? Paying hush money is foolish, but there I am: millions in it if we win and three lines in a newspaper can beat us. What else could I do but send this Throgmorton his money and hope he’d go on a spree on it and get his throat cut?”

“Didn’t you even try to get hold of these birds?” Papa asked, face and voice indicating clearly how little he valued the promoter’s defense.

“Yes, I tried, but it did me little enough good. I sent word to China to have the Japanese end looked to, and I’ve had Randall hunted for in Los Angeles, but with no luck. Not being able to go to the Post Office Department for help crippled us. Then I heard from them the second time.”

He produced another letter, similar to the first, in which Throgmorton thanked him for the draft, declined his invitation to a conference, suggested that in the interests of secrecy Mr. Cayterer’s agents had better stop their inquiries into his (Throgmorton’s) affairs, declared that several unforeseen matters had arisen to make necessary the expenditure of an additional twenty-five thousand dollars, and instructed Mr. Cayterer to send a draft for that amount to B. J. Randall, General Delivery, Portland, Oregon.

“And you?” Papa asked.

“Sent it.”

“So. Now what do your partners — the other members of your syndicate — think of your generosity?”

“They” — there was an odd reluctance in the promoter’s voice and he was staring at a distant chair — “know nothing about these letters, yet. Have you noticed anything... anything peculiar about the letters?”

“American paper, but that proves nothing.”

“The handwriting—” Mr. Cayterer stopped watching the distant chair and looked at Papa and at me with the eyes of an orator who is about to startle his audience. “The handwriting is mine.”

To that I said, nothing, while Papa said, “So.”

“It is. Not exactly mine, you understand, but — well, it’s about like mine would be if I tried to disguise it and didn’t make too good a job of it.”

“And that’s why you didn’t show it to the others?”

“Yes, or that’s one of the reasons. They might have thought I was trying to put something over on them. But I would have been tempted to pocket the loss and keep quiet anyway. A couple of the members of the syndicate could be frightened out easily enough.”

“Mr. Cayterer,” I made my first contribution to the discussion, “you did not, of course, write those letters, did you?”

“What?” His face was suddenly rosier than Papa’s and in his open mouth quite a bit of dental work was visible. “What the what,” he said, “do you think I am?”

“Behave yourself, Robin!” Papa ordered sharply.

“It is a point that should be covered,” I insisted, refusing to be cowed, “and I should like an answer.”

The promoter brushed his cigar off the desk, whither it had fallen when his mouth had so abruptly opened, and looked at me as if I were some not very prepossessing thing seen for the first time.

“You guessed it,” he complied with my request at last. “I didn’t of course write them.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cayterer,” and I relapsed into observant silence again.

“What next?” Papa questioned the promoter while scowling sidewise at me.

“Another letter yesterday — this one.”

It too was in the same handwriting, signed Fitzmaurice Throgmorton, and postmarked Kobe, Japan; and it ordered that a draft for one hundred thousand dollars be sent to the familiar Randall, General Delivery, Spokane, Washington.

“Fall for this one?”

“No!” Mr. Cayterer sat up very straight, shut his mouth hard so that the flesh which hid his jawbone bulged out, and, somewhat theatrically, slapped the top of his desk with one well-padded palm. “I’ve paid him enough. I’m paying you now. Get hold of these people. Tell ’em they’re welcome to what they’ve got, but that’s all. If he wants to blow up my game — all right! There’s prison in it for them!”

Papa was not one to be greatly impressed by eloquence or fervor or impassioned gestures.

“And suppose they laugh at me when I tell ’em that?” he inquired. “Will I have to admit I was only bluffing, or do you really want them thrown into the can?”

Mr. Cayterer wrinkled his pale forehead and rubbed his fleshy chin with the hand that had a moment ago so emphatically thumped the desk.

“Well, I don’t want to be throwing money around like confetti. If you can’t scare them off I suppose I’ll have to pay something. It hurts to be played for a sucker, but there’s too much money involved to let pride interfere. You find them and do what you can with them. You know how to handle those people, Thin. But, mind you, no fuss; no dragging in the Federal people!”

“Uh-huh. Now about the members of your syndicate — who are they?”

“Is that necessary?”

“Yes. I won’t work blindfolded.”

Mr. Cayterer looked at the top of his desk, cleared his throat, pouted complainingly at the desk, cleared his throat again, and said:

“All right. Tom Aston of the Golden Gate Trust Company, Captain Lucas of the Lucas-Born shipping concern, and Murray Tyler and Judge DeGraff of that law firm.”

“So. Now who besides you and them knows about the scheme?”

“No one else knows about the... the plan. My secretary, of course, and my nephew, but they—”

“What about this secretary? You mean the girl who was here when we came?”

“Yes, and you can disregard her in this matter. Miss Brenham has been in my employ for two years, which is not such a long time, maybe, but long enough for me to know that she is thoroughly trustworthy,”

“So.” The low value Papa placed on our client’s opinion almost flaunted itself in the accent he gave his favorite, monosyllable. “And the nephew?”

“Ford... Ford Nugent is his name — is my sister’s son. His parents are dead. He is a wild youngster, right enough, but I don’t think anybody ever questioned his honesty. He’s knocked around a lot, and knows Asia, so I got hold of him when this thing came up, intending to send him over there to keep an eye on things for me when the plan was put in operation.”

“And the rest of your employees?”

“They know nothing at all about it.”

“You mean you think they don’t. Who are they?”

“Well, there’s John Benedick, my chief clerk, who has been with me for ten years or more; and Carty, the bookkeeper, ten years; and Fraser and Ert, office men; and Ralph, the office boy, Miss Brenham’s brother; and Petrie, a draftsman; and Miss Zobel, stenographer and file clerk. There are others, but they are outside men, and none of them has been in the office since the Chinese plan came up. However, none of these people I have mentioned could possibly know anything about it.”

“We’ll want their addresses,” Papa said, quite as if Mr. Cayterer’s assurances had never been uttered, “and also your nephew’s. Now about your Chinese dark horse?”

“What about him?”

“Would he gyp you?”

“What for?” Mr. Cayterer was scornful. “I’m planning to hand him dollars where these blackmailers are getting pennies!”

“But how about his people?”

“There’s something in that. The leak must be on his end. But he can move there better than we, and we can trust him to take care of it. He’s nobody’s fool!”

“What did he say when you sent him word of the leak — if anything?”

“He sent back word to pay what was demanded and deduct it from his fund, and promised that if the trouble was on his end there wouldn’t be many demands.”

“So. Now about the two drafts you sent — have they come back to the bank yet?”

“No, they hadn’t at ten this morning.”

“Have you sent any of the syndicate’s money to the tuchun yet?”

“No. The first instalment was to have gone today, but I don’t like to let it go until I’ve got an idea how we’re going to come out on this business.”

“That’s just as well,” Papa decided. “If I were you, I’d hang on to it until we see what’s at the bottom of this. Is that nephew of yours around?”

“Not just now. He’ll be in this afternoon if you want to talk to him. But you might as well take my word for it that Ford is all right.”

“Does he know about these blackmail letters?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He advised me not to pay a nickel. But he’s young.”

“So. Let’s have the girl in.”

Mr. Cayterer put a finger on one of the battery of dark buttons on his desk, and almost immediately the door opened to admit the secretary, her blue eyes attentive on her employer, her pencil and notebook ready in her hands.

“No dictation, Miss Brenham. Mr. Thin wants to talk to you about that Chinese affair. I’ve engaged him to straighten it out for me.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Cayterer,” she said, and faced Papa and me.

“Won’t you sit down, Miss Brenham?” I offered her the chair from which I had risen.

“Oh, thank you!”

“What do you think of this Throgmorton business?” Papa asked her while I found another chair.

She looked interrogatively at her employer, who said, “I want you to answer Mr. Thin’s questions just as if they were my own, Miss Brenham.”

“I think it’s a shame,” she exclaimed, her singularly mild blue eyes bright on Papa’s face, “that Mr. Cayterer’s wonderful plans should have been interfered with in such a manner!”

I knew Papa would not like that, nor did he.

“Very regrettable,” he agreed in a tone that expressed perfect indifference to her opinion, “but that’s not exactly what I’m getting at. Where do you think the leak is?”

“Why Mr. Cayterer thinks that—”

“Just a moment. Mr. Cayterer’s ideas may be right or they may be wrong. Anyway I’ve heard them. What I want now are you own, if any. Do you think the leak was in this office?”

“Oh, no, sir! I think that the letters’ having come from Japan shows that the leak, as you call it, must have been over there.”

“The blackmailer could have an accomplice there,” Papa pointed out. “It’s a fact, you know, that the blackmail was to be paid in this country.”

The young woman looked at Mr. Cayterer, who stopped lighting a cigar to agree: “You’re right about that, Thin.”

“Oh, yes!” Miss Brenham’s gaze carried evident admiration from face to face. “I should never have thought of that!”

“Have you talked to anybody about Mr. Cayterer’s scheme?” Papa continued. “Oh, no, sir! Not to anyone.”

“That’s wrong. I asked you if you’d talked to anybody — not to anybody outside of this one and that one.”

“Oh, to Mr. Cayterer and Mr. Nugent, but no one else. I certainly do not ever discuss Mr. Cayterer’s affairs, and he had especially cautioned me about this.”

Papa got up and spoke to Mr. Cayterer: “Get us that list.”

“Thank you, Miss Brenham,” I said warmly as she and I stood up, endeavoring to offset Papa’s brusqueness toward her.

Before she could reply Mr. Cayterer had instructed her: “Miss Brenham, will you make up a list of the names and addresses of the office force.”

“Including Nugent and any ex-employees. that is, any who left within say the past three months,” Papa added.

“Oh, there aren’t any of those, are there, Mr. Cayterer?”

“No.”

“What time this afternoon will Nugent be in?” Papa asked while we were waiting for the young woman to return with the list.

“At three.”

“We’ll be in to see him.”

“Very well. I won’t be here, but I’ll leave word for him to wait for you.”

A few minutes later Miss Brenham brought in the list, and Papa and I left with it.

“What do you think of it, Robin?” Papa asked when we were in the street.

“I am not altogether satisfied that we did the wisest thing in accepting the operation,” I responded. “Morally, if not legally, we have made ourselves accomplices in Mr. Cayterer’s Chinese enterprise, and that enterprise, as you of course know, is clearly and plainly in violation of the—”

“Stop it!” Papa’s voice was so sharp that a man immediately in front of us jumped, looked back over his shoulder at Papa with startled eyes, and moved over toward the curb to get out of his way. “What do you think of that Brenham?” Papa went on in a more moderate tone.

“I think our Miss Queenan might profitably learn something of secretarial conduct from her.”

“You do, do you?” Papa stood abruptly still in the middle of the sidewalk. The man he had frightened a moment ago, now behind him, bumped into him, and scurried away from Papa’s scowl as if his life were in danger. “So that’s why you’re always picking on Florence,” Papa turned his scowl on me. “She don’t bow and scrape enough! Well, let me tell you, young fellow, the day after she ever tries to slobber over me like that Brenham does over Cayterer she’ll be reading the Help Wanted Female column!”

“I don’t like that Brenham,” he continued as he ceased blocking the sidewalk and moved on toward our office again. “She’ll scalp Cayterer one of these days. A slinky woman!”

I said nothing. To have attempted a defense of Miss Brenham against this unreasonable attack would have been merely to increase Papa’s disliking for her.

“Let me tell you something about Cayterer and his secretaries. He says he’s had this one two years. That’s a record for him. He and his secretaries used to be a standing joke. He never kept one longer than three or four months, and they were all girls you’d look at the second time. Figure it out for yourself. And keep your eye on this one. She’s slinky!”

I refused to contradict him, though my manner must have indicated that I was far from agreeing with what I considered his very groundless aversion to a young woman whose manner had favorably impressed me.

“You better see what Ford Nugent is like this afternoon,” Papa said as we entered our building, “and if you run into that woman, don’t let her close your eyes.” And he added, characteristically, “She’s slinky!”

“Yes, sir,” I replied quietly.

It was three-fifteen when I returned to Mr. Cayterer’s offices.

“Is Mr. Nugent in?” I asked the boy who had admitted us in the morning.

“Yes, sir. You’re Mr. Thin? Well, he’s in Mr. Cayterer’s office. You can go right back.”

I did so, and, having been thus directed, I opened the door of the promoter’s private office without knocking, a freedom of which I should certainly not have availed myself otherwise, and which I immediately regretted, although later my regret was somewhat less. Opening the door, then, I surprised Miss Brenham in the act of being kissed by, and apparently also kissing, a tall young man with rumpled brown hair over a sun-browned thin face.

They were standing, the participants in this decidedly unbusinesslike tableau, beside Mr. Cayterer’s desk, with their arms familiarly around one another, and their faces — after the quite appreciable moment their muscles required for reaction to the clicking of the door — turned toward me. Then the young woman sprang swiftly away from her — shall I say accomplice? — while he looked at me as if he did not like me.

“I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed.

“You ought to.”

The white line of a scar, running diagonally across the young man’s dark forehead, gave him, now that his features were tinged with chagrin, a peculiarly sinister appearance, which, however, was somewhat tempered by the absence of any brutality in his face.

“I came by appointment with Mr. Cayterer.” I did not wish to be suspected of having deliberately spied. “The boy told me to come right in. I assure you I would not otherwise have dared to enter without knocking, and I certainly had no intention, no thought, of intruding at... at such a time.”

The young man blinked his grey eyes and turned them toward Miss Brenham, who, her face becomingly pinkened, was gathering up papers from the top of her employer’s desk. When he looked at me again he had stopped blinking, and there was a faint trace of humor in his thin face.

“You’re the detective jobbie?”

I nodded, although I did not especially care for the words he had selected.

“Can you beat it?” He looked at me slowly and carefully, from head to foot. “You ought to be a good one! I never saw one that looked, acted and talked less like one, and I’ve known a few — even been jailed by some.”

“You are Mr. Nugent?” I asked, disregarding for the time his admission, which certainly reflected no credit on him.

“Yes, and you’re Thin. Sit down and let’s have it out.”

He sat in Mr. Cayterer’s chair, while I took the one Papa had occupied that morning, and Miss Brenham, carrying her papers, left the office, closing the door softly behind her.

The subsequent interview was rather unprofitable, inasmuch as the young man stubbonly refused to tell me anything of value about himself.

“Uncle Hop can give you the dope on. me,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t tell you anything I didn’t want him to know, and he’s got all the facts I want made public.”

“But this is a serious matter, Mr. Nugent, and a reticence that might be perfectly proper and justifiable in ordinary circumstances would not, I think you must grant, be becoming in these.”

He finished making a cigarette, lighted it, and pulled out a drawer to serve as a support for his feet.

“It’s serious for Uncle Hop, and maybe for you, but not for me. I’m only the hired man. There’s a trip and maybe some excitement, and a salary in it for me. And any mixups are in my favor, because they’ll increase the excitement and maybe the salary.” He emphasized the disloyalty of this unaccountable speech by grinning with broad recklessness through an outflung cloud of cigarette smoke. “So don’t expect me to bellyache about you troubles.”

“You spoke a moment ago, Mr. Nugent, of having been arrested: ‘jailed by some,’ referring to detectives, were, I think, your words. Would you mind relating the circumstances?”

“Fat chance, my lad!” He was, I should have said, not more than twenty-six or seven years of age, which would have made him some five years younger than I, and his “my lad” therefore ridiculous. “We criminals don’t go around exposing our records.”

The interview was really most unsatisfactory: he refused, in the face of all the persuasive force I could bring to bear, to assist me to the least extent, expressing complete indifference to his uncle’s difficulties, and maintaining that his only interest lay in the pay he was to receive and in the fact that there might be, as he phrased it, a chance to shoot somebody. By the end of three quarters of an hour I found I had more than enough of this nonsense, and so, making no attempt beyond that required by common courtesy to conceal my disapproval, I terminated the interview by withdrawing.

In Papa’s office, when I returned there, I found him and Miss Queenan sitting at his desk, with an afternoon paper spread in front of them. It was one of our stenographer’s duties to read carefully the daily papers, clipping and filing such items as might be of interest to us; that is, those items that dealt with crimes or with persons who had or seemed likely to be implicated in or affected by crimes. By these means we had in the course of some years built up a really valuable library of this sort. But now, as I approached Papa’s desk, I saw, as I had indeed suspected, for it was not unusual, that what held Papa’s and Miss Queenan’s attention was nothing more nor less than the comic strips page.

“If you don’t stop sniffing at what I do I’m going to hit you with something, Robin!” Papa looked up from his — shall I say vapid — entertainment to threaten. “Did you see Nugent?”

“Yes, sir, although not very successfully. I found him a rather irresponsible, not to say foolish, young man whose conversation was purely facetious.”

“So. I found out a few things about him. Left college to enlist during the war. Stayed in training camps here till the war was over. Took his training to South America, Asia, and the Balkans afterward, and used it in whatever fighting he could find. Spent a couple of months in Japan last year. Got no relations but Cayterer, no job but soldiering, no money,”

“That’s very good, sir,” I said. “Now there is one thing I discovered. When I entered Mr, Cayterer’s office Nugent and Miss Brenham were engaged in — well, rather demonstrative affection.”

Miss Queenan jerked her head up to toss her short brown hair out of her eyes, and her eyes were darkly bright.

“You mean kissing?”

“I do, Miss Queenan.”

“So,” Papa grunted. “That might come in handy, but there’s nothing very important about a youngster kissing his uncle’s secretary. If he didn’t kiss her it might mean something.”

“Is she pretty?” Miss Queenan asked.

“Ask Robin. My idea is she’s slinky!”

“She is,” I said judicially, “quite attractive in appearance.”

“A blonde, I bet!”

I made no response to that, since the conclusion’s pertinence was as hidden from me as the means by which Miss Queenan had arrived at it.

“See here, Mr. Thin,” — Miss Queenan still called Papa and me Mr. Thin to our faces, though I happened to know that in speaking of us to others she habitually dispensed with even that last barrier between employer and employed — “you’re not going to tell Mr. Cayterer about that, are you?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” I demanded, though what I should have liked to ask was by what right she questioned my intentions; but that would have led to words with Papa, who deliberately encouraged her to intrude in our affairs.

“Why because... because it’s none of his business. Is it?” she sought Papa’s support.

“None at all,” Papa agreed quite as if he meant it. But that he should have been sincere was, I knew, preposterous; he simply would not side with me against Miss Queenan, regardless of the absurdities this practice made him so frequently defend.

“I think it is,” I stood my ground. “He has employed us to secure information about his affairs for him, and such information as we may secure is his property.”

“I’m surprised, Mr. Thin! And you a poet!”

“Miss Queenan, it is true that by inclination and avocation I am a poet, but it is also true that by parental compulsion I am a detective; and, since I must be a detective, I purpose being as efficient and conscientious a detective as I may be. That certain aspects of the work are and always have, been distasteful to me is, I trust, not a secret, but I may not on that account shirk them.”

Papa applauded with exaggerated heartiness, beating his palms noisily together.

“That’s my boy, Florence!” he boasted with the mock-pride he liked to affect. “Cold-blooded as a tadpole! A pip, huh?”

“You know what I think?” she said. “I think he’s smitten with this Miss Brenham, and is telling on Nugent just out of jealousy!”

“That may be.” What could one say in the face of so idiotic a charge? “However, I consider that I should be lax in my duty if I concealed this or any other information of the sort from Mr. Cayterer, and I shall certainly tell him.”

I did so the following morning, in the promoter’s office.

“Not altogether a surprise,” he said deep in his chest, rolling a cigar in his hands, apparently unaware of the considerable damage he was doing it. “I suspected something of the sort. It doesn’t make any difference. I’ve decided to send Ford to China by this afternoon’s boat. This won’t have anything to do with the leak; you can count on that. Was there anything else?”

There was nothing else: I said so, and left the office, pausing to learn from the office boy that Nugent had not come in yet. Downstairs, in the lobby, I went into a telephone booth and got Papa on the wire.

“I want to keep Nugent under surveillance, but can’t do it myself, of course, since he knows roe. Can you spare me an operative?”

“Yes. Smitts is in. Where are you?”

“In the lobby of Cayterer’s building — Seaman’s National Bank Building.”

“Right. I’ll send Smitts over to you.”

I had hoped that Smitts would arrive before Nugent, so that I could have designated the young man to the operative and had that part of the surveillance over with, but, unfortunately, Nugent was going into an elevator as I left the booth. Five minutes later Smitts arrived, one of the men Papa and I employ from time to time, a small sandy chap with prematurely deep vertical lines in his cheeks and watery pale eyes that see with surprising accuracy.

“Smitts, there is a man I want you to shadow. His name is Ford Nugent, and the chances are he will sail for China this afternoon. I wish to know what he does between now and then. You will telephone me from the pier as soon as he gets there.”

“I’ll do that thing,”, he promised.

“Very well. Now you had better take your position by the street door, so he will not see us together. When he gets out of the elevator I will speak to him, going on into the elevator as if I were going up to his office. You will shadow him.”

This arrangement was not to hold, however: when Nugent stepped out of the elevator he was accompanied by Miss Brenham, and he caught my arm when I spoke to him.

“How are you, Mr. Thin?” he hailed me gaily, “And how are all the little mysteries?”

He seemed quite elated, doubtless at the prospect of the trip to China with its “chance to shoot somebody.”

“Good morning, Miss Brenham. Good morning, Mr. Nugent,” I responded.

“Got a couple of hours to spare,” he asked, and then, as I hesitated, “I don’t mean to waste. Here it is: if you’ll come along with us and promise net to interfere, not to desert us until we finish what we’re up to, I’ll promise to tell you something about your leak.”

“What would be the nature of that something?” I inquired, watching Miss Brenham, whose blue eyes were focused, with some perplexity, on her companion’s face.

“It will be something that will save you trouble, keep you from going off on the wrong foot, maybe, though I won’t pretend it’ll clear everything up.”

“Very well,” I agreed, “on that condition I will accompany you.”

“Good!” Nugent grasped my elbow with one hand, Miss Brenham’s with the other, and urged us toward the street door. “We’ve got to hurry!”

Passing Smitts in the vestibule, I shook my head slightly to indicate that he was not to follow, and then the three of us got into a taxicab that was waiting at the curb. Nugent gave the chauffeur a Post Street number.

“So you told Uncle Hop what you saw yesterday?” he asked as the taxicab began to move into the westbound stream of Market Street traffic. His voice was careless, but I could see that Miss Brenham was watching me intently.

“Yes. There was nothing else to do. We contracted to furnish Mr. Cayterer with what information we could secure, and we must do so.”

“Just the same,” the young woman said softly, “it wasn’t nice.”

“Stick around,” Nugent laughed, the scar on his forehead curling up at the ends, lending his laugh a sardonic tone, “and you’ll have something else to tell him.”

The Post Street address was a large apartment building, into which Nugent went, leaving Miss Brenham and me in the taxicab.

I took advantage of the opportunity to engage her in conversation.

“Does Mr. Cayterer know what you are doing, Miss Brenham?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you think he will approve?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t care whether he does. I hope he doesn’t! I’m not going back there again — not ever. I’m going with Ford. Thank God I don’t have to go back — there again!”

“Come, Miss Brenham,” I remonstrated, for she had become surprisingly vehement, “it couldn’t have been so bad as all that — being in Mr. Cayterer’s employ.”

“It was worse than all that You’ve no idea, Mr. Thin! You’ve — you’ve heard how hard it was for him to keep a secretary, how none of them staid for longer than a few weeks, before I came?”

“Yes, Miss Brenham, I have heard that.”

“And you have your opinion of the reason?”

“No, Miss Brenham,” I said, “I have no opinion.”

“Well, you’ve heard other opinions, I guess. And it would have been better if they were right, but they weren’t. There wasn’t any — any social relations between Mr. Cayterer and his secretaries. To him a secretary was... was an audience, or, as Ford says, somebody to strut in front of. That was why they never staid long. A girl was bound to see through him before long, and if she let him see it — and he was sharp enough — then he got rid of her.”

“Really, now, Miss Brenham, Mr. Cayterer does not—”

“I know t He isn’t completely a fool by any means. But that’s what makes it so sickening. He can — he does do really remarkable things, big things. But you should see him preparing to do them I Indecision, timidity hiding behind casualness at first And then he begins to talk, to boast, to pose, jokingly at first, so he won’t be tied to anything if he doesn’t muster up enough courage to carry it through.

“And that’s where his secretary’s part comes in. She must look big-eyed and amazed at him. And then he begins to outline a possible plan, designed principally, it would seem, to make his secretary gasp. And every time she gasps, he sticks his chest farther out and adds a more daring detail, until at last he’s got a plan that is really a marvel of audacity, and, what is more, he has got himself into a frame of mind that enables him to carry it out.

“And all the time his secretary knows that the least let-up in her worship would spoil the whole thing, because he isn’t a man who can be goaded into accomplishment He must be nursed. There must be someone beside him to exclaim and purr and flatter. And the fact that under that influence he can do tremendous things, overcome immense obstacles, somehow only makes it all the more sickening.

“And because I understood this almost from the very first is why I have staid with him so much longer than the others. I understood what it was he really wanted of me, what he was really paying for, and I considered! it as much a part of my duty as if he had put it in. words. It wasn’t dishonest of me to fawn on him and flatter him, because that’s what he was paying me for; but it was — well, sickening is the word that keeps coming to me. And after Ford came, it wasn’t — I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

She stopped and looked down at the glove she was twisting, and then up. at me, who was looking at the taximeter.

“You think I am exaggerating, don’t you, Mr. Thin? You think I am making up an extravagant theory out of perhaps a few very ordinary facts?”

I did indeed think so, but I didn’t like to say so, and neither did I like to lie about it. While I hesitated she began to talk again.

“Here, I can show you what I mean. These Throgmorton letters — Mr. Cayterer did not tell me about either of the first two until after he had sent the drafts. He didn’t tell me about them, in fact, until I had stumbled on them, or on the third of them anyway. What he had done was what was his natural course — he had submitted to those ridiculous demands, had actually thrown away thirty-five thousand dollars because he hadn’t the backbone not to submit. Half an hour after I had found out about them and had let him talk about them, and about what he was going to do about them, he had sent for you and your father and had determined not to pay any more. As truly as I’m sitting here, Mr. Thin, I could—”

“The story of your young life?” Nugent asked, assisting an extremely thin young woman in an extremely short skirt into the taxicab.

“Almost,” Miss Brenham said, flushing. “I was telling him about Mr. Cayterer.”

Then she fell to exchanging kisses and salutatory incoherencies with the thin young woman, whose name I learned when introduced was Betty (Elizabeth, I assumed) Bartworthy.

The house in front of which the taxicab presently disgorged us was a parsonage, where Nugent and Miss Brenham were married. From the parsonage, in the same taxicab, we went to the bride’s residence, a small house on Fourteenth Street Miss Bartworthy and I remained in the taxicab while the newly married couple went indoors.

“I knew she’d land him,” Miss Bartworthy said when the door had closed behind them.

“He’s a very fortunate young man, I’m sure,” I politely volunteered.

Deliberately, Miss Bartworthy made a most repulsive face at me — a quite horrible distortion of her features.

“My dear young lady!” I exclaimed.

She laughed and looked away from me, out of the window at the opposite sidewalk, her thin fingers nervously fondling the spiny surface of a silver-dipped seahorse suspended on a black ribbon.

I could make nothing of her actions, and though she did not speak again — did not even look at me again — I felt relief when the Nugents joined us, running down the steps and across the sidewalk, his arms full of bags, her hand waving at a large-bodied woman who stood on the house’s top step either laughing or crying.

We got in motion again, toward the pier, with little time to spare.

“Don’t you think,” I suggested as we adjusted ourselves to the small space at our disposal, “that since you’re going to be in a hurry when you reach the pier you might as well tell me now what you have promised?”

“There’s no hurry. I can tell you in — let’s see — five words.”

“Oh, very well.”

At the pier there was precious little or no time to spare. We had to run for it, with the two young women going ahead, while Nugent and I struggled with the bags. Beside the boat, Nugent shook my hand up and down while his wife and Miss Bartworthy were disarranging one another’s hats.

“That dope I promised you: neither Alma nor I had anything to do with it!”

“I didn’t expect much,” I called after him as he hurried aboard, “but I did hope for the truth, and you haven’t given it to me.”

His dark face, turned back over his shoulder as he climbed, was expressive of obviously sincere puzzlement.

“If you’ll drop me at the Palace,” Miss Bartworthy said as we went back to the taxicab, “I’ll promise not to frighten you with any more faces en route.”

“I was more bewildered than frightened,” I protested.

“Well, that’s good for you.”

Nothing else was said on the subject: she was, certainly, an extremely peculiar young woman as well as an extremely thin one.

“What now?” Papa asked when I came into his office. “Smitts says you went away with a man and a girl.”

“Nugent and Miss Brenham have been married and are on their way to China.”

“China?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Cayterer told me this morning he had decided to send Nugent over. The wedding and so forth must have been planned some time ago, since, apparently, the license and passports were ready.”

“So,” Papa said. “Serves Cayterer right — so he decided to get rid of the boy after you told him what you’d seen? He ought to—”

“What do you make of that, Mr. Thin?” Miss Queenan, fairly bursting into the office, interrupted, brandishing a folded newspaper in Papa’s face.

Papa took the paper, read, and passed it to me.

“Cayterer’s dark horse,” he pronounced.

“I bet a nickel,” Miss Queenan agreed.

I too agreed with them when I had read the Canton dispatch reporting the finding of the body of a tuchun of one of the larger provinces. The tuchun’s widow, physician, and confidential secretary had been arrested, the report went on to say, charged with having poisoned him and concealed his death by means of a pretense that he had gone into the mountains for his health. They were believed to have deposited large sums of money in a Paris bank and to have been about to leave the country when arrested.”

“Waiting for Hop Cayterer’s contribution before they left,” Papa said. “Let’s go see him.”

Mr. Cayterer was noticeably ill at ease, worried, when Papa and I were shown into his office.

“You don’t happen to know—” he began immediately the how-do-you-do’s were over, and stopped. “Miss Brenham, my secretary, went out a little before noon and hasn’t come back.”

It wasn’t a question, but it was meant as one.

“She and your nephew were married, and she has gone with him.”

He nodded his large sallow head slowly, as if he had expected that information, or even as if he had feared it.

“Seen this?” Papa asked, giving him the newspaper.

Mr. Cayterer read the Canton dispatch with so expressionless a face that I began to entertain doubts that the tuchun of the dispatch was the tuchun of Mr. Cayterer’s plans; but, when he let the paper fall on the desk and made a little rumbling noise deep in his throat, I saw that the blankness of his face was the emptiness of utter consternation. The soft glow from his shaded desk light glinted on hundreds of tiny globules of moisture on his forehead.

“Your man?” Papa demanded.

“My man.”

“So. You’re lucky he didn’t cost you more than the thirty-five thousand you sent Throgmorton.”

Blankness went out of Mr. Cayterer’s face, to be replaced by surprise at the thought of how much money those three distant Chinese criminals might have cost him.

“And now,” Papa went on, “we can go to the Post Office Department for help in catching Mr. B. J. Randall.”

“Yes, we can,” — Mr. Cayterer avoided Papa’s eyes, feeling, “I fancied, that he would rather endure his loss than admit to the world that he had twice been so easily and so completely taken in... but—”

“The matter can be handled,” I came to his assistance, “quickly and without undue publicity.”

“Now what?” Papa questioned me suspiciously.

“I should like,” I spoke to Mr. Cayterer, ignoring Papa’s question, “to borrow one of your employees for a few minutes.”

“Which one?”

“The boy will do”

Mr. Cayterer stabbed one of the buttons on his desk, and the bright-eyed office boy appeared.

“See here,” I addressed the boy quite sternly, “you’ve caused an enormous amount of trouble with your Fitzmaurice Throgmorton foolishness, and I don’t want any more of it. You bring those drafts back here!”

“W-what do you mean?”

“I mean what I say,” quite sharply. “And don’t you ever play any more games like this, or you’ll be finding yourself in hot water with the Post Office Department. What is your middle name — James, or John, or Joseph?”

“It’s Jackson, but—”

“I suppose it is. Now where are those drafts?”

“They’re... I don’t know what you mean. They’re... they’re home, pasted in a sort of scrapbook.”

“You got hold of this Chinese business hearing your sister and Nugent talk about it?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“And I suppose you sent forwarding address cards to Los Angeles, Portland and Spokane, to have Randall’s letters sent to General Delivery here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Now go home and get those drafts and bring them here. Hurry.”

The boy darted out of the office.

“Well, I’ll be what he said!” Mr. Cayterer gasped. “But. why—? how—?”

“Very simply,” I explained, rising and picking up my hat. “I suspected him as soon as you said the letters were in your handwriting. That quite gratuitous bit of finesse must have appealed very strongly to him, but it quite gave him away. Office boys almost always imitate their employers’ handwriting: I have never heard of one who didn’t at least occasionally copy his boss’ signature. It’s one of the conventions of the position.

“Then, when you told us he was Miss Bren ham’s brother, and I found that she and Nugent were intimate, I knew where the boy could have got his information. They no doubt discussed your plans when he was calling on her in the evening, and the boy heard enough to go on. Further, as an alias, Fitzmaurice Throgmorton has a decidedly juvenile sound; and even its creator distrusted it for actual use, and so fashioned another alias for use at the post office. In fashioning that second one, B. J. Randall, he fell into a quite common error: he was, as people so often are, unable to get away from his own name, and retained his initials, reversing them.

“The fact that the drafts had not come through for collection was another supporting fact: regardless of his honesty, a boy of fifteen could not cash a ten-thousand-dollar draft. But I dare say it was never a matter of money with him: he got his fun out of playing the dashing Fitzmaurice Throgmorton. This Canton dispatch dispelled my last doubt: those people were trying to swindle you out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and this smaller swindle delayed their success, quite demolished it in fact, so they could not have been responsible for it. I needed some assurance on that point, for the mature oriental mind frequently displays quite definite analogies with the juvenile occidental mind.”

“But look here!” Mr. Cayterer objected. “There were those letters. You saw them. They were mailed in Japan.”

“I beg your pardon, they were not. Japanese stamps can be procured of any stamp dealer, and a postmark is ridiculously easy to forge. Your office boy would, naturally, have no difficulty at all in getting the letters into, your mail.”

“There’s no use arguing with him,” Papa, getting up and clapping his hat on his head, assured Mr. Cayterer. “He’s right. Now what are you going to do about that kid?”

Anger pinkened Mr. Cayterer’s wan face.

“I’m going to—”

“Don’t fire him right away,” Papa advised. “Climb all over him, but don’t fire him. Handle him right and he’ll be worth a dozen boys, for a few weeks anyway, until his remorse wears thin. Then you can fire him, and you’ll have got that many weeks of good service out of him.”

On the heels of this — yes — thoroughly unscrupulous advice Papa and I left Mr. Cayterer’s office.

The Assistant Murderer

Black Mask, February 1926; aka: First Aide to Murder (Saturday Home Magazine, April 8, 1938)

Gold on the door, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.

The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk’s scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor’s feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold.

An ugly office — the proprietor was uglier.

His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat. These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features.

One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked. Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color. Veins had broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes — small, deep-set, and pale blue of iris — were bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.

A man of forty-something, ugly, sitting tilted back in his chair, feet on desk.

The gilt-labeled door opened and another man came into the office. Perhaps ten years younger than the man at the desk, he was, roughly speaking, everything that one was not. Fairly tall, slender, fair-skinned, brown-eyed, he would have been as little likely to catch your eye in a gambling-house as in an art gallery. His clothes — suit and hat were gray — were fresh and properly pressed, and even fashionable in that inconspicuous manner which is one sort of taste. His face was likewise unobtrusive, which was surprising when you considered how narrowly it missed handsomeness through the least meagerness of mouth — a mark of the too-cautious man.

Two steps into the office he hesitated, brown eyes glancing from shabby furnishings to ill-visaged proprietor. So much ugliness seemed to disconcert the man in gray. An apologetic smile began on his lips, as if he were about to murmur, “I beg your pardon, I’m in the wrong office.”

But when he finally spoke it was otherwise. He took another step forward, asking uncertainly:

“You are Mr. Rush?”

“Yeah.” The detective’s voice was hoarse with a choking harshness that seemed to corroborate the heavy-cold testimony of his eyes. He put his feet down on the floor and jerked a fat, red hand at a chair. “Sit down, sir.”

The man in gray sat down, tentatively upright on the chair’s front edge.

“Now what can I do for you?” Alec Rush croaked amiably.

“I want — I wish — I would like—” and further than that the man in gray said nothing.

“Maybe you’d better just tell me what’s wrong,” the detective suggested. “Then I’ll know what you want of me.” He smiled.

There was kindliness in Alec Rush’s smile, and it was not easily resisted. True, his smile was a horrible grimace out of a nightmare, but that was its charm. When your gentle-countenanced man smiles there is small gain: his smile expresses little more than his reposed face. But when Alec Rush distorted his ogre’s mask so that jovial friendliness peeped incongruously from his savage red eyes, from his brutal metal-studded mouth — then that was a heartening, a winning thing.

“Yes, I daresay that would be better.” The man in gray sat back in his chair, more comfortably, less transiently. “Yesterday on Fayette Street, I met a — a young woman I know. I hadn’t — we hadn’t met for several months. That isn’t really pertinent, however. But after we separated — we had talked for a few minutes — I saw a man. That is, he came out of a doorway and went down the street in the same direction she had taken, and I got the idea he was following her. She turned into Liberty Street and he did likewise. Countless people walk along that same route, and the idea that he was following her seemed fantastic, so much so that I dismissed it and went on about my business.

“But I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. It seemed to me there had been something peculiarly intent in his carriage, and no matter how much I told myself the notion was absurd, it persisted in worrying me. So last night, having nothing especial to do, I drove out to the neighborhood of — of the young woman’s house. And I saw the same man again. He was standing on a corner two blocks from her house. It was the same man — I’m certain of it. I tried to watch him, but while I was finding a place for my car he disappeared and I did not see him again. Those are the circumstances. Now will you look into it, learn if he is actually following her, and why?”

“Sure,” the detective agreed hoarsely, “but didn’t you say anything to the lady or to any of her family?”

The man in gray fidgeted in his chair and looked at the stringy dun carpet.

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don’t. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and — and — well — I don’t — That’s impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all.”

“Maybe, but, mind you, I’m not saying I will. I’d want to know more first.”

“More? You mean more—”

“More about you and her.”

“But there is nothing about us!” the man in gray protested. “It is exactly as I have told you. I might add that the young woman is... is married, and that until yesterday I had not seen her since her marriage.”

“Then your interest in her is—?” The detective let the husky interrogation hang incompleted in the air.

“Of friendship — past friendship.”

“Yeah. Now who is this young woman?”

The man in gray fidgeted again.

“See here, Rush,” he said, coloring, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you, and shall, of course, but I don’t want to tell you unless you are going to handle this thing for me. I mean I don’t want to be bringing her name into it if — if you aren’t. Will you?”

Alec Rush scratched his grizzled head with a stubby forefinger.

“I don’t know,” he growled. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I can’t take a hold of a job that might be anything. I’ve got to know that you’re on the up-and-up.”

Puzzlement disturbed the clarity of the younger man’s brown eyes.

“But I didn’t think you’d be—” He broke off and looked away from the ugly man.

“Of course you didn’t.” A chuckle rasped in the detective’s burly throat, the chuckle of a man touched in a once-sore spot that is no longer tender. He raised a big hand to arrest his prospective client in the act of rising from his chair. “What you did, on a guess, was to go to one of the big agencies and tell ’em your story. They wouldn’t touch it unless you cleared up the fishy points. Then you ran across my name, remembered I was chucked out of the department a couple of years ago. There’s my man,’ you said to yourself, ‘a baby who won’t be so choicy!’ ”

The man in gray protested with head and gesture and voice that this was not so. But his eyes were sheepish.

Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, “No matter. I ain’t sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I’ll take your job. It sounds phony, but maybe it ain’t. It’ll cost you fifteen a day and expenses.”

“I can see that it sounds peculiar,” the younger man assured the detective, “but you’ll find that it’s quite all right. You’ll want a retainer, of course.”

“Yes, say fifty.”

The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.

“Your name?” he asked.

“I would rather not. I’m not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?”

Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.

“Now! Now!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “How am I going to do business with a man like you?”

The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.

“It’s in your favor, maybe,” the detective admitted as he surrendered, “though it ain’t to your credit. But if you were off-color I guess you’d have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman — who is she?”

“Mrs. Hubert Landow.”

“Well, well, we’ve got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?”

“On Charles-Street Avenue,” the man in gray said, and gave a number.

“Her description?”

“She is twenty-two or — three years old, rather tall, slender in an athletic way, with auburn hair, blue eyes, and very white skin.”

“And her husband? You know him?”

“I have seen him. He is about my age — thirty — but larger than I, a tall, broad-shouldered man of the clean-cut blond type.”

“And your mystery man? What does he look like?”

“He’s quite young, not more than twenty-two at the most, and not very large — medium size, perhaps, or a little under. He’s very dark, with high cheek-bones and a large nose. High, straight shoulders, too, but not broad. He walks with small, almost mincing, steps.”

“Clothes?”

“He was wearing a brown suit and a tan cap when I saw him on Fayette Street yesterday afternoon. I suppose he wore the same last night, but I’m not positive.”

“I suppose you’ll drop in here for my reports,” the detective wound up, “since I won’t know where to send them to you?”

“Yes.” The man in gray stood up and held out his hand. “I’m very grateful to you for undertaking this, Mr. Rush.”

Alec Rush said that was all right. They shook hands, and the man in gray went out.

The ugly man waited until his client had had time to turn off into the corridor that led to the elevators. Then the detective said, “Now, Mr. Man!” got up from his chair, took his hat from the clothes-tree in the corner, locked his office door behind him, and ran down the back stairs.

He ran with the deceptive heavy agility of a bear. There was something bearlike, too, in the looseness with which his blue suit hung on his stout body, and in the set of his heavy shoulders — sloping, limber-jointed shoulders whose droop concealed much of their bulk.

He gained the ground floor in time to see the gray back of his client issuing into the street. In his wake Alec Rush sauntered. Two blocks, a turn to the left, another block, and a turn to the right. The man in gray went into the office of a trust company that occupied the ground floor of a large office building.

The rest was the mere turning of a hand. Half a dollar to a porter: the man in gray was Ralph Millar, assistant cashier.

Darkness was settling in Charles-Street Avenue when Alec Rush, in a modest black coupé, drove past the address Ralph Millar had given him. The house was large in the dusk, spaced from its fellows as from the paving by moderate expanses of fenced lawn.

Alec Rush drove on, turned to the left at the first crossing, again to the left at the next, and at the next. For half an hour he guided his car along a many-angled turning and returning route until, when finally he stopped beside the curb at some distance from, but within sight of, the Landow house, he had driven through every piece of thoroughfare in the vicinity of that house.

He had not seen Millar’s dark, high-shouldered young man.

Lights burned brightly in Charles-Street Avenue, and the night traffic began to purr southward into the city. Alec Rush’s heavy body slumped against the wheel of his coupé while he filled its interior with pungent fog from a black cigar, and held patient, bloodshot eyes on what he could see of the Landow residence.

Three-quarters of an hour passed, and there was motion in the house. A limousine left the garage in the rear for the front door. A man and a woman, faintly distinguishable at that distance, left the house for the limousine. The limousine moved out into the cityward current. The third car behind it was Alec Rush’s modest coupé.

Except for a perilous moment at North Avenue, when the interfering cross-stream of traffic threatened to separate him from his quarry, Alec Rush followed the limousine without difficulty. In front of a Howard Street theater it discharged its freight: a youngish man and a young woman, both tall, evening-clad, and assuringly in agreement with the descriptions the detective had got from his client.

The Landows went into the already dark theater while Alec Rush was buying his ticket. In the light of the first intermission he discovered them again. Leaving his seat for the rear of the auditorium, he found an angle from which he could study them for the remaining five minutes of illumination.

Hubert Landow’s head was rather small for his stature, and the blond hair with which it was covered threatened each moment to escape from its imposed smoothness into crisp curls. His face, healthily ruddy, was handsome in a muscular, very masculine way, not indicative of any great mental nimbleness. His wife had that beauty which needs no cataloguing. However, her hair was auburn, her eyes blue, her skin white, and she looked a year or two older than the maximum twenty-three Millar had allowed her.

While the intermission lasted Hubert Landow talked to his wife eagerly, and his bright eyes were the eyes of a lover. Alec Rush could not see Mrs. Landow’s eyes. He saw her replying now and again to her husband’s words. Her profile showed no answering eagerness. She did not show she was bored.

Midway through the last act, Alec Rush left the theater to maneuver his coupé into a handy position from which to cover the Landows’ departure. But their limousine did not pick them up when they left the theater. They turned down Howard Street afoot, going to a rather garish second-class restaurant, where an abbreviated orchestra succeeded by main strength in concealing its smallness from the ear.

His coupé conveniently parked, Alec Rush found a table from which he could watch his subjects without being himself noticeable. Husband still wooed wife with incessant, eager talking. Wife was listless, polite, unkindled. Neither more than touched the food before them. They danced once, the woman’s face as little touched by immediate interest as when she listened to her husband’s words. A beautiful face, but empty.

The minute hand of Alec Rush’s nickel-plated watch had scarcely begun its last climb of the day from where VI is inferred to XII when the Landows left the restaurant. The limousine — against its side a young Norfolk-jacketed Negro smoking — was two doors away. It bore them back to their house. The detective having seen them into the house, having seen the limousine into the garage, drove his coupé again around and around through the neighboring thoroughfares. And saw nothing of Millar’s dark young man.

Then Alec Rush went home and to bed.

At eight o’clock the next morning ugly man and modest coupé were stationary in Charles-Street Avenue again. Male Charles-Street Avenue went with the sun on its left toward its offices. As the morning aged and the shadows grew shorter and thicker, so, generally, did the individuals who composed this morning procession. Eight o’clock was frequently young and slender and brisk, Eight-thirty less so, Nine still less, and rear-guard Ten o’clock was preponderantly neither young nor slender, and more often sluggish than brisk.

Into this rear guard, though physically he belonged to no later period than eight-thirty, a blue roadster carried Hubert Landow. His broad shoulders were blue-coated, his blond hair gray-capped, and he was alone in the roadster. With a glance around to make sure Millar’s dark young man was not in sight, Alec Rush turned his coupé in the blue car’s wake.

They rode swiftly into the city, down into its financial center, where Hubert Landow deserted his roadster before a Redwood Street stockbroker’s office. The morning had become noon before Landow was in the street again, turning his roadster northward.

When shadowed and shadower came to rest again they were in Mount Royal Avenue. Landow got out of his car and strode briskly into a large apartment building. A block distant, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar and sat still in his coupé. Half an hour passed. Alec Rush turned his head and sank his gold teeth deep into his cigar.

Scarcely twenty feet behind the coupé, in the doorway of a garage, a dark young man with high cheek-bones, high, straight shoulders, loitered. His nose was large. His suit was brown, as were the eyes with which he seemed to pay no especial attention to anything through the thin blue drift of smoke from the tip of a drooping cigarette.

Alec Rush took his cigar from his mouth to examine it, took a knife from his pocket to trim the bitten end, restored cigar to mouth and knife to pocket, and thereafter was as indifferent to all Mount Royal Avenue as the dark youth behind him. The one drowsed in his doorway. The other dozed in his car. And the afternoon crawled past one o’clock, past one-thirty.

Hubert Landow came out of the apartment building, vanished swiftly in his blue roadster. His going stirred neither of the motionless men, scarcely their eyes. Not until another fifteen minutes had gone did either of them move.

Then the dark youth left his doorway. He moved without haste, up the street, with short, almost mincing, steps. The back of Alec Rush’s black-derbied head was to the youth when he passed the coupé, which may have been chance, for none could have said that the ugly man had so much as glanced at the other since his first sight of him. The dark young man let his eyes rest on the detective’s back without interest as he passed. He went on up the street toward the apartment building Landow had visited, up its steps, and out of sight into it.

When the dark young man had disappeared, Alec Rush threw away his cigar, stretched, yawned, and awakened the coupé’s engine. Four blocks and two turnings from Mount Royal Avenue, he got out of the automobile, leaving it locked and empty in front of a graystone church. He walked back to Mount Royal Avenue, to halt on a corner two blocks above his earlier position.

He had another half-hour of waiting before the dark young man appeared. Alec Rush was buying a cigar in a glass-fronted cigar store when the other passed. The young man boarded a street car at North Avenue and found a seat. The detective boarded the same car at the next corner and stood on the rear platform. Warned by an indicative forward hitching of the young man’s shoulders and head, Alec Rush was the first passenger off the car at Madison Avenue, and the first aboard a southbound car there. And again, he was off first at Franklin Street.

The dark youth went straight to a rooming-house in this street, while the detective came to rest beside the window of a corner drug store specializing in theatrical make-up. There he loafed until half-past three. When the dark young man came into the street again it was to walk — Alec Rush behind him — to Eutaw Street, board a car, and ride to Camden Station.

There, in the waiting-room, the dark young man met a young woman who frowned and asked:

“Where in the hell have you been at?”

Passing them, the detective heard the petulant greeting, but the young man’s reply was pitched too low for him to catch, nor did he hear anything else the young woman said. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, standing together in a deserted end of the waiting-room, so that Alec Rush could not have approached them without making himself conspicuous.

The young woman seemed to be impatient, urgent. The young man seemed to explain, to reassure. Now and then he gestured with the ugly, deft hands of a skilled mechanic. His companion became more agreeable. She was short, square, as if carved economically from a cube. Consistently, her nose also was short and her chin square. She had, on the whole, now that her earlier displeasure was passing, a merry face, a pert, pugnacious, rich-blooded face that advertised inexhaustible vitality. That advertisement was in every feature, from the live ends of her cut brown hair to the earth-gripping pose of her feet on the cement flooring. Her clothes were dark, quiet, expensive, but none too gracefully worn, hanging just the least bit bunchily here and there on her sturdy body.

Nodding vigorously several times, the young man at length tapped his cap-visor with two careless fingers and went out into the street. Alec Rush let him depart unshadowed. But when, walking slowly out to the iron train-shed gates, along them to the baggage window, thence to the street door, the young woman passed out of the station, the ugly man was behind her. He was still behind her when she joined the four o’clock shopping crowd at Lexington Street.

The young woman shopped with the whole-hearted air of one with nothing else on her mind. In the second department store she visited, Alec Rush left her looking at a display of laces while he moved as swiftly and directly as intervening shoppers would permit toward a tall, thick-shouldered, gray-haired woman in black, who seemed to be waiting for someone near the foot of a flight of stairs.

“Hello, Alec!” she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. “What are you doing in my territory?”

“Got a booster for you,” he mumbled. “The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?”

The store detective looked and nodded.

“Yes. Thanks, Alec. You’re sure she’s boosting, of course?”

“Now, Minnie!” he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. “Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it’s more than likely she’s got herself some lace by now.”

“Um-hmm,” said Minnie. “Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I’ll be with her.”

Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective’s arm again.

“I want a line on her,” he said. “What do you say we tail her around and see what she’s up to before we knock her over?”

“If it doesn’t take all day,” the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.

Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.

“Take a plant on the joint while I get a copper,” Alex Rush ordered.

When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.

“Second floor,” she said.

Behind her the house’s street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, “What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I’ll have you understand, and I—”

“Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here,” Alec Rush croaked. “Second floor. Take us up.”

The woman’s scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective’s voice for the harshness of great emotion.

“Why... why—” she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management — never to stand in the way of the police. “I’ll take you up,” she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.

Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the stairs.

“Who’s that?” a casually curt feminine voice asked.

“Landlady.”

The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, “This is her,” the policeman said, “You’ll have to come along,” and Minnie said, “Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you.”

“My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There’d be just as much sense to it if you’d all jumped out at me and yelled ‘Boo!’ ”

“This ain’t any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let’s go in where we can talk it over.”

Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshaling the others into the girl’s rooms.

“Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I’m easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you’re counting on me talking, too, you’d better smart me up.”

“Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl’s arm. “I’m at Goodbody’s.”

“You think I’ve been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”

“Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That’s what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.

The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.

“It’s all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody’s is hanging the rap on me — somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I’ve got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”

“You’ll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody’s going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”

“Got anything with a judge’s name on it that says you can?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t get a peep!”

Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.

“Who’s this?” he asked the girl.

“Try and find out!”

“I am trying,” he lied.

“You big bum!” said she. “You couldn’t find water in the ocean!”

Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.

Twilight was around the graystone church when the owner of the deserted coupé returned to it. The chunky girl — Polly Vanness was the name she had given — had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph’s subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.

Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupé so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curb-side spot within sight of the house.

The night went along and no one left or entered the Landow house.

Fingernails clicked on the coupé’s glass door.

A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective’s notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.

Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.

“Got a match?” the man asked.

The detective hesitated, said, “Yeah,” and held out a box.

A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large nose, high cheek-bones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.

But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.

“I thought it was you,” he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. “Maybe you don’t know me, but I knew you when you were on the force.”

The ex-detective-sergeant gave no meaning at all to a husky “Yeah.”

“I thought it was you in the heap on Mount Royal this afternoon, but I couldn’t make sure,” the young man continued, entering the coupé, sitting beside the detective, closing the door. “Scuttle Zeipp’s me. I ain’t as well-known as Napoleon, so if you’ve never heard of me there’s no hard feelings.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the stuff! When you once think up a good answer, stick to it.” Scuttle Zeipp’s face was a sudden bronze mask in the glow of his cigarette. “The same answer’ll do for my next question. You’re interested in these here Landows? Yeah,” he added in hoarse mimicry of the detective’s voice.

Another inhalation lighted his face, and his words came smokily out as the glow faded.

“You ought to want to know what I’m doing hanging around ’em. I ain’t tight. I’ll tell you. I’ve been slipped half a grand to bump off the girl — twice. How do you like that?”

“I hear you,” said Alec Rush. “But anybody can talk that knows the words.”

“Talk? Sure it’s talk,” Zeipp admitted cheerfully. “But so’s it talk when the judge says ‘hanged by the neck until dead and may God have mercy on your soul!’ Lots of things are talk, but that don’t always keep ’em from being real.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, brother, yeah! Now listen to this: it’s one for the cuff. A certain party comes to me a couple of days ago with a knock-down from a party that knows me. See? This certain party asks me what I want to bump off a broad. I thought a grand would be right, and said so. Too stiff. We come together on five hundred. I got two-fifty down and get the rest when the Landow twist is cold. Not so bad for a soft trick — a slug through the side of a car — huh?”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” the detective asked. “You want to make it a fancy caper — kill her on her birthday or a legal holiday?”

Scuttle Zeipp smacked his lips and poked the detective’s chest with a finger in the dark.

“Not any, brother! I’m thinking way ahead of you! Listen to this: I pocket my two-fifty advance and come up here to give the ground a good casing, not wanting to lam into anything I didn’t know was here. While I’m poking around, I run into another party that’s poking around. This second party gives me a tumble, I talk smart, and bingo! First thing you know she’s propositioning me. What do you guess? She wants to know what I want to bump off a broad! Is it the same one she wants stopped? I hope to tell you it is!

“It ain’t so silly! I get my hands on another two hundred and fifty berries, with that much more coming when I put over the fast one. Now do you think I’m going to do anything to that Landow baby? You’re dumb if you do. She’s my meal ticket. If she lives till I pop her, she’ll be older than either you or the bay. I’ve got five hundred out of her so far. What’s the matter with sticking around and waiting for more customers that don’t like her? If two of ’em want to buy her out of the world, why not more? The answer is ‘Yeah!’ And on top of that, here you are snooping around her. Now there it is, brother, for you to look at and taste and smell.”

Silence held for several minutes, in the darkness of the coupé’s interior, and then the detective’s harsh voice put a skeptical question:

“And who are these certain parties that want her out of the way?”

“Be yourself!” Scuttle Zeipp admonished him. “I’m laying down on ’em, right enough, but I ain’t feeding ’em to you.”

“What are you giving me all this for then?”

“What for? Because you’re in on the lay somewhere. Crossing each other, neither of us can make a thin dimmer. If we don’t hook up we’ll just ruin the racket for each other. I’ve already made half a grand off this Landow. That’s mine, but there’s more to be picked up by a couple of men that know what they’re doing. All right. I’m offering to throw in with you on a two-way cut of whatever else we can get. But my parties are out! I don’t mind throwing them down, but I ain’t rat enough to put the finger on them for you.”

Alec Rush grunted and croaked another dubious inquiry.

“How come you trust me so much, Scuttle?”

The hired killer laughed knowingly.

“Why not? You’re a right guy. You can see a profit when it’s showed to you. They didn’t chuck you off the force for forgetting to hang up your stocking. Besides, suppose you want to double-cross me, what can you do? You can’t prove anything. I told you I didn’t mean the woman any harm. I ain’t even packing a gun. But all that’s the bunk. You’re a wise head. You know what’s what. Me and you, Alec, we can get plenty!”

Silence again, until the detectives spoke slowly, thoughtfully.

“The first thing would be to get a line on the reasons your parties want the girl put out. Got anything on that?”

“Not a whisper.”

“Both of ’em women, I take it.”

Scuttle Zeipp hesitated.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But don’t be asking me anything about ’em. In the first place, I don’t know anything, and in the second, I wouldn’t tip their mitts if I did.”

“Yeah,” the detective croaked, as if he quite understood his companion’s perverted idea of loyalty. “Now if they’re women, the chances are the racket hangs on a man. What do you think of Landow? He’s a pretty lad.”

Scuttle Zeipp leaned over to put his finger against the detective’s chest again.

“You’ve got it, Alec! That could be it, damned if it couldn’t!”

“Yeah,” Alec Rush agreed, fumbling with the levers of his car. “We’ll get away from here and stay away until I look into him.”

At Franklin Street, half a block from the rooming-house into which he had shadowed the young man that afternoon, the detective stopped his coupé.

“You want to drop out here?” he asked.

Scuttle Zeipp looked sidewise, speculatively, into the elder man’s ugly face.

“It’ll do,” the young man said, “but you’re a damned good guesser, just the same.” He stopped with a hand on the door. “It’s a go, is it, Alec? Fifty-fifty?”

“I wouldn’t say so.” Alec Rush grinned at him with hideous good nature. “You’re not a bad lad, Scuttle, and if there’s any gravy you’ll get yours, but don’t count on me mobbing up with you.”

Zeipp’s eyes jerked to slits, his lips snarled back from yellow teeth that were set edge to edge.

“You sell me out, you damned gorilla, and I’ll—” He laughed the threat out of being, his dark face young and careless again. “Have it your own way, Alec. I didn’t make no mistake when I throwed in with you. What you say goes.”

“Yeah,” the ugly man agreed. “Lay off that joint out there until I tell you. Maybe you’d better drop in to see me to-morrow. The phone book’ll tell you where my office is. So long, kid.”

“So long, Alec.”

In the morning Alec Rush set about investigating Hubert Landow. First he went to the City Hall, where he examined the gray books in which marriage licenses are indexed. Hubert Britman Landow and Sara Falsoner had been married six months before, he learned.

The bride’s maiden name thickened the red in the detective’s bloodshot eyes. Air hissed sharply from his flattened nostrils. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said to himself, so raspingly that a lawyer’s skinny clerk, fiddling with other records at his elbow, looked frightenedly at him and edged a little away.

From the City Hall, Alec Rush carried the bride’s name to two newspaper offices, where, after studying the files, he bought an armful of six-month-old papers. He took the papers to his office, spread them on his desk, and attacked them with a pair of shears. When the last one had been cut and thrown aside, there remained on his desk a thick sheaf of clippings.

Arranging his clippings in chronological order, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar, put his elbows on the desk, his ugly head between his palms, and began to read a story with which newspaper-reading Baltimore had been familiar half a year before.

Purged of irrelevancies and earlier digressions, the story was essentially this:

Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat in Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence in pleasure on a constitution none too strong in the beginning. He was well-known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.

One Fanny Kidd, coming as was her custom at ten o’clock one morning to “do” Jerome Falsoner’s rooms, found him lying on his back in his living-room, staring with dead eyes at a spot on the ceiling, a bright spot that was reflected sunlight — reflected from the metal hilt of his paper-knife, which protruded from his chest.

Police investigation established four facts:

First, Jerome Falsoner had been dead for fourteen hours when Fanny Kidd found him, which placed his murder at about eight o’clock the previous evening.

Second, the last persons known to have seen him alive were a woman named Madeline Boudin, with whom he had been intimate, and three of her friends. They had seen him, alive, at some time between seven-thirty and eight o’clock, or less than half an hour before his death. They had been driving down to a cottage on the Severn River, and Madeline Boudin had told the others she wanted to see Falsoner before she went. The others had remained in their car while she rang the bell. Jerome Falsoner opened the street door and she went in. Ten minutes later she came out and rejoined her friends. Jerome Falsoner came to the door with her, waving a hand at one of the men in the car — a Frederick Stoner, who knew Falsoner slightly, and who was connected with the district attorney’s office. Two women, talking on the steps of a house across the street, had also seen Falsoner, and had seen Madeline Boudin and her friends drive away.

Third, Jerome Falsoner’s heir and only near relative was his niece, Sara Falsoner, who, by some vagary of chance, was marrying Hubert Landow at the very hour that Fanny Kidd was finding her employer’s dead body. Niece and uncle had seldom seen one another. The niece — for police suspicion settled on her for a short space — was definitely proved to have been at home, in her apartment in Carey Street, from six o’clock the evening of the murder until eight-thirty the next morning. Her husband, her fiancé then, had been there with her from six until eleven that evening. Prior to her marriage, the girl had been employed as stenographer by the same trust company that employed Ralph Millar.

Fourth, Jerome Falsoner, who had not the most even of dispositions, had quarreled with an Icelander named Einar Jokumsson in a gambling-house two days before he was murdered. Jokumsson had threatened him. Jokumsson — a short, heavily built man, dark-haired, dark-eyed — had vanished from his hotel, leaving his bags there, the day the body was found, and had not been seen since.

The last of these clippings carefully read, Alec Rush rocked back in his chair and made a thoughtful monster’s face at the ceiling. Presently he leaned forward again to look into the telephone directory, and to call the number of Ralph Millar’s trust company. But when he got his number he changed his mind.

“Never mind,” he said into the instrument, and called a number that was Goodbody’s. Minnie, when she came to the telephone, told him that Polly Vanness had been identified as one Polly Bangs, arrested in Milwaukee two years ago for shoplifting, and given a two-year sentence. Minnie also said that Polly Bangs had been released on bail early that morning.

Alec Rush pushed back the telephone and looked through his clippings again until he found the address of Madeline Boudin, the woman who had visited Falsoner so soon before his death. It was a Madison Avenue number. Thither his coupé carried the detective.

No, Miss Boudin did not live there. Yes, she had lived there, but had moved four months ago. Perhaps Mrs. Blender, on the third floor, would know where she lived now. Mrs. Blender did not know. She knew Miss Boudin had moved to an apartment house in Garrison Avenue, but did not think she was living there now. At the Garrison Avenue house: Miss Boudin had moved away a month and a half ago — somewhere in Mount Royal Avenue, perhaps. The number was not known.

The coupé carried its ugly owner to Mount Royal Avenue, to the apartment building he had seen first Hubert Landow and then Scuttle Zeipp visit the previous day. At the manager’s office he made inquiries about a Walter Boyden, who was thought to live there. Walter Boyden was not known to the manager. There was a Miss Boudin in 604, but her name was B-o-u-d-i-n, and she lived alone.

Alec Rush left the building and got in his car again. He screwed up his savage red eyes, nodded his head in a satisfied way, and with one finger described a small circle in the air. Then he returned to his office.

Calling the trust company’s number again, he gave Ralph Millar’s name, and presently was speaking to the assistant cashier.

“This is Rush. Can you come up to the office right away?”

“What’s that? Certainly. But how... how—? Yes, I’ll be up in a minute.”

None of the surprise that had been in Millar’s telephone voice was apparent when he reached the detective’s office. He asked no questions concerning the detective’s knowledge of his identity. In brown to-day, he was as neatly inconspicuous as he had been yesterday in gray.

“Come in,” the ugly man welcomed him. “Sit down. I’ve got to have some more facts, Mr. Millar.”

Millar’s thin mouth tightened and his brows drew together with obstinate reticence.

“I thought we settled that point, Rush. I told you—”

Alec Rush frowned at his client with jovial, though frightful exasperation.

“I know what you told me,” he interrupted. “But that was then and this is now. The thing’s coming unwound on me, and I can see just enough to get myself tangled up if I don’t watch Harvey. I found your mysterious man, talked to him. He was following Mrs. Landow, right enough. According to the way he tells it, he’s been hired to kill her.”

Millar leaped from his chair to lean over the yellow desk, his face close to the detective’s.

“My God, Rush, what are you saying? To kill her?”

“Now, now! Take it easy. He’s not going to kill her. I don’t think he ever meant to. But he claims he was hired to do it.”

“You’ve arrested him? You’ve found the man who hired him?”

The detective squinted up his bloodshot eyes and studied the younger man’s passionate face.

“As a matter of fact,” he croaked calmly when he had finished his examination, “I haven’t done either of those things. She’s in no danger just now. Maybe the lad was stringing me, maybe he wasn’t, but either way he wouldn’t have spilled it to me if he meant to do anything. And when it comes right down to it, Mr. Millar, do you want him arrested?”

“Yes! That is—” Millar stepped back from the desk, sagged limply down on the chair again, and put shaking hands over his face. “My God, Rush, I don’t know!” he gasped.

“Exactly,” said Alec Rush. “Now here it is. Mrs. Landow was Jerome Falsoner’s niece and heir. She worked for your trust company. She married Landow the morning her uncle was found dead. Yesterday Landow visited the building where Madeline Boudin lives. She was the last person known to have been in Falsoner’s rooms before he was killed. But her alibi seems to be as air-tight as the Landows’. The man who claims he was hired to kill Mrs. Landow also visited Madeline Boudin’s building yesterday. I saw him go in. I saw him meet another woman. A shoplifter, the second one. In her rooms I found a photograph of Hubert Landow. Your dark man claims he was hired twice to kill Mrs. Landow — by two women neither knowing the other had hired him. He won’t tell me who they are, but he doesn’t have to.”

The hoarse voice stopped and Alec Rush waited for Millar to speak. But Millar was for the time without a voice. His eyes were wide and despairingly empty. Alec Rush raised one big hand, folded it into a fist that was almost perfectly spherical, and thumped his desk softly.

“There it is, Mr. Millar,” he rasped. “A pretty tangle. If you’ll tell me what you know, we’ll get it straightened out, never fear. If you don’t — I’m out!”

Now Millar found words, however jumbled.

“You couldn’t, Rush! You can’t desert me — us — her! It’s not— You’re not—”

But Alec Rush shook his ugly pear-shaped head with slow emphasis.

“There’s murder in this and the Lord knows what all. I’ve got no liking for a blindfolded game. How do I know what you’re up to? You can tell me what you know — everything — or you can find yourself another detective. That’s flat.”

Ralph Millar’s fingers picked at each other, his teeth pulled at his lips, his harassed eyes pleaded with the detective.

“You can’t, Rush,” he begged. “She’s still in danger. Even if you are right about that man not attacking her, she’s not safe. The women who hired him can hire another. You’ve got to protect her, Rush.”

“Yeah? Then you’ve got to talk.”

“I’ve got to—? Yes, I’ll talk, Rush. I’ll tell you anything you ask. But there’s really nothing — or almost nothing — I know beyond what you’ve already learned.”

“She worked for your trust company?”

“Yes, in my department.”

“Left there to be married?”

“Yes. That is — No, Rush, the truth is she was discharged. It was an outrage, but—”

“When was this?”

“It was the day before the — before she was married.”

“Tell me about it.”

“She had — I’ll have to explain her situation to you first, Rush. She is an orphan. Her father, Ben Falsoner, had been wild in his youth — and perhaps not only in his youth — as I believe all the Falsoners have been. However, he had quarreled with his father — old Howard Falsoner — and the old man had cut him out of the will. But not altogether out. The old man hoped Ben would mend his ways, and he didn’t mean to leave him with nothing in that event. Unfortunately he trusted it to his other son, Jerome.

“Old Howard Falsoner left a will whereby the income from his estate was to go to Jerome during Jerome’s life. Jerome was to provide for his brother, Ben, as he saw fit. That is, he had an absolutely free hand. He could divide the income equally with his brother, or he could give him a pittance, or he could give him nothing, as Ben’s conduct deserved. On Jerome’s death the estate was to be divided equally among the old man’s grandchildren.

“In theory, that was a fairly sensible arrangement, but not in practice — not in Jerome Falsoner’s hands. You didn’t know him? Well, he was the last man you’d ever trust with a thing of that sort. He exercised his power to the utmost. Ben Falsoner never got a cent from him. Three years ago Ben died, and so the girl, his only daughter, stepped into his position in relation to her grandfather’s money. Her mother was already dead. Jerome Falsoner never paid her a cent.

“That was her situation when she came to the trust company two years ago. It wasn’t a happy one. She had at least a touch of the Falsoner recklessness and extravagance. There she was: heiress to some two million dollars — for Jerome had never married and she was the only grandchild — but without any present income at all, except her salary, which was by no means a large one.

“She got in debt. I suppose she tried to economize at times, but there was always that two million dollars ahead to make scrimping doubly distasteful. Finally, the trust company officials heard of her indebtedness. A collector or two came to the office, in fact. Since she was employed in my department, I had the disagreeable duty of warning her. She promised to pay her debts and contract no more, and I suppose she did try, but she wasn’t very successful. Our officials are old-fashioned, ultra-conservative. I did everything I could to save her, but it was no good. They simply would not have an employee who was heels over head in debt.”

Millar paused a moment, looked miserably at the floor, and went on:

“I had the disagreeable task of telling her her services were no longer needed. I tried to — It was awfully unpleasant. That was the day before she married Landow. It—” He paused and, as if he could think of nothing else to say, repeated, “Yes, it was the day before she married Landow,” and fell to staring miserably at the floor again.

Alec Rush, who had sat as still through the recital of this history as a carven monster on an old church, now leaned over his desk and put a husky question:

“And who is this Hubert Landow? What is he?”

Ralph Millar shook his downcast head.

“I don’t know him. I’ve seen him. I know nothing of him.”

“Mrs. Landow ever speak of him? I mean when she was in the trust company?”

“It’s likely, but I don’t remember.”

“So you didn’t know what to make of it when you heard she’d married him?”

The younger man looked up with frightened brown eyes.

“What are you getting at, Rush? You don’t think — Yes, as you say, I was surprised. What are you getting at?”

“The marriage license,” the detective said, ignoring his client’s repeated question, “was issued to Landow four days before the wedding-day, four days before Jerome Falsoner’s body was found.”

Millar chewed a fingernail and shook his head hopelessly.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” he mumbled around the finger. “The whole thing is bewildering.”

“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Millar,” the detective’s voice filled the office with hoarse insistence, “that you were on more friendly terms with Sara Falsoner than with anyone else in the trust company?”

The younger man raised his head and looked Alec Rush in the eye — held his gaze with brown eyes that were doggedly level.

“The fact is,” he said quietly, “that I asked Sara Falsoner to marry me the day she left.”

“Yeah. And she—?”

“And she — I suppose it was my fault. I was clumsy, crude, whatever you like. God knows what she thought — that I was asking her to marry me out of pity, that I was trying to force her into marriage by discharging her when I knew she was over her head in debt! She might have thought anything. Anyhow, it was — it was disagreeable.”

“You mean she not only refused you, but was — well — disagreeable about it?”

“I do mean that.”

Alec Rush sat back in his chair and brought fresh grotesqueries into his face by twisting his thick mouth crookedly up at one corner. His red eyes were evilly reflective on the ceiling.

“The only thing for it,” he decided, “is to go to Landow and give him what we’ve got.”

“But are you sure he—?” Millar objected indefinitely.

“Unless he’s one whale of an actor, he’s a lot in love with his wife,” the detective said with certainty. “That’s enough to justify taking the story to him.”

Millar was not convinced.

“You’re sure it would be wisest?”

“Yeah. We’ve got to go to one of three people with the tale — him, her, or the police. I think he’s the best bet, but take your choice.”

The younger man nodded reluctantly.

“All right. But you don’t have to bring me into it, do you?” he said with quick alarm. “You can handle it so I won’t be involved. You understand what I mean? She’s his wife, and it would be—”

“Sure,” Alec Rush promised; “I’ll keep you covered up.”

Hubert Landow, twisting the detective’s card in his fingers, received Alec Rush in a somewhat luxuriously furnished room in the second story of the Charles-Street Avenue house. He was standing — tall, blond, boyishly handsome — in the middle of the floor, facing the door, when the detective — fat, grizzled, battered, and ugly — was shown in.

“You wish to see me? Here, sit down.”

Hubert Landow’s manner was neither restrained nor hearty. It was precisely the manner that might be expected of a young man receiving an unexpected call from so savage-visaged a detective.

“Yeah,” said Alec Rush as they sat in facing chairs. “I’ve got something to tell you. It won’t take much time, but it’s kind of wild. It might be a surprise to you, and it might not. But it’s on the level. I don’t want you to think I’m kidding you.”

Hubert Landow bent forward, his face all interest.

“I won’t,” he promised. “Go on.”

“A couple of days ago I got a line on a man who might be tied up in a job I’m interested in. He’s a crook. Trailing him around, I discovered he was interested in your affairs, and your wife’s. He’s shadowed you and he’s shadowed her. He was loafing down the street from a Mount Royal Avenue apartment that you went in yesterday, and he went in there later himself.”

“But what the devil is he up to?” Landow exclaimed. “You think he’s—”

“Wait,” the ugly man advised. “Wait until you’ve heard it all, and then you can tell me what you make of it. He came out of there and went to Camden Station, where he met a young woman. They talked a bit, and later in the afternoon she was picked up in a department store — shoplifting. Her name is Polly Bangs, and she’s done a hitch in Wisconsin for the same racket. Your photograph was on her dresser.”

“My photograph?”

Alec Rush nodded placidly up into the face of the young man, who was now standing.

“Yours. You know this Polly Bangs? A chunky, square-built girl of twenty-six or so, with brown hair and eyes — saucy looking?”

Hubert Landow’s face was a puzzled blank.

“No! What the devil could she be doing with my picture?” he demanded. “Are you sure it was mine?”

“Not dead sure, maybe, but sure enough to need proof that it wasn’t. Maybe she’s somebody you’ve forgotten, or maybe she ran across the picture somewhere and kept it because she liked it.”

“Nonsense!” The blond man squirmed at this tribute to his face, and blushed a vivid red beside which Alec Rush’s complexion was almost colorless. “There must be some sensible reason. She has been arrested, you say?”

“Yeah, but she’s out on bail now. But let me get along with my story. Last night this thug I’ve told you about and I had a talk. He claims he has been hired to kill your wife.”

Hubert Landow, who had returned to his chair, now jerked in it so that its joints creaked strainingly. His face, crimson a second ago, drained paper-white. Another sound than the chair’s creaking was faint in the room: the least of muffled gasps. The blond young man did not seem to hear it, but Alec Rush’s bloodshot eyes flicked sidewise for an instant to focus fleetingly on a closed door across the room.

Landow was out of his chair again, leaning down to the detective, his fingers digging into the ugly man’s loose muscular shoulders.

“This is horrible!” he was crying. “We’ve got to—”

The door at which the detective had looked a moment ago opened. A beautiful tall girl came through — Sara Landow. Her rumpled hair was an auburn cloud around her white face. Her eyes were dead things. She walked slowly toward the men, her body inclined a little forward, as if against a strong wind.

“It’s no use, Hubert.” Her voice was as dead as her eyes. “We may as well face it. It’s Madeline Boudin. She has found out that I killed my uncle.”

“Hush, darling, hush!” Landow caught his wife in his arms and tried to soothe her with a caressing hand on her shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Oh, but I do.” She shrugged herself listlessly out of his arms and sat in the chair Alec Rush had just vacated. “It’s Madeline Boudin, you know it is. She knows I killed Uncle Jerome.”

Landow whirled to the detective, both hands going out to grip the ugly man’s arm.

“You won’t listen to what she’s saying, Rush?” he pleaded. “She hasn’t been well. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

Sara Landow laughed with weary bitterness.

“Haven’t been well?” she said. “No, I haven’t been well, not since I killed him. How could I be well after that? You are a detective.” Her eyes lifted their emptiness to Alec Rush. “Arrest me. I killed Jerome Falsoner.”

Alec Rush, standing arms akimbo, legs apart, scowled at her, saying nothing.

“You can’t, Rush!” Landow was tugging at the detective’s arm again. “You can’t, man. It’s ridiculous! You—”

“Where does this Madeline Boudin fit in?” Alec Rush’s harsh voice demanded. “I know she was chummy with Jerome, but why should she want your wife killed?”

Landow hesitated, shifting his feet, and when he replied it was reluctantly.

“She was Jerome’s mistress, had a child by him. My wife, when she learned of it, insisted on making her a settlement out of the estate. It was in connection with that that I went to see her yesterday.”

“Yeah. Now to get back to Jerome: you and your wife were supposed to be in her apartment at the time he was killed, if I remember right?”

Sara Landow sighed with spiritless impatience.

“Must there be all this discussion?” she asked in a small, tired voice. “I killed him. No one else killed him. No one else was there when I killed him. I stabbed him with the paper-knife when he attacked me, and he said, ‘Don’t! Don’t!’ and began to cry, down on his knees, and I ran out.”

Alec Rush looked from the girl to the man. Landow’s face was wet with perspiration, his hands were white fists, and something quivered in his chest. When he spoke his voice was as hoarse as the detective’s, if not so loud.

“Sara, will you wait here until I come back? I’m going out for a little while, possibly an hour. You’ll wait here and not do anything until I return?”

“Yes,” the girl said, neither curiosity nor interest in her voice. “But it’s no use, Hubert. I should have told you in the beginning. It’s no use.”

“Just wait for me, Sara,” he pleaded, and then bent his head to the detective’s deformed ear. “Stay with her, Rush, for God’s sake!” he whispered, and went swiftly out of the room.

The front door banged shut. An automobile purred away from the house. Alec Rush spoke to the girl.

“Where’s the phone?”

“In the next room,” she said, without looking up from the handkerchief her fingers were measuring.

The detective crossed to the door through which she had entered the room, found that it opened into a library, where a telephone stood in a corner. On the other side of the room a clock indicated 3:35. The detective went to the telephone and called Ralph Millar’s office, asked for Millar, and told him:

“This is Rush. I’m at the Landows’. Come up right away.”

“But I can’t, Rush. Can’t you understand my—”

“Can’t hell!” croaked Alec Rush. “Get here quick!”

The young woman with dead eyes, still playing with the hem of her handkerchief, did not look up when the ugly man returned to the room. Neither of them spoke. Alec Rush, standing with his back to a window, twice took out his watch to glare savagely at it.

The faint tingling of the doorbell came from below. The detective went across to the hall door and down the front stairs, moving with heavy swiftness. Ralph Millar, his face a field in which fear and embarrassment fought, stood in the vestibule, stammering something unintelligible to the maid who had opened the door. Alec Rush put the girl brusquely aside, brought Millar in, guided him upstairs.

“She says she killed Jerome,” he muttered into his client’s ear as they mounted.

Ralph Millar’s face went dreadfully white, but there was no surprise in it.

“You knew she killed him?” Alec Rush growled.

Millar tried twice to speak and made no sound. They were on the second-floor landing before the words came.

“I saw her on the street that night, going toward his flat!”

Alec Rush snorted viciously and turned the younger man toward the room where Sara Landow sat.

“Landow’s out,” he whispered hurriedly. “I’m going out. Stay with her. She’s shot to hell — likely to do anything if she’s left alone. If Landow gets back before I do, tell him to wait for me.”

Before Millar could voice the confusion in his face they were across the sill and into the room. Sara Landow raised her head. Her body was lifted from the chair as if by an invisible power. She came up tall and erect on her feet. Millar stood just inside the door. They looked eye into eye, posed each as if in the grip of a force pushing them together, another holding them apart.

Alec Rush hurried clumsily and silently down to the street.

In Mount Royal Avenue, Alec Rush saw the blue roadster at once. It was standing empty before the apartment building in which Madeline Boudin lived. The detective drove past it and turned his coupé in to the curb three blocks below. He had barely come to rest there when Landow ran out of the apartment building, jumped into his car, and drove off. He drove to a Charles Street hotel. Behind him went the detective.

In the hotel, Landow walked straight to the writing-room. For half an hour he sat there, bending over a desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper with rapidly written words, while the detective sat behind a newspaper in a secluded angle of the lobby, watching the writing-room exit. Landow came out of the room stuffing a thick envelope in his pocket, left the hotel, got into his machine, and drove to the office of a messenger service company in St. Paul Street.

He remained in this office for five minutes. When he came out he ignored his roadster at the curb, walking instead to Calvert Street, where he boarded a northbound street car. Alec Rush’s coupé rolled along behind the car. At Union Station, Landow left the street car and went to the ticket-window. He had just asked for a one-way ticket to Philadelphia when Alec Rush tapped him on the shoulder.

Hubert Landow turned slowly, the money for his ticket still in his hand. Recognition brought no expression to his handsome face.

“Yes,” he said coolly, “what is it?”

Alec Rush nodded his ugly head at the ticket-window, at the money in Landow’s hand.

“This is nothing for you to be doing,” he growled.

“Here you are,” the ticket-seller said through his grille. Neither of the men in front paid any attention to him. A large woman in pink, red, and violet, jostling Landow, stepped on his foot and pushed past him to the window. Landow stepped back, the detective following.

“You shouldn’t have left Sara alone,” said Landow. “She’s—”

“She’s not alone. I got somebody to stay with her.”

“Not—?”

“Not the police, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Landow began to pace slowly down the long concourse, the detective keeping step with him. The blond man stopped and looked sharply into the other’s face.

“Is it that fellow Millar who’s with her?” he demanded.

“Yeah.”

“Is he the man you’re working for, Rush?”

“Yeah.”

Landow resumed his walking. When they had reached the northern extremity of the concourse, he spoke again.

“What does he want, this Millar?”

Alec Rush shrugged his thick, limber shoulders and said nothing.

“Well, what do you want?” the young man asked with some heat, facing the detective squarely now.

“I don’t want you going out of town.”

Landow pondered that, scowling.

“Suppose I insist on going,” he asked, “how will you stop me?”

“Accomplice after the fact in Jerome’s murder would be a charge I could hold you on.”

Silence again, until broken by Landow.

“Look here, Rush. You’re working for Millar. He’s out at my house. I’ve just sent a letter out to Sara by messenger. Give them time to read it, and then phone Millar there. Ask him if he wants me held or not.”

Alec Rush shook his head decidedly.

“No good,” he rasped. “Millar’s too rattle-brained for me to take his word for anything like that over the phone. We’ll go back there and have a talk all around.”

Now it was Landow who balked.

“No,” he snapped. “I won’t!” He looked with cool calculation at the detective’s ugly face. “Can I buy you, Rush?”

“No, Landow. Don’t let my looks and my record kid you.”

“I thought not.” Landow looked at the roof and at his feet, and he blew his breath out sharply. “We can’t talk here. Let’s find a quiet place.”

“The heap’s outside,” Alec Rush said, “and we can sit in that.”

Seated in Alec Rush’s coupé, Hubert Landow lighted a cigarette, the detective one of his black cigars.

“That Polly Bangs you were talking about, Rush,” the blond man said without preamble, “is my wife. My name is Henry Bangs. You won’t find my fingerprints anywhere. When Polly was picked up in Milwaukee a couple of years ago and sent over, I came east and fell in with Madeline Boudin. We made a good team. She had brains in chunks, and if I’ve got somebody to do my thinking for me, I’m a pretty good worker myself.”

He smiled at the detective, pointing at his own face with his cigarette. While Alec Rush watched, a tide of crimson surged into the blond man’s face until it was as rosy as a blushing school-girl’s. He laughed again and the blush began to fade.

“That’s my best trick,” he went on. “Easy if you have the gift and keep in practice: fill your lungs, try to force the air out while keeping it shut off at the larynx. It’s a gold mine for a grifter! You’d be surprised how people will trust me after I’ve turned on a blush or two for ’em. So Madeline and I were in the money. She had brains, nerve, and a good front. I have everything but brains. We turned a couple of tricks — one con and one blackmail — and then she ran into Jerome Falsoner. We were going to give him the squeeze at first. But when Madeline found out that Sara was his heiress, that she was in debt, and that she and her uncle were on the outs, we ditched that racket and cooked a juicier one. Madeline found somebody to introduce me to Sara. I made myself agreeable, playing the boob — the shy but worshipful young man.

“Madeline had brains, as I’ve said. She used ’em all this time. I hung around Sara, sending her candy, books, flowers, taking her to shows and dinner. The books and shows were part of Madeline’s work. Two of the books mentioned the fact that a husband can’t be made to testify against his wife in court, nor wife against husband. One of the plays touched the same thing. That was planting the seeds. We planted another with my blushing and mumbling — persuaded Sara, or rather let her discover for herself, that I was the clumsiest liar in the world.

“The planting done, we began to push the game along. Madeline kept on good terms with Jerome. Sara was getting deeper in debt. We helped her in still deeper. We had a burglar clean out her apartment one night — Ruby Sweeger, maybe you know him. He’s in stir now for another caper. He got what money she had and most of the things she could have hocked in a pinch. Then we stirred up some of the people she owed, sent them anonymous letters warning them not to count too much on her being Jerome’s heir. Foolish letters, but they did the trick. A couple of her creditors sent collectors to the trust company.

“Jerome got his income from the estate quarterly. Madeline knew the dates, and Sara knew them. The day before the next one, Madeline got busy on Sara’s creditors again. I don’t know what she told them this time, but it was enough. They descended on the trust company in a flock, with the result that the next day Sara was given two weeks’ pay and discharged. When she came out I met her — by chance — yes, I’d been watching for her since morning. I took her for a drive and got her back to her apartment at six o’clock. There we found more frantic creditors waiting to pounce on her. I chased them out, played the big-hearted boy, making embarrassed offers of all sorts of help. She refused them, of course, and I could see decision coming into her face. She knew this was the day on which Jerome got his quarterly check. She determined to go see him, to demand that he pay her debts at least. She didn’t tell me where she was going, but I could see it plain enough, since I was looking for it.

“I left her and waited across the street from her apartment, in Franklin Square, until I saw her come out. Then I found a telephone, called up Madeline, and told her Sara was on her way to her uncle’s flat.”

Landow’s cigarette scorched his fingers. He dropped it, crushed it under his foot, lighted another.

“This is a long-winded story, Rush,” he apologized, “but it’ll soon be over now.”

“Keep talking, son,” said Alec Rush.

“There were some people in Madeline’s place when I phoned her — people trying to persuade her to go down the country on a party. She agreed now. They would give her an even better alibi than the one she had cooked up. She told them she had to see Jerome before she left, and they drove her over to his place and waited in their car while she went in with him.

“She had a pint bottle of cognac with her, all doped and ready. She poured out a drink of it for Jerome, telling him of the new bootlegger she had found who had a dozen or more cases of this cognac to sell at a reasonable price. The cognac was good enough and the price low enough to make Jerome think she had dropped in to let him in on something good. He gave her an order to pass on to the bootlegger. Making sure his steel paper-knife was in full view on the table, Madeline rejoined her friends, taking Jerome as far as the door so they would see he was still alive, and drove off.

“Now I don’t know what Madeline had put in that cognac. If she told me, I’ve forgotten. It was a powerful drug — not a poison, you understand, but an excitant. You’ll see what I mean when you hear the rest. Sara must have reached her uncle’s flat ten or fifteen minutes after Madeline’s departure. Her uncle’s face, she says, was red, inflamed, when he opened the door for her. But he was a frail man, while she was strong, and she wasn’t afraid of the devil himself, for that matter. She went in and demanded that he settle her debts, even if he didn’t choose to make her an allowance out of his income.

“They were both Falsoners, and the argument must have grown hot. Also the drug was working on Jerome, and he had no will with which to fight it. He attacked her. The paper-knife was on the table, as Madeline had seen. He was a maniac. Sara was not one of your corner-huddling, screaming girls. She grabbed the paper-knife and let him have it. When he fell, she turned and ran.

“Having followed her as soon as I’d finished telephoning to Madeline, I was standing on Jerome’s front steps when she dashed out. I stopped her and she told me she’d killed her uncle. I made her wait there while I went in, to see if he was really dead. Then I took her home, explaining my presence at Jerome’s door by saying, in my boobish, awkward way, that I had been afraid she might do something reckless and had thought it best to keep an eye on her.

“Back in her apartment, she was all for giving herself up to the police. I pointed out the danger in that, arguing that, in debt, admittedly going to her uncle for money, being his heiress, she would most certainly be convicted of having murdered him so she would get the money. Her story of his attack, I persuaded her, would be laughed at as a flimsy yarn. Dazed, she wasn’t hard to convince. The next step was easy. The police would investigate her, even if they didn’t especially suspect her. I was, so far as we knew, the only person whose testimony could convict her. I was loyal enough, but wasn’t I the clumsiest liar in the world? Didn’t the mildest lie make me blush like an auctioneer’s flag? The way around that difficulty lay in what two of the books I had given her, and one of the plays we had seen, had shown: if I was her husband I couldn’t be made to testify against her. We were married the next morning, on a license I had been carrying for nearly a week.

“Well, there we were. I was married to her. She had a couple of million coming when her uncle’s affairs were straightened out. She couldn’t possibly, it seemed, escape arrest and conviction. Even if no one had seen her entering or leaving her uncle’s flat, everything still pointed to her guilt, and the foolish course I had persuaded her to follow would simply ruin her chance of pleading self-defense. If they hanged her, the two million would come to me. If she got a long term in prison, I’d have the handling of the money at least.”

Landow dropped and crushed his second cigarette and stared for a moment straight ahead into distance.

“Do you believe in God, or Providence, or Fate, or any of that, Rush?” he asked. “Well, some believe in one thing and some in another, but listen. Sara was never arrested, never even really suspected. It seems there was some sort of Finn or Swede who had had a run-in with Jerome and threatened him. I suppose he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the night of the killing, so he went into hiding when he heard of Jerome’s murder. The police suspicion settled on him. They looked Sara up, of course, but not very thoroughly. No one seems to have seen her in the street, and the people in her apartment house, having seen her come in at six o’clock with me, and not having seen her — or not remembering if they did — go out or in again, told the police she had been in all evening. The police were too much interested in the missing Finn, or whatever he was, to look any further into Sara’s affairs.

“So there we were again. I was married into the money, but I wasn’t fixed so I could hand Madeline her cut. Madeline said we’d let things run along as they were until the estate was settled up, and then we could tip Sara off to the police. But by the time the money was settled up there was another hitch. This one was my doing. I... I... well, I wanted to go on just as we were. Conscience had nothing to do with it, you understand? It was simply that — well — that living on with Sara was the only thing I wanted. I wasn’t even sorry for what I’d done, because if it hadn’t been for that I would never have had her.

“I don’t know whether I can make this clear to you, Rush, but even now I don’t regret any of it. If it could have been different — but it couldn’t. It had to be this way or none. And I’ve had those six months. I can see that I’ve been a chump. Sara was never for me. I got her by a crime and a trick, and while I held on to a silly hope that some day she’d — she’d look at me as I did at her, I knew in my heart all the time it was no use. There had been a man — your Millar. She’s free now that it’s out about my being married to Polly, and I hope she — I hope— Well, Madeline began to howl for action. I told Sara that Madeline had had a child by Jerome, and Sara agreed to settle some money on her. But that didn’t satisfy Madeline. It wasn’t sentiment with her. I mean, it wasn’t any feeling for me, it was just the money. She wanted every cent she could get, and she couldn’t get enough to satisfy her in a settlement of the kind Sara wanted to make.

“With Polly, it was that too, but maybe a little more. She’s fond of me, I think. I don’t know how she traced me here after she got out of the Wisconsin big house, but I can see how she figured things. I was married to a wealthy woman. If the woman died — shot by a bandit in a hold-up attempt — then I’d have money, and Polly would have both me and money. I haven’t seen her, wouldn’t know she was in Baltimore if you hadn’t told me, but that’s the way it would work out in her mind. The killing idea would have occurred just as easily to Madeline. I had told her I wouldn’t stand for pushing the game through on Sara. Madeline knew that if she went ahead on her own hook and hung the Falsoner murder on Sara I’d blow up the whole racket. But if Sara died, then I’d have the money and Madeline would draw her cut. So that was it.

“I didn’t know that until you told me, Rush. I don’t give a damn for your opinion of me, but it’s God’s truth that I didn’t know that either Polly or Madeline was trying to have Sara killed. Well, that’s about all. Were you shadowing me when I went to the hotel?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so. That letter I wrote and sent home told just about what I’ve told you, spilled the whole story. I was going to run for it, leaving Sara in the clear. She’s clear, all right, but now I’ll have to face it. But I don’t want to see her again, Rush.”

“I wouldn’t think you would,” the detective agreed. “Not after making a killer of her.”

“But I didn’t,” Landow protested. “She isn’t. I forgot to tell you that, but I put it in the letter. Jerome Falsoner was not dead, not even dying, when I went past her into the flat. The knife was too high in his chest. I killed him, driving the knife into the same wound again, but downward. That’s what I went in for, to make sure he was finished!”

Alec Rush screwed up his savage bloodshot eyes, looked long into the confessed murderer’s face.

“That’s a lie,” he croaked at last, “but a decent one. Are you sure you want to stick to it? The truth will be enough to clear the girl, and maybe won’t swing you.”

“What difference does it make?” the younger man asked. “I’m a gone baby anyhow. And I might as well put Sara in the clear with herself as well as with the law. I’m caught to rights and another rap won’t hurt. I told you Madeline had brains. I was afraid of them. She’d have had something up her sleeve to spring on us — to ruin Sara with. She could out-smart me without trying. I couldn’t take any chances.”

He laughed into Alec Rush’s ugly face and, with a somewhat theatrical gesture, jerked one cuff an inch or two out of his coat-sleeve. The cuff was still damp with a maroon stain.

“I killed Madeline an hour ago,” said Henry Bangs, alias Hubert Landow.

The Figure of Incongruity

(written ~ 1926/27); aka: A Man Named Thin (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1, 1961)

Papa was, though I may be deemed an undutiful son for saying it, in an abominable mood. His chin protruded across the desk at me in a fashion that almost justified the epithet of brutal which had once been applied to it by an unfriendly journalist; and his mustache seemed to bristle with choler of its own, though this was merely the impression I received. It would be preposterous to assume actual change in the mustache which, whatever Papa’s humor, was always somewhat irregularly salient.

“So you’re still fooling with this damned nonsense of yours?”

On Papa’s desk, under one of his hands, lay a letter which, its odd shape and color informed me immediately, was from the editor of The Jongleur to whom, a few days before, I had sent a sonnet.

“If you mean my writing,” I replied respectfully, but none the less staunchly; for my thirtieth birthday being some months past, I considered myself entitled to some liberty of purpose, even though that purpose might be distasteful to Papa. “If you mean my writing, Papa, I assure you I am not fooling, but am completely in earnest.”

“But why in” — if now and then I garble Papa’s remarks in reporting them, it is not, I beg you to believe, because he is addicted to incoherencies, but simply because he frequently saw fit to sacrifice the amenities of speech to what he considered a vigor of expression — “do you have to pick on poetry? Aren’t there plenty of other things to write about? Why, Robin, you could write some good serious articles about our work, articles that would tell the public the truth about it and at the same time give us some advertising.”

“One writes what one is impelled to write,” I began not too hopefully, for this was by no means the first time I had begun thus. “The creative impulse is not to be coerced into—”

“Florence!”

I do not like to say Papa bellowed, but the milder synonyms are not entirely adequate to express the volume of sound he put into our stenographer’s given name by which he insisted on addressing her.

Miss Queenan appeared at the door — an unfamiliar Miss Queenan who did not advance to Papa’s desk with that romping mixture of flippancy and self-assurance which the press, with its propensity to exaggerate, has persuaded our generation to expect; instead, she stood there awaiting Papa’s attention.

“After this, Florence, will you see that my desk is not cluttered up with correspondence dealing with my son’s Mother Goose rhymes!”

“Yes, Mr. Thin,” she replied in a voice surprisingly meek for someone accustomed to speak to Papa as if she were a member of his family.

“My dear Papa,” I endeavored to remonstrate when Miss Queenan had retired, “I really think—”

“Don’t dear Papa me! And you don’t think! Nobody that thought could be such a...”

It would serve no purpose to repeat Papa’s words in detail. They were, for the most part, quite unreasonable, and not even my deep-seated sense of filial propriety could enable me to keep my face from showing some of the resentment I felt; but I heard him through in silence and when he had underscored his last sentence by thrusting The Jongleur’s letter at me, I withdrew to my office.

The letter, which had come to Papa’s desk through the carelessness of the editor in omitting the Jr. from my name, had to do with the sonnet I have already mentioned — a sonnet entitled “Fictitious Tears.” The editor’s opinion was that its concluding couplet, which he quoted in his letter, was not, as he politely put it, up to my usual standard, and he requested that I rewrite it, adjusting it more exactly to the tone of the previous lines, for which it was, he thought, a trifle too serious.

And glisten there no less incongruously

Than Christmas balls on deadly upas tree.

I reminded myself, as I took my rhyming dictionary from behind Gross’s Kriminal Psychologie where, in the interest of peace, I habitually concealed it, that I had not been especially pleased with those two lines; but after repeated trials I had been unable to find more suitable ones. Now, as I heard the noon whistles, I brought out my carbon copy of the sonnet and determined to devote the quiet of the luncheon hour to the creation of another simile that would express incongruity in a lighter vein.

To that task I addressed myself, submerging my consciousness to such an extent that when I heard Papa’s voice calling “Robin!” with a force that fairly agitated the three intervening partitions, I roused as if from sleep, with a suspicion that the first call I had heard had not been the first Papa had uttered. This suspicion was confirmed when, putting away paper and books, I hastened into Papa’s presence.

“Too busy listening to the little birdies twitter to hear me?” But this was mere perfunctory gruffness; his eyes were quite jovial so that in a measure I was prepared for his next words. “Barnable’s stuck up. Get to it.”

The Barnable Jewelry company’s store was six blocks from our offices, and a convenient street car conveyed me there before Papa’s brief order was five minutes old. The store, a small one, occupied a portion of the ground floor of the Bulwer Building, on the north side of O’Farrell Street, between Powell and Stockton Streets. The store’s neighbors on the ground floor of the same building were, going east toward Stockton Street, a haberdasher (in whose window, by the way, I noticed an intriguing lavender dressing robe), a barber shop, and a tobacconist’s; and going westward toward Powell Street, the main entrance and lobby of the Bulwer Building, a prescription druggist, a hatter, and a lunchroom.

At the jeweler’s door a uniformed policeman was busily engaged in preventing a curious crowd, most of whom presumably out on their luncheon hours, from either blocking the sidewalk or entering the store. Passing through this throng, I nodded to the policeman, not that I was personally acquainted with him but because experience had taught me that a friendly nod will often forestall questions, and went into the store.

Detective-Sergeant Hooley and Detective Strong of the Police Department were in the store. In one hand the former held a dark gray cap and a small automatic pistol which did not seem to belong to any of the people to whom the detectives were talking: Mr. Barnable, Mr. Barnable’s assistant, and two men and a woman unknown to me.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I addressed the detectives. “May I participate in the inquiry?”

“Ah, Mr. Thin!”

Sergeant Hooley was a large man whose large mouth did nothing to shape his words beyond parting to emit them, so that they issued somewhat slovenly from a formless opening in his florid face. His face held now, as when I had engaged him in conversation heretofore, an elusively derisive expression — as if, with intent to annoy, he pretended to find in me, in my least word or act, something amusing. The same impulse was noticeable in the stressed mister with which he invariably prefixed my name, notwithstanding that he called Papa Bob, a familiarity I was quite willing to be spared.

“As I was telling the boys, participating is just exactly what we need.” Sergeant Hooley exercised his rather heavy wit. “Some dishonest thief has been robbing the joint. We’re about through inquiring, but you look like a fellow that can keep a secret, so I don’t mind letting you in on the dirt, as we used to say at dear old Harvard.”

I am not privy to the quirk in Sergeant Hooley’s mind which makes attendance at this particular university constitute, for him, a humorous situation; nor can I perceive why he should find so much pleasure in mentioning that famous seat of learning to me who, as I have often taken the trouble to explain to him, attended an altogether different university.

“What seems to have happened,” he went on, “is that some bird come in here all by himself, put Mr. Barnable and his help under the gun, took ’em for what was in the safe, and blew out, trampling over some folks that got in his way. He then beat it up to Powell Street, jumped into a car, and what more do you want to know?”

“At what time did this occur?”

“Right after twelve o’clock, Mr. Thin — not more than a couple of minutes after, if that many,” said Mr. Barnable, who had circled the others to reach my side. His brown eyes were round with excitement in his round brown face, but not especially melancholy, since he was insured against theft in the company on whose behalf I was now acting.

“He makes Julius and me lay down on the floor behind the counter while he robs the safe, and then he backs out. I tell Julius to get up and see if he’s gone, but just then he shoots at me.” Mr. Barnable pointed a spatulate finger at a small hole in the rear wall, near the ceiling. “So I didn’t let Julius get up till I was sure he’d gone. Then I phoned the police and your office.”

“Was anyone else, anyone besides you and Julius, in the store when the robber entered?”

“No. We hadn’t had anyone in for maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Would you be able to identify the robber if you were to see him again, Mr. Barnable?”

“Would I? Say, Mr. Thin, would Carpentier know Dempsey?”

This counter-question, which seemed utterly irrelevant, was intended, I assumed, as an affirmative.

“Kindly describe him for me, Mr. Barnable.”

“He was maybe forty years old and tough-looking, a fellow just about your size and complexion.” I am, in height and weight, of average size, and my complexion might best be described as medium, so there was nothing in any way peculiar about my having these points of resemblance to the robber; still I felt that the jeweler had been rather tactless in pointing them out. “His mouth was kind of pushed in, without much lips, and his nose was long and flattish, and he had a scar on one side of his face. A real tough-looking fellow!”

“Will you describe the scar in greater detail, Mr. Barnable?”

“It was back on his cheek, close to his ear, and ran all the way down from under his cap to his jawbone.”

“Which cheek, Mr. Barnable?”

“The left,” he said tentatively, looking at Julius, his sharp-featured young assistant. When Julius nodded, the jeweler repeated, with certainty, “The left.”

“How was he dressed, Mr. Barnable?”

“A blue suit and that cap the sergeant has got. I didn’t notice anything else.”

“His eyes and hair, Mr. Barnable?”

“Didn’t notice.”

“Exactly what did he take, Mr. Barnable?”

“I haven’t had time to check up yet, but he took all the unset stones that were in the safe — mostly diamonds. He must have got fifty thousand dollars’ worth if he got a nickel!”

I permitted a faint smile to show on my lips while I looked coldly at the jeweler.

“In the event that we fail to recover the stones, Mr. Barnable, you are aware that the insurance company will require proof of the purchase of every missing item.”

He fidgeted, screwing his round face up earnestly.

“Well, anyways, he got twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth, if it’s the last thing I ever say in this world, Mr. Thin, on my word of honor as a gentleman.”

“Did he take anything besides the unset stones, Mr. Barnable?”

“Those and some money that was in the safe — about two hundred dollars.”

“Will you please draw up a list immediately, Mr. Barnable, with as accurate a description of each missing item as possible. Now what evidence have we, Sergeant Hooley, of the robber’s subsequent actions?”

“Well, first thing, he subsequently bumped into Mrs. Dolan as he was making his getaway. Seems she was—”

“Mrs. Dolan has an account here,” the jeweler called from the rear of the store when he and Julius had gone to comply with my request. Sergeant Hooley jerked his thumb at the woman who stood on my left.

She was a woman of fewer years than forty, with humorous brown eyes set in a healthily pink face. Her clothes, while neat, were by no means new or stylish, and her whole appearance was such as to cause the adjective “capable” to come into one’s mind, an adjective further justified by the crisp freshness of the lettuce and celery protruding from the top of the shopping-bag in her arms.

“Mrs. Dolan is manager of an apartment building on Ellis Street,” the jeweler concluded his introduction, while the woman and I exchanged smiling nods.

“Thank you, Mr. Barnable. Proceed, Sergeant Hooley.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thin. Seems she was coming in to make a payment on her watch, and just as she put a foot inside the door, this stick-up backed into her, both of them taking a tumble. Mr. Knight, here, saw the mix-up, ran in, knocked the thug loose from his cap and gun, and chased him up the street.”

One of the men present laughed deprecatorily past an upraised sunburned hand which held a pair of gloves. He was a weather-browned man of athletic structure, tall and broad-shouldered, and dressed in loose tweeds.

“My part wasn’t as heroic as it sounds,” he protested. “I was getting out of my car, intending to go across to the Orpheum for tickets, when I saw this lady and the man collide. Crossing the sidewalk to help her up, nothing was further from my mind than that the man was a bandit. When I finally saw his gun he was actually on the point of shooting at me. I had to hit him, and luckily succeeded in doing so just as he pulled the trigger. When I recovered from my surprise I saw he had dropped his gun and run up the street, so I set out after him. But it was too late. He was gone.”

“Thank you, Mr. Knight. Now, Sergeant Hooley, you say the bandit escaped in a car?”

“Thank you, Mr. Thin,” he said idiotically, “I did. Mr. Glenn here saw him.”

“I was standing on the corner,” said Mr. Glenn, a plump man with what might be called the air of a successful salesman.

“Pardon me, Mr. Glenn, what corner?”

“The corner of Powell and O’Farrell,” he said, quite as if I should have known it without being told. “The northeast corner, if you want it exactly, close to the building line. This bandit came up the street and got into a coupé that was driving up Powell Street. I didn’t pay much attention to him. If I heard the shot I took it for an automobile noise. I wouldn’t have noticed the man if he hadn’t been bare-headed, but he was the man Mr. Barnable described — scar, pushed-in mouth, and all.”

“Do you know the make or license number of the car he entered, Mr. Glenn?”

“No, I don’t. It was a black coupé, and that’s all I know. I think it came from the direction of Market Street. A man was driving it, I believe, but I didn’t notice whether he was young or old or anything about him.”

“Did the bandit seem excited, Mr. Glenn? Did he look back?”

“No, he was as cool as you please, didn’t even seem in a hurry. He just walked up the street and got into the coupé, not looking to right or left.”

“Thank you, Mr. Glenn. Now can anyone amplify or amend Mr. Barnable’s description of the bandit?”

“His hair was gray,” Mr. Glenn said, “iron-gray.”

Mrs. Dolan and Mr. Knight concurred in this, the former adding, “I think he was older than Mr. Barnable said — closer to fifty than to forty — and his teeth were brown and decayed in front.”

“They were, now that you mention it,” Mr. Knight agreed.

“Is there any other light on the matter, Sergeant Hooley?”

“Not a twinkle. The shotgun cars are out after the coupé, and I reckon when the papers get out we’ll be hearing from more people who saw things, but you know how they are.”

I did indeed. One of the most lamentable features of criminal detection is the amount of time and energy wasted investigating information supplied by people who, through sheer perversity, stupidity, or excessive imagination, insist on connecting everything they have chanced to see with whatever crime happens to be most prominent in the day’s news.

Sergeant Hooley, whatever the defects of his humor, was an excellent actor: his face was bland and guileless and his voice did not vary in the least from the casual as he said, “Unless Mr. Thin has some more questions, you folks might as well run along. I have your address and can get hold of you if I need you again.”

I hesitated, but the fundamental principle that Papa had instilled in me during the ten years of my service under him — the necessity of never taking anything for granted — impelled me to say, “Just a moment,” and to lead Sergeant Hooley out of the others’ hearing.

“You have made your arrangements, Sergeant Hooley?”

“What arrangements?”

I smiled, realizing that the police detectives were trying to conceal their knowledge from me. My immediate temptation was, naturally enough, to reciprocate in kind; but whatever the advantages of working independently on any one operation, in the long run a private detective is wiser in cooperating with the police than in competing with them.

“Really,” I said, “you must harbor a poor opinion of my ability if you think I have not also taken cognizance of the fact that if Glenn were standing where he said he was standing, and if, as he says, the bandit did not turn his head, then he could not have seen the scar on the bandit’s left cheek.”

Despite his evident discomfiture, Sergeant Hooley acknowledged defeat without resentment.

“I might of known you’d tumble to that,” he admitted, rubbing his chin with a reflective thumb. “Well, I reckon we might as well take him along now as later, unless you’ve got some other notion in your head.”

Consulting my watch, I saw that it was now twenty-four minutes past noon: my investigation had thus far, thanks to the police detectives’ having assembled all the witnesses, consumed only ten or twelve minutes.

“If Glenn were stationed at Powell Street to mislead us,” I suggested, “then isn’t it quite likely that the bandit did not escape in that direction at all? It occurs to me that there is a barber shop two doors from here in the opposite direction — toward Stockton Street. That barber shop, which I assume has a door opening into the Bulwer Building, as barber shops similarly located invariably do, may have served as a passageway through which the bandit could have got quickly off the street. In any event, I consider it a possibility that we should investigate.”

“The barber shop it is!” Sergeant Hooley spoke to his colleague, “Wait here with these folks till we’re back, Strong. We won’t be long.”

“Right,” Detective Strong replied.

In the street we found fewer curious spectators than before.

“Might as well go inside, Tim,” Sergeant Hooley said to the policeman in front as we passed him on our way to the barber shop.

The barber shop was about the same size as the jewelry store. Five of its six chairs were filled when we went in, the vacant one being that nearest the front window. Behind it stood a short swarthy man who smiled at us and said, “Next,” as is the custom of barbers.

Approaching, I tendered him one of my cards, from perusal of which he looked up at me with bright interest that faded at once into rather infantile disappointment. I was not unfamiliar with this phenomenon: there are a surprising number of people who, on learning that my name is Thin, are disappointed in not finding me an emaciated skeleton or, what would doubtless be even more pleasing, grossly fat.

“You know, I assume, that Barnable’s store has been robbed?”

“Sure! It’s getting tough the way those babies knock ’em over in broad daylight!”

“Did you by any chance hear the report of the pistol?”

“Sure! I was shaving a fellow, Mr. Thorne, the real estate man. He always waits for me no matter how many of the other barbers are loafing. He says — Anyhow, I heard the shot and went to the door to look up there, but I couldn’t keep Mr. Thorne waiting, you understand, so I didn’t go up there myself.”

“Did you see anyone who might have been the bandit?”

“No. Those fellows move quick, and at lunchtime, when the street’s full of people, I guess he wouldn’t have much trouble losing himself. It’s funny the way—”

In view of the necessity of economizing on time, I risked the imputation of discourtesy by interrupting the barber’s not very pertinent comments.

“Did any man pass through here, going from the street into the Bulwer Building, immediately after you heard the shot?”

“Not that I remember, though lots of men use this shop as a kind of short cut from their offices to the street.”

“But you remember no one passing through shortly after you heard the shot?”

“Not going in. Going out, maybe, because it was just about lunchtime.”

I considered the men the barbers were working on in the five occupied chairs. Only two of these men wore blue trousers. Of the two, one had a dark mustache between an extremely outstanding nose and chin; the other’s face, pink from the shaving it had just undergone, was neither conspicuously thin nor noticeably plump, nor was his profile remarkable for either ugliness or beauty. He was a man of about thirty-five years, with fair hair and, as I saw when he smiled at something his barber said, teeth that were quite attractive in their smooth whiteness.

“When did the man in the third chair” — the one I have just described — “come in?”

“If I ain’t mistaken, just before the hold-up. He was just taking off his collar when I heard the shot. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning away.

“A tough break,” Sergeant Hooley muttered in my ear.

I looked sharply at him.

“You forget or, rather, you think I have forgotten, Knight’s gloves.”

Sergeant Hooley laughed shortly. “I forgot ’em for a fact. I must be getting absent-minded or something.”

“I know of nothing to be gained by dissembling, Sergeant Hooley. The barber will be through with our man presently.” Indeed, the man rose from the chair as I spoke. “I suggest that we simply ask him to accompany us to the jeweler’s.”

“Fair enough,” the sergeant agreed.

We waited until our man had put on his collar and tie, his blue jacket, gray coat, and gray hat. Then, exhibiting his badge, Sergeant Hooley introduced himself to the man.

“I’m Sergeant Hooley. I want you to come up the street with me.”

“What?”

The man’s surprise was apparently real, as it may well have been.

Word for word, the sergeant repeated his statement.

“What for?”

I answered the man’s question in as few words as possible.

“You are under arrest for robbing Barnable’s jewelry store.”

The man protested somewhat truculently that his name was Brennan, that he was well-known in Oakland, that someone would pay for this insult, and so on. For a minute it seemed that force would be necessary to convey our prisoner to Barnable’s, and Sergeant Hooley had already taken a grip on the man’s wrist when Brennan finally submitted, agreeing to accompany us quietly.

Glenn’s face whitened and a pronounced tremor disturbed his legs as we brought Brennan into the jewelry store, where Mrs. Dolan and Messrs. Barnable, Julius, Knight, and Strong came eagerly to group themselves around us. The uniformed man the Sergeant had called Tim remained just within the street door.

“Suppose you make the speeches,” Sergeant Hooley said, offering me the center of the stage.

“Is this your bandit, Mr. Barnable?” I began.

The jeweler’s brown eyes achieved astonishing width.

“No, Mr. Thin!”

I turned to the prisoner.

“Remove your hat and coat, if you please. Sergeant Hooley, have you the cap that the bandit dropped? Thank you, Sergeant Hooley.” To the prisoner, “Kindly put this cap on.”

“I’m damned if I will!” he roared at me.

Sergeant Hooley held a hand out toward me.

“Give it to me. Here, Strong, take a hold on this baby while I cap him.”

Brennan subsided. “All right! All right! I’ll put it on!”

The cap was patently too large for him, but, experimenting, I found it could be adjusted in such a manner that its lack of fit was not too conspicuous, while its size served to conceal his hair and alter the contours of his head.

“Now will you please,” I said, stepping back to look at him, “take out your teeth?”

This request precipitated an extraordinary amount of turmoil. The man Knight hurled himself on Detective Strong, while Glenn dashed toward the front door, and Brennan struck Sergeant Hooley viciously with his fist. Hastening to the front door to take the place of the policeman who had left it to struggle with Glenn, I saw that Mrs. Dolan had taken refuge in the corner, while Barnable and Julius avoided being drawn into the conflict only by exercising considerable agility.

Order was at length restored, with Detective Strong and the policeman handcuffing Knight and Glenn together, while Sergeant Hooley, sitting astride Brennan, waved aloft the false teeth he had taken from his mouth.

Beckoning to the policeman to resume his place at the door, I joined Sergeant Hooley, and we assisted Brennan to his feet, restoring the cap to his head. He presented a villainous appearance: his mouth, unfilled by teeth, sank in, thinning and aging his face, causing his nose to lengthen limply and flatly.

“Is this your baby?” Sergeant Hooley asked, shaking the prisoner at the jeweler.

“It is! It is! Its the same fellow!” Triumph merged with puzzlement on the jeweler’s face. “Except he’s got no scar,” he added slowly.

“I think we shall find his scar in his pocket.”

We did — in the form of a brown-stained handkerchief still damp and smelling of alcohol. Besides the handkerchief, there were in his pockets a ring of keys, two cigars, some matches, a pocket-knife, $36, and a fountain pen.

The man submitted to our search, his face expressionless until Mr. Barnable exclaimed, “But the stones? Where are my stones?”

Brennan sneered nastily. “I hope you hold your breath till you find ’em,” he said.

“Mr. Strong, will you kindly search the two men you have handcuffed together?” I requested.

He did so, finding, as I expected, nothing of importance on their persons.

“Thank you, Mr. Strong,” I said, crossing to the corner in which Mrs. Dolan was standing. “Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?”

Mrs. Dolan’s humorous brown eyes went blank.

“Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?” I repeated, extending a hand toward it.

She made a little smothered laughing sound in her throat, and handed me the bag, which I carried to a flat-topped showcase on the other side of the room. The bag’s contents were the celery and lettuce I have already mentioned, a package of sliced bacon, a box of soap chips, and a paper sack of spinach, among the green leaves of which glowed, when I emptied them out on the showcase, the hard crystal facets of unset diamonds. Less conspicuous among the leaves were some banknotes.

Mrs. Dolan was, I have said, a woman who impressed me as being capable, and that adjective seemed especially apt now: she behaved herself, I must say, in the manner of one who would be capable of anything. Fortunately, Detective Strong had followed her across the store; he was now in a position to seize her arms from behind, and thus incapacitate her, except vocally — a remaining freedom of which she availed herself to the utmost, indulging in a stream of vituperation which it is by no means necessary for me to repeat.

It was a few minutes past two o’clock when I returned to our offices.

“Well, what?” Papa ceased dictating his mail to Miss Queenan to challenge me. “I’ve been waiting for you to phone!”

“It was not necessary,” I said, not without some satisfaction. “The operation has been successfully concluded.”

“Cleaned up?”

“Yes, sir. The thieves, three men and a woman, are in the city prison, and the stolen property has been completely recovered. In the detective bureau we were able to identify two of the men, ‘Reader’ Keely, who seems to have been the principal, and a Harry McMeehan, who seems to be well-known to the police in the East. The other man and the woman, who gave their names as George Glenn and Mrs. Mary Dolan, will doubtless be identified later.”

Papa bit the end off a cigar and blew the end across the office.

“What do you think of our little sleuth, Florence?” he fairly beamed on her, for all the world as if I were a child of three who had done something precocious.

“Spiffy!” Miss Queenan replied. “I think we’ll do something with the lad yet.”

“Sit down, Robin, and tell us about it,” Papa invited. “The mail can wait.”

“The woman secured a position as manager of a small apartment house on Ellis Street,” I explained, though without sitting down. “She used that as reference to open an account with Barnable, buying a watch, for which she paid in small weekly installments. Keely, whose teeth were no doubt drawn while he was serving his last sentence in Walla Walla, removed his false teeth, painted a scar on his cheek, put on an ill-fitting cap, and, threatening Barnable and his assistant with a pistol, took the unset stones and money that were in the safe.

“As he left the store he collided with Mrs. Dolan, dropping the plunder into a bag of spinach which, with other groceries, was in her shopping-bag. McMeehan, pretending to come to the woman’s assistance, handed Keely a hat and coat, and perhaps his false teeth and a handkerchief with which to wipe off the scar, and took Keely’s pistol.

“Keely, now scarless, and with his appearance altered by teeth and hat, hurried to a barber shop two doors away, while McMeehan, after firing a shot indoors to discourage curiosity on the part of Barnable, dropped the pistol beside the cap and pretended to chase the bandit up toward Powell Street. At Powell Street another accomplice was stationed to pretend he had seen the bandit drive away in an automobile. These three confederates attempted to mislead us further by adding fictitious details to Barnable’s description of the robber.”

“Neat!” Papa’s appreciation was, I need hardly point out, purely academic — a professional interest in the cunning the thieves had shown and not in any way an approval of their dishonest plan as a whole. “How’d you knock it off?”

“That man on the corner couldn’t have seen the scar unless the bandit had turned his head, which the man denied. McMeehan wore gloves to avoid leaving prints on the pistol when he fired it, and his hands are quite sunburned, as if he does not ordinarily wear gloves. Both men and the woman told stories that fitted together in every detail, which, as you know, would be little less than a miracle in the case of honest witnesses. But since I knew Glenn, the man on the corner, had prevaricated, it was obvious that if the others’ stories agreed with his, then they too were deviating from the truth.”

I thought it best not to mention to Papa that immediately prior to going to Barnable’s, and perhaps subconsciously during my investigation, my mind had been occupied with finding another couplet to replace the one the editor of The Jongleur had disliked; incongruity, therefore, being uppermost in my brain, Mrs. Dolan’s shopping-bag had seemed a quite plausible hiding place for the diamonds and money.

“Good shooting!” Papa was saying. “Pull it by yourself?”

“I cooperated with Detectives Hooley and Strong. I am sure the subterfuge was as obvious to them as to me.”

But even as I spoke a doubt arose in my mind. There was, it seemed to me, a possibility, however slight, that the police detectives had not seen the solution as clearly as I had. At the time I had assumed that Sergeant Hooley was attempting to conceal his knowledge from me; but now, viewing the situation in retrospect, I suspected that what the sergeant had been concealing was his lack of knowledge.

However, that was not important. What was important was that, in the image of jewels among vegetables, I had found a figure of incongruity for my sonnet.

Excusing myself, I left Papa’s office for my own, where, with rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and carbon copy on my desk again, I lost myself in the business of clothing my new simile with suitable words, thankful indeed that the sonnet had been written in the Shakespearean rather than the Italian form, so that a change in the rhyme of the last two lines would not necessitate similar alterations in other lines.

Time passed, and then I was leaning back in my chair, experiencing that unique satisfaction that Papa felt when he had apprehended some especially elusive criminal. I could not help smiling when I reread my new concluding couplet.

And shining there, no less inaptly shone

Than diamonds in a spinach garden sown.

That, I fancied, would satisfy the editor of The Jongleur.

The Advertising Man Writes a Love Letter

Judge, February 26, 1927

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Curse in the Old Manner

The Bookman, September 1927

A plague on these women who, lengthily wooed,

Are not to be won till one’s out of the mood,

And who then discerning one’s temperateness

Accuse one of cooling because they said yes!

Diamond Wager

Detective Fiction Weekly, October 19, 1929, as Samuel Dashiell

I

I always knew West was eccentric.

Ever since the days of our youth, in various universities — for we seemed destined to follow each other about the globe — I had known Alexander West to be a person of the most bizarre, though not unattractive, personality: At Heidelberg, where he renounced water as a beverage; at Pisa, where he affected a one-piece garment for months; at the Sorbonne, where he consorted with the most notorious characters, boasting an acquaintance with Le Grand Raoul, an unspeakable ruffian of La Villette.

And in later life, when we met in Constantinople, where West was American minister, I found that his idiosyncrasies were common topics in the diplomatic corps. In the then Turkish capital I naturally dined with West at the Legation, and except for his pointed beard and Prussian mustache being somewhat more gray, I found him the same tall, courtly figure, with a keen brown eye and the hands of generations, an aristocrat.

But his eccentricities were then of more refined fantasy. No more baths in snow, no more beer orgies, no more Libyan negroes opening the door, no more strange diets. At the Legation, West specialized in rugs and gems. He had a museum in carpets. He had even abandoned his old practice of having the valet call him every morning at eight o’clock with a gramophone record.

I left the Legation thinking West had reformed. “Rugs and precious stones,” I reflected; “that’s such a banal combination for West.” Although I did recall that he had told me he was doing something strange with a boat on the Bosporus; but I neglected to inquire about the details. It was something in connection with work, as he had said, “Everybody has a pleasure boat; I have a work boat, where I can be alone.” But that is all I retained concerning this freak of his mind.

It was some years later, however, when West had retired from diplomacy, that he turned up in my Paris apartment, a little grayer, straight and keen as usual, but with his beard a trifle less pointed — and, let’s say, a trifle less distinguished-looking. He looked more the successful business man than the traditional diplomat. It was a cold, blustery night, so I bade West sit down by my fire and tell me of his adventures; for I knew he had not been idle since leaving Constantinople.

“No, I am not doing anything,” he answered, after a pause, in reply to my question as to his present activities. “Just resting and laughing to myself over a little prank I played on a friend.”

“Oho!” I declared; “so you’re going in for pranks now.”

He laughed heartily. I could hardly see West as a practical joker. That was one thing out of his line. As he held his long, thin hands together, I noticed an exceptionally fine diamond ring on his left hand. It was of an unusual luster, deep set in gold, flush with the cutting. His quick eye caught me looking at this ornament. As I recall, West had never affected jewelry of any kind.

“Oh, yes, you are wondering about this,” he said, gazing into the crystal. “Fine yellow diamond; not so rare, but unusual, set in gold, which they are not wearing any longer. A little present.” He repeated blandly, after a pause, “A little present for stealing.”

“For stealing?” I inquired, astonished. I could hardly believe West would steal. He would not play practical jokes and he would not steal.

“Yes,” he drawled, leaning back away from the fire. “I had to steal about four million francs — that is, four million francs’ worth of jewels.” He noted the effect on me, and went on in a matter-of-fact way: “Yes, I stole it, stole it all. Got the police all upset; got stories in the newspapers. They referred to me as a super-thief, a master criminal, a malefactor, a crook, and an organized gang. But I proved my case. I lifted four million from a Paris jeweler, walked around town with it, gave my victim an uncomfortable night, and walked in his store the next day between rows of wise gentlemen, gave him back his paltry four million, and collected my bet, which is this ring you see here.”

West paused and chuckled softly to himself, still apparently getting the utmost out of this late escapade in burglary. Of course, I remembered only recently seeing in the newspapers how some clever gentleman cracksman had succeeded in a fantastic robbery in the Rue de la Paix, Paris, but I had not read the details.

I was genuinely curious. This was, indeed, West in his true character. But to go in for deliberate and probably dangerous burglary was something which I considered required a little friendly counsel on my part. West anticipated my difficulty in broaching the subject.

“Don’t worry, old man. I pinched the stuff from a good friend of ours, really a pal, so if I had been caught it would have been fixed up, except I would have lost my bet.”

He looked at the yellow diamond.

“But don’t you realize what would have happened if you had been caught?” I asked. “Prank or not, your name would have been aired in the newspapers — a former American minister guilty of grand larceny; an arrest; a day or so in jail; sensation; talk, ruinous gossip!”

He only laughed the more. He held up an arresting hand. “Please don’t call me an amateur. I did the most professional job that the Rue de la Paix has seen in years.”

I believe he was really proud of this burglary.

West gazed reflectively into the fire. “But I wouldn’t do it again — not for a dozen rings.” He watched the firelight dance in the pure crystal of the stone on his finger. “Poor old Berthier, he was wild! He came to see me the night I lifted his diamonds, four million francs’ worth, mind you, and they were in my pocket at the time. He asked me to accompany him to the store and go over the scene.

“He said perhaps I might prove cleverer than detectives, whom he was satisfied were a lot of idiots. I told him I would come over the next day, because, according to the terms of our wager, I was to keep the jewels for more than twenty-four hours. I returned the next day, and handed them to him in his upstairs office. The poor wretch that I took them from was downstairs busy reconstructing the ‘crime’ with those astute gentlemen, the detectives, and I’ve no doubt that they would eventually have caught me, for you don’t get away with robbery in France. They catch you in the end. Fortunately I made the terms of my wager to fit the conditions.”

West leaned back and blinked satisfyingly at the ceiling, tapping his fingertips together. “Poor old Berthier,” he mused. “He was wild.”

As soon as West had mentioned that his victim was a mutual friend, I had thought of Berthier. Moreover, Berthier’s was one of those establishments in which a four-million-franc purchase or a theft of the same size might not seem so unusual. West interrupted my thoughts concerning Berthier.

“I made Berthier promise that he would not dismiss any employee. That also was in the terms of our wager because I dealt directly with Armand the head salesman and a trusted employee. It was Armand who delivered the stones.” West leaned nearer, his brown eyes squinting at me as if in defense of any reprehension I might impute to him. “You see, I did it, not so much as a wager, but to teach Berthier a lesson. Berthier is responsible for his store, he is the principal shareholder, the administration is his own, it was he and it was his negligence in not rigidly enforcing more elementary principles of safety that made the theft possible.” He turned the yellow diamond around on his finger. “This thing is nothing, compared to the value of the lesson he learned.”

West stroked his stubby beard. He chuckled. “It did cost me some of my beard. A hotel suite, an old trunk, a real Russian prince, a fake Egyptian prince, a would-be princess, a first-class reservation to Egypt, a convenient bathroom, running water and soapsuds. Poor old Armand, who brought the gems — he and his armed assistants — they must have almost fainted when, after waiting probably a good half hour, all they found in exchange for a four-million-franc necklace was a cheap bearskin coat, a broad brimmed hat, and some old clothes.”

I must admit that I was growing curious. It was about a week ago when I had seen this sensational story in the newspapers. I knew West had come to tell me about it, as he had so often related to me his various escapades, and I was getting restive. Moreover, I knew Berthier well, and I could readily imagine the state of his mind on the day of the missing diamonds.

I had a bottle of 1848 cognac brought up, and we both settled down to the inner warmth of this most friendly of elixirs.

II

“You see,” West began, with this habitual phrase of his, “I had always been a good customer of Berthier’s. I have bought trinkets from Berthier’s both in New York and Paris since I was a boy. And in getting around as I did in various diplomatic posts, I naturally sent Berthier many wealthy clients. I got him the work on two very important crown jewel commissions; I sent him princes and magnates; and of course he always wanted to make me a present, knowing well that the idea of a commission was out of the question.

“One day not long ago I was in Berthier’s with a friend who was buying some sapphires and platinum and a lot of that atrocious modern jewelry for his new wife. Berthier offered me this yellow diamond then as a present, for I had always admired it, but never felt quite able to buy it, and knowing at the same time that even if I did buy it he would have marked the price so low as to be embarrassing.

“However, we compromised by dining together that night in Ciro’s; and there he pointed out to me the various personalities of that international crowd who wear genuine stones. ‘I can’t understand,’ Berthier said, after a comprehensive observation of the clientele, ‘how all these women are not robbed even more regularly than they are. Even we jewelers, with all our protective systems, are not safe from burglary.’

“Berthier then went on to tell me of some miserable wretch who, only the day before, had smashed a show window down the street and filched several big stones. ‘A messy job,’ he commented, and he informed me that the police soon apprehended this window burglar.

“He continued, with smug assurance: ‘It’s pretty hard for a street burglar to get away with anything these days. It’s the other kind,’ he added, ‘the plausible kind, the apparently rich customer, the clever, ingenious stranger, with whom we cannot cope.’ ”

When West mentioned this “clever, ingenious stranger,” I had a mental picture of him stepping into just such a role for his robbery of Berthier’s; but I made no comment, and let him go on with his story.

“You see, I had always contended the same thing. I had always held that jewelers and bankers show only primitive intelligence in arranging their protective schemes, dealing always with the hypothetical street robbery, the second story man, the gun runner, while they invariably go on for years unprotected against these plausible gentlemen who, in the long run, are the worst offenders. They get millions where the common thief gets thousands.

“I might have been a bit vexed at Berthier’s cocksureness,” West continued by way of explanation, “but you see, I am a shareholder in a bank that was once beautifully swindled, so I let Berthier have it straight from the shoulder.

“ ‘You fellows deserve to be robbed,’ I said to Berthier. ‘You fall for such obvious gags.’

“Berthier protested. I asked him about the little job they put over on the Paris house of Kerstners Frères. He shrugged his shoulders. It seems that a nice gentleman who said he was a Swiss,” West explained, “wanted to match an emerald pendant that he had, in order to make up a set of earrings. Kerstners had difficulty in matching the emerald which the nice Swiss gentleman had ordered them to purchase at any price.

“After a search Kerstners found the stone and bought it at an exorbitant price. They had simply bought in the same emerald. Of course, the gentleman only made a mere hundred thousand francs, a simple trick that has been worked over and over again in various forms.

“When I related this story, Berthier retorted with some scorn to the effect that no sensible house would fall for such an old dodge as that. I then asked Berthier about that absurd robbery that happened only a year ago at Latour’s, which is a very ‘sensible’ house and incidentally Berthier’s chief competitor.”

West asked me if I knew about this robbery. I assured him I did, inasmuch as all Paris had laughed, for the joke was certainly on the prefect of police. On the prefect’s first day in office some ingenious thief had contrived to have a whole tray of diamond rings sent under guard to the prefect, from which he was to choose one for an engagement present for his recently announced fiancée.

The thief impersonated a clerk right in the prefect’s inner waiting room, and, surrounded by police, he took the tray into the prefect’s office, excused himself for blundering into the wrong room, slipped the tray under his coat, walked back to the waiting room, and after assuring the jeweler’s representatives that they wouldn’t have to wait long, he disappeared. Fortunately, the thief was arrested the following day in Lyons.

West laughed heartily as he talked over the unique details of this robbery. I poured out some cognac. “Well, my genteel burglar,” I pursued, “that doesn’t yet explain how you yourself turned thief and lifted four million.”

“Very simple,” West replied. “Berthier was almost impertinent in his self-assurance that no one could rob Berthier’s. ‘Not even the most fashionably dressed gentleman nor the most plausible prince could trick Berthier’s,’ he asserted with some vigor. Then he assured me, as if it were a great secret, ‘Berthier never delivers jewels against a check until the bank reports the funds.’

“ ‘There are always loopholes,’ I rejoined, but Berthier argued stupidly that it was impossible. His boastful attitude annoyed me.

“I looked him straight in the eye. ‘I’ll bet you, if I were a burglar, I could clean your place out.’ Berthier laughed in that jerky, nervous way of his. ‘I’d pay you to rob me,’ he said. ‘You needn’t; but I’ll do it anyway,’ I told him.

“Berthier thought a bit. ‘I’ll bet you that yellow diamond that you couldn’t steal so much as a baby’s bracelet from Berthier’s.’

“ ‘I’ll bet you I can steal a million,’ I said.

“ ‘It’s a go,’ said Berthier, shaking my hand. ‘The yellow diamond is yours if you steal anything and get away with it.’

“ ‘Perhaps three or four million,’ I said.

“ ‘It’s a bet. Steal anything you want,’ Berthier agreed.

“ ‘I’ll teach you smart Rue de la Paix jewelers a lesson,’ I informed him.

“Accordingly, over our coffee, we arranged the terms of our wager, and I suppose Berthier promptly forgot about it.”

West sipped his cognac thoughtfully before restoring the glass to the mantel, and then went on:

“The robbery was so easy to plan, yet I must admit that it had many complications. I had always said that the plausible gentleman was the loophole, so I looked up my old friend Prince Meyeroff, who is always buying and selling and exchanging jewels. It’s a mania with him. I had exchanged a few odd gems with him in Constantinople, as he considered me a fellow connoisseur.

“I found him in Paris, and soon talked him into the mood to buy a necklace. In fact, he had disposed of some old family pieces, and was actually meditating an expensive gift for his favorite niece.

“I explained to the prince that I had a little deal on, and asked him to let me act as his buyer. I had special reasons. Moreover, he was one of my closest friends back in St. Petersburg. Meyeroff said he would allow me a credit up to eight hundred thousand francs for something very suitable for this young woman who was marrying into the old French nobility.

“I told the prince to go to Berthier’s and choose a necklace, approximating his price, but to underbid on it. I would then go in and buy it at the price contemplated.

“I figured this would give them just the amount of confidence in me that would be required to carry off a bigger affair that I was thinking of.

“Meanwhile I bethought myself of a disguise. I let my beard grow somewhat to the sides and cut off the point. I affected a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, and a half-length bearskin coat. I then braced up my trousers almost to my ankles. Some days later — in fact, it was just over a week ago — I went to Berthier’s, after I ascertained that Berthier himself was in London. I informed them I wanted to buy a gift or two in diamonds, and it was not many minutes before I had shown the clerks that money was no object with me.

“They brought me out a most bewitching array of necklaces, tiaras, collars, bracelets, rings. A king’s ransom lay before my eyes. Of course, I fell in love with a beautiful flat stone necklace of Indian diamonds with an enormous square pendant. I fondled it, held it up, almost wept over it, but decided, alas, that I could not buy it. Four million francs, the salesman, Armand, had said. I shook my head sadly. Too expensive for me. But how I loved it!

“I finally decided that a smaller one would be very nice. It was the one with a gorgeous emerald pendant, en cabochon, which Prince Meyeroff had seen and described to me. I asked the price.

“Armand demurred. ‘You have chosen the same one that a great connoisseur has admired. Prince Meyeroff wanted it, but it was a question of price.’

“ ‘How much?’ I asked.

“ ‘Eight hundred thousand francs.’

“Of course, I was buying for the prince, so with a great flourish of opulence I arranged to buy the smaller necklace, though I continued flirting with that handsome Indian string. I assumed the name of Hazim, gave my home town as Cairo, and my present address a prominent hotel in the Rue de Rivoli.

“I ordered a different clasp put on the necklace, and departed for my bank, declaring I was expecting a draft from Egypt. I then went to my apartment, sent to the hotel an old trunk full of cast-off clothes, from which I carefully removed the labels. My beard was proving most disciplined, rounding my face out nicely. Picture yourself the flat hat, the bulgy fur coat, my trousers pulled up toward the ankles!”

III

“I returned to Berthier’s next day and bought the necklace for Meyeroff. I paid them out of a bag, eight hundred thousand francs, and received a receipt made out to Mr. Hazim of Cairo and the Rue de Rivoli. I again looked longingly at the Indian necklace. I casually mentioned what a delight it would be for my daughter who was engaged to an Egyptian prince.

“ ‘I must get her something,’ I told Berthier’s man. He tried all his arts on me. Four million was not too much for an Egyptian princess, and in Egypt, where they wear stones. He emphasized the last phrase. I hesitated, but went out with my little necklace, saying I’d see later.

“I had a hired automobile of enormous proportions waiting outside which must at least have impressed the doorman at Berthier’s, whom I had passed many times in the past, but who failed to recognize me in this changed get-up. You see, Egyptians don’t understand this northern climate, and are inclined to dress oddly.

“I then went to my hotel and made plans for stealing that four-million-franc necklace. In the hotel I was regarded as a bit of an eccentric, so no one bothered me. I had two rooms and a bath. Flush against the wall of my salon, toward the bath, I placed a small square table. I own a beautiful inlaid Louis XVI glove box which, curiously, opens both at the top and at the ends. The ends hinge onto the bottom and are secured by little gadgets at the side, stuck in the plush lining. It makes an admirable jewel case, especially for necklaces; and moreover, it was just the thing needed for my robbery. I placed this box on the little table with the end flush against the wall.

“It looked simple. With a hole in the wall fitting the end of the glove box, I could easily contrive to pull down the shutterlike end and draw the contents through the wall into the bathroom.

“Being a building of modern construction, it would not require much work to punch a hole through the plaster and terra cotta with a drill-bit. I decided on that plan, for the robbery was to take place precisely at three o’clock the following afternoon and in my own rooms.

“That afternoon I decided to buy the Indian necklace. I passed by Berthier’s and allowed myself to be tempted by the salesman Arnold. ‘I can’t really pay so much for a wedding gift,’ I said, ‘but the prince is very rich.’ I told Armand that naturally I felt a certain pride about the gift I should give my daughter under such special circumstances.

“Armand held up the gorgeous necklace, letting the lights play on the great square pendant. ‘Anyway, sir, the princess will always have the guarantee of the value of the stones. That is true of any diamond purchased at Berthier’s.’

“And with that thought I yielded. I asked for the telephone, saying I must call my bank and arrange for the transfer of funds. That also was simple. I had previously arranged with Judd, my valet, to be in a hotel off the Grands Boulevards, and pretend he was a banker if I should telephone him and ask him to transfer money from my various holdings.”

West interrupted his narrative, gulping down the remainder of the cognac. The wrinkles about his eyes narrowed in a burst of merriment.

“It was really cute,” he continued. “I telephoned from Berthier’s own office, asking for this hotel number on the Élysée exchange. Naturally no one remembers all the bank telephone numbers in Paris, and when Judd answered the telephone his deferential tones might have been those of an accredited banker.

“ ‘Four million tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and I’ll leave the transfer to your judgment. I want the money in thousands in a sack. I’ll come with Judd, so you won’t need to worry about holding a messenger to accompany me. I am only going as far as Berthier’s. It’s a wedding gift for my daughter.’

“Judd must have thought me crazy, although it would take a lot to surprise him.

“Armand listened to the conversation. Two other clerks heard it, and later I was bowed out to the street, where my enormous hired car awaited. My next job was to get a tentative reservation on the Latunia, which was leaving Genoa for Alexandria the following day. Prince Hazim, I called myself at the steamship office. This was for Berthier’s benefit, in case they should check up my sailing. Then I went to work.

“I went to the hotel and drew out a square on the wall, tracing it thinly around the end of the box. I slept that night in the hotel. In the morning I arose at nine o’clock, paid my bill, and told the hotel clerk I was leaving that evening for Genoa.

“I called at Berthier’s still wearing the same bearskin coat and flat hat, and assured myself that the necklace was in order. Armand showed it to me in a handsome blue morocco case, which made me a bit apprehensive. He was profoundly courteous.

“I objected to the blue box, but added that it would do for a container later on, as I had an antique case to transport both the necklaces I was taking with me. I told him of my hasty change of plans. Urgent business, I said, in Egypt.

“Armand was sympathetic. I promised to return at three o’clock with the money. I went to the hotel and ordered lunch and locked the doors. I had sent Judd away after he had brought me some tools. It was but the work of fifteen minutes to cut my square hole through the plaster. I wore out about a dozen drills, however, getting through that brittle terra cotta tile.

“At one o’clock, when the lunch came up, I had the hole neatly through to the bathroom. I covered it with a towel on that side, and in the salon I backed a chair against it over which I threw an old dressing gown.

“I quickly disposed of the waiter, locked the door, and replaced the table at the wall. Taking out the necklace I had bought for Prince Meyeroff, I laid it doubled in the glove box. It was a caged rainbow, lying on the rose-colored plush lining. The box I stuck flush with the square aperture.

“I had provided myself with a stiff piece of wire something like an elongated buttonhook. A warped piece of mother-of-pearl inlay provided a perfect catch with which to pull down the end of the box.

“I tried the invention from the bathroom. I had overlooked one thing. I forgot that when the hole was stopped up by the box it would be dark. Thanks to my cigarette lighter, I could see to pull down the hinged end and draw out the jewels. I tried it. The hook brought down the end without a sound. I could see the stones glowing in the flickering light of the briquette. I began fishing with the hook, and the necklace with its rounded emerald slid out as if by magic.

“I fancied they might make a grating sound in the other room, so I padded the hole with a napkin. I’ll cough out loud, or sing, or whistle, I said to myself. Then I thought of the bath water. I turned on the tap full force; the water ran furiously. I walked into the salon swinging the prince’s necklace in my hand; the water was making a terrific uproar. Satisfied as to this strategy, I turned off the water.

“But what to do to disguise the box at the close-fitting square hole still bothered me. My time was getting short. I must do some important telephoning to Berthier’s. I must try the outer door from the bedroom into the hall. I must have my travel cap ready and my long traveling coat across the foot of the bed. I must let down my trousers to the customary length. I must get ready my shaving brush.

“It was five minutes to three. They were expecting me at Berthier’s with four million francs. Armand was probably at this moment rubbing his hands, observing with satisfaction that suave face of his in the mirrors.

“Still there was that telltale, ill-fitting edge of the hole about the box. I discovered the prince’s necklace was still hanging from my hand. It gave me quite a surprise. I realized this was a ticklish business, this robbing of the most ancient house in the Rue de la Paix. I laid the necklace in the box closing the end. The hole was ugly, although the bits of paint and plaster had been well cleaned up from the floor.

“I had a stroke of genius. My flat black hat! I would lay it on its crown in front of the hole, with a big silk muffler carelessly thrown against it shutting off any view of the trap. I tried that plan, placing the box near the side of the hat. It looked like a casual litter of the objects. My old trunk was on the other side of the table to be sacrificed with its old clothes necessary stage properties.

“I then tried the camouflage, picked up the box, walked to the center of the room. The hat and muffler concealed the hole. I then walked to the table and replaced the box, this time casually alongside the hat, deftly putting the end in the hole. The hat moved only a few inches and the muffler hung over the brim, perfectly hiding and shadowing the trap, though most of the box was clearly visible. It looked perfectly natural. I then placed the box farther out, moved the hat against the hole, and the trap was arranged.

“Now to try my experiment in human credulity. I telephoned Berthier’s. Armand came immediately. ‘Hazim,’ I said. ‘I wish to ask you a favor.’ Armand recognized my voice, and inquired if I were carrying myself well. ‘My dear friend,’ I began in English, ‘I have found that the Genoa train leaves at five o’clock, and I am in a dreadful rush and am not half packed. I have the money here in my hotel. Could you conceivably bring me the necklace and collect the money here? It would help me tremendously.’

“I also suggested that Armand bring someone with him for safety’s sake, as four million in notes, which had to be expedited through two branch banks, was not an affair to treat lightly. Someone might know about it. I knew Berthier’s would certainly have Armand guarded, with one or perhaps two assistants.

“Armand was audibly distressed, and asked me to wait. It seemed like an hour before the response came. ‘Yes, Mr. Hazim, we shall be pleased to deliver the necklace on receipt of the funds. I shall come with a man from our regular service and will have the statement ready to sign.’

“I urged him to hurry, and said I would be glad to turn over the money, as the presence of such an amount in my rooms made me nervous.

“That was exactly three fifteen. I quickly arranged the chairs so two or three would have to sit well away from the table. I laid my bearskin over the chair nearest the table. I opened the trunk as if I were packing. I telephoned the clerk to be sure to send my visitors to the salon door of my suite.

“My cap and long coat were ready in the bedroom. The door into the hall was almost closed, but not latched, so I would not have to turn the knob. I quickly removed my coat and vest, and laid them on a chair in the bedroom, ready to spring into. I wore a shirt with a soft collar attached. I removed my ready-tied cravat and hung it over a towel rack and turned my collar inside very carelessly as if for shaving purposes.

“In the bowl I prepared some shaving lather, and when that was all ready I was all set for making off with the prince’s necklace and that other one — if it came.

“I’ll admit I was nervous. I was considering the whole plot as a rather absurd enterprise, and all I could think of was the probably alert eyes and ears of the two or more suspicious employees on the glove box.”

IV

“They arrived at twenty-five minutes to four. There were only two of them. I hastily lathered the edges of my spreading beard, and called out sharply for them to enter. The boy showed in Armand and a dapper individual who was evidently a house detective of Berthier’s. Armand was all solicitude. I shook hands with him with two dry fingers, holding a towel with the other hand, as I had wished to make it apparent that I was deep in a shaving operation.

“ ‘Just edging off my beard a little.’

“The two men were quite complacent.

“ ‘And the necklace?’ I asked eagerly.

“Armand drew the case from inside his coat and opened it before my eyes. We all moved toward the window. I was effusive in my admiration of the gems. I fluttered about much like the old fool that I probably am, and finally urged them to sit down.

“I then brought the glove box and showed the prince’s necklace to both of them, and continued raving about both necklaces.

“We compared the two. The Indian was, of course, even more magnificent by contrast. The detective laid the smaller necklace back in the box, while I asked Armand to lay the big one over it in the box into which I was going to pack some cotton. My glove box was smaller and therefore easier and safer to carry, I said. I held the box open while Armand laid the necklace gingerly inside. I was careful to avoid getting the soap on the box, so I replaced it gently on the table near the hat, getting the end squarely against the hole. It seemed I had plenty of time.

“I even lingered over the box and wiped off a wayward fleck of soapsuds. The trap was set. I could not believe that the rest would be so easy, and I had to make an effort to conceal my nervousness.

“The two men sat near each other. I explained that as soon as I could clear the soap off my face I would get the sack of money and transact the business. I took Armand’s blue box from Berthier’s and threw it in the top tray of the trunk. They appeared to be the most unsuspecting creatures. They took proffered cigarettes and lighted up, whereupon I went directly into the bathroom, still carrying my towel. I dropped that towel. My briquette was there on the washstand. I hummed lightly as I turned on the hot water in the tub. It spouted out in a steaming, gushing stream. Quickly I held the lighted briquette at the hole, caught the gleam of the warped mother-of-pearl, and pulled at it with the wire.

“It brought the end down noiselessly on the folded napkin in the hole. The jewels blazed like fire. My hand shook as I made one savage jab at the pile with the long hook and felt the ineffable resistance of the two necklaces being pulled out together. I was afraid I might have to hook one at a time, but I caught just the right loops, and they came forward almost noiselessly along the napkin to where my left hand waited.

“I touched the first stone. It was the big necklace, the smaller one being underneath. My heart leaped as I saw the big pendant on one side of the heap not far from the cabochon emerald. I laid down the wire and drew them out deftly with my fingers, the gems piling richly in my spread-out left hand, until the glittering pile was free. I thrust them with one movement of my clutching fingers deep into the left pocket of my trousers. The water was churning in my ears like a cascade.

“I shut off the tap and purposely knocked the soap into the tub to make a noise, and walked into the bedroom, grabbing my cravat off the rack as I went. That was a glorious moment. The bedroom was dark. The door was unlatched. The diamonds were in my pocket. The way was clear.

“I pulled up my shirt collar, stuck on the cravat, and fixed it neatly as I reached the chair where my coat and vest lay. I plunged into them, buttoned the vest with one hand, and reached for my long coat and cap with the other. In a second I was slipping noiselessly through the door into the hall, my cap on my head, my coat over my arm.

“I had to restrain myself from running down that hall. I was in flight. It was a great thrill, to be moving away, each second taking me farther away from the enemy in that salon. Even if they are investigating at this moment, I thought, I should escape easily.

“I was gliding down those six flights of steps gleefully, released from the most tense moments I had ever gone through, when suddenly a horrible thought assailed me. What if Berthier’s had posted a detective at the hotel door. I could see my plans crashing ignominiously. I stopped and reflected. The hotel has two entrances; therefore the third person, if he is there, must be in the lobby and therefore not far from the elevator and stairway.

“I thought fast, and it was a good thing I did. I was then on the second floor. I called the floor boy, turning around quickly as if mounting instead of descending.

“ ‘Will you go to the lobby and ask if there is a man from Berthier’s waiting? If he is there, will you tell him to come up to apartment 615 immediately?’

“I stressed the last word and, slipping a tip into the boy’s hand, started up toward the third floor. With the boy gone, I turned toward the second floor, walked quickly down to the far end, where I knew the service stairway of the hotel was located. As I plunged into this door I saw the boy and a stout individual rushing up the steps toward the third floor. I sped down this stairway, braving possible suspicion of the employees. I came out in a kind of pantry, much to the surprise of a young waiter, and I commenced a tirade against the hotel’s service that must have burned his ears. I simulated fierce indignation.

“ ‘Where is that good-for-nothing trunkman?’ I demanded. ‘I’m leaving for Genoa at five, and my trunk is still unmoved.’ Meanwhile I glared at him as if making up my mind whether I would kill him or let him live.

“ ‘The trunkmen are through there,’ said the waiter, pointing to a door. I rushed through.

“Inside this basement I called out: ‘Where in hell is the porter of this hotel?’

“An excited trunkman left his work. I repeated fiercely the instructions about my trunk, and then asked how to get out of this foul place. I spotted an elevator and a small stairway, and without another word was up these steps and out in a side street off the Rue de Rivoli.

“I fancied the whole hotel was swarming with excited people by this time, and I jumped into a cruising taxicab.

“ ‘Trocadero,’ I ordered, and in one heavenly jolt I fell back into the seat while the driver sped on, up the Seine embankment to a section of quiet and reposeful streets.

“I breathed the free air. I realized what a fool I was; then I experienced a feeling of triumph, as I felt the lump of gems in my pocket. I got out and walked slowly to my apartment, went to the bath and trimmed my beard to the thinnest point, shaving my cheeks clean. I put on a high crown hat, a long fur-lined coat, took a stick, and sauntered out, myself once more, Mr. West, the retired diplomat, who would never think of getting mixed up in such an unsightly brawl as was now going on between the hotel and the respected and venerable institution known as Berthier’s.”

West shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s all. Berthier was right. It was not so easy to rob a Rue de la Paix jeweler, especially of four million francs’ worth of diamonds. I had returned to my apartment, and was hardly through my dinner when the telephone rang.

“ ‘This is Berthier,’ came the excited voice. He told me of this awful Hazim person. He asked if he might see me.

“That night Berthier sat in my library and expounded a dozen theories. ‘It’s a gang, a clever gang, but we’ll catch them,’ he said. ‘One of them duped our man in the hotel lobby by calling him upstairs.’

“ ‘But if you catch the men, will you catch your four millions?’ I asked, fingering the pile of stones in my pocket.

“ ‘No,’ he moaned. ‘A necklace is so easy to dispose of, stone by stone. It’s probably already divided up among that bunch of criminals.’

“I really felt flattered, but not so much then as when I read the newspapers the next day. It was amusing. I have them all in my scrapbook now.”

“ ‘How did you confess?’ I asked West.

“Simple, indeed, but only with the utmost reluctance. I found the police were completely off the trail. At six o’clock the next afternoon I went to Berthier’s, rather certain that I would be recognized. I walked past the doorman into the store, where Armand hardly noticed me. He was occupied with some wise men. I heard him saying: ‘He was not so tall, as he was heavily built, thick body, large feet, and square head, with a shapeless mass of whiskers. He was from some Balkan extraction, hardly what you’d call a gentleman.’

“I asked to see Berthier, who was still overwrought and irritable.

“ ‘Hello, West,’ he said to me. ‘You’re just the man I want. Please come down and talk with these detectives. You must help me.’

“ ‘Nothing doing,’ I said. ‘Your man Armand has just been very offensive.’

“Berthier stared at me in amazement.

“ ‘Armand!’ he repeated. ‘Armand has been offensive!’

“ ‘He called me a Balkan, said I had big feet, and that I had a square head, and that I was hardly what one would call a gentleman.’

“Berthier’s eyes popped out like saucers.

“ ‘It’s unthinkable,’ he said. ‘He must have been describing that crook we’re after.’

“I could see that Berthier took this robbery seriously.

“ ‘I thought you never fell for those old gags,’ I said.

“ ‘Old gags!’ he retorted, his voice rising. ‘Hardly a gag, that!’

“ ‘Old as the hills!’ I assured him. ‘The basis of most of the so-called magic one sees on the stage.’ I paused. ‘And what will you do with these nice people when you catch them?’

“ ‘Ten years in jail, at least,’ he growled.

“I looked at my watch. The twenty-four hours were well over. Berthier had talked himself out of adjectives concerning this gang of thieves; he could only sit and clench his fists and bite his lips.

“ ‘Four million,’ he muttered. ‘It could have been avoided. That man Armand—’

“I took my cue. ‘That man Berthier,’ I said crisply, accusingly, ‘should run his establishment better. Besides, my wager concerned you, and not Armand—’

“Berthier looked up sharply, his brain struggling with some dark clew. I mechanically put my hand in my trousers pocket and very slowly drew out a long iridescent string of crystallized carbon ending in a great square pendant.

“Berthier’s jaw dropped. He leaned forward. His hand raised and slowly dropped to his side.

“ ‘You!’ he whispered. ‘You, West!’

“I thought he would collapse. I laid the necklace on his desk, a hand on his shoulder. He found his voice.

“ ‘Was it you who got those necklaces?’

“ ‘No. It was I who stole that necklace, and I who win the wager. Please hand over the yellow diamond.’

“I think it took Berthier ten minutes to regain his composure. He didn’t know whether to curse me or to embrace me. I told him the whole story, beginning with our dinner at Ciro’s. The proof of it was that the necklace was there on his desk.

“And I am sure Armand thinks I am insane. He was there when Berthier gave me this ring, this fine yellow diamond.”

West settled back in his chair, holding his glass in the same hand that wore the gem.

“Not so bad, eh?” he asked.

I admitted that it was a bit complicated. I was curious about one point, and that was his make-up. He explained: “You see, the broad low-crowned hat reduces one inch from my height; the wide whiskers, instead of the pointed beard, another inch; the bulgy coat, another inch; the trousers, high at the shoes, another inch. That’s four inches off my stature with an increase of girth about one-sixth my height — an altogether different figure. A visit to a pharmacy changed my complexion from that of a Nordic to a Semitic.”

“And the hotel?” I asked.

“Very simple. I had Berthier go around and pay the damages for plugging that hole. He’ll do anything I say now.”

I regarded West in the waning firelight.

He was supremely content.

“You must have hated to give up those Indian gems after what you went through to get them?”

West smiled.

“That was the hardest of all. It was like giving away something that was mine, mine by right of conquest. And I’ll tell you another thing — if they had not belonged to a friend, I would have kept them.”

And knowing West as I do, I am sure he spoke the truth.

Night Shade

Mystery League Magazine, October 1, 1933

A sedan with no lights burning was standing beside the road just above Piney Falls bridge and as I drove past it a girl put her head out and said, “Please.” Her voice was urgent but there was not enough excitement in it to make it either harsh or shrill.

I put on my brakes, then backed up. By that time a man had got out of the sedan. There was enough light to let me see he was young and fairly big. He moved a hand in the direction I had been going and said, “On your way, buddy.”

The girl said again, “Will you drive me into town, please?” She seemed to be trying to open the sedan door. Her hat had been pushed forward over one eye.

I said, “Sure.”

The man in the road took a step toward me, moved his hand as before, and growled, “Scram, you.”

I got out of my car. The man in the road had started toward me when another man’s voice came from the sedan, a harsh warning voice. “Go easy, Tony. It’s Jack Bye.” The sedan door swung open and the girl jumped out.

Tony said, “Oh!” and his feet shuffled uncertainly on the road; but when he saw the girl making for my car he cried indignantly at her, “Listen, you can’t ride to town with—”

She was in my roadster by then. “Good night,” she said.

He faced me, shook his head stubbornly, began, “I’ll be damned if I’ll let—”

I hit him. The knockdown was fair enough, because I hit him hard, but I think he could have got up again if he had wanted to. I gave him a little time, then asked the fellow in the sedan, “All right with you?” I still could not see him.

“He’ll be all right,” he replied quickly. “I’ll take care of him, all right.”

“Thanks.” I climbed into my car beside the girl. The rain I had been trying to get to town ahead of was beginning to fall. A coupe with a man and a woman in it passed us going toward town. We followed the coupe across the bridge.

The girl said, “This is awfully kind of you. I wasn’t in any danger back there, but it was — nasty.”

“They wouldn’t be dangerous,” I said, “but they would be — nasty.”

“You know them?”

“No.”

“But they knew you. Tony Forrest and Fred Barnes.” When I did not say anything, she added, “They were afraid of you.”

“I’m a desperate character.”

She laughed. “And pretty nice of you, too, tonight. I wouldn’t’ve gone with either of them alone, but I thought with two of them...” She turned up the collar of her coat. “It’s raining in on me.”

I stopped the roadster again and hunted for the curtain that belonged on her side of the car.

“So your name’s Jack Bye,” she said while I was snapping it on.

“And yours is Helen Warner.”

“How’d you know?” She had straightened her hat.

“I’ve seen you around.” I finished attaching the curtain and got back in.

“Did you know who I was when I called to you?” she asked when we were moving again.

“Yes.”

“It was silly of me to go out with them like that.”

“You’re shivering.”

“It’s chilly.”

I said I was sorry my flask was empty.

We had turned into the western end of Hellman Avenue. It was four minutes past ten by the clock in front of the jewelry store on the corner of Laurel Street. A policeman in a black rubber coat was leaning against the clock. I did not know enough about perfumes to know the name of hers.

She said, “I’m chilly. Can’t we stop somewhere and get a drink?”

“Do you really want to?” My voice must have puzzled her; she turned her head quickly to peer at me in the dim light.

“I’d like to,” she said, “unless you’re in a hurry.”

“No. We could go to Mack’s. It’s only three or four blocks from here, but — it’s a nigger joint.”

She laughed. “All I ask is that I don’t get poisoned.”

“You won’t, but you’re sure you want to go?”

“Certainly.” She exaggerated her shivering. “I’m cold. It’s early.”

Toots Mack opened his door for us. I could tell by the politeness with which he bowed his round bald black head and said, “Good evening, sir; good evening, madam,” that he wished we had gone some place else, but I was not especially interested in how he felt about it. I said, “Hello, Toots; how are you this evening?” too cheerfully.

There were only a few customers in the place. We went to the table in the corner farthest from the piano. Suddenly she was staring at me, her eyes, already very blue, becoming very round.

“I thought you could see in the car,” I began.

“How’d you get that scar?” she asked, interrupting me. She sat down.

“That?” I put a hand to my cheek. “Fight — couple of years ago. You ought to see the one on my chest.”

“We’ll have to go swimming some time,” she said gaily. “Please sit down and don’t keep me waiting for my drink.”

“Are you sure you—”

She began to chant, keeping time with her fingers on the table, “I want a drink, I want a drink, I want a drink.” Her mouth was small with full lips, and it curved up without growing wider when she smiled.

We ordered drinks. We talked too fast. We made jokes and laughed too readily at them. We asked questions — about the name of the perfume she used was one — and paid too much or no attention to the answers. And Toots looked glumly at us from behind the bar when he thought we were not looking at him. It was all pretty bad.

We had another drink, and I said, “Well, let’s slide along.”

She was nice about seeming neither too anxious to go nor to stay. The ends of her pale blond hair curled up over the edge of her hat in back.

At the door, I said, “Listen, there’s a taxi-stand around the corner. You won’t mind if I don’t take you home?”

She put a hand on my arm. “I do mind. Please—” The street was badly lighted. Her face was like a child’s. She took her hand off my arm. “But if you’d rather...”

“I think I’d rather.”

She said slowly, “I like you, Jack Bye, and I’m awfully grateful for—”

I said, “Aw, that’s all right,” and we shook hands, and I went back into the speakeasy.

Toots was still behind the bar. He came up to where I stood. “You oughtn’t to do that to me,” he said, shaking his head mournfully.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You oughtn’t to do it to yourself,” he went on just as sadly. “This ain’t Harlem, boy, and if old Judge Warner finds out his daughter’s running around with you and coming in here, he can make it plenty tough for both of us. I like you, boy, but you got to remember it don’t make no difference how light your skin is or how many colleges you went to, you’re still a nigger.”

I said, “Well, what do you suppose I want to be? A Chinaman?”

Albert Pastor at Home

Esquire, Autumn 1933

Lefty comes in and drops his suitcase and kicks the door shut and says, “How’s kid?”

I get up to shake hands with him and say, “How’s it, Lefty?” and see he has got a goog or black eye that is maybe a week old and some new skin growing in alongside his jaw. I am too polite to stare at these things. I ask, “Well, how’d you find the old home town?”

“I just looked behind the railroad depot and there it was,” he replies jokingly. “Is there anything in the bottom drawer?”

There is a bottle of Scotch in the bottom drawer. Lefty says it is not good Scotch because he does not want anybody to think he can be fooled by stuff that is made in t this country, but he drinks it in a way that would not hurt the feelings of the man that made it in any country.

He unbuttons his vest and says, “Kid, I’m here to tell you it was one swell visit. This big city stuff is all oke, but when you go back to the place you was born and the kids you run around with and your family and — Say, kid, I got a kid brother that ain’t eighteen yet and you ought to see him. Big as me except for weight and a couple inches of height and can he throw hands. When we put the gloves on down the cellar mornings — what a kid, kid! Even when I was in shape I would’ve had trouble holding him. You ought to see him, kid.”

I think that it will be all right to refer to those things on Lefty’s face now, so I say. “I’d like to. Why don’t you bring him on? Any boy that can get to your ponem like that ought—”

Lefty puts a hand to the eye that is not in as good shape as the other one and says, “That ain’t his. That’s—” He laughs and takes his hand away from his eyes and takes a jewelry box out of his coat pocket and passes it to me. “Take a look at that.”

In the box there is a watch that looks like platinum attached to a chain that looks like platinum. I think they are.

Lefty says, “Read what’s on it.”

On the back of the watch it says To Albert Pastor (which is the way Lefty writes his name when he has to) with the gratitude of the members of the Grocers’ Protective Association.

“Grocers’ Protective Association,” I say slowly, “that sounds like—”

“A racket!” he finishes for me and laughs and bangs my desk with his hand. “Call me a liar if you want, but back there in my home town, this little burg that ain’t got a quarter million people in it — but get me right, a swell little burg just the same — they got racketeers!”

I would not want to call Lefty a liar even if I thought he was a liar because he would have been heavyweight champion of the world before he left the ring to go in business with me if they did not have rules you are supposed to fight by in the ring and if he did not have a temper which kept him forgetting they had rules you were supposed to fight by. So I say, “Is that so?”

Lefty says that is so. He says, “You could’ve knocked me over with the District Attorney’s office. Big city stuff back there! Ain’t that a howl? And my old man being shook down along with the rest of them,” He reaches for the bottle of Scotch that he says is not good.

“Your old man is a grocer?” I ask.

“Uh-huh, and he always wanted me to follow in his own footsteps.” Lefty says. “and that’s the real reason he didn’t have no use for my fistic career. But that’s all right now — now that I retired from the arena. He’s a swell old guy when you’re old enough to understand him and we got along fine. I give him a sedan and you’d ought to see the way he carries on about it. You’d think it was a Dusenberg.”

“Was it?” I ask.

Lefty says, “No, but you’d think it was a Rolls the way he carries on about it. Well. I’m there a couple days and he lets off about these bums that’d been lining up the grocers round town — join the protective association or else, with not many takers for the else. It seems the grocer business ain’t none too good by its own self and paying alimony to these mugs don’t help it none. The old man’s kind of worried.

“I don’t say nothing to him, but I go off by myself and do some thinking and I think, what’s the matter with me going to see these babies and ask them do they want to listen to reason or have I got to go to work on them? I can’t see nothing wrong with that idea. Can you?”

“No, Lefty,” I say, “I can’t.”

“Well, neither could I,” Lefty says, “and so I did and they don’t think they want to listen to reason. There’s a pair of them in the protective association office when I come in — just about what I expected — they know the words, but they ain’t got the motions right yet. There was a third one come in after awhile, but I’m sweating good by that time and handy pieces has been broke off some of the furniture, so I make out all right, and the old man and some of the others get together and buy me this souper with some of the dues they’d’ve had to pay next month if there’d been any protective association left.”

He puts the watch and chain back in the box and carefully puts the box back in his pocket. “And how’s your father’s horse?” he asks.

I take the envelope with the money in it out of my pocket and give it to him. “There’s your end,” I say, “only Caresse’s not in. You know — the little fat guy around on Third avenue.”

“I know him,” Lefty says. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He says he’s paid so much for protection now that he’s got nothing left to protect,” I say, “and he won’t stand for the boost.”

Lefty says, “So?” He says, “That’s the way, soon’s I get out of town these babies think they can cut up.” He stands up and buttons his vest. “Well,” he says, “I guess I’ll go round to see that baby and ask him does he want to listen to reason or have I got to go to work on him?”

Two Sharp Knives

Collier’s, January 13, 1934, aka: To a Sharp Knife

On my way home from the regular Wednesday night poker game at Ben Kamsley’s I stopped at the railroad station to see the 2:11 come in — what we called putting the town to bed — and as soon as this fellow stepped down from the smoking-car I recognized him. There was no mistaking his face, the pale eyes with lower lids that were as straight as if they had been drawn with a ruler, the noticeably flat-tipped bony nose, the deep cleft in his chin, the slightly hollow grayish cheeks. He was tall and thin and very neatly dressed in a dark suit, long dark overcoat, and derby hat, and carried a black Gladstone bag. He looked a few years older than the forty he was supposed to be. He went past me toward the street steps.

When I turned around to follow him I saw Wally Shane coming out of the waiting-room. I caught Wally’s eye and nodded at the man carrying the black bag. Wally examined him carefully as he went by. I could not see whether the man noticed the examination. By the time I came up to Wally the man was going down the steps to the street.

Wally rubbed his lips together and his blue eyes were bright and hard. “Look,” he said out of the side of his mouth, “that’s a ringer for the guy we got—”

“That’s the guy,” I said, and we went down the steps behind him.

Our man started toward one of the taxicabs at the curb, then saw the lights of the Deerwood Hotel two blocks away, shook his head at the taxi driver, and went up the street afoot.

“What do we do?” Wally asked. “See what he’s—?”

“It’s nothing to us. We take him. Get my car. It’s at the corner of the alley.”

I gave Wally the few minutes he needed to get the car and then closed in. “Hello, Furman,” I said when I was just behind the tall man.

His face jerked around to me. “How do you—” He halted. “I don’t believe I—” He looked up and down the street. We had the block to ourselves.

“You’re Lester Furman, aren’t you?” I asked.

He said, “Yes,” quickly.

“Philadelphia?”

He peered at me in the light that was none too strong where we stood. “Yes.”

“I’m Scott Anderson,” I said. “Chief of police here. I—”

His bag thudded down on the pavement. “What’s happened to her?” he asked hoarsely.

“Happened to whom?”

Wally arrived in my car then, abruptly, skidding into the curb. Furman, his face stretched by fright, leaped back away from me. I went after him, grabbing him with my good hand, jamming him back against the front wall of Henderson’s warehouse. He fought with me there until Wally got out of the car. Then he saw Wally’s uniform and immediately stopped fighting.

“I’m sorry,” he said weakly. “I thought — for a second I thought maybe you weren’t the police. You’re not in uniform and — It was silly of me. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “Let’s get going before we have a mob around us.” Two cars had stopped just a little beyond mine and I could see a bellboy and a hatless man coming toward us from the direction of the hotel. Furman picked up his bag and went willingly into my car ahead of me. We sat in the rear. Wally drove. We rode a block in silence, then Furman asked, “You’re taking me to police headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Philadelphia.”

“I” — he cleared his throat — “I don’t think I understand you.”

“You understand that you’re wanted in Philadelphia, don’t you, for murder?”

He said indignantly, “That’s ridiculous. Murder! That’s—” He put a hand on my arm, his face close to mine, and instead of indignation in his voice there was now a desperate sort of earnestness. “Who told you that?”

“I didn’t make it up. Well, here we are. Come on, I’ll show you.”

We took him into my office. George Propper, who had been dozing in a chair in the front office, followed us in. I found the Trans-American Detective Agency circular and handed it to Furman. In the usual form it offered fifteen hundred dollars for the arrest and conviction of Lester Furman, alias Lloyd Fields, alias J. D. Carpenter, for the murder of Paul Frank Dunlap in Philadelphia on the twenty-sixth of the previous month.

Furman’s hands holding the circular were steady and he read it carefully. His face was pale, but no muscles moved in it until he opened his mouth to speak. He tried to speak calmly. “It’s a lie.” He did not look up from the circular.

“You’re Lester Furman, aren’t you?” I asked.

He nodded, still not looking up.

“That’s your description, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“That’s your photograph, isn’t it?”

He nodded, and then, staring at his photograph on the circular, he began to tremble — his lips, his hands, his legs.

I pushed a chair up behind him and said, “Sit down,” and he dropped down on it and shut his eyes, pressing the lids together. I took the circular from his limp hands.

George Propper, leaning against a side of the doorway, turned his loose grin from me to Wally and said, “So that’s that and so you lucky stiffs split a grand and a half reward money. Lucky Wally! If it ain’t vacations in New York at the city’s expense it’s reward money.”

Furman jumped up from the chair and screamed, “It’s a lie. It’s a frame-up. You can’t prove anything. There’s nothing to prove. I never killed anybody. I won’t be framed. I won’t be—”

I pushed him down on the chair again. “Take it easy,” I told him. “You’re wasting your breath on us. Save it for the Philadelphia police. We’re just holding you for them. If anything’s wrong it’s there, not here.”

“But it’s not the police. It’s the Trans-American De—”

“We turn you over to the police.”

He started to say something, broke off, sighed, made a little hopeless gesture with his hands, and tried to smile. “Then there’s nothing I can do now?”

“There’s nothing any of us can do till morning,” I said. “We’ll have to search you, then we won’t bother you any more till they come for you.”

In the black Gladstone bag we found a couple of changes of clothes, some toilet articles, and a loaded.38 automatic. In his pockets we found a hundred and sixty-some dollars, a book of checks on a Philadelphia bank, business cards and a few letters that seemed to show he was in the real-estate business, and the sort of odds and ends that you usually find in men’s pockets. While Wally was putting these things in the vault I told George Propper to lock Furman up.

George rattled keys in his pocket and said, “Come along, darling. We ain’t had anybody in our little hoosegow for three days. You’ll have it all to yourself, just like a suite in the Ritz.”

Furman said, “Good night and thank you,” to me, and followed George out.

When George came back he leaned against the doorframe again and asked, “How about you big-hearted boys cutting me in on a little of that blood money?”

Wally said, “Sure. I’ll forget that two and a half you been owing me three months.”

I said, “Make him as comfortable as you can, George. If he wants anything sent in, O.K.”

“He’s valuable, huh? If it was some bum that didn’t mean a nickel to you — Maybe I ought to take a pillow off my bed for him.” He spat at the cuspidor and missed. “He’s just like the rest of ’em to me.”

I thought, Any day now I’m going to forget that your uncle is county chairman and throw you back in the gutter. I said, “Do all the talking you want, but do what I tell you.”

It was about four o’clock when I got home — my farm was a little outside the town — and maybe half an hour after that before I went to sleep. The telephone woke me up at five minutes past six.

Wally’s voice: “You better come down, Scott. The fellow Furman’s hung himself.”

“What?”

“By his belt — from a window bar — deader’n hell.”

“All right. I’m on my way. Phone Ben Kamsley I’ll pick him up on my way in.”

“No doctor’s going to do this man any good, Scott.”

“It won’t hurt to have him looked at,” I insisted. “You’d better phone Douglassville, too.” Douglassville was the county seat.

“O.K.”

Wally phoned me back while I was dressing to tell me that Ben Kamsley had been called out on an emergency case and was somewhere on the other side of town, but that his wife would get in touch with him and tell him to stop at headquarters on his way home.

When, riding into town, I was within fifty or sixty feet of the Red Top Diner, Heck Jones ran out with a revolver in his hand and began to shoot at two men in a black roadster that had just passed me.

I leaned out and yelled, “What’s it?” at him while I was turning my car.

“Hold-up,” he bawled angrily. “Wait for me.” He let loose another shot that couldn’t have missed my front tire by more than an inch, and galloped up to me, his apron flapping around his fat legs. I opened the door for him, he squeezed his bulk in beside me, and we set off after the roadster.

“What gets me,” he said when he had stopped panting, “is they done it like a joke. They come in, they don’t want nothing but ham and eggs and coffee and then they get kind of kidding together under their breath and then they put the guns on me like a joke.”

“How much did they take?”

“Sixty or thereabouts, but that ain’t what gripes me so much. It’s them doing it like a joke.”

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll get ’em.”

We very nearly didn’t, though. They led us a merry chase. We lost them a couple of times and finally picked them up more by luck than anything else, a couple of miles over the state line.

We didn’t have any trouble taking them, once we had caught up to them, but they knew they had crossed the state line and they insisted on a regular extradition or nothing, so we had to carry them on to Badington and stick them in the jail there until the necessary papers could be sent through. It was ten o’clock before I got a chance to phone my office.

Hammill answered the phone and told me Ted Carroll, our district attorney, was there, so I talked to Ted — though not as much as he talked to me.

“Listen, Scott,” he asked excitedly, “what is all this?”

“All what?”

“This fiddle-de-dee, this hanky-panky.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “Wasn’t it suicide?”

“Sure it was suicide, but I wired the Trans-American and they phoned me just a few minutes ago and said they’d never sent out any circulars on Furman, didn’t know about any murder he was wanted for. All they knew about him was he used to be a client of theirs.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say except that I would be back in Deerwood by noon. And I was.

Ted was at my desk with the telephone receiver clamped to his ear, saying, “Yes.... Yes.... Yes,” when I went into the office. He put down the receiver and asked, “What happened to you?”

“A couple of boys knocked over the Red Top Diner and I had to chase ’em almost to Badington.”

He smiled with one side of his mouth. “The town getting out of your hands?” He and I were on opposite sides of the fence politically and we took our politics seriously in Candle County.

I smiled back at him. “Looks like it — with one felony in six months.”

“And this.” He jerked a thumb toward the rear of the building, where the cells were.

“What about this? Let’s talk about this.”

“It’s plenty wrong,” he said. “I just finished talking to the Philly police. There wasn’t any Paul Frank Dunlap murdered there that they know about; they’ve got no unexplained murder on the twenty-sixth of last month.” He looked at me as if it were my fault. “What’d you get out of Furman before you let him hang himself?”

“That he was innocent.”

“Didn’t you grill him? Didn’t you find out what he was doing in town? Didn’t you—”

“What for?” I asked. “He admitted his name was Furman, the description fitted him, the photograph was him, the Trans-American’s supposed to be on the level. Philadelphia wanted him, I didn’t. Sure, if I’d known he was going to hang himself — You said he’d been a client of the Trans-American. They tell you what the job was?”

“His wife left him a couple of years ago and he had them hunting for her for five or six months, but they never found her. They’re sending a man up to-night to look it over.” He stood up. “I’m going to get some lunch.” At the door he turned his head over his shoulder to say, “There’ll probably be trouble over this.”

I knew that; there usually is when somebody dies in a cell.

George Propper came in grinning happily. “So what’s become of that fifteen hundred fish?”

“What happened last night?” I asked.

“Nothing. He hung hisself.”

“Did you find him?”

He shook his head. “Wally took a look in there to see how things was before he went off duty, and found him.”

“You were asleep, I suppose.”

“Well, I was catching a nap, I guess,” he mumbled, “but everybody does that sometimes — even Wally sometimes when he comes in off his beat between rounds — and I always wake up when the phone rings or anything. And suppose I had been awake. You can’t hear a guy hanging hisself.”

“Did Kamsley say how long he’d been dead?”

“He done it about five o’clock, he said he guessed. You want to look at the remains? They’re over at Fritz’s undertaking parlor.”

I said, “Not now. You’d better go home and get some more sleep, so your insomnia won’t keep you awake tonight.”

He said, “I feel almost as bad about you and Wally losing all that dough as you do,” and went out chuckling.

Ted Carroll came back from lunch with the notion that perhaps there was some connection between Furman and the two men who had robbed Heck Jones. That didn’t seem to make much sense, but I promised to look into it. Naturally, we never did find any such connection.

That evening a fellow named Rising, assistant manager of the Trans-American Detective Agency’s Philadelphia branch, arrived. He brought the dead man’s lawyer, a scrawny, asthmatic man named Wheelock, with him. After they had identified the body we went back to my office for a conference.

It didn’t take me long to tell them all I knew, with the one additional fact I had picked up during the afternoon, which was that the police in most towns in our corner of the state had received copies of the reward circular. Rising examined the circular and called it an excellent forgery: paper, style, type were all almost exactly those used by his agency.

They told me the dead man was a well-known, respectable, and prosperous citizen of Philadelphia. In 1938 he had married a twenty-two-year-old girl named Ethel Brian, the daughter of a respectable, if not prosperous, Philadelphia family. They had a child born in 1940, but it lived only a few months. In 1941 Furman’s wife had disappeared and neither he nor her family had heard of her since, though he had spent a good deal of money trying to find her. Rising showed me a photograph of her, a small-featured, pretty blonde with a weak mouth and large, staring eyes.

“I’d like to have a copy made,” I said.

“You can keep that. It’s one of them that we had made. Her description’s on the back.”

“Thanks. And he didn’t divorce her?”

Rising shook his head with emphasis. “No, sir. He was a lot in love with her and he seemed to think the kid’s dying had made her a little screwy and she didn’t know what she was doing.” He looked at the lawyer. “That right?”

Wheelock made a couple of asthmatic sounds and said, “That is my belief.”

“You said he had money. About how much, and who gets it?”

The scrawny layer wheezed some more, said, “I should say his estate will amount to perhaps half a million dollars, left in its entirety to his wife.” That gave me something to think about, but the thinking didn’t help me out then.

They couldn’t tell me why he had come to Deerwood. He seemed to have told nobody where he was going, had simply told his servants and his employees that he was leaving town for a day or two. Neither Rising nor Wheelock knew of any enemies he had. That was the crop.

And that was still the crop at the inquest the next day. Everything showed that somebody had framed Furman into our jail and that the frame-up had driven him to suicide. Nothing showed anything else. And there had to be something else, a lot else.

Some of the else began to show up immediately after the inquest. Ben Kamsley was waiting for me when I left the undertaking parlor, where the inquest had been held. “Let’s get out of the crowd,” he said. “I want to tell you something.”

“Come on over to the office.”

We went over there. He shut the door, which usually stayed open, and sat on a corner of my desk. His voice was low. “Two of those bruises showed.”

“What bruises?”

He looked curiously at me for a second, then put a hand on the top of his head. “Furman — up under the hair — there were two bruises.”

I tried to keep from shouting. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I am telling you. You weren’t here that morning. This is the first time I’ve seen you since.”

I cursed the two hoodlums who had kept me away by sticking up the Red Top Diner and demanded, “Then why didn’t you spill it when you were testifying at the inquest?”

He frowned. “I’m a friend of yours. Do I want to put you in a spot where people can say you drove this chap to suicide by third-degreeing him too rough?”

“You’re nuts,” I said. “How bad was his head?”

“That didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean. There’s nothing the matter with his skull. Just a couple of bruises nobody would notice unless they parted the hair.”

“It killed him just the same,” I growled. “You and your friendship—”

The telephone rang. It was Fritz. “Listen, Scott,” he said, “there’s a couple ladies here that want a look at that fellow. Is it all right?”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know ’em — strangers.”

“Why do they want to see him?”

“I don’t know. Wait a minute.”

A woman’s voice came over the wire: “Can’t I please see him?” It was a very pleasant, earnest voice.

“Why do you want to see him?” I asked.

“Well, I” — there was a long pause — “I am” — a shorter pause, and when she finished the sentence her voice was not much more than a whisper — “his wife.”

“Oh, certainly,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

I hurried out.

Leaving the building, I ran into Wally Shane. He was in civilian clothes, since he was off duty. “Hey, Scott?” He took my arm and dragged me back into the vestibule, out of sight of the street. “A couple of dames came into Fritz’s just as I was leaving. One of ’em’s Hotcha Randall, a baby with a record as long as your arm. You know she’s one of that mob you had me working on in New York last summer.”

“She know you?”

He grinned. “Sure. But not by my right name, and she thinks I’m a Detroit hoodlum.”

“I mean did she know you just now?”

“I don’t think she saw me. Anyway, she didn’t give me a tumble.”

“You don’t know the other one?”

“No. She’s a blonde, kind of pretty.”

“O.K.,” I said. “Stick around a while, but out of sight. Maybe I’ll be bringing them back with me.” I crossed the street to the undertaking parlor.

Ethel Furman was prettier than her photograph had indicated. The woman with her was five or six years older, quite a bit larger, handsome in a big, somewhat coarse way. Both of them were attractively dressed in styles that hadn’t reached Deerwood yet.

The big woman was introduced to me as Mrs. Crowder. I said, “I thought your name was Randall.”

She laughed. “What do you care, Chief? I’m not hurting your town.”

I said, “Don’t call me Chief. To you big-city slickers I’m the town whittler. We go back through here.”

Ethel Furman didn’t make any fuss over her husband when she saw him. She simply looked gravely at his face for about three minutes, then turned away and said, “Thank you,” to me.

“I’ll have to ask you some questions,” I said, “so if you’ll come across the street...”

She nodded. “And I’d like to ask you some.” She looked at her companion. “If Mrs. Crowder will—”

“Call her Hotcha,” I said. “We’re all among friends. Sure, she’ll come along, too.”

The Randall woman said, “Aren’t you the cut-up?” and took my arm.

In my office I gave them chairs and said, “Before I ask you anything I want to tell you something. Furman didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

Ethel Furman opened her eyes wide. “Murdered?”

Hotcha Randall said, as if she had had the words on the tip of her tongue right along, “We’ve got alibis. We were in New York. We can prove it.”

“You’re likely to get a chance to, too,” I told her. “How’d you people happen to come down here?”

Ethel Furman repeated, “Murdered?” in a dazed tone.

The Randall woman said, “Who’s got a better right to come down here? She was still his wife, wasn’t she? She’s entitled to some of his estate, isn’t she? She’s got a right to look out for her own interests, hasn’t she?”

That reminded me of something. I picked up the telephone and told Hammill to have somebody get hold of the lawyer Wheelock — he had stayed over for the inquest, of course — before he left town, and tell him I wanted to see him. “And is Wally around?”

“He’s not here. He said you told him to keep out of sight. I’ll find him, though.”

“Right. Tell him I want him to go to New York to-night. Send Mason home to get some sleep. He’ll have to take over Wally’s night trick.”

Hammill said, “Oke,” and I turned back to my guests.

Ethel Furman had come out of her daze. She leaned forward and asked, “Mr. Anderson, do you think I had — had anything to do with Lester’s — with his death?”

“I don’t know. I know he was killed. I know he left you something like half a million.”

The Randall woman whistled softly. She came over and put a diamond-ringed hand on my shoulder. “Dollars?”

When I nodded, the delight went out of her face, leaving it serious. “All right, Chief,” she said, “now don’t be a clown. The kid didn’t have a thing to do with whatever you think happened. We read about him committing suicide in yesterday morning’s paper, and about there being something funny about it, and I persuaded her to come down and—”

Ethel Furman interrupted her friend. “Mr. Anderson, I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Lester. I left him because I wanted to leave him, but I wouldn’t have done anything to him for money or anything else. Why, if I’d wanted money from him all I’d’ve had to do would’ve been to ask him. Why, he used to put ads in papers telling me if I wanted anything to let him know, but I never did. You can — his lawyer — anybody who knew anything about it can tell you that.”

The Randall woman took up the story. “That’s the truth, Chief. I’ve been telling her she was a chump not to tap him, but she never would. I had a hard enough time getting her to come for her share now he’s dead and got nobody else to leave it to.”

Ethel Furman said, “I wouldn’t’ve hurt him.”

“Why’d you leave him?”

She moved her shoulders. “I don’t know how to say it. The way we lived wasn’t the way I wanted to live. I wanted — I don’t know what. Anyway, after the baby died I couldn’t stand it any more and cleared out, but I didn’t want anything from him and I wouldn’t’ve hurt him. He was always good to me. I was — I was the one that was wrong.”

The telephone rang. Hammill’s voice. “I found both of ’em. Wally’s home. I told him. The old guy Wheelock is on his way over.”

I dug out the phony reward circular and showed it to Ethel Furman. “This is what got him into the can. Did you ever see that picture before?”

She started to say “No,” then a frightened look came into her face. “Why, that’s — it can’t be. It’s — it’s a snapshot I had — have. It’s an enlargement of it.”

“Who else has one?”

Her face became more frightened, but she said, “Nobody that I know of. I don’t think anybody else could have one.”

“You’ve still got yours?”

“Yes. I don’t remember whether I’ve seen it recently — it’s with some old papers and things — but I must have it.”

I said, “Well, Mrs. Furman, it’s stuff like that that’s got to be checked up, and neither of us can dodge it. Now there are two ways we can play it. I can hold you here on suspicion till I’ve had time to check things up, or I can send one of my men back to New York with you for the check-up. I’m willing to do that if you’ll speed things up by helping him all you can and if you’ll promise me you won’t try any tricks.”

“I promise,” she said. “I’m as anxious as you are to—”

“All right. How’d you come down?”

“I drove,” the Randall woman said. “That’s my car, the big green one across the street.”

“Fine. Then he can ride back with you, but no funny business.”

The telephone rang again while they were assuring me there would be no funny business. Hammill said, “Wheelock’s here.”

“Send him in.”

The lawyer’s asthma nearly strangled him when he saw Ethel Furman. Before he could get himself straightened out I asked, “This is really Mrs. Furman?”

He wagged his head up and down, still wheezing.

“Fine,” I said. “Wait for me. I’ll be back in a little while.” I herded the two women out and across the street to the green car. “Straight up to the end of the street and then two blocks left,” I told the Randall woman, who was at the wheel.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To see Shane, the man who’s going to New York with you.”

Mrs. Dober, Wally’s landlady, opened the door for us.

“Wally in?” I asked.

“Yes, indeedy, Mr. Anderson. Go right on up.” She was staring with wide-eyed curiosity at my companions while talking to me.

We went up a flight of stairs and I knocked on his door.

“Who is it?” he called.

“Scott.”

“Come on in.”

I pushed the door open and stepped aside to let the women in.

Ethel Furman gasped, “Harry,” and stepped back.

Wally had a hand behind him, but my gun was already out in my hand. “I guess you win,” he said.

I said I guessed I did and we all went back to headquarters.

“I’m a sap,” he complained when he and I were alone in my office. “I knew it was all up as soon as I saw those two dames going into Fritz’s. Then, when I was ducking out of sight and ran into you, I was afraid you’d take me over with you, so I had to tell you one of ’em knew me, figuring you’d want to keep me under cover for a little while anyhow — long enough for me to get out of town. And then I didn’t have sense enough to go.

“I drop in home to pick up a couple of things before I scram and that call of Hammill’s catches me and I fall for it plenty. I figure I’m getting a break. I figure you’re not on yet and are going to send me back to New York as the Detroit hood again to see what dope I can get out of these folks, and I’ll be sitting pretty. Well, you fooled me, brother, or didn’t — Listen, Scott, you didn’t just stumble into that accidentally, did you?”

“No. Furman had to be murdered by a copper. A copper was most likely to know reward circulars well enough to make a good job of forging one. Who printed that for you?”

“Go on with your story,” he said. “I’m not dragging anybody in with me. It was only a poor mug of a printer that needed dough.”

“Okay. Only a copper would be sure enough of the routine to know how things would be handled. Only a copper — one of my coppers — would be able to walk into his cell, bang him across the head, and string him up on the — Those bruises showed.”

“They did? I wrapped the blackjack in a towel, figuring it would knock him out without leaving a mark anybody’d find under the hair. I seem to’ve slipped up a lot.”

“So that narrows it down to my coppers,” I went on, “and — well — you told me you knew the Randall woman, and there it was, only I figured you were working with them. What got you into this?”

He made a sour mouth. “What gets most saps in jams? A yen for easy dough. I’m in New York, see, working on that Dutton job for you, palling around with gamblers, and racketeers, passing for one of them; and I get to figuring that here my work takes as much brains as theirs, and is as tough and dangerous as theirs, but they’re taking in big money and I’m working for coffee and doughnuts. That kind of stuff gets you.

“Then I run into this Ethel and she goes for me like a house afire. I like her, too, so that’s dandy; but one night she tells me about this husband of hers and how much dough he’s got and how nuts he is about her and how he’s still trying to find her, and I get to thinking. I think she’s nuts enough about me to marry me. I still think she’d marry me if she didn’t know I killed him. Divorcing him’s no good, because the chances are she wouldn’t take any money from him and, anyway, it would only be part. So I got to thinking about suppose he died and left her the roll.

“That was more like it. I ran down to Philly a couple of afternoons and looked him up and everything looked fine. He didn’t even have anybody else close enough to leave more than a little of his dough to. So I did it. Not right away; I took my time working out the details, meanwhile writing to her through a fellow in Detroit.

“And then I did it. I sent those circulars out — to a lot of places — not wanting to point too much at this one. And when I was ready I phoned him, telling him if he’d come to the Deerwood Hotel that night, some time between then and the next night, he’d hear from Ethel. And, like I thought, he’d’ve fallen for any trap that was baited with her. You picking him up at the station was a break. If you hadn’t, I’d’ve had to discover he was registered at the hotel that night. Anyway, I’d’ve killed him and pretty soon I’d’ve started drinking or something, and you’d’ve fired me and I’d’ve gone off and married Ethel and her half-million under my Detroit name.” He made the sour mouth again. “Only I guess I’m not as sharp as I thought.”

“Maybe you are,” I said, “but that doesn’t always help. Old man Kamsley, Ben’s father, used to have a saying, ‘To a sharp knife comes a tough steak.’ I’m sorry you did it, Wally. I always liked you.”

He smiled wearily. “I know you did,” he said. “I was counting on that.”

His Brother’s Keeper

Collier’s, February 17, 1934

I knew what a lot of people said about Loney but he was always swell to me. Ever since I remember he was swell to me and I guess I would have liked him just as much even if he had been just somebody else instead of my brother; but I was glad he was not just somebody else.

He was not like me. He was slim and would have looked swell in any kind of clothes you put on him, only he always dressed classy and looked like he had stepped right out of the bandbox even when he was just loafing around the house, and he had slick hair and the whitest teeth you ever saw and long, thin, clean-looking fingers. He looked like the way I remembered my father, only better-looking. I took more after Ma’s folks, the Malones, which was funny because Loney was the one that was named after them. Malone Bolan. He was smart as they make them, too. It was no use trying to put anything over on him and maybe that was what some people had against him, only that was kind of hard to fit in with Pete Gonzalez.

Pete Gonzalez not liking Loney used to bother me sometimes because he was a swell guy too, and he was never trying to put anything over on anybody. He had two fighters and a wrestler named Kilchak and he always sent them in to do the best they could, just like Loney sent me in. He was the topnotch manager in our part of the country and a lot of people said there was no better anywhere, so I felt pretty good about him wanting to handle me, even if I did say no.

It was in the hall leaving Tubby White’s gym that I ran into him that afternoon and he said, “Hello, Kid, how’s it?” moving his cigar farther over in a corner of his mouth so he could talk.

“Hello. All right.”

He looked me up and down, squinting on account of the smoke from his cigar. “Going to take this guy Saturday?”

“I guess so.”

He looked me up and down again like he was weighing me in. His eyes were little enough anyhow and when he squinted like that you could hardly see them at all. “How old are you, Kid?”

“Going on nineteen.”

“And you’ll weigh about a hundred and sixty,” he said.

“Sixty-seven and a half. I’m growing pretty fast.”

“Ever see this guy you’re fighting Saturday?”

“No.”

“He’s plenty tough.”

I grinned and said, “I guess he is.”

“And plenty smart.”

I said, “I guess he is,” again.

He took his cigar out of his mouth and scowled at me and said like he was sore at me, “You know you got no business in the ring with him, don’t you?” Before I could think up anything to say he stuck the cigar back in his mouth and his face and his voice changed. “Why don’t you let me handle you, Kid? You got the stuff. I’ll handle you right, build you up, not use you up, and you’ll be good for a long trip.”

“I couldn’t do that,” I said. “Loney taught me all I know and—”

“Taught you what?” Pete snarled. He looked mad again. “If you think you been taught anything at all you just take a look at your mug in the next looking-glass you come across.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and spat out a piece of tobacco that had come loose. “Only eighteen years old and ain’t been fighting a year and look at the mug on him!”

I felt myself blushing. I guess I was never any beauty but, like Pete said, I had been hit in the face a lot and I guess my face showed it. I said, “Well, of course, I’m not a boxer.”

“And that’s the God’s truth,” Pete said. “And why ain’t you?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s just not my way of fighting.”

“You could learn. You’re fast and you ain’t dumb. What’s this stuff getting you? Every week Loney sends you in against some guy you’re not ready for yet and you soak up a lot of fists and—”

“I win, don’t I?” I said.

“Sure you win — so far — because you’re young and tough and got the moxie and can hit, but I wouldn’t want to pay for winning what you’re paying, and I wouldn’t want any of my boys to. I seen kids — maybe some of them as promising as you — go along the way you’re going, and I seen what was left of them a couple years later. Take my word for it, Kid, you’ll do better than that with me.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “and I’m grateful to you and all that, but I couldn’t leave Loney. He—”

“I’ll give Loney a piece of change for your contract, even if you ain’t got one with him.”

“No, I’m sorry, I–I couldn’t.”

Pete started to say something and stopped and his face began to get red. The door of Tubby’s office had opened and Loney was coming out. Loney’s face was white and you could hardly see his lips because they were so tight together, so I knew he had heard us talking.

He walked up close to Pete, not even looking at me once, and said, “You chiseling dago rat.”

Pete said, “I only told him what I told you when I made you the offer last week.”

Loney said, “Swell. So now you’ve told everybody. So now you can tell ’em about this.” He smacked Pete across the mouth with the back of his hand.

I moved over a little because Pete was a lot bigger than Loney, but Pete just said, “O.K., pal, maybe you won’t live forever. Maybe you won’t live forever even if Big Jake don’t never get hep to the missus.”

Loney swung at him with a fist this time but Pete was backing away down the hall and Loney missed him by about a foot and a half, and when Loney started after him Pete turned and ran toward the gym.

Loney came back to me grinning and not looking mad any more. He could change that way quicker than anybody you ever saw. He put an arm around my shoulders and said, “The chiseling dago rat. Let’s blow.” Outside he turned me around to look at the sign advertising the fights. “There you are, Kid. I don’t blame him for wanting you. There’ll be a lot of ’em wanting you before you’re through.”

It did look swell, KID BOLAN VS. SAILOR PERELMAN, in red letters that were bigger than any of the other names and up at the top of the card. That was the first time I ever had had my name at the top. I thought, I’m going to have it there like that all the time now and maybe in New York some time, but I just grinned at Loney without saying anything and we went on home.

Ma was away visiting my married sister in Pittsburgh and we had a nigger woman named Susan taking care of the house for us and after she washed up the supper dishes and went home Loney went to the telephone and I could hear him talking low. I wanted to say something to him when he came back but I was afraid I would say the wrong thing because Loney might think I was trying to butt into his business, and before I could find a safe way to start, the doorbell rang.

Loney went to the door. It was Mrs. Schiff, like I had a hunch it would be, because she had come over the first night Ma was away.

She came in laughing, with Loney’s arm around her waist, and said, “Hello, Champ,” to me.

I said “Hello,” and shook hands with her.

I liked her, I guess, but I guess I was kind of afraid of her. I mean not only afraid of her on Loney’s account but in a different way. You know, like sometimes when you were a kid and you found yourself all alone in a strange neighborhood on the other side of town. There was nothing you could see to be downright afraid of but you kept halfway expecting something. It was something like that. She was awful pretty but there was something kind of wild-looking about her. I don’t mean wild-looking like some floozies you see; I mean almost like an animal, like she was always on the watch for something. It was like she was hungry. I mean just her eyes and maybe her mouth because you could not call her skinny or anything or fat either.

Loney got out a bottle of whisky and glasses and they had a drink. I stalled around for a few minutes just being polite and then said I guessed I was tired and I said good night to them and took my magazine upstairs to my room. Loney was beginning to tell her about his run-in with Pete Gonzalez when I went upstairs.

After I got undressed I tried to read but I kept worrying about Loney. It was this Mrs. Schiff that Pete made the crack about in the afternoon. She was the wife of Big Jake Schiff, the boss of our ward, and a lot of people must have known about her running around with Loney on the side. Anyhow Pete knew about it and he and Big Jake were pretty good friends besides him now having something to pay Loney back for. I wished Loney would cut it out. He could have had a lot of other girls and Big Jake was nobody to have trouble with, even leaving aside the pull he had down at the City Hall. Every time I tried to read I would get to thinking things like that so finally I gave it up and went to sleep pretty early, even for me.

That was a Monday. Tuesday night when I got home from the movies she was waiting in the vestibule. She had on a long coat but no hat, and she looked pretty excited.

“Where’s Loney?” she asked, not saying hello or anything.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say where he was going.”

“I’ve got to see him,” she said. “Haven’t you any idea where he’d be?”

“No, I don’t know where he is.”

“Do you think he’ll be late?”

I said, “I guess he usually is.”

She frowned at me and then she said, “I’ve got to see him. I’ll wait a little while anyhow.” So we went back to the dining-room.

She kept her coat on and began to walk around the room looking at things but without paying much attention to them. I asked her if she wanted a drink and she said, “Yes,” sort of absent-minded, but when I started to get it for her she took hold of the lapel of my coat and said, “Listen, Eddie, will you tell me something? Honest to God?”

I said, “Sure,” feeling kind of embarrassed looking in her face like that, “if I can.”

“Is Loney really in love with me?”

That was a tough one. I could feel my face getting redder and redder. I wished the door would open and Loney would come in. I wished a fire would break out or something.

She jerked my lapel. “Is he?”

I said, “I guess so. I guess he is, all right.”

“Don’t you know?”

I said, “Sure, I know, but Loney don’t ever talk to me about things like that. Honest, he don’t.”

She bit her lip and turned her back on me. I was sweating. I spent as long a time as I could in the kitchen getting the whisky and things. When I went back in the dining-room she had sat down and was putting lip-stick on her mouth. I set the whisky down on the table beside her.

She smiled at me and said, “You’re a nice boy, Eddie. I hope you win a million fights. When do you fight again?”

I had to laugh at that. I guess I had been going around thinking that everybody in the world knew I was going to fight Sailor Perelman that Saturday just because it was my first main event. I guess that is the way you get a swelled head. I said, “This Saturday.”

“That’s fine,” she said, and looked at her wrist-watch. “Oh, why doesn’t he come? I’ve got to be home before Jake gets there.” She jumped up. “Well, I can’t wait any longer. I shouldn’t have stayed this long. Will you tell Loney something for me?”

“Sure.”

“And not another soul?”

“Sure.”

She came around the table and took hold of my lapel again. “Well, listen. You tell him that somebody’s been talking to Jake about — about us. You tell him we’ve got to be careful, Jake’d kill both of us. You tell him I don’t think Jake knows for sure yet, but we’ve got to be careful. Tell Loney not to phone me and to wait here till I phone him to-morrow afternoon. Will you tell him that?”

“Sure.”

“And don’t let him do anything crazy.”

I said, “I won’t.” I would have said anything to get it over with.

She said, “You’re a nice boy, Eddie,” and kissed me on the mouth and went out of the house.

I did not go to the door with her. I looked at the whisky on the table and thought maybe I ought to take the first drink of my life, but instead I sat down and thought about Loney. Maybe I dozed off a little but I was awake when he came home and that was nearly two o’clock.

He was pretty tight. “What the hell are you doing up?” he said.

I told him about Mrs. Schiff and what she told me to tell him.

He stood there in his hat and overcoat until I had told it all, then he said, “That chiseling dago rat,” kind of half under his breath and his face began to get like it got when he was mad.

“And she said you mustn’t do anything crazy.”

“Crazy?” He looked at me and kind of laughed. “No, I won’t do anything crazy. How about you scramming off to bed?”

I said, “All right,” and went upstairs.

The next morning he was still in bed when I left for the gym and he had gone out before I got home. I waited supper for him until nearly seven o’clock and then ate it by myself. Susan was getting sore because it was going to be late before she got through. Maybe he stayed out all night but he looked all right when he came in Tubby’s the next afternoon to watch me work out, and he was making jokes and kidding along with the fellows hanging around there just like he had nothing at all on his mind.

He waited for me to dress and we walked over home together. The only thing that was kind of funny, he asked me, “How do you feel, Kid?” That was kind of funny because he knew I always felt all right. I guess I never even had a cold all my life.

I said, “All right.”

“You’re working good,” he said. “Take it easy to-morrow. You want to be rested up for this baby from Providence. Like that chiseling dago rat said, he’s plenty tough and plenty smart.”

I said, “I guess he is. Loney, do you think Pete really tipped Big Jake off about—”

“Forget it,” he said. “Hell with ’em.” He poked my arm. “You got nothing to worry about but how you’re going to be in there Saturday night.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Don’t be too sure,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be lucky to get a draw.”

I stopped still in the street, I was so surprised. Loney never talked like that about any of my fights before. He was always saying, “Don’t worry about how tough this mug looks, just go in and knock him apart,” or something like that.

I said, “You mean—?”

He took hold of my arm to start me walking again. “Maybe I overmatched you this time, Kid. This sailor’s pretty good. He can box and he hits a lot harder than anybody you been up against so far.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said, scowling straight ahead. “Listen, what do you think about what Pete said about you needing more boxing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t ever pay attention much to what anybody says but you.”

“Well, what do you think about it now?” he asked.

“Sure, I’d like to learn to box better, I guess.”

He grinned at me without moving his lips much. “You’re liable to get some fine lessons from this Sailor whether you want ’em or not. But no kidding, suppose I told you to box him instead of tearing in, would you do it? I mean for the experience, even if you didn’t make much of a showing that way.”

I said, “Don’t I always fight the way you tell me?”

“Sure you do. But suppose it meant maybe losing this once but learning something?”

“I want to win, of course,” I said, “but I’ll do anything you tell me. Do you want me to fight him that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll see.”

Friday and Saturday I just loafed around. Friday I tried to find somebody to go out and shoot pheasants with but all I could find was Bob Kirby and I was tired of listening to him make the same jokes over and over, so I changed my mind and stayed home.

Loney came home for supper and I asked him what the odds were on our fight.

He said, “Even money. You got a lot of friends.”

“Are we betting?” I asked.

“Not yet. Maybe if the price gets better. I don’t know.”

I wished he had not been so afraid I was going to lose but I thought it might sound kind of conceited if I said anything about it, so I just went on eating.

We had a swell house that Saturday night. The armory was packed and we got a pretty good hand when we went in the ring. I felt fine and I guess Dick Cohen, who was going to be in my corner with Loney, felt fine too, because he looked like he was trying to keep from grinning. Only Loney looked kind of worried, not enough that you would notice it unless you knew him as well as I did, but I could notice it.

“I’m all right,” I told him. A lot of fighters say they feel uncomfortable waiting for their fight to start but I always feel fine.

Loney said, “Sure you are,” and slapped me on my back.

“Listen, Kid,” he said, and cleared his throat. He put his mouth over close to my ear so nobody else would hear him. “Listen, Kid, maybe — maybe you better box him like we said. O.K.?”

I said, “O.K.”

“And don’t let those mugs out front yell you into anything. You’re doing the fighting up there.”

I said, “O.K.”

The first couple of rounds were kind of fun in a way because this was new stuff to me, this moving around him on my toes and going in and out with my hands high. Of course I had done some of that with fellows in the gym but not in the ring before and not with anybody that was as good at it as he was. He was pretty good and had it all over me both of those rounds but nobody hurt anybody else.

But in the first minute of the third he got to my jaw with a honey of a right cross and then whammed me in the body twice fast with his left. Pete and Loney had not been kidding when they said he could hit. I forgot about boxing and went in pumping with both hands, driving him all the way across the ring before he tied me up in a clinch. Everybody yelled so I guess it looked pretty good but I only really hit him once; he took the rest of them on his arms. He was the smartest fighter I had ever been up against.

By the time Pop Agnew broke us I remembered I was supposed to be boxing so I went back to that, but Perelman was going faster and I spent most of the rest of the round trying to keep his left out of my face.

“Hurt you?” Loney asked when I was back in my corner.

“Not yet,” I said, “but he can hit.”

In the fourth I stopped another right cross with my eye and a lot of lefts with other parts of my face and the fifth round was still tougher. For one thing, the eye he had hit me in was almost shut by that time and for another thing I guess he had me pretty well figured out. He went around and around me, not letting me get set.

“How do you feel?” Loney asked when he and Dick were working on me after that round. His voice was funny, like he had a cold.

I said, “All right.” It was hard to talk much because my lips were puffed out.

“Cover up more,” Loney said.

I shook my head up and down to say I would.

“And don’t pay any attention to those mugs out front.”

I had been too busy with Sailor Perelman to pay much attention to anybody else but when we came out for the sixth round I could hear people hollering things like, “Go in and fight him, Kid,” and “Come on, Kid, go to work on this guy,” and “What are you waiting for, Kid?” so I guessed they had been hollering like that all along. Maybe that had something to do with it or maybe I just wanted to show Loney that I was still all right so he would not worry about me. Anyway, along toward the last part of the round, when Perelman jarred me with another one of those right crosses that I was having so much trouble with, I got down low and went in after him. He hit me some but not enough to keep me away and, even if he did take care of most of my punches, I got in a couple of good ones and I could tell that he felt them. And when he tied me up in a clinch I knew he could do it because he was smarter than me and not because he was stronger.

“What’s the matter with you?” he growled in my ear. “Are you gone nuts?” I never liked to talk in the ring so I just grinned to myself without saying anything and kept trying to get a hand loose.

Loney scowled at me when I sat down after that round. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you to box him?” He was awful pale and his voice was hoarse.

I said, “All right, I will.”

Dick Cohen began to curse over on the side I could not see out of. He did not seem to be cursing anybody or anything, just cursing in a low voice until Loney told him to shut up.

I wanted to ask Loney what I ought to do about that right cross but, with my mouth the way it was, talking was a lot of work and, besides, my nose was stopped up and I had to use my mouth for breathing, so I kept quiet. Loney and Dick worked harder on me than they had between any of the other rounds. When Loney crawled out of the ring just before the gong he slapped me on the shoulder and said in a sharp voice, “Now box.”

I went out and boxed. Perelman must have got to my face thirty times that round; anyway it felt like he did, but I kept on trying to box him. It seemed like a long round.

I went back to my corner not feeling exactly sick but like I might be going to get sick, and that was funny because I could not remember being hit in the stomach to amount to anything. Mostly Perelman had been working on my head. Loney looked a lot sicker than I felt. He looked so sick I tried not to look at him and I felt kind of ashamed of making a bum out of him by letting this Perelman make a monkey out of me like he was doing.

“Can you last it out?” Loney asked.

When I tried to answer him I found that I could not move my lower lip because the inside of it was stuck on a broken tooth. I put a thumb up to it and Loney pushed my glove away and pulled my lip loose from the tooth.

Then I said, “Sure. I’ll get the hang of it pretty soon.”

Loney made a queer gurgling kind of noise down in his throat and all of a sudden put his face up close in front of mine so that I had to stop looking at the floor and look at him. His eyes were like you think a hophead’s are. “Listen, Kid,” he says, his voice sounding cruel and hard, almost like he hated me. “To hell with this stuff. Go in and get that mug. What the hell are you boxing for? You’re a fighter. Get in there and fight.”

I started to say something and then stopped, and I had a goofy idea that I would like to kiss him or something and then he was climbing through the ropes and the gong rang.

I did like Loney said and I guess I took that round by a pretty good edge. It was swell, fighting my own way again, going in banging away with both hands, not swinging or anything silly like that, just shooting them in short and hard, leaning from side to side to get everything from the ankles up into them. He hit me of course but I figured he was not likely to be able to hit me any harder than he had in the other rounds and I had stood up under that, so I was not worrying about it now. Just before the gong rang I threw him out of a clinch and when it rang I had him covering up in a corner.

It was swell back in my corner. Everybody was yelling all around except Loney and Dick and neither of them said a single word to me. They hardly looked at me, just at the parts they were working on and they were rougher with me than they ever were before. You would have thought I was a machine they were fixing up. Loney was not looking sick any more. I could tell he was excited because his face was set hard and still. I like to remember him that way, he was awful good-looking. Dick was whistling between his teeth very low while he doused my head with a sponge.

I got Perelman sooner than I expected, in the ninth. The first part of the round was his because he came out moving fast and left-handing me and making me look pretty silly, I guess, but he could not keep it up and I got in under one of his lefts and cracked him on the chin with a left hook, the first time I had been able to lay one on his head the way I wanted to. I knew it was a good one even before his head went back and I threw six punches at him as fast as I could get them out — left, right, left, right, left, right. He took care of four of them but I got him on the chin again with a right and just above his trunks with another, and when his knees bent a little and he tried to clinch I pushed him away and smacked him on the cheek-bone with everything I had.

Then Dick Cohen was putting my bathrobe over my shoulders and hugging me and sniffling and cursing and laughing all at the same time, and across the ring they were propping Perelman up on his stool.

“Where’s Loney?” I asked.

Dick looked around. “I don’t know. He was here. Boy, was that a mill!”

Loney caught up to us just as we were going in the dressing-room. “I had to see a fellow,” he said. His eyes were bright like he was laughing at something, but he was white as a ghost and he held his lips tight against his teeth even when he grinned kind of lopsided at me and said, “It’s going to be a long time before anybody beats you, Kid.”

I said I hoped it was. I was awful tired now that it was all over. Usually I get awful hungry after a fight but this time I was just awful tired.

Loney went across to where he had hung his coat and put it on over his sweater, and when he put it on the tail of it caught and I saw he had a gun in his hip pocket. That was funny because I never knew him to carry a gun before and if he had had it in the ring everybody would have been sure to see it when he bent over working on me. I could not ask him about it because there were a lot of people in there talking and arguing.

Pretty soon Perelman came in with his manager and two other men who were strangers to me, so I guessed they had come down from Providence with him too. He was looking straight ahead but the others looked kind of hard at Loney and me and went up to the other end of the room without saying anything. We all dressed in one long room there.

Loney said to Dick, who was helping me, “Take your time. I don’t want the Kid to go out till he’s cooled off.”

Perelman got dressed pretty quick and went out still looking straight ahead. His manager and the two men with him stopped in front of us. The manager was a big man with green eyes like a fish and a dark kind of flat face. He had an accent, too, maybe he was a Polack. He said, “Smart boys, huh?”

Loney was standing up with one hand behind him. Dick Cohen put his hands on the back of a chair and kind of leaned over it. Loney said, “I’m smart. The Kid fights the way I tell him to fight.”

The manager looked at me and looked at Dick and looked at Loney again and said, “M-m-m, so that’s the way it is.” He thought a minute and said, “That’s something to know.” Then he pulled his hat down tighter on his head and turned around and went out with the other two men following.

I asked Loney, “What’s the matter?’

He laughed, but not like it was anything funny. “Bad losers.”

“But you’ve got a gun in—”

He cut me off. “Uh-huh, a fellow asked me to hold it for him. I got to go give it back to him now. You and Dick go on home and I’ll see you there in a little while. But don’t hurry, because I want you to cool off before you go out. You two take the car, you know where we parked it. Come here, Dick.”

He took Dick over in a corner and whispered to him. Dick kept nodding his head up and down and looking more and more scared, even if he did try to hide it when he turned around to me. Loney said, “Be seeing you,” and went out.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Dick.

He shook his head and said, “It’s nothing to worry about,” and that was every word I could get out of him.

Five minutes later Bob Kirby’s brother Pudge ran in and yelled, “Jees, they shot Loney!”

I shot Loney. If I was not so dumb he would still be alive any way you figure it. For a long time I blamed it on Mrs. Schiff, but I guess that was just to keep from admitting that it was my own fault. I mean I never thought she actually did the shooting, like the people who said that when he missed the train that they were supposed to go away on together she came back and waited outside the armory and when he came out he told her he had changed his mind and she shot him. I mean I blamed her for lying to him, because it came out that nobody had tipped Big Jake off about her and Loney. Loney had put the idea in her head, telling her about what Pete had said, and she had made up the lie so Loney would go away with her. But if I was not so dumb Loney would have caught that train.

Then a lot of people said Big Jake killed Loney. They said that was why the police never got very far, on account of Big Jake’s pull down at the City Hall. It was a fact that he had come home earlier than Mrs. Schiff had expected and she had left a note for him saying that she was running away with Loney, and he could have made it down to the street near the armory where Loney was shot in time to do it, but he could not have got to the railroad station in time to catch their train, and if I was not so dumb Loney would have caught that train.

And the same way if that Sailor Perelman crowd did it, which is what most people including the police thought even if they did have to let him go because they could not find enough evidence against him. If I was not so dumb Loney could have said to me right out, “Listen, Kid, I’ve got to go away and I’ve got to have all the money I can scrape up and the best way to do it is to make a deal with Perelman for you to go in the tank and then bet all we got against you.” Why, I would have thrown a million fights for Loney, but how could he know he could trust me, with me this dumb?

Or I could have guessed what he wanted and I could have gone down when Perelman copped me with that uppercut in the fifth. That would have been easy. Or if I was not so dumb I would have learned to box better and, even losing to Perelman like I would have anyway, I could have kept him from chopping me to pieces so bad that Loney could not stand it any more and had to throw away everything by telling me to stop boxing and go in and fight.

Or even if everything had happened like it did up to then he could still have ducked out at the last minute if I was not so dumb that he had to stick around to look out for me by telling those Providence guys that I had nothing to do with double-crossing them.

I wish I was dead instead of Loney.

This Little Pig

Collier’s, March 24, 1934

Max Rhinewien’s telegram brought me back from Santa Barbara. He glared at me over his bicarbonate of soda and demanded, “And where’ve you been?”

“Where’d you wire me? I’ve been trying to finish a play.”

“Is there a picture in it?”

“Why not? You bought Soviet Law, didn’t you? And that’s a bibliography.”

“Never mind,” he said, “it’s a good title anyway. Listen, Bugs, I want you to hop over to Serrita and—”

“Nothing doing. I’ve still got nine days coining to me and I want to get the play finished.”

“As a favor to me, Bugs. It won’t take over a week, I promise you. Is a week going to hurt? You can take your nine days afterwards — take ten days — take two weeks if you want. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t in a hole. My God, I’d be the last person in the world to interfere with your play. But maybe it’ll be better for you this way. Maybe you’ll come back to your play with a clear mind — you know — better perspective. You got some problems, haven’t you, that you ain’t been able to clear up yet? Well, you get away from it for a little while and give your self-conscious mind a chance to work and—”

I never had much luck arguing with Max. I said, “All right, I’ll go.”

“Thanks. That’s fine. I knew I could count on you. Did you see the Go West! script?”

“No.”

“Well, I said all along it needed something, but it wasn’t till last night I could put my finger on it. It ain’t a bad story at all — this Blaine’s got something — but it needs just that one thing; and you know what it is? Sexing up.”

“You mean you’re going to put sex in a Western picture?” I asked.

“Yep!”

I shook my head.

He beamed on me. “Can’t see it, huh? I guess a lot of people can’t, but stick around and you will. And you’ll see Westerns grossing in the first-run houses instead of just in the neighbs and the sticks. Listen, Bugs, is Sol Feldman a dope?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Exactly. Not that anybody knows of. Well, I happened to hear only last night that they’re sexing up this The Dogie Trail plenty.”

“Why don’t you let him? Why don’t you wait and see how—”

He slapped a hand down flat on his desk. “You know that ain’t my way,” he said. “I got to be always first in the field. You know that. And we can beat ’em to release by a week or two easy.”

“It’s all right with me. It’s not my baby. What do I do?”

“I want you to sex up Go West! Keep it clean, see, but cram it with that stuff. You’re the boy to do it. You’ll have to get over there right away — take a plane — and you’ll have to work your stuff up as they go along, because they already been shooting a couple days, but you can do that all right. This fellow Lawrence Blaine that wrote the script is out with them and you can either make him help you or send him back, whichever you want. And you won’t have any trouble with Fred.”

“That part’s O. K.,” I said, “but tell me one thing: how are you going to sex up Betty Lee Fenton?”

“Why not — so you keep it clean? She ain’t crippled. She can throw herself around if somebody shows her how, can’t she? Anyhow, you don’t have to depend on her. There’s other girls over there — Ann Meadows and Gracie King and — and if you want to take anybody else, go ahead. I’m sending Danny Finn along with you. I was thinking you might work him in something along the line that he’s a drunk piano player that Gracie — say — is taking along to open a dance-hall in this mining town, and she’s got some girls with her and — you know — you can work it up.”

“Didn’t Paramount try something like that with Gene Pallette in Fighting Caravans three or four years ago? I didn’t see the picture, but I heard—”

“What of it?” Max asked. “Is the stuff you write going to be like anybody else’s? That’s what I’m counting on — the Parish touch — the angle you got that nobody else can come anywheres near.”

“Go on,” I said, “I bet you tell that to all the writers. Have you got a copy of the script?”

“Miss Shepherd’ll give you one. I appreciate this a lot, Bugs.” He shook a fist at me. “Like that, see, but clean.”

I said, “Absolutely,” and — with Danny Finn — flew over the mountains to Serrita.

I found Fred LePage in his tent — besides housing the company, the tents served as a U. S. cavalry encampment in the picture — rehearsing a small dark girl in a one-eyed fade-away. (A one-eyed fade-away is where a character that has been rebuffed glances sidewise — fearfully or reproachfully as a rule — into the camera or at whoever did the rebuffing, and slinks off.) Fred greeted me with open arms. “Hello! What are you doing here?”

“Didn’t Max wire you?”

His grin went away. “Maybe. I stopped reading his wires. He’s driving me nuts.”

“A fine business,” I said. “The director of a horse opera going temperamental.”

He had the decency to seem embarrassed. “Well, if you were in my shoes—” He broke off. “Uh — you know Kitty Doran? This is Bugs Parish.”

The small dark girl dimpled and held out her hand. “How do you do?”

Fred growled, “Come on, what’s the bad news?”

When I told him he hit the top of the tent and spun there. I had expected him to yell his head off, of course, but he put on a really grand performance.

“You know how Max is,” I said with soothing intent as soon as I could get a word in. “He hears Feldman’s going in for sex in the open spaces — we’ve got to have sex in our open spaces. What the hell? He’ll probably change his mind before—”

“That’s just it,” he howled. “He’ll change his mind again and stick me with a week’s retakes and I’m already three days behind. What was the idea of sending us way over here in the first place? And with nothing ready. I got to do every damned thing myself. What’s he trying to do — make a bum out of me? Why don’t he give me some of those crooner shorts if that’s what he’s trying to do?”

Fred was only a run-of-the-mine director, but his habit of getting pictures into the can a little ahead of his schedule and a little under his budget made him worth his wages, and he knew it.

I said, “I don’t blame you for squawking. Let’s see what you’ve shot and we’ll save as much of it as we can.”

He said, “I know it’s not your fault, but, by God, Max is driving me nuts.”

Betty Lee Fenton, our little gingham girl, came in and said: “Hello, Bugs. Say, is Max sticking this guy Finn in the picture? He knows I don’t like to work with him.”

“Danny’s a good comic, whatever else you say about him.”

She made a face. “The else is plenty.”

“How are you on good clean sex?”

“What?”

“I don’t mean tonight, or anything like that; I mean in the picture.”

“What is this — a gag?”

I moved my head up and down. “And it’s got Fred here rolling on the floor. The picture’s new title is Go West with Sex.”

Then it was her turn. “I might’ve known it,” she shrieked. “Once I let Max talk me into a ride-ride-bang-bang, he thinks he can do anything to me. Well, he can’t, and he might just as well find it out right now. If he’s crazy, I’m not. Don’t he think my public’s got a right to the kind of a characterization they expect of me? Does Fox try things like that with Janet Gaynor? Of course not. Sheehan’s got too much sense. Max is a fool.”

Fred said to her, “Now for God’s sake don’t you start cutting up.”

She turned on him: they were not very fond of each other. “Listen, Mr. Lubitsch, I’ve had—”

I said, “Come, come, my gal, you’re yelling before you’re hurt. Maybe—”

She turned on me. “You’re damned right I am! And I’m veiling long distance to Max right now.” And out she went.

Kitty Doran said primly, “I think she’s unreasonable.”

Fred said: “What? Oh! Uh — better scoot, Kitty. We got to work.”

“All righty.” She smiled brightly at him and came over to me. “I’m awfully, awfully glad to have met you, Mr. Parish, and I hope— Well, by-by, Freddy.” She waved her hand at both of us and went out.

“Whaty is thaty?” I asked Fred.

“She’s all right, just a kid that had a couple of bits in my last picture. I’m giving her a small part in this.” He looked as if a thought had struck him. “We might build it up a little. She’s pretty good.”

“She must be — if she needs private coaching in one-eyed fade-aways.”

“She’s just a green kid, of course,” he admitted, “but — you’ll see. You don’t think you got a chance of changing what La Fenton calls her characterization, do you?”

“No. I’m counting on Ann for the chief—”

“Sure,” he said, “and we can build up Kitty’s part, too. She’s just a green kid, but she takes direction swell and—”

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

He scowled at me. “Are you going to start that too? Any other director can pick a girl out of the line because he knows talent when he sees it, but with me it’s got to be because I’ve fallen for the dame and she’s playing me for a sucker. You and Ann ought to incorporate.”

“Ann doesn’t think your Kitty’s got talent?”

“Ann’s just being disagreeable. What’s the matter with women? Look here, Bugs: I’m not saying this kid’s a Hepburn; I’m saying she’s got something. What do you know about it? You’ve never seen her work. Wait till you do.”

That seemed reasonable enough. I said: “O. K., Freddy. Get your author and let’s start pushing his masterpiece around.’

I sat beside Ann at dinner that night and we went for a walk down a canyon afterwards. “What’s the matter with everybody?” I asked.

“I hadn’t noticed,” she said. “Location fever, I guess.”

“Sure, but that oughtn’t to come till you’ve been out a couple of weeks, and here you’ve all been out only since — what? — Sunday and you’re already split up into tight little groups going around dog-eyeing each other.”

“Well, Fred’s been in a bad humor and I guess it’s catching.”

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

She laughed, though not very happily. “It started with the Indians. It was somebody’s bright idea to send us to hell and gone over here because these Indians had never been used in pictures before. You know what I mean? Simple, natural, unspoiled, that kind of junk. What a bright idea that was! Never having worked in pictures before, these little red brothers had no idea of what extras get. All they knew was what they read about Garbo and Gable and they started off putting anything from a hundred dollars a day up on their price tags. Then, when we got ’em over that, we found out they didn’t have any horses and most of ’em didn’t know how to ride, so we had to get horses and teach them. Then Fred tried shooting them without putting Indian make-up on ’em — some more of that natural stuff — and had to shoot ’em all over again. All that wasted time and money — and you know how Fred is about the schedule and budget.” We took about ten steps in silence, then she said, “And then this cutie.”

“The Doran girl?”

“Yes. You know her?”

“I met her before dinner.”

“Sure. If you’ve seen Fred you’ve seen her.”

“Why don’t you write that guv off, Ann?” I said. “What do you want to waste your time on him for when you can have a fellow like me?”

“Probably because I’m a sap,” she said, “but neither of us can help that. How big a part is Fred persuading you to give her in the new script?”

“It depends on what she can carry. Is she any good?”

“Terrible!” She took hold of my arm. “She really is. It’s not just that I am jealous, though I am — awfully. Oh, Bugs, can I help it that I’m nuts about that guy?”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but I can do without hearing too much of it.”

She squeezed my arm and said, “I’m sorry,” as if she were thinking of something else. Presently she asked, “Do you think she’s pretty?”

“She is.”

“Prettier than I am?”

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ve got to talk to somebody. You’re the only one that knows how I really feel about Fred. I... I hoped maybe you could help me.”

“You mean help you get him back?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a sweet job to give me. You’re not just nuts about him — you’re nuts. Anyway, how do you know he isn’t really in love with the girl — and through with you?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said with complete certainty. “You know what a push-over he is for a new face and a new line — and how soon it blows over.”

“Then the answer’s easy. Just wait it out.”

She caught her breath. “I’m afraid. I’m always afraid that this time he’ll get himself so tangled up that he won’t — maybe won’t want to get out of it.”

I thought, that would be swell. I said, “There’s nothing I can do about it, but I’ll see.”

She squeezed my arm. “Thanks, Bugs. I knew you—”

“Better wait till you see whether you’ve got anything to thank me for. Let’s go back. I’ve got a couple of hours’ work to do.”

The next day I discovered that Fred was right, Ann wrong, about Kitty Doran’s ability. Her part in the scene I watched was pretty simple and she had to be told how to do everything, but, once told, she managed to do it with a sort of fake naturalness and an aliveness that were very effective.

When they had cut, Fred came over to me. “Well?” he asked, grinning.

“Not bad,” I said. “How does she photograph?”

He laughed. “Wait till you see the rushes. Hey, Lew!” The camera man joined us. Fred said, “Bugs wants to know how Doran photographs.”

Lew said, “Easy to handle. How about a little poker tonight, Bugs?”

“If I get through in time. Maybe we’ll—”

Kitty Doran said, “Oh, hello, Mr. Parish.”

I said, “Hello.”

One of the boys handed me a telegram from Max Rhinewien:

AFTER CONSIDERATION THINK YOU RIGHT ABOUT INADVISABILITY OF CHANGING FENTON CHARACTERIZATION STOP DID YOU SEE QUOTE EAT EM ALIVE UNQUOTE QUERY SUGGEST SHOTS OF BATTLE BETWEEN SNAKES OR SPIDERS OR PERHAPS SNAKE SWALLOWING FROG AS SYMBOL OF EVIL ATTACKING GOOD STOP SEVERAL HUNDRED FEET OF BISON BEING DRIVEN THROUGH SNOW TO YELLOWSTONE WINTER QUARTERS AVAILABLE IF YOU CAN WORK IT IN STOP BEST REGARDS

I passed it over to Fred. “Betty Lee F. made her squawk stick as usual, which is all to the good.”

“That’s all to the good,” he agreed, and read the telegram. “A fine time we’d have trying to make that bum look like anything but Virtue-in-a-simple-frock! You ain’t gonna put no varmints in this yere fillum, air yuh, pardner?”

“No, suh,” I said. “I hates a snake like pison and I just ain’t got no use full buffalo. You sure you want that swimming-hole sequence we were talking about?”

“Sure. It’s a natural for Kitty.”

“O.K. I’m going back and work a while. When you get through with Danny Finn, send him over. He remembers the old Ray Griffith gags better than I do and we need some of them.”

Kitty Doran caught up to me when I was within twenty feet of my tent. “Oh, Mr. Parish, I’m so happy! Freddy says you’re going to give me a real part in the picture.”

“That depends,” I said, “on whether you can handle it.”

She looked at me wide-eyed. “But... but Freddy said I was doing fine. Was that just because — just because he likes me? Tell me what I do wrong, Mr. Parish. I’ll stop doing it. Honest, I will. Honest, I want so much to— Am I awful bad?”

“No.”

“But I’m not very good?”

“I don’t know. What I’ve seen is all right, but I haven’t seen enough yet.”

“Oh, then I think—” She laughed. “I mean I hope you’ll not be disappointed. I mean in Freddy’s opinion.” She went into the tent ahead of me. “Could you tell me what my part is?”

“It hasn’t been worked out yet. You’re probably the cut-up of the expedition. Tomorrow you sneak off to go swimming and are surrounded by Indians or cavalrymen or something and can’t get to your clothes — that kind of junk.”

“I think that’s fine,” she said.

I let that go at that.

“You’re a friend of Ann Meadows, aren’t you?” she asked. “I saw you with her last night.”

“Yes.”

“She hates me, doesn’t she?”

“She’s in love with Fred.”

“I know, but it’s not my fault that he likes me.”

“She thinks it is. She thinks you’re stringing him along for a break in the pictures.”

“Well, what of it?” she demanded. “Didn’t he give her her first break?”

“Maybe, but she happens to be in love with him.”

“Well, I like him very much too.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

She stood in front of me and her lower lip trembled. “I guess you think I’m a dirty little tramp, Mr. Parish, but, honest, I want so bad to make good in pictures that I guess I’d do anything to get a break.”

“Could I count on that?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said, “but yes.”

“That’s honest, anyhow. Now run along: I’ve got to work.”

“But—”

“Scram. I’ve got to work.”

She laughed and held out her hand. “I like you. Can I call you — your first name’s Chauncey, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh, but you don’t know me well enough to call me that. Make it Bugs.”

“Bugs,” she said, “and thanks.”

I thought about her for a couple of minutes after she had gone and then settled down to the typewriter. A page and a half later Ann came in.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt you.” She sat down and lit a cigarette. Her face was red and angry.

“That’s all right,” I told her. “What’s the matter?”

“Mr. LePage and I have just had a row. He accused me of sulking in front of the camera, so I told him what I thought of him and walked off the set.”

“After all,” I reminded her, “we are making a picture.”

“I don’t give a damn about the picture.”

“That’s not the spirit of Pagliacci. The show must go on though our hearts—”

She dropped her cigarette on the floor and stamped on it. “Cut it out. Bugs. I don’t feel like kidding. I’m sick. You know what she did?”

“Kitty?”

“Yes. She told him I was trying to persuade you not to fatten her part up any more than you had to.”

“That’s true in a way, isn’t it?” I asked.

She looked at me suspiciously. “It is not. I never— You didn’t tell her that?”

“No. You’re being a chump, Ann.”

“I suppose I am,” she said gloomily, “but who cares? I ought to—” She broke off as Danny Finn came in, said, “Hello, Danny; be seeing you, Bugs,” and went out.

Danny smacked his lips. “I could go for that dame. I got a swell Indian gag, Bugs. Listen to this.”

I listened and said, “No, Groucho would be sore. He used that in Duck Soup.”

“But there’s no Indians in Duck Soup.”

“The gag’s the same. I want something for a swimming-hole sequence we’re using Kitty Doran in.”

“Doran, huh?” He smacked his lips. “I could go for that dame. How about this? Eddie Sutherland used it in one of the Oakie pictures.” He described it to me.

“Yes, maybe we can kick that around, but cut out the double-wing-and-scram on the end. Now let’s see what else we can dig up.”

We had five more gags — two early Sennetts, a Chaplin, one from As Thousands Cheer, and one that practically everybody had used — by the time Fred came in from his day’s work afield. Betty Lee Fenton and Kitty Doran were with him.

Betty Lee paused at the door only long enough to ask. “You heard from Max?”

“Sure,” I said. “Your virginity’s safe.”

“I thought it would be,” she said and went away.

Danny, looking after her, automatically smacked his lips and muttered, “I could go for...”

Fred asked, “What’ve you guys got?” and, when we told him our six gags, said, “I guess they’ll do.”

Danny went away.

Fred yawned and spread himself on my cot. “Ann tell you about the blow-up?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t do anything with her,” he complained. “She’s just laying down on me.”

Kitty said, “It was disgraceful.” Neither of us paid any attention to her.

“The part can be whittled down,” I said. “She doesn’t have to be the one that Wiley seems to be falling for.”

“We’ve got to do something,” he growled. “She’s wooden. Why the hell does she have to take her spite out on the picture?”

Kitty clapped her hands. “Oh, Freddy, couldn’t I have that love scene with Wiley? I know I could do it. Please.”

“It could be written that way,” I said.

He scowled at her and at me. “Max wouldn’t stand for it. It’d have to be too big a part — we’d need a name.”

“Max wants sex,” I said. “Here it is.”

“Please, Freddy!” she cooed. “Please, darling! Just try me.”

He shook his head. “Max’d raise hell.”

“Well, I’ve got to do something,” I said. “What?”

Kitty said, “Please, sweetheart!”

He looked at me.

I said, “I’ll front for you to Max.”

He jumped up from the cot. “All right, damn it! Go ahead!” Kitty laughed happily and put her arms around his neck. I said, “Clear out, youse mugs, this means a solid night’s work for me.”

Kitty came back alone at a few minutes before midnight. “I just bad to come in to thank you,” she said, “because I owe this wonderful chance all to you and I’m so excited I know I won’t be able to sleep a wink tonight. Could I see what you’ve written for me? Just a tiny peep, Bugsy?”

“Stop talking like that,” I said. “One more Bugsy puts you back among the people who call me Mr. Parish.”

“I’m sorry, Bugs, but I’m so happy I don’t know what I’m doing.” She began to dance around the tent. “Freddy likes me to call him Freddy.”

“Would he like your being here?”

She laughed. “Then maybe I’d better stay till late — till we re sure he’ll be asleep and won’t see me leaving. Can’t I see what you’ve written?”

“Help yourself.”

She read the new pages of script carefully and said: “I like that. I think it’s fine. But look, I’ve got an idea. I know an awfully cute little dance. I’ll show it to you — and see if you don’t think it could be worked in in that campfire scene. You know, I could dance around the fire.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “We could have thirty or forty Nubian slaves bring you on in a silver chariot and while you were dancing around the fire we could release a flock of swans.”

She pouted. “You’re making fun of me again, but let me show you. It’s a cute dance.”

She showed me and it was a cute dance.

I said, “It’s a cute dance.”

“And you’ll let me do it?”

“No.”

“You’re a meany. I guess you think I’m an awful pig, but there’s something else I want to ask you — another favor. Freddy’s been awfully nice to me, but he’s mostly a Western picture director, isn’t he?”

“Most of his pictures have been outdoor he-man stuff, yes.”

“That’s what I thought. Well, will you help me with the love scenes? I’m so awfully anxious to make good and they’re the kind of things you write and you’d know more about it. Will you?”

“Sure, but it’s not going to do you any good at this stage of the game to let Fred get the idea that you’re slighting him. He—”

“I know, but we can he tactful about it, can’t we? I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings for worlds.”

“Your sentiments do you credit,” I said. “Now you’d better—”

“Oh, no, I can’t leave till we re sure Freddy’s gone to bed. He might see me. I’m going to curl right up in this corner and I won’t bother you one teeny-weeny bit.”

So I wrote her a love scene with Ted Wiley, the male lead, and we shot it against the campfire almost in silhouette, and I directed it. and if I do say it myself it was every bit as good as when Murnau first did it against a sky in Sunrise. And everybody except Ann agreed that we had a find in Kitty.

Ann took me aside to say, “I’ve seen a lot of hammy performances, but...”

I said: “I’m very sorry to hear you say that, Miss Meadows. I thought we were all great artists working together in a great art form.”

She wrinkled up her forehead. “Listen, Bugs, what are you up to? On the level.”

“I’m fixing things — for everybody.”

She looked at me suspiciously. ”I wonder.”

I crossed my heart.

“How?

I told her. “By simply doing what everybody wants. It’s a beautiful plan. You want Fred back. You get him. Fred and Kitty want her to get a chance in pictures. She gets it. Betty Lee wants to keep her virginal characterization. She keeps it. I don’t want anything. As usual, I get it.”

“But how does that bring Fred back?”

“Wouldn’t he break with his own mother if she sent him over his schedule and budget? Well, with Kitty carrying the sex burden, she steals the picture completely from Fenton. Whether your jealousy will let you see it or not, she’s not bad, and when Fenton sees the finished film she realizes it and squawks her head off in her usual refined manner. Max has got too much dough tied up in her to let her be buried by an unknown, and Kitty’s part is written so that if the big scenes come out the rest will have to come out and something else will have to be put in its place — and that means more money and time. And who does Fred blame for that but me and Kitty? He can’t do anything to me: he can bounce her out of his affections and his picture. On the other hand, you have only a small part in the dingus now and he probably still loves you and—”

“Maybe,” she said slowly, “but I don’t like it. You’re being malicious and you could’ve—”

“Sure, I’m being malicious, but I’ve got to have some fun. Besides, a lot of people get good lessons out of it. Max learns he oughtn’t to try to sex up westerns; Fred, that if his gods are Budget and Schedule that he should stick to them; Kitty, that little pigs who go to market shouldn’t carry too big baskets; and maybe all of you that I’m not just an amiable boob.”

She shook her head. “There’s more to it than you’re telling me, and I don’t like it.”

There was more to it.

Ten days later I finished my work on the script and went back to Hollywood, but, of course, not immediately on to Santa Barbara and the play. Max Rhinewien had bought a I Bulgarian comedy which he said needed more epigrams and he talked me into doing the adaptation. That took about four weeks and I finally escaped by simply ducking out on him.

I had been in Santa Barbara eight clays when Ann telephoned me. She said, “Bugs? I think you ought to know that your plan worked so well that Kitty Doran is dying in St. Martin’s Hospital,” and hung up.

Kitty wasn’t dying. Her mouth and throat were burned, but they had pumped the stuff out of her before it got a chance to work. She raised her head a little and smiled painfully at me when I came into the hospital room.

“What the hell is this?” I asked. “Never mind. Don’t try to talk.”

“I can talk,” she said. “Bugs, they took all my stuff out of the picture and when I asked Freddy about it he was awful nasty and he said Ann Meadows told him you meant them to.”

“Forget it. We’ll fix you up.”

“But it was my chance to make good and now—” She began to cry.

“Stop it. You’ll get another one as soon as you’re up. I’ve got an original with a part in it for you that won’t be cut and—”

She sat up in bed. “Honest?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, making it up as I went along, but not working too hard at it, “it’s about a boy and a girl and another girl and maybe another boy.”

She smiled at me as if I were handing her Romeo and Juliet. “You’re a darling, Bugsy! How soon do you think my mouth will be all right?”

“It’ll never be all right till you stop that Bugsy stuff. Look at me. Did you really try to kill yourself, or was it just another act?”

She hung her head. “I... I... now don’t get mad — I don’t really know, Bugsy — Bugs, I mean. I thought I meant it, but I guess I did kind of spit it out. Maybe — at first I meant it, all right, but maybe after I started I thought it might he just as good if I didn’t actually — you know — die, if I–Listen, B-Bugs, now you tell me something. When you played that dirts trick — it was an awful dirty trick — on me, wasn’t it a little because you thought I liked Freddy and you liked me and you thought you could—”

“Don’t be a dope,” I said. “You were only a very small cog in the wheel. I was up to something that had nothing to do with you, then you got into this mess and I — God knows why — thought I ought to do something about it. I’m willing to give you a boost up, but get this straight: I’m not tangled up with you now, I’ve never been, and I’m never going to be.”

“You don’t have to be so nasty about it,” she said.

“I’m not being nasty, I’m being definite.”

“Will... will you kiss me?”

“What for? Sure, if you want.”

“Oh,” she said, “then that’ll be all right.”

“This Little Pig”: The Revised Ending

“This Little Pig” is one of two stories for which I Hammett’s original typescript survives. When I examined the typescript to restore the story to its original form, I was delighted to discover that Hammett had written two different endings. His original ending is the one you just read. This one, marked “revised,” is the one used by Collier’s when it printed “This Little Pig” in 1934.

I had been in Santa Barbara eight clays when Ann telephoned me. She said, “Oh. Bugs, you’ve got to come down. Kitty Doran is dying in St. Martin’s Hospital.”

“What?”

“She committed suicide. Hurry, Bugs.”

I had a car that could do plenty and a chauffeur who could get plenty out of it, but that ride to Los Angeles seemed the longest I had ever made.

Kitty wasn’t dying. Her month was burned and her face was white and thin, but she raised her head a little and smiled painfully at me when I came into the hospital room.

“What the hell is this?” I asked. “Never mind. Don’t try to talk.”

“I can talk,” she said. “Bugs, they took all my stuff out of the picture and when I asked Freddy about it he was awfully nasty to me and he said Ann Meadows told him you meant them to.”

“Forget it. We’ll fix you up.”

“But did you?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do my best to square it. Get well and I’ll see that you have another chance. I can make Max—”

“Will you? You’re a darling, Bugsy! I’ll—”

Ann came in.

Kitty sat up straight in bed and cried, “Make her go away. I told them not to let her in.”

Ann said, “I only came in to thank you.”

“Make her go away,” Kitty screamed. “Make her go away!”

I said “All right” and took Ann out into the corridor. “Now what?” I asked.

She leaned against the wall and laughed. “But I ought to thank her,” she said through her laughter. “I might’ve gone on and on being so silly.”

“This makes a lot of sense to me,” I growled.

“Don’t you see? When I phoned you — when I thought she had really tried to kill herself — it was you I was worried about — about your having it on your conscience that your trick had driven her to it, and I knew then that—”

“Didn’t she really try?”

“No. The doctor said she could’ve taken gallons of the stuff she took, and they found out she’d done the same thing twice before and knew it wouldn’t kill her. But I didn’t know that then and I found out it was you I— Honest, Bugs, I knew it even before Fred put the finishing touch to it.”

“What’s he up to?”

She laughed. “Not up — down. If he kept on in the same direction and at the same speed he’s in Panama by now. He lit out for Mexico as soon as he heard what she’d done.”

“And you’re sure you’re not just—”

She held her face up to me. “Aw, Bugs, don’t be as stupid as I was.”

I had my arms around her when the first slipper whizzed past our heads. The second one grazed my shoulder as we escaped around the nearest corner, leaving Kitty standing in her doorway screaming un-nice things about us.

“See how sick she is,” Ann said, “just like Tarzan, but just the same don’t let’s ever think up any more smart schemes.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This one got out of hand for a while, but the result seems to be O. K.”

Notes

1

Province in Southern China bordering Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Vietnam.

2

Ancient name for the people of Myanmar.

Content

The Collected Dashiell Hammett

The Parthian Shot

Immortality

The Great Lovers (Article)

The Barber and His Wife

The Road Home

The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody

The Joke on Eloise Morey

The Vicious Circle

I

II

III

IV

Holiday

The Crusader

The Green Elephant

I

II

III

The Dimple

The Second-Story Angel

Laughing Masks

Chapter II The Mysterious Advertisement

Chapter III Matching Wits

Chapter IV Unwelcomed Visitors

Chapter V Forcing His Luck

Chapter VI “Flashing, Dripping Jaws”

Chapter VII The Third Degree

Chapter VIII Double-Crossed

Chapter IX A Break for Freedom

Chapter X “My Hands Will Be Steady”

Chapter XI The Death Letter

The Man Who Killed Dan Odams

Itchy

I

II

III

IV

V

Ester Entertains

The New Racket

Afraid of a Gun

Nightmare Town

Another Perfect Crime

Ber-Bulu

Ruffian’s Wife

The Nails in Mr. Cayterer

The Assistant Murderer

The Figure of Incongruity

The Advertising Man Writes a Love Letter

Curse in the Old Manner

Diamond Wager

I

II

III

IV

Night Shade

Albert Pastor at Home

Two Sharp Knives

His Brother’s Keeper

This Little Pig

“This Little Pig”: The Revised Ending

Notes