Mostly Murder

Fredric Brown

This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.

http://www.blackmask.com

  • The Laughing Butcher
  • The Four Blind Men
  • The Night the World Ended
  • The Motive Goes Round and Round
  • Cry Silence
  • The Nose of Don Aristide
  • A Voice Behind Him
  • Miss Darkness
  • I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen
  • Town Wanted
  • The Greatest Poem Ever Written
  • Little Apple Hard to Peel
  • This Way Out
  • A Little White Lye
  • The Dangerous People
  • Cain
  • The Death of Riley
  • Don't Look Behind You


  • The Laughing Butcher

    YESTERDAY MUST HAVE been a dull day for news, because the Chicago Sun gave three inches to the funeral of a dwarf downstate, in Corbyville.

    “Listen to this, Bill,” Kathy said, and Wally—(that's my only in-law, Kathy's brother)—and I looked up from our game of cribbage.

    “Yeah?” I said. Kathy read it to us.

    Then she said, “Bill, wasn't that—” She let it trail off.

    I looked at her warningly, because of her brother being there with us, and I said, “The dwarf that beat you at a game of chess five years ago? Yeah, that was the one.”

    Wally put down his last card, said, “Thirty-one for two,” and pegged it. I scored my hand and he scored his and the crib, and it put him out and ended the game.

    “Five years ago,” he said. “And yesterday was your anniversary. That's put it on your honeymoon, if it was exactly five years ago, I mean. She play chess with dwarfs on your honeymoon?”

    “One dwarf,” I told him. “One game. In Corbyville. And she got beaten.”

    “Served her right,” Wally said. “Look, Bill—wasn't it about that time, five years ago, they lynched a guy in Corbyville? The case they called the 'The Corbyville Horror'?”

    “A few weeks after that,” I said.

    “The guy was a butcher, and a black magician, or something. Or they thought he was. Killed somebody by magic, or . . . What was it about, anyway?”

    I was looking at the window, and the window was a black, blank square of night, and I wanted to shiver, but with Wally watching me that way, I couldn't. I got up and walked over to the window instead, so I could look down on the lights and traffic of Division Street instead of at the black night above it.

    “It was the butcher they lynched,” I said. I turned around from the window. “We saw him, too.”

    Wally picked up his glass of beer and took a sip of it.

    “Some of it's coming back to me,” he said. “Corbyville's that circus town, isn't it? Town where a lot of ex-circus people live?”

    I nodded.

    “And this Corbyville Horror business. Wasn't a guy found out in the middle of a field of snow, dead, with two sets of footprints leading up to his body and none leading away from it?”

    “That's right,” I said.

    “And one set of footprints was his own and the other set just led to the body and vanished as though the guy had flown?”

    “Yes,” I said.

    “I remember now. And the town lynched this butcher-magician because he had a down on the guy who was killed, and—”

    “Something like that.”

    “They never did find out what really happened?” Wally asked.

    “No.”

    He took another sip of beer and shook his head.

    “I remember now that it puzzled me. How could a set of tracks go halfway across a field of snow and then stop, and not either come back or go on?”

    “One set's easy to explain,” I said. “I mean those of the guy they found dead out there in the field.”

    “Sure, him. But what about the one who chased him? He did chase him, didn't he? I mean, if I remember rightly, his footprints were on top of the dead man's in the snow.”

    “That's right,” I said. “I saw those footprints myself. Of course by the time I saw them there were a lot of other prints around and they'd taken the body away, but I talked to the men who found the body, and they were sure of their description of those prints, and of the fact that there weren't any other ones around, within a hundred yards.”

    “Didn't somebody suggest ropes?”

    “No trees or telephone poles anywhere near. Nope.”

    Kathy went and got us some more beer. I asked Wally if he wanted another game of cribbage. “No,” he said. “The story.”

    I poured his glass full and then mine.

    “What do you want to know, Wally?” I asked.

    “What killed him?”

    “Heart failure,” I said.

    “But—what was chasing him?”

    “Nothing was chasing him,” I said slowly. “Nothing at all. He wasn't running away from anybody or anything. It was more horrible than that.”

    I went over and sat down in the big armchair. Kathy came over and curled up on my lap like a contented kitten. Over her shoulder I could see that black square of night that was the open window.

    “It was much more horrible than that, Wally,” I repeated slowly. “He wasn't running away from something. He was running toward something. Something out in the middle of that field.”

    Wally laughed uneasily. “Bill,” he said, “you don't talk like a Chicago copper. You talk like a fey Irishman. What was out in that field?”

    “Death,” I told him.

    That held him for minute. Then he asked, “What about the one-way tracks, the ones that led to the body and not away from it?”

    * * *

    It was warm and pleasant up there on top of the hill, I remember. I stopped the car at the side of the muddy road, put my arm around Kathy and kissed her, with the soundness that a second-day-of-honeymoon kiss deserves. We had been married the morning before, in Chicago, and were driving south. I had arranged a month off and we figured to get to New Orleans and back, driving leisurely, and stopping off wherever we wished. We had spent the first night of our honeymoon in Decatur, a town I'll never forget.

    I won't forget Corbyville, either, although not for the same reason. But of course I didn't know that then. I pointed to the view through the windshield and down the hill into the valley, bright green and muddy brown from the recent rains. And with a little village at the bottom of it—three score or so of houses huddled together like frightened sheep.

    “Ain't it purty?” I said.

    “Beautiful,” Kathy said. “The valley, I mean. Is that Corbyville? Where are the elephants? Didn't I read they used elephants for the plowing outside Corbyville?”

    I laughed at her. “One elephant, and it died years ago. I guess there are a lot of the circus people left there, though. Maybe we'll see some of them when we drive through.”

    “I forget the story, Bill,” Kathy said. “Why is it so many circus people live there? Some circus owner—”

    “Old John Corby,” I said. “He owned about the third biggest circus in the country and made a fortune from it. That was the town he came from—it had some other name then—and he put all his profits into the land there, got to own nearly the whole town and valley.

    “And when he died, his will left houses and stores and farms to people in his circus, on the condition that they live there. A lot of 'em wouldn't, of course; weren't ready to settle down, and went with some other circus instead. But a lot of 'em did take what was left them and live there. Out of a population of a thousand or so, over a hundred, I think are ex-circus people. . . . Did I ever tell you I love you, Kathy?”

    “I seem to remem . . . Bill, not here! You—”

    So after a minute I slid the car in gear and started down the slippery, winding road into the valley. We were off the main highway, coming in on a side road that wasn't used much, and it was pretty bad. The mud was inches deep in the ruts. It wasn't too bad until we were just a half-mile outside the village, and then suddenly the wheels were sliding and the back end of the car, despite my efforts with the wheel, slewed around and went off the road. I tried to start, and the back wheels spun in mud that was like soup.

    I said appropriate words, suitably modified to fit Kathy's presence, and got out of the car, then looked around. There was a little three-room frame farmhouse only a few dozen paces away, and a stocky, blond man of about thirty was already walking from the house toward the car. He grinned at me.

    “Nice roads we got here,” he said. “You in very deep?”

    “Not too bad,” I told him. “If you can give me a hand, maybe two of us—”

    “Wish I could,” he said. “But anything heavy's against the rules. I've got a bum ticker. The doc won't let me pick up anything heavier than a potato, and I got to do that slow.” He looked up and down the road. “We might get you out with some gunny sacks or boards, but it'd hardly be worth the trouble. Pete Hobbs is about due by here. He's the mailman.”

    “Drive a truck?”

    The blond man laughed. “Sure, but he won't need it. Pete used to be a strong man with Corby. He's getting old, but he can pick up the back end of your car with one hand. You and the missus want to drop in the house till Pete gets here?”

    Kathy had been listening, and she must have liked the man because she said sure, we'd be glad to.

    So we went in, and it was half an hour before the mailman came along and we got to know the Wilsons fairly well, for half an hour. That was the blond man's name, Len Wilson. His wife, Dorothy, was a stunner. Almost as pretty as Kathy.

    No, Len Wilson told us, he hadn't been with any circus. He had been born right here on this small farm, and Dorothy had been born in Corbyville. They had been married four years, and you could see that they were still in love. I noticed how considerate they were of each other; how, when he started up to get an ash tray for me, Dorothy spoke almost sharply to him to make him sit down again. The sort of sharpness one might use on a child.

    I remember wondering how, since Len couldn't exert himself physically, he managed to run a farm, even a small one. Maybe he knew I'd be wondering that. Anyway, he told me the answer.

    “I can work all right,” he told me, “as long as it isn't heavy, and I keep at a steady, dogged pace. I can lift a thousand pounds—about ten pounds at a time. I can walk a hundred miles, if I walk slowly and rest once in a while. And I can run a farm, a little one like this, the same way. Not that I get rich doing it.” He grinned a little.

    A honking out front brought us to our feet, and Dorothy Wilson said:

    “That's Pete. I'll run ahead and be sure to catch him.”

    The rest of us followed more slowly, Kathy and I matching our pace to Len's. The ex-strong-man got out of his mail truck and he and I easily lifted the car's back end around to where the wheels would find traction.

    As I got under the wheel, Len waved.

    “Might see you in town, if you're stopping there,” he said. “I'm riding in with Pete.”

    Anyway, that was how we met Len Wilson. We saw him only once more, in Corbyville, a little later.

    I was going to drive on through, I remember, but Kathy wanted to stop and eat. I parked the car in front of a clean-looking hamburger joint and we went in. That was where we met the dwarf.

    I remember thinking, when we first went in and sat down at the counter, that there was something strange and out of proportion about the five-foot-tall little man who nodded to us from behind the counter and took our orders. But I didn't realize what it was until he walked back to the grill to put on the hamburgers we ordered. He wasn't five feet tall at all; he was about three feet. The area back of the counter was built up, about two feet higher than the floor in the rest of the room.

    He saw me lean over the counter and look down, and grinned at me.

    “My chin'd just about come to the level of the counter without that arrangement,” he said.

    “You ought to get a patent on it,” Kathy said. “Say, isn't that a chess board down there at the end of the counter?”

    He nodded. “I was working out a problem. You play?”

    That was better than the smell of the hamburgers to Kathy. Few women like chess, but she's one of the few, even if she doesn't look like it. To look at Kathy you'd think gin rummy would be her top intellectual entertainment, but you'd be fooled. She's got more brains and more education than I. Got a master's degree and would probably be teaching if she hadn't decided to marry me instead. Which, I'll admit, was a big waste of brains.

    Kathy told him she played and how about a quick game? And she wasn't kidding on the quick part; she really does move fairly fast, and the dwarf—I noticed with relief—kept up with the pace she set. I know enough about chess, due to Kathy, to follow the moves, and when a game goes fairly quick, I can stay interested watching it.

    Kathy had the men set up by the time he brought our hamburgers and coffee, and I watched until midgame while I ate. Then I strolled front to the doorway and stood leaning against the jamb, looking out across the street.

    Directly across from me, in the doorway of the butcher shop, a butcher in a white apron was doing the same thing. My gaze passed him over lightly the first time, then went back to him and got stuck there. At first, I didn't even know why.

    Then a child—a girl of about six or seven—came skipping along the street, noticed him when she was a dozen paces away, and stopped skipping. She circled widely, almost to the outer curb, to keep as much distance as possible between herself and the butcher. He didn't seem to notice her at all, and once she was safely behind his back, she started skipping again.

    Definitely, I realized, she had been afraid of him. It could have been nothing, of course; a child who'd been scolded for filching a wiener from the butcher shop, but—well, it didn't seem like that.

    It didn't seem like that because what happened made me look at the butcher's face. It was calm, impassive. If he had noticed the child, he had neither frowned nor smiled at the wide circle she had made. And the face itself was handsome, but . . . I shivered a little.

    A Chicago cop gets used to seeing faces that aren't nice to look at. He sees faces daily that might be Greek masks of hate or lust or avarice. He gets used to hopped-up torpedoes and crazy killers. He takes faces like that in his stride; they're his business.

    But this wasn't that sort of face. It was an evil face, but subtly evil. The man's features were straight and regular and his eyes were clear. The evil was behind the face, behind the eyes. I couldn't even put my finger on how I knew it was there. It wasn't something I could see; it was something I felt.

    The part of my brain that's trained to observe and remember was cataloguing the rest of him as well—I don't know why. Height, five eleven; weight, one eighty; age, about forty; black hair, brown eyes, olive complexion; distinguishing features—an aura of evil.

    I wondered what the looie in charge of my precinct would say if I turned in a report like that.

    I strolled back into the restaurant and looked at the chess game, mildly wishing Kathy would be through so she could leave with me while the butcher was still standing there. I wondered what her reaction to him would be.

    There were still a lot of pieces on the board, though. Kathy looked up at me.

    “Having trouble,” she admitted. “This gentlemen really knows how to play chess. Why aren't you smart like that, Bill?”

    The dwarf grinned without looking up, and moved a pawn.

    “She's played this game before, too,” he said. “It's even so far.”

    “But not now,” Kathy said.

    I looked at the pieces and saw what she meant. The dwarf had left one of his knights unprotected. Kathy's hand hovered over the board a moment, then her bishop swooped to conquer.

    “Attababy,” I said to Kathy and patted her shoulder. “Take your time,” I told her. “It's only our honeymoon.”

    I strolled back to the doorway. The white-aproned butcher was still there.

    Out of the doorway of the store next door to the butcher shop came Len Wilson. He walked, as before, slowly. He walked toward the butcher shop. I started to hail him, to ask him to come over and have a cup of coffee with me while Kathy and the dwarf finished their game. I had my mouth open to call to him, but I didn't.

    Len Wilson caught the butcher's eye, and stopped. There was something so peculiar about his way of stopping, as though he had run into a brick wall, that I didn't call. I watched, instead.

    The butcher was smiling, but it wasn't a nice smile. He said something, but I couldn't hear it across the street, nor could I hear what Len answered. It was like watching a movie whose sound track had stopped working.

    I saw the butcher reach into his pocket and take something out, hold it casually in his hand. It looked like a tiny doll, about two inches long. It could have been made of wax. He did something, I couldn't see what, with the doll between his hands.

    Then he said something again—several sentences—and laughed again. I could hear the laugh across the street, even though I hadn't heard the words. It wasn't loud, but it carried. And Len Wilson's fists clenched, and he started forward—not slowly at all—for the butcher.

    I started, too, at the same time. There wasn't any mistaking the expression on Len's face. His intention wasn't any intention that a man with a bad ticker should have. He was going to take a poke at that butcher, a man bigger than he was and husky looking besides, and for a man in Len's shape it was going to be just too bad unless that one poke did the work.

    But Len had been only a few steps away, and I'd been across the street. I saw him swing wildly and miss, and then an auto horn and squealing brakes made me step back just in time to keep from getting killed in the middle of the street. When I looked again, the tableau had changed. The big butcher was standing behind Len, with Len's arm doubled in a hammerlock. Len's face was red with either pain or futile anger, or both.

    I took a quick look for traffic both ways this time before I started across toward them. I don't mind telling you that I was afraid. Not physically afraid of that butcher, but—well, there was something about him that had made me want to hit him, even before Len had come along, but that made me afraid to do it, too.

    Suddenly I noticed that Kathy and the dwarf were with me, Kathy abreast of me on one side, and the dwarf scuttling by me on the other side, his short legs going like piston rods as he passed me.

    “Let go of him, Kramer, damn you!” he was yelling.

    The butcher let go of Len, and Len almost collapsed, leaning back again the building. The dwarf got to Len first, and reached into Len's vest pocket. He came out with a little box of pills. He handed them to me.

    “Give him one, quick,” he said. “I can't reach.”

    I got the box open—they were nitro pills, I noticed—and got Len to take one.

    “Take him across to my place,” the dwarf was saying. “Make him sit down and rest.”

    And Kathy was on Len's other side and we were helping him across the street.

    The dwarf wasn't with us. I saw that Len seemed to be breathing normally and making it all right, then I glanced back over my shoulder.

    Again it was a conversation I couldn't hear, but could see. The dwarf's face, on a level with the butcher's belt, was dark with fierce anger. There was smiling amusement on the butcher's face, and again I felt that impact of evil.

    The butcher said something. The dwarf took a step forward and kicked viciously at the butcher's shin. He connected, too.

    I almost stopped, thinking I'd have to let Kathy support Len while I ran back to rescue the foolhardy dwarf.

    But the butcher didn't make a move. Instead, he leaned back again the door post of his shop and laughed. Great peals of loud laughter that must have been audible a full block away. He didn't even lean down to rub his kicked shin. He laughed.

    He was still laughing when Kathy and I had taken Len through the open doorway of the restaurant. I turned around and the dwarf, his face almost purple with thwarted anger, was crossing the street after us, and the butcher still stood there laughing. It wasn't a nice laugh at all. It made me want to kill him, and I've got a pretty even disposition myself.

    We let Len down into one of the seats at a booth, and the dwarf was beside us, his face calm again. I glanced out through the window and saw that the butcher was gone, probably back into his shop. And the silence, after that laughter, seemed blessed.

    “Shall I get Doc?” the dwarf asked Len. Len Wilson shook his head. “I'm all right. That nitro pill fixed me up. Just let me sit and rest a minute or two.”

    “Cup of coffee while you're resting?”

    “Sure,” Len said. “And make me a hamburger, will you, Joe? Haven't eaten much.”

    Kathy sat down across from Len in the booth and I went back with the dwarf named Joe. He went up the ramp that led to the raised area back of the counter and he again wasn't a dwarf any more. He was five feet tall and his eyes were higher than mine as I sat at one of the counter stools opposite the hamburger grill. He took a hamburger patty from the refrigerator and slapped it on the grill, and then I caught his eye.

    “What,” I asked, jerking my thumb in the direction of the butcher shop, “was that?”

    “That,” he said, “was Gerhard Kramer.” He made it sound like profanity.

    “And who is Gerhard Kramer?”

    “A nice guy,” he said, “if you listen to some people who think so. Most of us don't. Some of us are pretty close to thinking he's the devil himself.”

    “Outside of a butcher,” I asked, “who is he? What was he?”

    “Used to be with Corby's circus. Sideshow magician and mentalist. He makes a better butcher. But he still keeps on with magic—only the black kind, the serious kind.”

    “He really believes in it? Wax dolls and that sort of stuff?”

    “You saw that doll, then? Well, he makes people believe he believes in it. Got half the town scared stiff of him.”

    “Yet they buy in his store?” He flipped over the hamburger frying on the grill.

    “They're afraid not to, I guess, if it comes to that. Oh, and some of the women aren't afraid of him. He's attractive to women. He does all right. He owns a good share of the town. Probably likes cutting up dead animals or he wouldn't have to run that shop. Yeah, he does all right.”

    Something in his tone of voice made me ask, “Except what?”

    He slit a bun and put the hamburger in it, drew a cup of coffee, and started around the counter with them. I stayed still. I knew he'd answer my question when he got back.

    He came back and said, “Len's wife, mister. That's the one thing he wants and can't have.”

    “Dorothy?” I asked, surprised. I don't know why I was surprised.

    He looked so puzzled that I realized he hadn't known that we had stopped at the Wilsons' place on our way into Corbyville. He had thought that our first sight of Len had been across the street. I told him about it.

    “Yes, Dorothy,” he said. “She was a town girl before she married Len. Kramer wanted her and Len took her out from under his nose. Kramer's hated Len ever since. And, damn him, he'll probably get her if Len isn't more careful of himself. He'll keel over and leave a clear field.”

    “But won't Dorothy Wilson have something to say about that?” I asked. “Would she marry a—a guy like Kramer?”

    He looked gloomy. “I told you women like him. She likes him—can't see anything wrong with him. Oh, I don't mean she'd cheat on Len, or anything like that. But if Len would die, why, after a year or so—”

    “And that doll,” I said. “That wax doll. Does that mean Kramer doesn't want to wait until Len dies naturally, if he does? Does Kramer really believe in that land of magic?”

    The dwarf looked at me cynically. “Sometimes that kind of magic can work, mister,” he said. “You saw it blame near work just now, when he showed it to Len.”

    I saw what he meant. I got up and went back to the front of the store. Len looked better, and Kathy was talking to him animatedly.

    “I've just learned Len plays chess, Bill,” she said. “He's a friend of Joe Laska—that's the man who runs the restaurant here—and says they play a lot. We could have played a game out at Len's house while we were there.”

    “Sure,” I said, “only you didn't. How'd you come out on the game with Joe? You were a knight ahead, I remember, and I see he put the board back, so I guess you finished the game.”

    “Yes, we finished. We were coming out to join you just when—when the trouble started across the street.”

    With Len sitting there I didn't want to go into that; I'd tell Kathy later what it was all about. “Who won?” I asked quickly.

    “Joe, darn him. That business of giving me the knight was a gambit. He checkmated me four moves later.”

    Len grinned, a little weakly. “Joe's a great guy for those gambits, lady. If you play with him again, watch out any time he offers you a piece for free.”

    The dwarf came back then and said that he was going to get a car to take Len home. But I wouldn't hear of that, of course. I made Len get into my car—he could walk all right by now—and Kathy and I drove him home.

    Dorothy Wilson took a look at Len as he came through the door and took him off upstairs to put him to bed for the rest of the day. She had called back, asking us to wait, and we did.

    But when she came down it turned out she had wanted us to wait so she could offer us something to eat, and we explained that we had just eaten in town. So Dorothy walked out to the car with us.

    “Joe Laska phoned me,” she said. “He said—well, I gathered that Len tried again to start a fight with Gerry Kramer. Oh, I wish Len wouldn't be so foolish. To hear Len—and Joe, too—talk, you'd think Gerry was a devil or something.”

    Something made me ask, “And isn't he?” She laughed a little. “He's one of the nicest men in town. The men around here don't like him because he's handsome and polished and—well, you know how smalltown people are.”

    “Oh,” I said. “But he's nice, really. Why, he holds a mortgage on this place of ours, overdue. He could put Len and me off any time he wanted, but he doesn't, in spite of the way Len acts about him.”

    I didn't want to hear any more of it. I wanted to say, “Sure, he'd rather let Len stay on a farm and work himself to death than maybe go to a city somewhere and get a softer job where he could last a longer time.”

    But I didn't say it. I had no business to, just because I hadn't liked a man's face and his laugh.

    We said good-by to Mrs. Wilson and drove off.

    After a while, I said, “Women—” disgustedly, and then asked Kathy what she had thought of the butcher.

    “I don't really know,” she said. “He is good-looking all right, and maybe Mrs. Wilson is right, but—well, I wouldn't trust him. There seemed to be something wrong about him, Bill. Something—uh—wicked, evil.”

    And since she was smart enough to have seen that for herself, I told her, as we drove along, everything that I had seen and what Joe, the dwarf, had told me.

    We talked about it quite a while. There had been something about that scene in front of the butcher shop, and about the situation back of it, that wasn't going to be easy to forget. We wouldn't have forgotten it, I'm sure, even if it had ended there.

    But after a while it slid into the back of our minds. We were, after all, on our honeymoon.

    We drove to New Orleans and spent a wonderful two weeks in the marvelous fall weather they have there, and I remember the warmth was all the more wonderful when we read in the papers that Illinois and Indiana had been having freezing weather and early snows.

    We started driving back then, leisurely. We didn't plan our route from day to day, and I don't know whether we would have driven through Corbyville at all, if we hadn't happened to buy a Centralia newspaper in Metropolis, just after we'd crossed the Ohio River from Paducah.

    There was a headline:

    BUTCHER LYNCHED IN CORBYVILLE

    And in that first story there wasn't any play-up at all of the “Corbyville Horror” angle that made Sunday supplements all over the country. The lynching—it was the first in a long time in the State of Illinois—was the angle of the Centralia paper.

    Apparently the reporters hadn't actually been on the scene as yet, because there weren't many details. I read the story out loud to Kathy, then she took the paper away from me and read it again to herself, while I sat and thought, and finished my coffee.

    It seemed, according to the Centralia paper, that one Len Wilson, a farmer living just outside Corbyville, had died under rather mysterious circumstances, and that the people of the town blamed the local butcher, Gerhard Kramer, for Wilson's death. The sheriff, summoned from Centralia, had refused, for lack of evidence, to arrest Kramer.

    And while the sheriff was out at the farm a group of townsmen, who had already been out at the farm, yanked Gerhard Kramer out of his butcher shop and strung him up on the light pole right in front of the store. Sheriff's deputies had been unable to find out who—outside, I suppose, of Kramer himself—had been involved in the lynching.

    I paid our check in the restaurant and we went out and got in the car.

    “Are you going through Corbyville?” Kathy asked. “Yes,” I said. “I want to know what happened. Don't you?”

    “I guess so, Bill,” she said.

    We got to Corbyville about two o'clock. It was a quiet town when we drove down the main street. It was unnaturally quiet.

    I drove slowly. The butcher shop, I noticed, was closed, although there wasn't any wreath on the door. The hamburger stand across from it, the dwarf's place, was closed too. There, there was a sign on the door that read:

    CLOSED TILL MONDAY

    I drove on out to the Wilson farm.

    There was still an inch of snow on the ground, and it was cold, unseasonably cold for early October. There were cars parked in front—four of them.

    We got out and walked back where there was a little knot of men standing beside a fence, and beyond the fence was an open field. I could see the foot prints—the two sets of footprints that the Sunday supplements and all the newspapers made so much of. Alongside of them were other prints now, of course, ones that would not have been there when the first ones were made.

    I took a good look at those tracks, without climbing over the fence. You've read about them, and they were just what the papers said. Two sets of tracks led out across that snow-covered field; neither set came back. It put a little chill down your spine to look at them, to visualize how they had looked to the first men there, those who had discovered the body, when the rest of the field was virgin white.

    Len Wilson's footprints were a little the smaller of the two sets. You could tell which they were easily enough. He had been running, fast, the other set had been made after Len's. In places one of the bigger prints came on top of Len's.

    Kathy stood staring at them, studying them.

    I talked a few minutes to the men who were standing around. One was a deputy sheriff stationed there. He wanted to know who I was, and I showed him my Chicago credentials, and explained that I'd known Len slightly, and was interested for that reason. The other three men were reporters. One all the way from Chicago.

    “Where is Mrs. Wilson?” I asked.

    I didn't particularly want to talk to Dorothy Wilson, but I felt that if she was in the house, Kathy and I should go there, at least for a minute.

    “With her folks in Corbyville,” the Chicago reporter told me. “Say, those tracks. It's the damnedest thing.” He turned and stared at them. Then he said, “I guess I can see why they lynched that butcher. If he hated Len Wilson, and if he went in for black magic—well, if this isn't, what the hell is?”

    The deputy sheriff spat over the fence. He started to say something, noticed Kathy, and changed his mind. He cleared his throat and said, “Black magic, phooey! But I'd still like to know how he did it. He was a circus sideshow magician, but even so—”

    “Are those other footprints his?” I asked.

    “His size. We haven't found the particular pair of shoes that made them. He probably ditched 'em.”

    “I—I guess I'm a little scared,” Kathy said.

    “I'm a lot scared,” I told her.

    We got in the car and drove away, north toward Chicago and home.

    “It—it's horrible, Bill,” Kathy said, after a while.

    “What was he running from?”

    “Nothing, Kathy,” I told her. “He was running toward.”

    I told her how I figured it and why, and her eyes got wider and scareder. When I finished, she grabbed my arm. “Bill,” she said, “you're a—a policeman. Does that mean you'll have to—to tell?”

    I shook my head. “If I had any evidence, yes. But an opinion is my own, even if we know it's right.”

    Kathy relaxed, but we didn't talk much the rest of the way to Chicago.

    * * *

    Wally said, “All right, my beloved brother-in-law, I'm dumb and you're a big, smart copper. I don't get it.” He downed the last of his beer and put the empty glass down quietly. “What was he running toward?”

    “Death,” I said. “I told you that. Death, out in the middle of the field, standing there waiting for him. He was pretty sick, Wally. I'm guessing he knew he didn't have long to live anyway. Otherwise, it wouldn't have made too much sense. But he loved Dorothy, and he hated that laughing butcher, Kramer. He knew that he was going to die, anyway, and if he died in such a manner that the town would figure Kramer did it, either by black magic or by some trick of sleight of hand—”

    “Sleight of foot,” said Wally.

    “All right, sleight of foot,” I amended. “He'd have his revenge on Kramer. And the town knowing Kramer, knowing how Kramer hated Len and wanted him to die, would blame the butcher if there was any supernatural-looking angle to Len's death, anything unexplainable. Even if he wasn't arrested or lynched, the town would believe he had something to do with it. He'd have to leave. So by dying that way, a little sooner, Len got his revenge on a man he must have hated almost as much as he loved Dorothy—and he saved Dorothy from her blindness. If Len had waited to die naturally, she probably would have married Kramer after a while, because for some reason she was blind to the evil in him. Don't you see?”

    Kathy stirred in my lap.

    “Like in chess, Wally,” she said. “A gambit—where you make a sacrifice to win. Like Joe, the dwarf, gave me a knight, and then checkmated me. That's how Joe and Len, playing chess on the same side of the board for once, checkmated the butcher.”

    “Huh?” Wally said. “The dwarf was in on it?”

    “He had to be,” I said. “Who else could have made the footprints that led only one way from the body to the fence? Who besides the dwarf could have ridden on Len's back while he ran like mad out into the field until his heart gave way, and who but a dwarf could have fastened a pair of Kramer's shoes on, backward?”

    The Four Blind Men

    I WAS SITTING WITH Cap Gurney in his office and we were batting the breeze about nothing in particular and homicide in general. That's Gurney's department—Homicide. Not committing it, but getting the guys who do. He's good at it, too, damn good.

    “A clue,” Gurney said, “is the most meaningless thing there is. Nine times out of ten it points the wrong way. It helps fill in a picture, though. See what I mean?”

    I said, “Like the blind men and the elephant. Know that old one?”

    “No. Should I?”

    I said, “You might as well. Four blind men went up to touch an elephant to see what one was like. One touched his trunk and thought an elephant was like a snake; one touched his tail and figured an elephant was like a rope; one got his hands against the elephant's side and thought it was like a wall, and the fourth one got his hands around one of the elephant's legs and thought an elephant was like a tree. They argued about it the rest of their lives.”

    “Uh-huh,” said Gurney. “Now that you tell it, I had heard it. But it's good. It holds water.”

    “A lot of water,” I said. “I carried water for one once when I was a kid, to get tickets to the circus. Fifty buckets, unless they changed elephants on me.”

    Gurney didn't even grin. “It points up what I meant. A clue doesn't mean anything; it's like what one of those blind men got hold of and—”

    The phone rang and Gurney picked it up. He said, “Yeah” about ten times at intervals and then for a change he said, “Okay,” and put the receiver back.

    He said, “Talking about circuses, there's a guy dead over at the winter quarters of Harbin-Wilson Shows. Shot. Ringmaster. Some funny angles. Mutt and Jeff are handling it, and that was Mutt on the phone. He wants me to come over.”

    He was closing up his desk and putting on his coat while he talked, and I put on mine. He said, “Want to come along?” and I said, “Sure,” and we went down and got in his car.

    Mutt, I might explain, is Walter Andrews and he's called that because his partner is Jeff Kranich and Jeff's a little guy and Andrews is tall, so naturally they call them Mutt and Jeff.

    In the car Gurney said, “He was killed with a blank cartridge. A thirty-two caliber blank cartridge out of the pistol he used in the ring. There are some funny angles.”

    I said, “That one's funny enough.”

    “Muzzle of the gun was held to his temple,” Cap said. “Even a blank shoots a wad and even if it didn't, with the muzzle jammed right against a man's temple, the blast alone would kill him.”

    “Could it be suicide, Cap?”

    “Could be,” Gurney said. “Gun was in his hand, but it could have been put there. Paraffin test to see if there were powder marks on his hand won't mean anything because there will be anyway. It was a new gun, bought this afternoon, and he'd fired a round of blanks, just to try it out, Mutt says. Then he reloaded it.”

    “But Mutt doesn't think it's suicide,” I said, “or he wouldn't have called you. Why isn't it?”

    “Some funny angles. Three shots were fired out of the gun. All at the time of the murder. It's hard to picture a man shooting off two blanks in the air and then the third into his temple. It doesn't make sense.”

    I said, “It doesn't make any more sense for a murderer to have done it. How do they know the three shots were all fired at the time of the murder, if it was murder?”

    “Two people heard 'em,” Gurney said. “The three shots were within a space of ten seconds. Guy named Ambers heard 'em from about fifty feet away, out in the arena. He's an animal man. A keeper I mean, not a trainer. He was dozing and they woke him up. A watchman heard 'em from the floor above—he says. One other guy was in the building—a bookkeeper, working late in the office. Says he didn't hear any shots, and that could be because the office was fairly far away.”

    Gurney braked to a stop for a red light. He could have turned on his flasher and gone through, but he never did that unless there was a real hurry. I guess he figured the dead ringmaster would wait till we got there.

    I said, “I still say it doesn't make any more sense for a murderer to fire two extra shots—with blanks—than for a suicide. You didn't answer that.”

    “No, I didn't,” Gurney said. “Because I don't know. But Mutt says suicide's practically out of the question, and that's why he wanted me over there. He didn't tell me how he figured suicide is out.”

    He stopped the car and started jockeying it into a parking space. He said, “The ringmaster's name was Sopronowicz. Everybody under him hated his guts because he was an all-around louse. A sadist. The kind of guy anybody might want to kill, even with a blank cartridge.

    “Any one of the three men in the building at the time might have done it, far as reason is concerned. Especially Ambers, the annual keeper. Sopronowicz was cruel to animals, and Ambers loves 'em. Ambers admits he'd like to have killed him, but says he didn't. And there aren't any powder marks on his hands.”

    “How about the others?”

    “Watchman is named Carle. He's Sopronowicz's father-in-law. There could be a motive there, even though Sopronowicz got him the job. The bookkeeper's name is Gold. Sopronowicz—”

    “Let's just call him Soppy from now on,” I suggested. “The ringmaster had arguments with Gold over bookkeeping. He had a slight percentage interest in the circus, and thought he was being cheated on his statements.”

    “Nice guy,” I said.

    Gurney said, “Everybody loved him.” We got out of the car and started for the entrance of the building.

    “Used to be a skating rink,” Gurney told me. “Harbin-Wilson has used it for whiter quarters for years now. You've heard of 'em?”

    “Small circus, isn't it? A one-ring outfit that plays the smaller towns and some fairs, the way I've heard it. But getting back to friend Soppy, Cap—”

    “You know everything I do,” Gurney interrupted me. “All I know's what Mutt told me, and you know that now.”

    The door was locked and he hammered on it until Jeff opened it. Jeff said, “Hi, Cap. Hi, Fred. Come on, this way. It's in a room off the arena.”

    We followed him down the hall and through a door that led to a high-ceilinged room almost big enough for a football field. You could see that it had been planned, originally, for an ice rink, although it looked more like the inside of a circus tent now. There was a clear space in the middle, with a ring laid out below, and trapezes and other aerial apparatus above. The animals were at the far end, and the place smelled like a circus, too—a very stale circus. There were a dozen horses in stalls, a somewhat frowzy elephant, and a couple of mangy big cats in cages.

    The elephant started across the concrete floor to meet us and a wizened little gray-haired man pulled her back gently with a bull-hook.

    “That's Ambers,” Jeff said. “The little one. The big one is an elephant.”

    “Thanks,” I said. “That all the menagerie they got?”

    “All the performing ones. A few more that go along for show don't join up till they hit the road. Couple of weeks from now. There's where the stiff is.”

    Jeff Kranich was pointing to a double doorway that led off the main arena. Both doors were wide open, hooked back against the wall. Through them we could see the body lying on the floor, back against a door on the far side of the room past the double doorway.

    Mutt was leaning gloomily against the wall, staring down at what had been the ringmaster. He didn't greet us; he just started talking. He said, “It makes nuts. I haven't moved a thing, Cap, except to lift his hand and put it down again in the same position. Three shells fired, all right. And we've questioned the only three men we know to have been in the building and their stories sound O.K., except that they were far apart and none of 'em can alibi the others.”

    Gurney said, “You said it wouldn't be suicide. Got a good reason?”

    “Plenty good,” Mutt said. “The guy was happy. He just picked a four-leaf clover. Gold—that bookkeeper—tells me he was getting a full partnership in the show when the season started. Walker died last year, and Harbin made Sopronowicz the offer. The show's in the black. He'd have cleared thirty-forty thousand or more this coming season, more money than he ever had before. He was in good shape physically; just passed an insurance exam yesterday. And everybody I've talked to says he was so cheerful the last few days he was twice as mean as usual. Ambers says the bull's got bookmarks to prove it; he was working the bull early this evening along with the trainer, a guy named Standish.

    “He wasn't broke; he's got over two hundred bucks in his wallet. And suddenly he kills himself for no reason at all? Nuts.”

    Gurney was looking around the room. There wasn't much in it. A big wardrobe cabinet on one side, closed and padlocked. Two closed trunks and two folding chairs, both lying on their sides.

    “Chairs were knocked over that way?” Gurney asked. Mutt nodded. “I didn't move anything that I didn't move back. I been questioning people and getting nowhere. It makes nuts.”

    “Who found him?” Gurney wanted to know. “Ambers. But not right away. He was off the arena in a room that has a bunk in it down near the other end. He was taking a nap; says it's O. K. for him to do that because he's on damn near twenty-four hour duty here. He heard three shots, but figured Sopronowicz was just trying the gun again; didn't think much of it. But he couldn't go back to sleep again and twenty minutes or so later—that's his guess—he came back out into the arena and wandered down to this end of it to get something. He saw the body lying there when he passed that double doorway.” Gurney asked, “How about Carle, the watchman?”

    “Heard the shots from the floor above where he was making the rounds. Didn't think anything of it for the same reason Ambers didn't. Says about half an hour after he heard 'em Ambers came hunting him and told him to phone the police. That would fit, for tune. And Gold still didn't know about it till we got here. Neither Ambers nor Carle thought to go back to the office to tell him.”

    “How do they figure it, or do they?”

    “They don't, except they're sure it isn't suicide. Carle especially. Says Sopronowicz had a yellow streak a foot wide down his back, and that the only person on earth who wouldn't want to shoot Sopronowicz was Sopronowicz. Besides, they both knew about the partnership and the big luck it was for him to get it.”

    Gurney jerked his thumb at the door—the only door in the room aside from the open double doorway. “Was that bolted like it is now?”

    “Yeah,” Mutt said. “Bolted from this side. And it's a tight bolt. I could just barely get it open to see what was through there. It's a hallway. I bolted it again.”

    I looked around again and then walked back to the arena. I walked down to where Ambers and the animals were. The wizened little man was using a currycomb on a beautiful palomino gelding.

    He looked around at me. “Got it doped out yet?” he wanted to know.

    “They haven't,” I said.

    “Good. Hope they don't. Ever.”

    “You got it doped out?” I asked him.

    “Me? Hell no. But if I did I sure wouldn't tell anybody.”

    “The law says you should.”

    He chuckled. “Don't tell me the law, son. I read Black-stone once when I was young. It didn't take, but I remember one thing. You got to tell what you know, but you don't got to tell what you think or guess. Now run along and peddle your marbles.”

    I didn't run along and peddle my marbles, but I did wander back toward the others. I passed Mutt coming out of the doorway of the death room. I went in and Gurney was leaning against the wall at the same spot where Mutt had been leaning, staring thoughtfully down at the body.

    I asked him, “Mind if I straighten one of these chairs?”

    Gurney said, “Go ahead.” I put one of the chairs right side up and sat down on it. I asked him, “Got an idea?” and he said, “Yeah.”

    I asked, “What?” and he didn't answer. So I tried to get an idea myself and I didn't.

    Then Mutt came in, with a kind of funny look on his face, and he nodded at Gurney.

    Gurney said, “Good. You can wind it up then, you and Jeff.” He turned to me and said, “Come on, Fred. Let's go.”

    “You got it?” I asked him.

    “Yeah. Come on; let's have a beer and I'll tell you about it.”

    But he didn't, right away, even after we had the beers in front of us.

    He said, “To crime,” and we took a drink. Then he said, “You solved it, you know. That story about the four blind men.”

    “All right,” I said, “so you want to be coy for a while. So I'll help you by floundering around myself. Here's what I've got—or haven't got.

    “I don't think it was suicide because there wasn't any reason for suicide and plenty of reasons against it. So there was a killer and he came in through the open doorway because the door to the hall was tightly bolted on the inside. Want me to play all of the four blind men for you?”

    “Go ahead.”

    I said, “The chairs were both knocked over, so there was a struggle. But I saw, as well as you did, that his hair wasn't mussed, except right over the right temple from the blast. And his shirt wasn't rumpled and his waxed mustache wasn't mussed. So, said the second blind man, there wasn't a struggle.”

    I took another sip of beer. I said, “The killer was pretty clever, since there wasn't a struggle, to get hold of the gun and trick Soppy into letting him hold the muzzle to his temple. It would have to be by trickery unless Soppy was asleep. But the killer wasn't very clever or he wouldn't have gummed up things by firing two extra shots. They gummed the suicide hypothesis, even if lack of motive for suicide didn't. And yet, said the fourth blind man, the killer tried to make it look like suicide by putting the gun in Soppy's hand. As the fifth blind man, the one named Mutt, said, it makes nuts.”

    Gurney said, “Your trouble is with the blind men. You took the story from the wrong end. You missed the whole point of the story you told me.”

    “Yeah?” I said. “And what was the point?”

    “The point of the story was that it was an elephant,” Gurney said.

    He took a long draught of his beer and put the glass down empty. He signaled the bartender, and then he said, “What happened is simple. The elephant wasn't staked out; you saw that. It happened to wander down to the door of the room where Sopronowicz was doing something or other. It saw him, and neither Ambers nor the trainer was around and it recalled whatever cruel treatment it had ever had at Sopronowicz's hands. And Sopronowicz didn't have a bull-hook.

    “It started through the double doorway to get him, and what happened from there on in took about ten seconds. The ringmaster saw death lumbering through the double doorway from the arena and he did the best he could. He fired a blank in the bull's face to scare it and the bull kept coming. One or the other of them knocked over the chairs; probably the elephant, because the chairs were right there inside the double door.

    “Sopronowicz fired another shot, probably as he reached the single doorway that he could have got through and the elephant couldn't. But it was bolted and the bolt stuck and anyway it opened toward him and he couldn't have made it before the elephant got him.

    “And—well, it isn't pleasant, I guess, to be killed by an elephant. You get all your bones broken and maybe a blunt tusk through your guts, and maybe you last thirty seconds and maybe three minutes, but it's a bad thirty seconds or three minutes.

    “In the last second, he saved himself that. Probably the elephant's trunk was going around him when he put the muzzle to his temple and pulled the trigger. So he falls down dead and the elephant probably sniffs at him with the end of his trunk and sees—or smells, or knows somehow—that he's dead, and lets it go at that. And goes back about his business.”

    “It could be,” I said. “It makes sense. But—”

    “But nothing,” Gurney said. “While you were jawing with Ambers I remembered your story about the elephant and got the answer. So I sent Mutt to check with a little paraffin if there were powder marks on the elephant's face and trunk. When he came back and nodded that there were, that was that. So thanks for the story.”

    I finished my beer and ordered another one apiece for us.

    I said, “You still miss the point of the story, though. It was the conflicting impressions the blind men got, each from touching a different part of the critter. The fact that it was an elephant wasn't the point of the story at all, damn it.”

    Gurney said, “But just the same, it was an elephant.”

    “Nuts,” I said. And we drank our beer.

    The Night the World Ended

    “BEER, MR. RAYMER?” Nick the Greek asked.

    Bill Raymer, rim man on the Courier-Times, put a foot up on the rail. “Yeah, Nick. How's things? Halloran been in yet?”

    “Not yet, Mr. Raymer.” Nick flipped the suds off, shoved the beer across the bar. “Damn. I hoped I'd miss him.”

    Nobody liked Halloran, night-side city editor and general wise guy. His idea of a joke was to get somebody to break a leg. Like the time he sent a green kid who was trying out for a reporter's job to get a story from Louis Goroni, the numbers king. He figured Goroni would give the kid the scare of his life and toss nun out on his pratt. Which is what happened—except being tossed out of a second-story window sent the kid to the hospital for three months. P.S. He didn't get on the paper, of course. Halloran laughed about it for almost a week.

    Raymer was the only customer in the place. Johnny Gin was asleep in a back corner, and Metaxa, the cat, was examining a mouse hole with the care it deserved.

    Nick drew himself a short beer and tossed it off. “Any big news tonight, Mr. Raymer?”

    “Deadest night in years. Wish a big story would break, or else we're going to have a lousy paper.”

    Nick looked thoughtful. “The biggest story that could break, what would that be?”

    “The end of the world, I guess, Nick.”

    The door opened to let another customer in. Raymer slid his glass in wet circles on the bar. “End of the World, Saturday Night,” he said, and took a long swallow of his beer.

    Somebody beat him on the back, then chuckled as Raymer choked. “What the hell is this 'end of the world' stuff? You been drinking out of the same bottle as Johnny Gin?” Halloran was in a good humor. Probably someone had just slipped on a banana peel he'd dropped.

    Raymer straightened up. Nick said, “Hiyuh, Mr. Halloran. Beer?”

    “Yeah. Come on, Bill. What's this stuff about the end of the world coming on Saturday night?”

    Raymer shrugged. “Name of a painting. Some artist painted a picture of a Paris cafe called the 'End of the World.' He called his painting 'End of the World, Saturday Night.' That's all.”

    “So what?” Halloran wanted to know.

    “So nothing. I just sort of like it. Let's skip the whole thing. Gimme another beer, Nick.”

    “That would be a headline,” Halloran said, “'WORLD WILL END AT 1:45 TONIGHT.' Gimme another beer, Nick.”

    Nick chuckled. “Maybe she end tonight, huh, Mr. Halloran? This is Saturday night, sure enough.”

    Raymer smiled wryly. “That would be a story to end all stories, all right. Only you couldn't get away with it—if you're thinking of trying it. One edition of that and you'd spend the rest of your life in jail, if people didn't lynch you first.”

    Halloran nodded. He put his glass down, empty, and started to turn from the bar.

    His eyes fell on Johnny Gin, asleep back in the corner. Sodden, fuzz-witted old Johnny, whose last name nobody knew nor cared about—just another punchy stew-bum, who had attached himself to the Greek's place because Nick gave him drinks and pretzels for sweeping out and mopping up and cuspidor cleaning.

    Halloran laughed. He said, “Wonder what Johnny Gin'd do if he thought the world was going to end tonight. Gimme one more beer, Nick.”

    Raymer raised one eyebrow half a pica. “Mean you're thinking of running off a special edition just to find out?”

    “Special edition, hell. Johnny can't read any type small-er'n headlines. All we got to do is get a galley proof of a banner head and paste it over the regular headline. For that matter, we wouldn't even need a paper; we could just wake him up and tell him the world is going to end. But— uh—”

    “But it lacks the artistic touch,” supplied Raymer. Nick said, “Johnny, he just get dronk, that's all.”

    “Would he?” Halloran said. “He's drunk all the time anyway. I'll bet it'd wake him up.”

    Raymer said, “I think Nick's right, Halloran. He'd just get a little drunker than usual.”

    Halloran was feeling good now. He said, “Okay you mugs, I'll prove it to you. When I take lunch time at eleven I'll bring in a doctored-up—Wait, better, I'll give it to the kid sells papers down on the corner. After I'm in here—and we'll tell Johnny I don't work for the paper any more so he won't wonder why I didn't know already—”

    “Johnny, he wouldn't wonder nothing,” said the Greek. “We'll make it good anyway,” Halloran told him. “So after I've been in here a while the kid will stick his head in the door and yell. . . .”

    * * *

    “EXTRA! Extra-EXTRA! ReaDALL aBOUT-”

    “Gimme one,” said Halloran. He gave the kid a coin and got the top paper from the stack. The kid ran back out.

    Johnny Gin had been leaning against the end of the bar. Nick had called him over there just before Halloran came in. Halloran had bought him a beer and he had lifted it in a grave toast to his benefactor. But he knew they wouldn't want him to join in the conversation, and that was all right with Johnny Gin.

    He didn't have anything to say to them, or they to him. His world was different; his world was made up of things like the pattern of smudges on the mirror, the feel of that little ridge in the wood of the bar as he ran his fingers back and forth over it, the smell of whisky, and the strange and dreamlike thoughts he had sometimes—and could never remember clearly afterwards.

    He took another pull at the beer. It was weak stuff, but—

    “My God!” Halloran was saving, “Nick! Johnny! Look!”

    Halloran sounded excited. Probably, Johnny thought, something about war. People got excited about war.

    To be polite he peered down the bar at the paper Halloran was holding up. He squinted, but it was just gray paper with a blacker strip running across the top. He had to walk closer, until he was almost near enough to reach out and touch Halloran before that top line came in focus. It was in big black type, clear across the top of the front page.

    “WORLD WILL END AT 1:45 TONIGHT!”

    His lips formed the words, mumblingly.

    “Jeez,” Nick said. “Tonight.”

    Halloran turned the paper around again. His hands trembled a little as he held it so he could read the fine type.

    “Collision with—uh—Mars. Mars pulled out of its orbit by—by sudden gravitational shift in sun's power. Mars pulled toward the sun and coming for Earth like a bat out of hell, and it'll hit us at one forty-five tonight—impact will reduce both planets to fine dust—”

    “Jeez,” said Nick.

    “Harvard Observatory, Lick Observatory, all of them confirm it.”

    He put down the paper. He looked across the bar. “My God,” he said. “Nick, we'll be dead in—in two and a quarter hours! All of us. Dead!”

    He sounded awfully worked up about it, Johnny Gin thought. But then maybe it would matter a lot to some people. Maybe Halloran had a lot to live for, although he didn't look like it.

    So the world was going to end. Well, then there wasn't anything he, Johnny, could do about it, was there? Except, of course—He sensed that both of them—both Mr. Halloran and Nick—were looking at him now waiting for him to say something, wondering what he was going to say.

    He cleared his throat. “Uh—Nick, can I have a bottle of that Brentwood? A pint, maybe. I'll—” He was going to offer to do some extra work tomorrow, and then realized how silly that was. There wouldn't be any tomorrow. “Uh— can I?”

    Nick shrugged. “Told you so,” he said to Halloran. “Well, you stuck my neck out. I gotta give it to heem now.”

    Halloran looked disgusted. “The God damn bum!” he snarled. “Hasn't got the guts to be afraid.” He stomped out.

    Nick took a pint bottle from the back-bar and slid it along to Johnny. Johnny opened it with the ease of long practice.

    He said, “Thanks. Looking at you—last time.” He tilted the bottle and took a moderate swig. He didn't want to get too drunk; he'd make his bottle last him. He wanted to be able to walk out into the street a little before it happened, and watch the fireworks. Might be worth seeing.

    He went back to the chair in the corner and sat down.

    One comforting thought; he wouldn't have to sweep and mop tonight. Nick closed at two, and that would be fifteen minutes too late.

    But just the same, he was sorry it was going to happen. It wasn't a bad world; it was a blurry, confusing one sometimes. But he rather liked it, except for those rather dreadful periods when things weren't confusing at all. The times when things were bitingly clear to him, and he knew what his name had been and what he had been—not that it was anything to brag about, much—and knew what he was now. And those times he drank a lot, and fast, and the memories went away and stayed for a while.

    Tonight he didn't remember. And that was good. Tonight would be a bad night for remembering.

    He took another drink and looked up.

    Halloran was gone. Nick was leaning against the back bar, staring at nothing. Maybe Nick was worried; maybe Nick was afraid to die. Maybe he should say something to make Nick feel better. Nick wasn't a bad guy, except that he was crabby sometimes when there were no customers around.

    Johnny said, “It's all right, Nick. We probably won't even feel it when it happens.”

    Nick swore at him.

    So Nick was in that mood. Too bad; might be a good time to talk to somebody. But not Nick. Not if Nick felt like that.

    Maybe he should go out. Out on the bridge a few blocks away, where he liked to walk once in a while, to watch the dancing reflections of the lights on the black water.

    Sure, and why shouldn't he have a bottle of good whisky —just for this once and last time—to take with him. Why not celebrate? Why not—except for the mood Nick was in —borrow that big automatic Nick kept in the cash drawer under the bar, and—about one o'clock, say—fire it into the sky and yell. Like New Year's—or better.

    Hell, the end of the world came only once. A guy ought to do something.

    He said, “Nick—”

    Nick was coming past the end of the bar, heading for the door that led to the rooms back of the tavern. Nick said, “Back in a few meenutes, Johnny. Call me eef someone come in.”

    The door closed behind him.

    Johnny Gin sat there maybe a minute before it came to him that this was his chance to do what he wanted. Nick was crabby; Nick would never give him a bottle of the good stuff, nor let him borrow the gun. But what did either of those things matter to Nick, when you thought about it? He'd never sell the good whisky, nor need the gun, would he?

    A bit fearfully, Johnny stood up and tiptoed around behind the bar. He left the pint Brentwood bottle, still more than half full, back on the table in the corner. He looked over the bottles on the back bar.

    A cognac bottle took his eye. A fifth, two-thirds full. That would be plenty. And cognac he had drunk once, somewhere. Paris, that was it. Paris on leave and he'd been in a uniform and his arm had been in a sling and he'd had to drink left-handed. He grinned at the partial recollection. He bent close to peer at the label. Three-Star Hennessey. He took the bottle gently and reverently, and then turned to the drawer and pulled it open. There was a lot of money there, but money wasn't worth anything now. Nick kept just small change in the register. This was where he kept the big bills for cashing pay-checks.

    Johnny Gin reached across the money and picked up the gun. It was big, and heavy in his hand. A forty-five automatic. But it felt familiar. He'd had one of these once, and known how to use it. That had been in France, too.

    He didn't hear the back door open, but he heard Nick's shout and turned as Nick, his face distorted with rage, was running toward him, reaching out huge hands. Black murder in Nick's face. And Nick only a few feet away. The gun went off.

    Johnny hadn't meant for it to. Panic had squeezed his hand tight on the gun as he had turned. That was all.

    In the confined space of the tavern room the roar of the forty-five was like—like the end of the world.

    Nick stopped coming at him, and stood still a minute, his face stupid.

    Johnny whimpered. “Nick, I didn't mean to—I wasn't stealing—Nick, it's the end of the world and I just wanted to—”

    Nick fell down and lay there back of the bar and blood came out on the front of his white shirt and a little blood out of his mouth too.

    And Johnny Gin knew it wasn't any use trying to explain to Nick any more. Blind panic hit Johnny Gin.

    He couldn't walk out from behind the bar without walking over the thing that had been Nick Karapopulos. But somehow he was around in front of the bar, so he must have climbed over it. Then he was out in the street, the automatic still clutched in one of his hands and the other tightly gripping the neck of the cognac bottle.

    He ran half a block before he stopped, panting. He leaned against a telephone pole until his breath came back. He needed a drink and he pulled the cork of the cognac bottle with his teeth, spat the cork, and took a long pull. It was raw and fiery and yet smooth, too.

    Yes, he remembered that taste now. With the pleasant burn in his throat he stood looking up at the sky and the stars seemed nearer and more fiery and he wondered if they were as hot as the cognac. And this was the last night the stars would shine—so anybody could see them.

    The end of the world! You fool, Johnny Gin, what does it matter that you've killed a man when he was going to die within an hour anyway? What does anything matter anymore?

    The end of the world. It's the end of the world! The end of the world!

    Yell at the sky that's going to kill you and fire your gun at it once and maybe you'll hit a star. It's the end of everything, Johnny Gin, and the sky has killed Nick Karapopulos already and you'll never have to mop out his place again.

    Windows were going up. Somebody yelled something angry at him. Maybe they'd been asleep, these people, and hadn't seen papers or had their radios on. Maybe they didn't know-Johnny yelled it to them as he ran toward the bridge. That was the place. Those lights on the black water, and the stars down deep in the water under the river. The fiery stars in the murderous sky.

    Yell, Johnny Gin. But save your bullets until the fireworks really start. Only he was panting again and had to drop to a walk. And there were footsteps behind him now, heavy footsteps that ran, pounding against sidewalk.

    They were coming after him, and he tried to hurry faster, and he heard the yell behind him, and then “Stop or I'll fire!” and the bang of a gun, and then the gun in his own hand went off as he whirled around.

    And then the blue uniform was down on the sidewalk, not coming toward him any more, and there weren't any more pounding footsteps on the sidewalk.

    He hadn't meant to do that, either. He hadn't known that he could—or else that shot had been uncannily lucky. He hadn't meant to—but he couldn't let them stop him now. Not with the fireworks, the big fireworks, so near. He stumbled on, then had to rest a moment again, leaning against a building. He put the cognac bottle to his lips, gulped, then choked and coughed.

    He was stumbling on again, and there was the long approach to the bridge and he was going up, and then there was water under the bridge and he stopped and leaned over looking down into the star-spangled blackness of the water and the rippling lights and the quiet silver wake of the sailing moon.

    He put the gun in his pocket to have a hand free and he lifted the bottle again. There was only a little in the bottom; most of it must have slopped out while he ran. It burned his throat, and his throat and his soul felt raw, and there was no surcease in the quiet of the water below him.

    You've killed a man, Johnny Gin. Two men, probably, and one of them a policeman. And the end of the world is sour on your stomach and you remember the blood that came out of Nick Karapopulos' mouth, and you're beginning to remember other things, too.

    It's messy, Johnny Gin. It's not a good end to the world, and you know it. And you may not even last till it comes, because they'll be sending the squad cars for you, and they are sending them, because there is the far wail of the siren, shrieking closer.

    And here on the open bridge, no place to hide. Shrieking closer. They'll shoot you, Johnny Gin. Shrieking closer.

    And the black water not far below, and he was climbing over the rail. They'd never find him there, in the black water.

    The awful shock of the cold water. And floundering and drowning—only then not drowning for he was standing on the bottom, once he'd righted himself, and the water was only chest-high, and his teeth were chattering. Chattering so that he wondered that the squad car shrieking overhead didn't hear the sound.

    He was cold, deathly cold, and cold sober. The shock, and then the worse shock as things came back to him and he knew what had happened.

    With the shock of the cold water, the curse of clarity was upon him. Slowly, the man who had been Johnny Gin worked his way toward the shore of the black, icy water. . . .

    * * *

    The voice of the girl at the downstairs switchboard sounded strange, very strange:

    “Yes, Mr. Halloran, he says to tell you he's coming up to see you.”

    Halloran bellowed, “The hell with him. Damn it, you know one forty-five's deadline for the final and it's almost that now. He'll have to—”

    The voice of the switchboard girl was stranger still. “I— but Mr. Halloran, he's got a gun. He says he won't be stopped. But he wants you to know he's coming.”

    “Huh?” said Halloran. “What'd you say his name is?”

    “John Wilcox, Mr. Halloran—and” Halloran heard the girl hesitate and another voice say something to her. “—and he says he's got to see you by one forty-five. He says the world is going to—uh—end, at one forty-five. I—uh—think he's—uh—serious, Mr. Halloran.”

    Halloran's face went pale. He looked up at the clock.

    “Get the police,” he said, “the minute he leaves to come up here!”

    “All right, Mr. Halloran, he says to tell you now he's com—”

    Halloran slammed down the receiver and ran.

    And it was nice timing. He made his deadline—though not the way he intended.

    It was just exactly one forty-five when Halloran ran out of the back door into the alley. And John Wilcox, who had been Johnny Gin, had figured that was what Halloran would do and was waiting for him there.

    The end of the world for Halloran, and just when he'd predicted it. Quite a joke on him and too bad, really, that he didn't live to appreciate it. At that, he might not have. I told you he wasn't very subtle.

    The Motive Goes Round and Round

    THERE WAS SOMETHING STANDING by Mr. Nicholas Razatsky's bed.

    In the shadowy dimness of light coming through canvas, it might have been anything. It might have been a lavender antelope with gilded hoofs.

    In fact, it was.

    Knowing that it was, Mr. Razatsky didn't worry about it. He rolled over and the canvas cot shivered under his weight, but didn't collapse. He opened one eye sleepily.

    Something had awakened him and it couldn't have been the lavender antelope. For the antelope was made of wood. It stood there motionless and silent, although it suggested motion, for its gilded hoofs were raised in a running position and its body was supported by a brass rod running up from the flooring through its stomach and out its back in the darkness above.

    Mr. Razatsky opened his other eye and raised himself up on one elbow.

    Beyond the antelope was a laughing zebra, but its laugh was set in silent plastic. It was a beautiful zebra, much shinier and handsomer than the wooden animals, and Mr. Razatsky wished he could replace all of his menagerie with the newfangled plastic ones.

    Beyond the zebra was a horse with a silver mane, and beyond the horse the canvas sidewall that hung around the merry-go-round's circumference at night.

    But whatever Mr. Razatsky had heard, it could not have been one of his animals. Nor could it have been a noise from the carnival lot outside. There was noise outside, for a few of the concessions were still running to late hangers-on. Lots of noise out there, and the sound of a strong wind thumping canvas, too. But Mr. Razatsky had turned in early tonight, and his ear had been attuned only to sound within the circling sidewall of his merry-go-round. The sounds outside he heard, but they would not have awakened him.

    He cleared his throat and asked, “Is anybody?”

    There wasn't any answer. Mr. Razatsky sighed and got out of bed. He walked around the platform, shining his flashlight first into the swan-car and then into the baby-elephant-car. There was a drunken rideboy asleep in the latter.

    Mr. Razatsky sighed again. Those nicely upholstered spots were magnets, it seemed, for drunken rideboys, the ideal place for them to sleep off a jag. But a drunken ride-boy can make an awful mess of a merry-go-round float.

    He said, “Pete, wake up, no?” and shook the rideboy's shoulder until the fellow's eyes opened.

    “Aw, Nick,” mumbled the sleeper. “Let a guy sleep.”

    “Somewhere else, yes,” said Mr. Razatsky. “All night, somewhere else. Good-by now.” Gently but firmly he ejected the rideboy and then went back to sit on the edge of his cot alongside the engine-housing in the center of the merry-go-round.

    Outside was the sound of stakes being driven. That meant it looked like wind was coming up, and they were double-staking the bigger tops. No danger to his merry-go-round, of course; no ordinary windstorm could bother that.

    But the sound of staking made him restless. Instead of lying down again, Mr. Razatsky pulled on his shoes and trousers—the latter having been hanging over the lavender antelope—and went outside.

    The Great Hernando, who ran the illusion show, was standing there leaning against the merry-go-round ticket booth, watching the canvasmen ring a stake.

    Spang. Spang. Then faster, spang, spang, spang. Then merging into one continuous sound as the stake went into hard-packed ground as though into butter.

    “Wind coming up, Perfessor?” Mr. Razatsky yelled over the sound.

    The Great Hernando turned. “Hi, Nick,” he said. “Don't think so, but it might. They're just playing safe.” Mr. Razatsky nodded. “Tune is it?” he asked.

    “Little after midnight. I'm going to the cookhouse for java. Come along?”

    “See you there later, Perfessor,” said Mr. Razatsky. He took the Great Hernando's place against the ticket booth as the illusionist went on up the midway.

    It was good to feel the wind in his face and to hear the rhythmic spang of sledge on stake head. But he wasn't thinking of either of these things, nor yet coffee with the Great Hernando.

    For Mr. Razatsky's mind was in the ticket booth against which he leaned. Not, however, on the subject of tickets and profits. Tickets and profits took care of themselves when you had a merry-go-round concession with a good solid carney, and when you ran it faithfully and lived economically.

    It was not for financial reasons that the booth against which he leaned was to Mr. Razatsky a shrine. True, in afternoon and evening, the booth held tickets, but it held also the seller of those tickets, Margie Evans.

    Young and beautiful was Margie Evans. Ever since, at the far-distant opening of the season, Mr. Razatsky had hired her to sell tickets, he had been on the merry-go-round figuratively even more so than literally.

    Not that he had ever said anything to her, or ever would. It was too ridiculous to think of a slob like him winning a girl like Margie.

    For Margie was a vision and a dream. She had blonde hair that was like cornsilk and eyes that were brown and bright, but soft like her hand when—once in a long while— it accidentally touched his.

    Oh, yes, golden Margie was too good for a fat-and-almost-forty Lithuanian carney who could not even speak too-good English yet. Well, maybe he wasn't fat, Mr. Razatsky solaced himself, but anyway stocky and plump, which was even worse because it was funnier.

    And then there was the fact that Margie worked for him and if he ever said anything to her or tried to take her anywhere or anything, she'd think he was trying to take advantage of the fact that she worked for him, wouldn't she?

    Yes, it was hopeless. So hopeless that he was glad that young Mr. Nesterman had been hanging around the ticket booth of late. Toby Nesterman was the nephew of old man Burman, who owned the carney. Maybe some day Toby would own it, or anyway a slice of it.

    And Toby Nesterman was a nice young fellow, too. It would make a good match for Margie.

    The canvasmen had worked their way around back of the illusion show top now, and the midway was deserted. Mr. Razatsky sighed and turned to head for the cookhouse at the back end of the lot. All the fronts were dark except the office wagon, out in the middle of the midway just past the bingo top, and the cookhouse. It had been a pretty good day, and Walter Schmid, the bookkeeper-paymaster, must be working late checking in the receipts.

    Jay Coulin, the watchman, was sitting on the tongue of the office wagon, leaning back against it. Mr. Razatsky said, “Hullo, Jay,” and the watchman started, and nearly fell off the wagon tongue.

    He grinned sheepishly. “Hi, Nick. Musta been asleep. Good thing it was you come along, and not the boss.”

    Mr. Razatsky shook a stubby finger at him, and walked on. The boss was coming, as a matter of fact. Asa Burman and his nephew, Toby Nesterman, were cutting across the midway toward the office wagon. Mr. Razatsky waited to pass the time of night with them.

    “Hi there, Nick,” said the carney owner, and then yelled in the direction of the office wagon a few paces away, “Hey, Schmid, you through yet?”

    Toby stopped beside Mr. Razatsky. He said, “Nick, you'll see Margie tomorrow, and I'll be out of town. Will you tell her—”

    Asa Burman had walked up to the door of the office wagon and opened it. A sudden, not quite articulate, sound from him made Toby Nesterman and Mr. Razatsky turn to see what was wrong.

    Burman said, “Get Doc,” and climbed quickly into the wagon.

    Past Burman, Mr. Razatsky could see little Walter Schmid, the accountant, lying doubled up on the floor in front of the iron safe. The safe was open.

    Mr. Razatsky swung around to head for Doc's trailer, but Toby had seen, too, and Toby was younger and had faster reflexes. He was already dashing across the midway back in the direction from which he had come.

    So Mr. Razatsky turned back to the door of the office wagon. He said, “Toby's gone to get him, Mr. Burman. I can do anything?”

    Burman had been bending over the accountant. He straightened up and turned around. “He's dead, Nick. And the money's gone—today's receipts.”

    Suddenly Mr. Razatsky jumped, because a voice said, over his shoulder, “Then it's murder.” The Great Hernando was standing there, although Mr. Razatsky hadn't heard or seen him coming.

    “Better not touch anything, Asa,” the illusionist added.

    “And better phone the police.”

    Asa Burman was already backing out of the office wagon. “Didn't touch anything,” he grunted. Then, his feet back on the lot again, he turned toward the white-faced watchman.

    “You, Jay,” he said. “Where the devil were you?”

    Jay Coulin licked his lips nervously. “I—I guess I was dozing, Mr. Burman. It was early, and there were people going by, and I thought—”

    “When did you see Schmid last?” Hernando demanded.

    “M-midnight. I heard a clock strike uptown. He—he was all right then.”

    Asa Burman raised a wrist to look at his watch. “Only half-past now. Run over to that all-night drugstore and phone the coppers. Tell 'em our money car got hijacked. Don't mention murder.”

    As though glad of a chance to escape, the watchman turned and ran toward the front end of the midway.

    Hernando stared curiously into the open door of the brightly lighted office wagon. “Why not, Asa?” he wanted to know. “It is murder, isn't it?”

    “There's no mark on him that I can see. And he had a bad heart. Had a couple of attacks last year. My guess is he keeled over naturally, and somebody came by and found him that way, and Jay asleep, and walked off with the cash.”

    Mr. Razatsky nodded soberly, and hoped that Mr. Bur-man was right. Murder, maybe by one of the carneys wasn't nice to think about. Robbery was bad enough.

    A curious crowd, almost all carneys, was gathering around the wagon now. Somehow, word had got down to the cookhouse where most of those who were still awake and on the lot had been gathered.

    There was excitement in the crowd and curiosity, but no grief. Walter Schmid had been a crabbed little man with an acid tongue, and hadn't joined in the easy friendships of the lot. He had been just an office-machine, as far as the carneys were concerned. Not one of them, really.

    And then there were sirens wailing in the night, and policemen pushing through the crowd around the office wagon.

    Mr. Razatsky went to the cookhouse and ordered coffee and, as afterthought, a hamburger steak. While he ate, others of the carneys drifted back. Some of them with morsels of news.

    The police had set up shop in the penny arcade, and were questioning carneys. The police had decided it was murder. The police had found it wasn't murder. There wasn't a mark on the body. The police had found the gun he'd been shot with, lying on the floor of the office wagon where the killer had dropped it. They'd found some short ropes the killer had brought to tie up Schmid with. The coroner had told the police Schmid had died of heart failure.

    The money had been found. There was a goose-egg on Schmid's head where the killer had hit him. The money was still missing. Nobody knew exactly how much, but it was about a thousand dollars in currency and two hundred in silver.

    The police had arrested Toby Nesterman for murder, having found some of the money under his bed.

    “You're kidding, no?” Mr. Razatsky asked. He put down his knife and fork and looked up at the Great Hernando, who had brought that last item of news. There was a worried look in Mr. Razatsky's eyes as the illusionist shook his head.

    “No,” said Hernando, “I'm not kidding, Nick. They took him down to the station house and booked him.”

    “But that is very silly,” said Mr. Razatsky. “He was with his uncle when Asa looked in and saw Schmid.”

    Hernando shrugged. “Sure, but he'd just met Asa a few minutes before, and he didn't have any alibi for the half hour before that.”

    “Neither have I, Perfessor,” said Mr. Razatsky, “but they didn't arrest me.”

    “They didn't find the money under your bed.”

    “Phooey,” said Mr. Razatsky. “Somebody could have put it there to put the blame on him.”

    “There's more evidence than that, Nick. I don't know just what it was, but the police seem pretty much satisfied with it.”

    “Phooey,” repeated Mr. Razatsky firmly. “Toby Nesterman is nice young feller. He'd no more kill anybody than—than one of my merry-go-round horses would bite me.”

    “They're not sure he intended to kill Schmid,” explained Hernando. “He was going to tie him up. But the shock of being held up scared Schmid and his weak ticker went bad. Maybe it'll be only a manslaughter rap.”

    “Is silly,” said Mr. Razatsky. “By morning they find out they made a mistake and he'll be back.”

    By morning they hadn't.

    Nor by one o'clock in the afternoon, when he was getting ready to start the merry-go-round, had Toby returned. Rumor around the lot had it that he was now formally charged with armed robbery and that the police were using the threat of a manslaughter charge to threaten him into a confession.

    Mr. Razatsky shook his head slowly and went up to the ticket booth.

    “Margie,” he said.

    “Yes, Nick?”

    “He didn't done it—do it. Toby is a nice young feller, not thief. They find out they make mistake.”

    He didn't look directly at her, but down at the roll of tickets lying on the ledge. He asked, “You'd like day off maybe? I can get somebody sell tickets.”

    “N-no, Nick. Thanks. I'm afraid there's nothing I could do.”

    “Go see him, maybe. It would make him feel better He—he likes you, Margie. If he knew you knew he didn't done—do it—”

    “He does, Nick. I saw him a few minutes this morning,”

    “Oh,” said Mr. Razatsky. Then: “How was he feeling Margie?”

    “Pretty blue, and bitter. He says somebody framed him, but made it a tight case. He's afraid they'll convict him.”

    “They won't, Margie,” said Mr. Razatsky. He put conviction into his voice, more conviction than he felt. He kicked at the sawdust in front of the ticket booth a while, not quite daring to look up into Margie Evan's face.

    Then he looked around as though counting the people on the midway, and said, “Don't sell no tickets, just yet, Margie. I got to see Asa about some business.”

    Asa Burman was struggling with the books in the office wagon when Mr. Razatsky knocked. He looked out the door and then said, “Come on in, Nick.” His voice sounded tired, and old.

    Mr. Razatsky went in. “Mr. Burman,” he said, “Toby didn't steal that money. He's a good boy.”

    “Wish you could prove that, Nick. It looks awful black against him. I don't think they'll push the manslaughter business, though.”

    Something in the carnival owner's tone made Mr. Razatsky look at him very closely, and what he saw in Asa's face worried him. It was uncertainty. The case against Toby must be very bad indeed, he thought, if the boy's own uncle wasn't completely sure of his innocence.

    “But why, Mr. Burman,” Mr. Razatsky protested, “would Toby want money that bad?”

    Burman shook his head. “He shouldn't have. But he gambled some, so that's the way the police figure it.”

    “The stories around the lot are mixed up, Mr. Burman. What have the police got against him?”

    “Pretty black, Nick. They found a gun in here with his fingerprints on it. It was Toby's gun; he had it for target practice And they found the bag of silver hidden under his bed Not the paper money; they haven't found that yet.” Mr. Razatsky screwed up his face thoughtfully, trying to make sense out of it. “How the cops figure it?”

    Asa Burman leaned back in the chair. “They say he came here with the pistol and with ropes. He was going to stick the gun in Schmid's back and then tie him up and walk off with the money. Maybe, they say, he had a mask on or a handkerchief around his face so Schmid wouldn't know him, or maybe he just figured on never letting Schmid get a look at him. Schmid's chair here had its back to the door, and he could have opened it quietly and stepped in without being seen.”

    “Ah!” said Mr. Razatsky. “The police think the shock of having a gun stuck in his back—”

    “Yeah. Schmid was lying just about where he'd have been if he'd fallen out of this chair, so that makes sense. They say Toby took the money, but got excited and forgot the gun and the ropes. He put 'em down to feel Schmid's heart to see whether he'd have to tie him up, and then he got scared and forgot 'em after he'd taken the dough.”

    “But anybody,” protested Mr. Razatsky, “could have put the money by Toby's bed, and they put only the silver. How much paper money was there?”

    “About nine hundred and sixty. Schmid had entered the total as eleven twenty-three, the rest being the silver. They think Toby maybe mailed the paper money to himself somewhere, but couldn't do that with the silver.”

    Mr. Razatsky frowned. “That is silly, no? If he took risk of keeping silver, why mail the rest?”

    Mr. Burman sighed. “They got an answer for that, too. if the silver was found, he intended to claim it was planted there. If it wasn't, he'd have it too. If he hadn't forgotten the gun with his prints on it!”

    “But somebody, he could have planted the gun, too.”

    “Yeah,” agreed Burman. “Somebody could have.”

    Mr. Razatsky saw that the carney owner wished he could believe it.

    Sadly Mr. Razatsky returned to his merry-go-round. He avoided the ticket booth. He threw the switch, and the organ started tinkling The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. It ran all afternoon and evening, and Mr. Razatsky's mind as well as his body, went in circles with it.

    It seemed to him sometimes, and it seemed so today, that the merry-go-round was an oasis, a stationary point in a midway and a world that spun around it.

    After a while, he managed to resemble his usual cheerful self, and smiled at the children and joked with them, and sometimes forgot to collect tickets for the second ride.

    In the lull between the afternoon crowd and the evening crowd, Hernando came by. He leaned against the swan-car, and shook his head unhappily. “Looks bad for Toby, Nick,” he said. “Something new, it comes up?”

    “Nope. But tomorrow's tear-down.”

    “So what has that got to do with it being worse for Toby?” Mr. Razatsky wanted to know.

    “We move on. Look, assume for a minute that Toby didn't do it. Well, the coppers are sure he did. They're still hunting the rest of the dough, but if they don't find it by the time the carney moves, they'll give up. And Toby'll be convicted sure when they try him.”

    “Ummm,” said Mr. Razatsky. His eyes strayed to the ticket box. Margie had just left, but the booth was still warm with her presence.

    “You mean that Toby, he's got no chance at all?” he asked.

    “Not unless they can pin it on somebody else. I mean, unless they can find out who really did it—if Toby didn't.” Mr. Razatsky sighed.

    He thought about it while he ate his supper, and thinking about it didn't make it any better. Toby Nesterman hadn't done it. Toby wouldn't have done a thing like that, a nice young feller like Toby. But then who had? Who else could have?

    Mr. Razatsky wished that he was a detective, but he knew that he wasn't. He didn't have even the faintest glimmer of an idea as to what had really happened last night.

    Somebody had got away with nine hundred and sixty dollars, and had framed Toby for it. But by now the money would be in some safe place, off the lot. That money was somebody's winter stake, and the thief wouldn't touch it, probably, until the season was over.

    Then as it was getting dark he went back to the merry-go-round. Margie was already in the ticket booth. Mr. Razatsky rested his elbow on the sill and kicked at the ground in front of the booth. “Margie,” he said troubledly.

    “Yes, Nick?”

    “He—he didn't do it, Margie.”

    “I know he didn't, Nick. He told me he didn't.” Mr. Razatsky said, “Uh—” and couldn't think of anything to add to it, so he turned and walked away quickly. The weather was threatening that evening, and not so many people came to the carnival grounds. Business was bad, and the merry-go-round was still most of the time. Mr. Razatsky had a lot of time to think, in the intervals when there were no tickets to collect.

    He kept the music going, though. His mind worked better when the organ was wheezing out // You Knew Susie or There's an Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor. And once, when he thought he was on the verge of an idea, he started up the merry-go-round with no customers at all and let it go round and round, while he leaned on the shiny new zebra he'd bought to replace the horse that had broken. He'd bought that zebra from Walter Schmid, the now dead bookkeeper, and that gave him his idea.

    Round and round went Mr. Razatsky and the zebra, his mind looking at all angles of the idea, and he knew that it would work. At any rate, there was only one possible hitch to it, and he could find out about that by asking Asa Bur-man. Mr. Burman would know.

    At ten-thirty he said gently to the girl, “I think we close up, Margie. With so few marks, just costs money to keep running.”

    He put up the canvas sidewall around the merry-go-round and then went back to the office wagon.

    “Asa,” he said, “you knew Schmid pretty well, no?”

    “Schmid? Well?” The carney owner looked at Mr. Razatsky curiously. “I knew him pretty well, no. That about covers it. He was a funny duck.”

    “He married? Have family?”

    “No. No relatives at all. There wasn't anybody for us to notify. I looked up the records on him to make sure Why?”

    “I was just wondering who got his money.”

    “Didn't have any to worry about. He bought up that old top from the Sullivan Shows and was gonna sell it to a revival outfit. Turned out the canvas hadn't been stored right and had rotted. And he couldn't sue Sullivan, because Sullivan went bankrupt.”

    “Umm,” said Mr. Razatsky thoughtfully. “That makes it even better, no?”

    “Makes what better, Nick?”

    “Nothing. Just I was thinking to myself out loud.”

    Mr. Razatsky thought it over a bit before he slept, and then he slept very soundly.

    He rose early and went into town. At the local bank he showed his letter of credit from his own bank and proceeded to cash a check for a thousand dollars.

    Back in the privacy of the curtained merry-go-round on the lot he divided the money into two rolls. The forty-dollar one he put into his pocket.

    When, at one o'clock, Margie Evans came around to open the ticket office, he'd thought the idea through, and it was foolproof.

    “Margie,” he said in a trembling voice.

    “Yes, Nick?” The young woman smiled at him.

    “Look, Margie, before you open the booth will you go to the drug store and phone the police? Tell them that a suggestion I would like to make about—about the robbery.”

    Her eyes were curious, but she didn't ask what the suggestion was. “Why, certainly, Nick, but Captain Burdick who is in charge of it—I think he's on the lot now. I saw him walking toward—wait I'll go see.” Mr. Razatsky watched the swing of her skirts as she ran toward the other end of the midway and he sighed. But he said to himself, “Don't be big fool, you Nick.” He was smiling when she came back with the law. “Yeah, what?” demanded Captain Burdick. “Just an idea,” said Mr. Razatsky. “Maybe it don't mean nothing, but then again if it don't mean nothing, it's me that's out twenty-five dollars.”

    “Twenty-five dollars for what?”

    “For the zebra,” said Mr. Razatsky. “Huh? What about a zebra?”

    “We would have to break it,” said Mr. Razatsky. Captain Burdick took off his hat to scratch his head. He turned to Margie and said, “Lady, is this guy nuts?”

    “No,” Mr. Razatsky answered for himself. “I am not nuts, no. It is an idea that maybe the money could be in the zebra. The money that was stolen from the office wagon.”

    Captain Burdick tried to scratch his head again but discovered he'd put his hat back on.

    “Mister,” he said, “for all I care you can break as many zebras as you want, but what makes you think the money's there? Who'd have put it there? Nesterman?”

    “Nesterman, Toby, didn't know the zebra was hollow. Schmid.”

    “Schmid? The dead guy? You're nuts!”

    “No,” said Mr. Razatsky firmly. “I am not nuts. Look, this Schmid, he was broke. He made money dealing around carney props on the side, but he had bad luck and went broke. You knew that, no?”

    “Sure, but-”

    “So the end of the season is coming, and he has no stake for winter coming up, and he wants money. So maybe he could rob himself. Is easy. He wanted somebody else to take the blame so he would not be suspected, so he could pick on Toby, no?”

    “He could pick on Toby, yes. But how did he—”

    “To that I am coming. He could leave the wagon when nobody was looking and hide the money—the paper money. And he could put the silver money by Toby's bed and take Toby's gun, holding so Toby's prints from his ringers would still be on it. The ropes he would already have had in the wagon.”

    “Then why didn't he tie himself up?” demanded the captain. “Look, that could be, all right, but it was the scare of being held up that stopped his ticker.”

    “Could have been, yes. But excitement makes the heart beat fast, too. Too fast. A man with a weak heart should not try to do anything criminal, no? Back in the wagon he gets ready the ropes. It's in the bag already. He's ready to tie himself up, but his heart is pounding with excitement. It pounds one pound too hard. And before he was ready, maybe, he heard somebody coming.”

    “Who?”

    “Me,” said Mr. Razatsky. “Just a little while before I have been waked up by somebody coming into the merry-go-round. That would be Schmid, hiding the money in the hollow zebra that is made of plastic. All my other animals they are wood. The zebra's mouth is open and the money could push down in.”

    Captain Burdick's eyes ran the gamut of animals until they came to rest upon the shiny zebra. “It sounds screwy to me,” he said dubiously, “but—”

    “But maybe, no,” said Mr. Razatsky. “I had just bought the zebra a little while ago from Schmid. He knew a man who had a broken merry-go-round and when my horse came apart, he offered to get me one for twenty-five dollars. So he knew it was plastic, hollow. Nobody else he would not have known. Not Toby. But to Schmid, it would be a perfect hiding place, no? You see?”

    “Captain Burdick shrugged. “It's your idea,” he said.

    “And is my zebra. But I thought you should be here when I break it.” Mr. Razatsky sighed. “I get a hammer.”

    He got one from the engine housing at the center of the merry-go-round, raised it, and took a last regretful look at the zebra. Undoubtedly it was the shiniest and best-looking member of his menagerie.

    He swung the hammer, hard. It was a heavy hammer, almost a sledge, and Mr. Razatsky's first carney job had been driving stakes. He still had muscles.

    The zebra shattered, and fell in chunks from the brass pole. Together they peered down into the debris.

    “Well, I guess you're out a zebra,” said Captain Burdick.

    “Wait,” said Mr. Razatsky. “The legs, they are hollow.”

    He picked up one hind leg and shook it vigorously. Then the other.

    “Wouldn'ta gone back there,” said Burdick, “if it'd been poked in the mouth.”

    Obviously expecting nothing, he picked up a foreleg and shook it. Out dropped a sheaf of bills with a paper around the middle, the kind of band that was used in the office wagon—and also a fat roll with a rubber band around it.

    Captain Burdick uttered a startled exclamation and reached down to pick both rolls up, thereby missing Mr. Razatsky's wide-open mouth and eyes.

    He riffled through the sheaf of bills first. He said, “What the devil? There's over nine hundred here, in this one.”

    He peeled off the rubber band, unrolled and quickly counted the other. “And about the same amount in this one. I thought nine-sixty was all that was gone.”

    Mr. Razatsky opened his mouth and, since nothing came out, he closed it again. He gulped and tried a second time.

    “I—uh—well, I—” was the best he could do.

    “Nick!” It was Margie's voice, and he dared look at her face, to find it was golden-shining like her hair. “Nick— I—see what happened. Let me explain it to him, please. He might get—oh, go wait for me outside.”

    Glad to escape, Mr. Razatsky ducked out under the canvas sidewall and went to lean against the ticket booth.

    In a few minutes Margie came. She held out the roll of money to him.

    “You—you sap, Nick,” she said. But the tone of her voice made it all right by Mr. Razatsky no matter what she'd called him.

    He grinned sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders as he took his roll of money. “But, Margie,” he said, “I only wanted to help.”

    “Nick Razatsky, are you in love with me?”

    He didn't dare look at her now. He cleared his throat of something that made it hard for him to speak. He nodded blindly. “But, Margie, I wouldn't dream of pestering you. I want it you and Toby should be happy.”

    “But dreaming's all you've ever done. And just because Toby hung around here you thought I was—why didn't you ever say anything?”

    He spread his hands helplessly. “I'm too old for you, Margie. I'm thirty-seven, and you're only twenty-one or two, and I'm just a big—”

    “Dope!” she finished for him. “I'm twenty-nine, Nick. And free and white. And—and I think you're a swell guy.”

    Still not daring to believe, he made himself look up, and he met her eyes. He put out hands, unbelievingly, toward her, not remembering or caring that he stood in the middle of a midway. But she eluded him, for women are always more practical about such things. And, from the safety of the ticket booth she smiled at him.

    “The crowd's coming, Nick. Better get the merry-go-round going.”

    He stood there for a moment, just looking at her, and then turned and walked, almost blindly, to take down a sidewall curtain of silk brocade to reveal a carousel of solid gold whose glittering menagerie was of jade and lapis lazuli steeds with rubies set for eyes.

    Cry Silence

    IT WAS THAT OLD silly argument about sound. If a tree falls deep in the forest where there is no ear to hear, is its fall silent? Is there sound where there is no ear to hear it? I've heard it argued by college professors and by street sweepers.

    This tune it was being argued by the agent at the little railroad station and a beefy man in coveralls. It was a warm summer evening at dusk, and the station agent's window opening onto the back platform of the station was open; his elbows rested on the ledge of it. The beefy man leaned against the red brick of the building. The argument between them droned in circles like a bumblebee.

    I sat on a wooden bench on the platform about ten feet away. I was a stranger in town, waiting for a train that was late. There was one other man present; he sat on the bench beside me, between me and the window. He was a tall, heavy man with an uncompromising kind of face, and huge, rough hands. He looked like a farmer in his town clothes.

    I wasn't interested in either the argument or the man beside me. I was wondering only how late that damned train would be.

    I didn't have my watch; it was being repaired in the city. And from where I sat I couldn't see the clock inside the station. The tall man beside me was wearing a wrist watch and I asked him what time it was.

    He didn't answer.

    You've got the picture haven't you? Four of us; three on the platform and the agent leaning out of the window. The argument between the agent and the beefy man. On the bench, the silent man and I.

    I got up off the bench and looked into the open door of the station. It was seven-forty; the train was twelve minutes overdue. I sighed, and lighted a cigarette. I decided to stick my nose into the argument. It wasn't any of my business, but I knew the answer and they didn't.

    “Pardon me for butting in,” I said, “but you're not arguing about sound at all; you're arguing semantics.”

    I expected one of them to ask me what semantics was, but the station agent fooled me. He said, “That's the study of words, isn't it? In a way, you're right, I guess.”

    “All the way,” I insisted. “If you look up 'sound' in the dictionary, you'll find two meanings listed. One of them is 'the vibration of a medium, usually air, within a certain range,' and the other is 'the effect of such vibrations on the ear.' That isn't the exact wording, but the general idea. Now by one of those definitions, the sound—the vibration —exists whether there's an ear around to hear it or not. By the other, the vibrations aren't sound unless there is an ear to hear them. So you're both right; it's just a matter of which meaning you use for the word 'sound'.”

    The beefy man said, “Maybe you got something there.” He looked back at the agent. “Let's call it a draw then, Joe. I got to get home. So long.”

    He stepped down off the platform and went around the station.

    I asked the agent, “Any report on the train?”

    “Nope,” he said. He leaned a little farther out the window and looked to his right and I saw a clock in a steeple about a block away that I hadn't noticed before. “Ought to be along soon though.”

    He grinned at me. “Expert on sound, huh?”

    “Well,” I said, “I wouldn't say that. But I did happen to look it up in the dictionary. I know what the word means.”

    “Uh-huh. Well, let's take that second definition and say sound is sound only if there's an ear to hear it. A tree crashes in the forest and there's only a deaf man there. Is there any sound?”

    “I guess not,” I said. “Not if you consider sound as subjective. Not if it's got to be heard.”

    I happened to glance to my right, at the tall man who hadn't answered my question about the tune. He was still staring straight ahead. Lowering my voice a bit, I asked the station agent, “Is he deaf?”

    “Him? Bill Meyers?” He chuckled; there was something odd in the sound of that chuckle. “Mister, nobody knows. That's what I was going to ask you next. If that tree falls down and there's a man near, but nobody knows if he's deaf or not, is there any sound?”

    His voice had gone up in volume. I stared at him, puzzled, wondering if he was a little crazy, or if he was just trying to keep up the argument by thinking up screwy loopholes.

    I said, “Then if nobody knows if he's deaf, nobody knows if there was any sound.”

    He said, “You're wrong, mister. That man would know whether he heard it or not. Maybe the tree would know, wouldn't it? And maybe other people would know, too.”

    “I don't get your point,” I told him. “What are you trying to prove?”

    “Murder, mister. You just got up from sitting next to a murderer.”

    I stared at him again, but he didn't look crazy. Far off, a train whistled, faintly. I said, “I don't understand you.”

    “The guy sitting on the bench,” he said. “Bill Meyers. He murdered his wife. Her and his hired man.”

    His voice was quite loud. I felt uncomfortable; I wished that far train was a lot nearer. I didn't know what went on here, but I knew I'd rather be on the train. Out of the corner of my eye I looked at the tall man with the granite face and the big hands. He was still staring out across the tracks. Not a muscle in his face had moved.

    The station agent said, “I'll tell you about it, mister. I like to tell people about it. His wife was a cousin of mine, a fine woman. Mandy Eppert, her name was, before she married that skunk. He was mean to her, dirt mean. Know how mean a man can be to a woman who's helpless?

    “She was seventeen when she was fool enough to marry him seven years ago. She was twenty-four when she died last spring. She'd done more work than most women do in a lifetime, out on that farm of his. He worked her like a horse and treated her like a slave. And her religion wouldn't let her divorce him or even leave nun. See what I mean, mister?”

    I cleared my throat, but there didn't seem to be anything to say. He didn't need prodding or comment. He went on.

    “So how can you blame her, mister, for loving a decent guy, a clean, young fellow her own age when he fell in love with her? Just loving him that's all. I'd bet my life on that because I knew Mandy. Oh they talked, and they looked at each other—I wouldn't gamble too much there wasn't a stolen kiss now and then. But nothing to kill them for, mister.”

    I felt uneasy; I wished the tram would come and get me out of this. I had to say something, though; the agent was waiting. I said, “Even if there had been, the unwritten law is out of date.”

    “Right, mister.” I'd said the right thing. “But you know what that bastard sitting over there did? He went deaf.”

    “Huh?” I said.

    “He went deaf. He came in town to see the doc and said he'd been having earaches and couldn't hear any more. Was afraid he was going deaf. Doc gave him some stuff to try, and you know where he went from the doc's office?”

    I didn't try to guess.

    “Sheriff's office,” he said. “Told the sheriff he wanted to report his wife and his hired man were missing, see? Smart of him. Wasn't it? Swore out a complaint and said he'd prosecute if they were found. But he had an awful lot of trouble getting any of the questions the sheriff asked. Sheriff got tired of yelling and wrote 'em down on paper. Smart. See what I mean?”

    “Not exactly,” I said. “Hadn't his wife run away?”

    “He'd murdered her. And him. Or rather, he was murdering them. Must have taken a couple of weeks, about. Found 'em a month later.”

    He glowered, his face black with anger. “In the smokehouse,” he said. “A new smokehouse made out of concrete and not used yet. With a padlock on the outside of the door. He'd walked through the farmyard one day about a month before—he said after their bodies were found—and noticed the padlock wasn't locked, just hanging in the hook and not even through the hasp. “See? Just to keep the padlock from being lost or swiped, he slips it through the hasp and snaps it.”

    “My God,” I said. “And they were in there? They starved to death?”

    “Thirst kills you quicker, if you haven't either water or food. Oh, they'd tried hard to get out, all right. Scraped halfway through the door with a piece of concrete he'd worked loose. It was a thick door. I figure they hammered on that door plenty. Was there sound, mister, with only a deaf man living near that door, passing it twenty times a day?”

    Again he chuckled humorlessly. He said: “Your train'll be along soon. That was it you heard whistle. It stops up by the water tower. It'll be here in ten minutes.” And without changing his tone of voice, except that it got louder again, he said: “It was a bad way to die. Even if he was right in killing them, only a black-hearted son of a bitch would have done it that way. Don't you think so?” I said: “But are you sure he is—”

    “Deaf? Sure, he's deaf. Can't you picture him standing there in front of that padlocked door, listening with his deaf ears to the hammering inside? And the yelling?

    “Sure, he's deaf. That's why I can say all this to him, yell it in his ear. If I'm wrong, he can't hear me. But he can hear me. He comes here to hear me.”

    I had to ask it. “Why? Why would he—if you're right.”

    “I'm helping him, that's why. I'm helping him to make up his black mind to hang a rope from the grating in the top of that smokehouse, and dangle from it. He hasn't got the guts to, yet. So every tune he's in town, he sits on the platform a while to rest. And I tell him what a murdering son of a bitch he is.”

    He spat toward the tracks. He said, “There are a few of us know the score. Not the sheriff; he wouldn't believe us, said it would be hard to prove.”

    The scrape of feet behind me made me turn. The tall man with the huge hands and the granite face was standing up now. He didn't look toward us. He started for the steps.

    The agent said, “He'll hang himself, pretty soon now. He wouldn't come here and sit like that for any other reason, would he, mister?”

    “Unless,” I said, “he is deaf.”

    “Sure. He could be. See what I meant? If a tree falls and the only man there to hear it is maybe deaf and maybe not, is it silent or isn't it? Well, I got to get the mail pouch ready.”

    I turned and looked at the tall figure walking away from the station. He walked slowly and his shoulders, big as they were, seemed a little stooped.

    The clock in the steeple a block away began to strike for seven o'clock.

    The tall man lifted his wrist to look at the watch on it. I shuddered a little. It could have been coincidence, sure, and yet a little chill went down my spine. The train pulled in, and I got aboard.

    The Nose of Don Aristide

    TRULY, SENOR? YOU HAVE never heard of the great French detective, Aristide Pettit?

    It seems inconceivable, Senor, and you yourself of the profession. For only one case he was with us, but such brilliance. We of the city of Rio de Aires felt pride to be associated with him even so briefly. Certainly I shall tell you of him, but first the business at hand.

    Yes, Senor, your application is most properly filled outer should one say filled in? Either? Ah, that is what makes your language so difficult to us. The things such as that an application may filled out or filled in, and instead of being opposite they are the same. Yet are not “out” and “in” opposites? But no matter. Your application is most satisfactory, and your references of the best.

    Oh, yes, Senor, I quite understand and agree that you speak our language most fluently. You have most admirably demonstrated. Not nearly so fluent is my poor English. I ask therefore that you bear with my use of it in our conversation. The practice will be of assistance to me the greatest.

    And most truly do I hope that you will work with us. We appreciate the great advantage to us of studying the methods of the great detectives of other countries. No, do not be modest, Senor. In your references we have read how you have tracked down the robbers of banks of your country.

    Perhaps, who knows, we shall learn as much from you as from Senor Aristide Pettit. Ah, there was true brilliance! I make, of course, no invidious comparisons, for we are not yet familiar at first hand with your methods—but those of Don Aristide! We wish only that he had remained with us longer.

    You have really never heard of him, never seen his picture? In physique he is small except in one feature. He has a magnificent nose. It is a nose truly in the tradition of his countryman Cyrano de Bergerac. You do, of course, know of Cyrano de Bergerac?

    But yes, though Don Aristide's body is not large his nose is colossal. You Americans have a phrase—a nose for news. Don Aristide has, one might say, a nose for crime. On just one case he worked for us, but that I can verify. Truly he has a nose for crime. Also he has a magnificent mustache. I must mention that for reasons that will become clear.

    The case—I cannot give you all the details, Senor. You will understand that there are international complications. International, that is, to the extent that it concerned the security of my country against the foul machinations of a near neighbor of ours. A good neighbor indeed! These things will not be a secret from you when you are actually in our employ. We know that you are not a spy for we have investigated you carefully already and the application you have just filled out or in is but a formality.

    But for the moment I shall not name the country. I shall tell you merely that there was a plot to foment a revolution. It was not in this case a move from the left. Rather it was a move from the right and financed by our dear neighbors who hoped to gain disputed territory that lies between us.

    “Don Aristide,” I told him—I had known him then for a week only but already I felt that I could address him in the familiar mode—“I am confident that you will find what we want found, what we must find, the one thing that will give us complete data to enable us to break up this treasonable conspiracy.”

    “Voila!” he said, rising to his feet. Did I mention that in addition to being small he was most dynamic? “It is done, Monsieur. But tell me what is it that you wish found. The nose of Aristide Pettit will sniff it out for you.”

    And he bowed modestly.

    “It is a list,” I told him, “of several hundred names. It is believed—no, it is certain—that it is in the hands of a spy who is working at the studios of the great Panamera Moving Picture Company in this very city. We have reason to know that it is there.”

    “And the reason, Monsieur, why ordinary police methods will not work?” he asked. You will perceive that his keen mind had already seen there was a difficulty.

    I bowed to him. “Because, Don Aristide, the studios cover many acres, comprise many buildings. The list is believed—no, is known—to be on a tiny piece of microfilm about half a centimeter (a quarter of an inch in American measurement, Senor) square. You perceive the difficulty.”

    His eyes lighted up with interest They shone with brilliance. He sat back down—in the very chair in which you now sit, Senor—and stroked his mustache thoughtfully. I waited respectfully, waiting for him to ask questions and knowing that he would ask the correct ones and that, having answers, he would proceed to solve the insoluble.

    His first question was, of course, “Monsieur, are the high officials, the proprietors, the executives, involved in this matter?”

    “They are not,” I told him. “The affair does not concern the studio as a whole nor its management. They are above reproach.”

    “Then,” he said, “you suspect a particular culprit. Otherwise you would not know that he works at the studio.”

    Again I felt impelled to bow to him, and I did. I told him, “We most strongly suspect—indeed, we are certain— that la Senora de Rodriguez, one Dona Maria, a widow, is the spy. She is the make-up artiste of the studios.”

    “Tres bien. It should be simple, then, narrowed down to one person, even though that one person may have the run of the studios and may have hidden it anywhere.”

    I said, “If it is easy, Don Aristide, the ease has escaped our cruder brains. We can arrest her, of course, but the object is so minute—a piece of confetti in size—that we might never find it, yet its importance is tremendous. Nor, we are certain, will the spy talk or confess.”

    “Then she must give it to us of her own free will. How long have we, Monsieur?”

    “It must be in our hands by tomorrow. Yet a search for so tiny and easily hidden an object might take weeks. Consider, Don Aristide, that the tiny object may be in one of a thousand ways disguised. It may be coated white, among scraps of white paper. It may be one sequin among thousands of sequins on one of a thousand costumes. It may be stuck underneath a beauty spot. It may be inside a jar of cold cream; it may appear to be a soap chip among ten thousand soap chips. It may—” I stopped because it seemed futile to enumerate the innumerable.

    Don Aristide rose to his feet again and, stroking that luxuriant black mustache of his, he began to pace my office. There, Senor, along the length of that very rug. He paced like a tiger—or perhaps because of his small stature I should say that he paced like a small lithe panther.

    Ah, what a man, Senor, and with what a magnificent brain! What a detective!

    In two minutes—only two minutes—he stopped pacing and struck the palm of his left hand with his right fist.

    “Voila,” he said. “Monsieur, I have a plan. Do you know this Senora de Rodriguez? Can you give me a letter of introduction to her?”

    “But certainly,” I told him. “Under what name?”

    “My own, Monsieur. Aristide Pettit. Tell her who I am and what case I am working on. Enlist her aid in my behalf.”

    And so brilliant was the light in his eyes that I did not argue with him, Senor. I wrote the letter and gave it to him, and I told him that the affair was in his hands.

    That was at ten o'clock in the morning, Senor, and in the hour after siesta there was a knock on my door.

    I called out “Entra Usted,” and into my office walked a small old man, gray-haired and with sunken cheeks. Then I saw his nose.

    “Don Aristide!” I shouted. “What has—? It is make-up, of course, but your so beautiful mustache, your so luxuriant mustache—need you have sacrificed it?”

    “It is nothing,” he said, and I saw that his eyes gleamed as brightly as ever. “It will grow again. It was a small sacrifice to make for success.”

    “For success?” I was incredulous. “Surely, Don Aristide, you cannot mean that you have the microfilm already?”

    “The groundwork for my plan is laid, Monsieur,” he told me. “This afternoon, this very hour, if all goes well it shall be in your hands. You wish perhaps to accompany me upon my second trip to the studios, to share in my triumph?”

    It is needless to say, Senor, that I most certainly wished to accompany him. What more would one ask than an opportunity to watch the great Aristide Pettit at work?

    As we drove to the studio in my car he told me, “This morning, Monsieur, with the help of your gracious letter I met the charming Senora de Rodriguez. It is without doubt that she is guilty. Though I did not accuse her, though I pretended to enlist her assistance and to believe her innocent, yet she trembled when I explained to her the object of our search.

    “I took her, as she thought, into my confidence. I told her that I wished to have the run of the lot in disguise and I asked her to disguise me. In her salon and with her equipment I shaved off my mustache and asked her to complete the disguise for me.”

    “It is an excellent disguise,” I told him.

    “It is passable. I could have done better myself, but the disguise itself means nothing. It is, however, part of the plan that she should see me both before and after the transformation. I merely wandered around the lot for a while, and then came to you. Now we both return and you may watch the springing of my trap.”

    “How, Don Aristide?” I asked.

    “Allow me,” he said, “to ask you to wait and see. In my conversation with her, please merely follow my lead and agree with what I may tell her.”

    I agreed. It would have been futile, I saw, to plead for enlightenment. The great artist in any profession must be granted the privilege of using his own methods without interference.

    We entered the salon of Senora de Rodriguez, and Don Aristide bowed low and kissed her hand. “Alas, Senora,” he said to her after our greetings were over. “It grieves me to say that your so excellent work of this morning was wasted. In this disguise I learned nothing.”

    She said, “I am sorry, Senor Pettit. I did my best.”

    “But Senora,” he told her, “I am not implying that it is you who are at fault. The disguise is most excellent. It is I who failed. So it has been most reluctantly decided that we must search the entire studio. A small army of our police and detectives is coming; they will search everything, everywhere, everybody. We must pin our faith on that search.”

    I thought I saw Senora de Rodriguez start a little, Senor, but I was so surprised myself that I could not be sure, I knew that no arrangements had been made for a small army nor yet a large army of detectives and police to visit the studio. Yet I nodded confirmation.

    “And so,” Don Aristide continued, “I ask one more favor of you, Senora. That you remove this make-up you have so artistically applied and restore me to my former appearance.”

    “Gladly, Senor Pettit,” Senor de Rodriguez told nun. “Ten minutes will be all the time I will need, if you will be seated here as you were this morning.”

    While she removed the make-up I wandered about the salon thinking how difficult, how nearly impossible, a truly thorough search would be, even of this one large room with its many costumes in long rows, with its thou-sands of jars and bottles and its draperies and furniture. And for so tiny an object, Senor.

    But I knew we would not have to make that search, for I had faith in the brilliance of Don Aristide. While the Senora worked on his face, Don Aristide talked to me.

    “Do not fear, Monsieur,” he said. “It shall be found. I, Aristide Pettit, shall direct the search and all the searchers. And I shall find the object though it be hidden a mile away or under my very nose. I promise you, upon my reputation as a detective.”

    Following his lead I merely said, “Yes, Don Aristide.”

    When the Senora had finished he looked at himself in the mirror, and threw up his hands in a gesture of despair.

    “Alas,” he said, “I am not myself. I do not feel myself without my mustache. It will take weeks to grow again. How long have we before the men come, Monsieur? Half an hour perhaps?”

    And when I nodded, he turned to Senora de Rodriguez. He said, “Senora, you are a great artist with make-up. Would it be possible, in that length of time or less, for you to restore to my face a mustache like to my own? You saw me with it this morning and in addition I have my card of identity with a picture of myself which you may study.”

    “Certainly, Senor,” the Senora said. “I can do it for you, and it will be a pleasure.”

    I noticed from the tremor in her voice that she was becoming increasingly nervous.

    Again I wandered about the studio and stared out the window onto the lot. And when I turned back, Don Aristide was getting up from the chair and his face looked as it had before, complete with magnificent mustache. And over it he smiled at me and there was a gleam of triumph in his eyes.

    “Do you wish the honor of making the arrest, Monsieur?” he said.

    “I beg your pardon, Don Aristide,” I said. “You mean—”

    “Of course. You may now arrest la Senora Rodriguez. The microfilm is safe. You heard my suggestion, and I am sure that she followed it.”

    The woman turned and ran toward the door, but with a catlike motion, Don Aristide caught her by the arm. He had her before I could even move, Senor, and I am both light on my feet and fast. She screamed and clawed at him, and I helped subdue her.

    The screams brought many running, actors and directors and executives of the studio. And before them all, I said, “Senora de Rodriguez, I arrest you in the name of the state for high treason.”

    But I said no more, and looked to Don Aristide, for this was his moment and it was up to him to explain—if he wished—before the assemblage of motion picture actors and directors and executives how he had accomplished his objective. Before all of us, he explained.

    “The trick, Messieurs,” he said, “was to find the microfilm without the days of search that would be necessary. The brain of Aristide Pettit solved the problem.

    “It was not, Monsieur,” he said to me, “that I sacrificed my mustache lightly. It was the price of victory. First, this very morning I eased the suspicions of the culprit by appealing to her for assistance, by pretending to be frank with her and by letting her disguise me.”

    He shrugged his shoulders eloquently. “It was so simple, Monsieur. This afternoon, before your very eyes and ears, I accomplished the rest. The brain of Aristide Pettit and the nose of Aristide Pettit cooperated to succeed. First, I threw the culprit into a panic—a thinly concealed panic, I am sure you noticed—by telling her a detailed search was to be made.

    “And then—you heard me, Monsieur—I told her a place to hide it. I suggested subtly to her the one place to hide it where, one would think, no one would possibly search. Under the very nose of the chief searcher.

    “What is more logical than that she would hide it there, given the presumably innocent suggestion and then, immediately afterwards, the perfect opportunity—the building up of a heavy and luxuriant mustache under the very nose of Aristide Pettit?”

    I was overcome with admiration, Senor. “Bravo, Don Aristide!” I said. Gently I reached toward his mustache. “And may I have the great honor of—”

    He stepped back quickly. “Please, Don Pedro, not here. Not before all these people. As I have said, I feel naked without it. I shall remove it in your office, and then I shall use my own not inconsiderable powers as a make-up artist to restore it.”

    Was that not brilliant, Senor? We of this country learned much from Aristide Pettit. Such a mind! Such subtlety and such daring! What a method!

    You will perceive, Senor, why we are particularly interested now in learning more of the detective methods of other countries, including your own. It is more than true that a None Americano, one so well qualified as yourself, can be of the greatest—

    What did you ask?

    Oh. No. That I regret to say, Senor. We recovered the microfilm, but it was not in the mustache. That, however, was not the fault of Don Aristide, not in the slightest. The police matron at the jail found it. It was cemented to one of the Senora's toenails, under a false toenail that had been fitted on top of the real one.

    So you understand, Senor, that the failure of Aristide Pettit's plan was in no way his fault. The microfilm was inaccessible to the Senora while she was working on the mustache. She could not, of course, have removed her shoe and stocking and soaked off the false toenail. So no one blamed Don Aristide for that. His method was brilliant and his deductions flawless. And, after all, the microfilm was found as a result of the arrest and the plotters were apprehended.

    What more could one ask? The result is what counts.

    You ask why Don Aristide is no longer with us?

    He is in this very city, Senor, and I promise that you shall meet him. But the moving picture studio, which is able to offer many times what we of the police can offer even to a truly great detective, hired him away from us. They thought, and rightly perhaps, that they could make better use than we of his so great ingenuity. He is now writing and directing moving pictures at a truly fabulous salary.

    So you see, Senor, what an illustrious predecessor you have had and how much will be expected of you. Also, perhaps, how surprising may be the rewards of detective work of true brilliance. No es verdad?

    A Voice Behind Him

    THERE IS A LOVELY LITTLE horror story about the peasant who started through the haunted wood—the wood that was, people said, inhabited by devils who took any mortal who came their way. But the peasant thought, as he walked slowly along:

    I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn't any justice.

    A voice behind him said, “There isn't.”

    * * *

    The Great Raimondi once heard a voice behind him. I do not mean the voice of the cannon; he heard that every day and twice on Saturdays and on Sundays—for, quite literally, The Great Raimondi sought the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's mouth. The Great Raimondi, The Human Cannon-Ball.

    Maybe you saw him at the height of his glory, which, again to speak literally, was ten feet above the top of the ferris wheel, over which the cannon shot him, into a net.

    It's an easy job, as jobs go, and pays two hundred dollars a week. The job is open now. If you're interested, see Otto Weber of the Dunn & Weber Combined Shows.

    You wear padded white coveralls, white gloves, white football helmet, under which your ears are so well plugged with waxed cotton that the deafening bellow of the cannon, as you leave it, is not more loud than the sound of a popgun.

    You arc whitely into the sky, over the top of the sixty-foot ferris wheel, and down again into the net stretched fifteen feet above the ground at a precisely measured distance from the cannon's muzzle.

    It's as safe as houses—unless something goes wrong with the mechanism of the cannon. And Keber, who designed and owns it, says nothing can; it's a simple coil spring— the bang and the puff of smoke are merely pyrotechnics So if you want to be the third Great Raimondi, wire Otto Weber, care of Billboard, Cincinnati. Oh, yes! You'll be billed as “The Great Raimondi”; the name goes with the job. What happened to the first two Great Raimondis? Well the first one (his name was Roberts) stubbed his toe on the ferris wheel one Saturday afternoon two years ago. He missed the net.

    But don't let that worry you. Weber adjusted the spring tension and it won't happen again.

    And the second Great Raimondi? He's the one I'm trying to tell you about, if you'll quit thinking of that job that's open and quit asking me questions about it. The second Great Raimondi's name was Tony Grosz and he was a Sicilian. It's Tony Grosz I'm trying to tell you about. It's Tony Grosz who, like the peasant in the haunted wood, heard a voice behind him. But it wasn't a devil. Or was it?

    * * *

    Tony Grosz sat in a tavern that afternoon. Tony wasn't a drinking man. But Tony had trouble, and he was compromising with his unhappiness by drinking beer.

    Tony's trouble wasn't money. You can see that yourself; two hundred a week is a lot of dough for a carney. It's a lot of dough for anybody. Even for a married man. That was Tony's trouble—he was married and he was in love with his wife. Her name was Marie, and he had been married to her for four months, since the first week of the season. A real marriage, not a carney one, if you know what I mean.

    Yes, Tony had married the girl. But in spite of that, his love for her was a flame, a roaring flame.

    That morning, that very morning, they had quarreled bitterly.

    And now, hunched up on a bar stool, Tony Grosz brooded. You couldn't call it thinking; he was past that stage.

    He picked up his beer to take another sip of it, and caught sight of himself in the mirror back of the bar. It disclosed a not particularly handsome man, thirty-two years old, of only average height and a bit less than average weight, but compact and wiry. His skin was a touch on the swarthy side and just then showed the blue-black beginning of a beard.

    There was an old knife scar across his forehead and his nose had once been broken and was not quite straight. His eyes were like hot little coals between the narrowed lids. It was definitely not a handsome face. It was, though, an attractive face when he smiled and his white teeth flashed and his eyes flashed with them. But he hadn't smiled yet today.

    He didn't now. He glowered at his reflection in the mirror as he put the glass down empty.

    This was in a little Spanish place. He'd walked as far as he could from the carnival lot and found himself in that part of town. The town was San Antonio, if it matters.

    He said, “Un' otra cerveza,” which means another beer. It was about all the Spanish he knew, but it was all he needed or wanted. Oh, he knew a few other phrases if he wanted to try to remember them. He'd learned them from Marie, who was part Spanish and spoke the lingo.

    She'd taken him for Spanish, too, the first time they'd met. She'd smiled at him suddenly and warmly, a smile that was like a caress and said, “Si, senor?” and he'd said, “Si, chiquita,” and then laughed when she'd come back with a torrent of fast Spanish that he couldn't get a single word of.

    The bartender was picking up his glass. He said, “Si, senor”

    For just a fraction of a second Tony thought he was being mocked—and his hand made an almost involuntary movement toward his knife. He jerked his hand back, put it flat on the bar, and stared at it. God, how jittery he must be to react that way to something these Mexicans said a thousand times a day, just because he'd been thinking—

    He stared at the window. It was getting dark outside and he looked at his wrist watch. There was still plenty of time. He didn't want to get there until just time to change.

    He looked at his beer, and wished he hadn't ordered it. He looked at the bartender, and hated him. He thought of the night outside, and hated it. He saw his reflection in the smeary mirror, and hated that.

    He drank his beer slowly.

    Marie, he thought. Marie, Marie, Marie, Marie! It was as thought he was saying it over and over to himself, although his lips did not move.

    He looked again at the clock. Still lots of tune. Maybe he shouldn't go. He'd drunk only beer, but he'd drunk lots of beer. He felt it, a little. Maybe his timing, his muscle control, would be off, just enough off to make him miss the net.

    Well, that would be all right, too.

    She'd feel sorry then, if she loved him. But she didn't love him. She couldn't, after the things she'd said.

    Of course, he, too, had said things.

    No, he'd go away. That was the answer. Go away. Across the fields from the carnival lot was the railroad jungle and the freights highballing out to everywhere.

    Un' otra cerveza.

    Then he was out in the night with the moon, bright and enormously big, low in the sky at the end of the street. In the dim area between the street lights it threw his shadow long and far ahead of him and he walked into it. Then it would wane and fade as he neared a corner, wax and darken after he had passed the street light.

    Yes, he'd go away. He wasn't going to the lot tonight, or ever.

    Before him was his shadow, growing and shrinking from street light to street light, and then there was bright noise and loud lights and the carney lot. His feet had brought him there. Something in his mind, unknown to him, had timed it, too; he could tell by the feel of the crowd. Just about time for him to be getting into costume.

    His fingernails bit into his palms as he turned in between the freak show and the jig show, the passage between the tents that led back to his trailer. Was she there?

    No, she wasn't there. The trailer was dark. He went inside, turned on the lights and dressed for the act. Where was she? But he was glad she wasn't there. He didn't want ever to see her again. After this trip out of the camion he'd never see her again. She'd said she didn't want to see him again.

    Well, if that was the way she felt about it, she could damn well have her way. She could have the trailer, too, and what was in it, and any amount of money left over from last week's pay.

    Quickly he unbuttoned the white coveralls so he could get at his pocket in his suit underneath them. There was about forty dollars in his wallet. He didn't count it, just emptied it on the table. He wouldn't even come back to the trailer again, lest she be here. To hell with her, he thought, loving her so much that the thought of leaving almost blinded him with anger at her.

    Before he buttoned up the coveralls again he took the change out of his trousers pocket, smacked that down on top of the bills on the table.

    Then he pulled on the white gauntlets, fastened the white helmet under his chin, and reached for the light switch. He pulled back his hand. A note. He'd have to leave a note, since he wasn't coming back.

    He found the stub of a pencil and a piece of paper.

    “Marie,” he wrote. “I'm going away.” . . . What else? He chewed the end of the pencil. . . What else was there to say? I love you; I hate you. That would be silly.

    There wasn't anything else to say. “I'm going away” covered it. That and the gesture of leaving every dollar he had.

    He scrawled “Tony” under the note and put the paper down beside the money on the table.

    He hurried out. The crowd had gathered. The cannon was ready.

    Weber nodded at him. Tony climbed onto the cannon. Up to the yawning muzzle. He balanced himself there for that dramatic minute before he lowered himself inside.

    He folded his arms and posed there, like a gladiator might have stood in the arena. Inside, of course, he was sick and miserable, but he didn't let that show on his proud, dark face. He stood dramatically looking up over the high ferris wheel. A figure of white courage—hollow inside with misery.

    He lowered himself into the cannon, into position. He counted the seconds steadily, tensed himself. Then the shock of the releasing spring, the impact, the never-quite-believable sensation of falling upward. The ferris wheel below him and the net appearing tiny and a mile away, then growing larger as it came nearer, and the slow half-turn in the air that landed him on his back in the middle of the net.

    That was that, and the last time he'd ever do it. Only as he hung from the side of the net to drop lightly to the ground did he wonder why he'd bothered to do it tonight. And it didn't matter, then.

    He pushed through the crowd and hurried between the freak show top and the jig show top, the canvassed aisle that led to the trailer. And then he stopped.

    Damn! There was a light on inside the trailer. Had he left the light on?

    No, he'd turned it off, and—yes, he could see her inside, through the window. She'd come back to the trailer, as she always did while he was doing his act. She never watched. She never had told him why.

    He stood there, his muscles tensing as they had inside the cannon. When he'd left the note and the money, he forgot he'd be going back to the trailer to take off his costume.

    But why should he? To hell with the costume. He pulled off the white gauntlets, dropped them and the white helmet on the ground, stripped off the padded coveralls.

    The door of the trailer was opening. The light went out.

    He had to go past it to reach the fields which separated the carnival lot from the railroad jungles where he could catch a rattler out of town. He had to keep on going, or flee ignominiously back to the midway, or meet her face to face if she came this way. He didn't want to. He didn't want to see her again—because with all his soul he did want to see her again, and Sicilian pride is like that.

    He kept on going, seeing her—because he didn't want to see her—out of the corner of his eye. She stood in the doorway, and she held something in her hand. A dim, shadowy figure in the long shadow of the freak show top behind which the trailer was parked.

    Just out of the corner of his eye, as he strode past, within six feet of her. His knees turned to rubber with the effort of keeping on walking and his shoulders and neck became rigid as he tried to refrain from looking at her squarely.

    And he was fiercely, miserably glad that it had worked out this way—for maybe he was wrong. Maybe she still loved him as he still loved her.

    Maybe she would call him back. Maybe she would call, “Tony, Tony, don't go.”

    And then it would be all right; he could turn around.

    Suddenly he was past the door of the trailer, and she hadn't spoken yet. He reached the edge of the shadow of the big tent and the moon threw his own shadow, longer than his height, before him. And still she hadn't spoken. She hadn't called him back, and the bitterness within him was blacker than his shadow. His life was ashes, and his love was hate.

    His hand—he didn't remember putting it there—was inside his coat, on the handle of his knife. The thought had come—somebody else will get her.

    It was agony. It was unbearable, the thought that she might give herself to another man. And sooner or later she would; she was a woman, she was flesh and blood, made for love. Some time, if not soon, now that she no longer loved him, she would love another.

    He kept walking, but his steps slowed down—and his shadow ahead of him on the path across the field slowed, too. And the other shadow, her shadow joined it. She was coming up behind him, sneaking up silently, one arm raised . . .

    “You leave and I'll kill you!”

    It flashed into his mind. That was what she'd said, that very morning, in the quarrel. One of the nicer things, when he'd threatened to leave her. He hadn't believed her. He'd forgotten it.

    Inside him, something laughed. He turned and struck with the knife . . . .

    She lay there, face down, in the grass of the field. His blow had been true, to the heart, to the fickle, murderous heart of her. But he was glad—what a word to use, glad— that she had fallen forward so he could not see her face, in death.

    There was something he had to do. It had something to do with his legs and feet, moving them, turning around and walking to the tracks where he could catch a freight. He had to go away. He couldn't quite see why, or why he wanted to, or how it mattered. But something inside him told him to get going—to hurry, to flee.

    Whatever it was, it wasn't strong enough to hurry him, not just yet. Kneeling, to wipe his knife on the grass, standing again, putting it back in its sheath inside his coat, turning away from what he had done, putting one foot in front of the other toward the railroad yards, he moved like a slow automaton, like a man in a dream.

    Something inside him screamed to him to hurry, to run, but his body wouldn't do it. He walked as it he were wading through waist-high water.

    He stopped and turned back once, only a few steps away. His eyes drank in the last sight of her. Her slender body lying still across the path, her arms forward in the deeper grass as though she were holding on, holding her body down to earth even though its soul could no longer be held.

    He couldn't see her hands nor the little stiletto one of them must have held, the hand that had been upraised to his defenseless back. Had it not been for her shadow betraying her—ah!

    He managed to turn, to take a step and yet another, and then to keep going toward the tracks.

    Marie, Marie! It was to the rhythm of his steps and to the beating of his heart and to the pulse beat of the night. She is dead, she is dead. And black aching misery came over him because she was dead—not because he had killed her.

    He had been spared deciding whether to go back and kill her so she would never give herself to another man. He had been spared deciding that, and there was no guilt on his soul; she had come after him, silently, to kill, and her shadow in the moonlight had betrayed her.

    Another step and another, slowly. He should hurry, for she lay in the open in the moonlight, not far from the carnival lot. It would not be long before she would be found. He should hurry, but he walked slowly.

    One step, then another.

    And a long time later, he stood beside the tracks of the jungle, watching a switch engine couple freight cars behind the big engine that stood waiting to take them—and him— away.

    A busy little devil of a switch engine, with gaping red maw of firebox, and spewing smoke from its stack, as it ran silently—

    Silently?

    He didn't have to reach up with his hands to know that they were still there, that he had forgotten to take them out—those plugs of thick wax that protected his ears from the roar of the cannon!

    And now, knowing that, he didn't have to guess at the rest. He didn't have to know the words of her pleading when she had called to him not to go away, when she had even run after him, an arm thrust out in supplication, to bring nun back . . .

    The silent little devil of a switch engine went past him, down to the other end of the yards; it started back. He walked out onto the track in front of it. He turned, facing away from it, as it came. And his hands went up, now, and took the plugs of wax from his ears.

    He stood there, very still, hearing—this time—a voice behind him.

    Miss Darkness

    IT WAS LATE IN THE afternoon, almost dinner time, when Miss Darkness came to stay at Mrs. Prandell's boarding house. The evening papers had just come, and—while Mrs. Prandell was taking Miss Darkness upstairs to show her the advertised vacant room—Mr. Anstruther, in the sitting room downstairs, was saying, “Quite a bit of excitement downtown this afternoon, Miss Wheeler. Did you see any of it?”

    “You mean the bank robbery, Mr. Anstruther? No, I was at the main library all afternoon, doing my research.” Miss Wheeler's research, of course, was for her magnum opus, a study of Elizabethan poets, a project which had engaged all of her thoughts since her retirement two years before as a teacher of high school English. A strange thing, Miss Wheeler's affinity for Elizabethans; in the flesh those robustious fellows would have shocked her past measure. “Did you see any of it?”

    “I heard the sirens,” said Mr. Anstruther, and he wondered why Miss Wheeler—who had a sudden picture of Mr. Anstruther, as Ulysses, tied to the mast of a ship—giggled a little. But upstairs, Mrs. Prandell was opening the door of the vacant room. “Fifteen dollars,” she said, “with breakfast and dinner. We don't serve lunches. Or it's ten dollars, just with breakfast.” Her tone of voice added that if Miss Darkness didn't want it, plenty of others would.

    “I—I'll take it,” said Miss Darkness. “Just with breakfast.”

    “Linens once a week; no cooking in rooms; no guests, of course, except in the sitting room downstairs; no pets; no radios after ten o'clock; you furnish your own soap, towels, light bulbs; and breakfast either at seven-thirty or eight-thirty, whichever you prefer. Some go to work earlier than others so we have two times. Which do you want?”

    “Eight-thirty, please.”

    “And—” Mrs. Prandell glanced down at the small, cheap cardboard suitcase which Miss Darkness had brought, “payable in advance, please.” She unbent a little when Miss Darkness had fumbled in her purse and handed over a ten dollar bill. “I'll make you out your receipt after dinner; I've got to help the cook now. What did you say your name is, Miss—?”

    “Westerman,” said Miss Darkness. “Mary Westerman.”

    So Mrs. Prandell went downstairs to supervise the cooking, and Miss Darkness (who had not yet, of course, been named that) went into her room and shut the door.

    A little while later, about the time Mrs. Prandell was preparing to tinkle the dinner bell, Miss Darkness left her room. At the turn in the stairs, she almost ran head on into Mr. Barry, ascending for a preprandial wash-up.

    Mr. Barry, insurance salesman, was—by the consensus of Mrs. Prandell's paying guests—a very nice young man. Certainly he was the most presentable male within a radius of blocks. He was not tall, but then neither was Miss Darkness. And he had dark curly hair and humorous eyes and a nice mouth that started, involuntarily, to purse into a whistle when he saw Miss Darkness.

    Funny about that. I mean, Miss Wheeler and Miss Gaines, sitting in the sitting room awaiting the call to dinner, could see the turn of the stairs and Miss Darkness standing there. But they saw only a rather mousy-looking girl in a cheap, ready-made dress, whereas Mr. Barry saw much more than that. One might say that he saw the girl herself through the inexpensive dress (in a nice way, of course, for he was a nice young man) and he liked what he saw. Miss Darkness was small-boned and delicate, beautifully wrought. Her face was pale, to Misses Wheeler-Gaines; milk-white, to Mr. Barry. Her eyes were big and dark (like moonlit pools) and a little frightened.

    Mr. Barry smiled at her. He said, “Nobody tells me these things. (A misleading statement, for everybody told everything at Mrs. Prandell's; the only reason Mr. Barry hadn't heard was that he had just come in.) You're staying here? A new guest?”

    “Yes,” said Miss Darkness, and her eyes were wary now, but not so frightened.

    “Then may I introduce myself? Walter Barry.”

    “Mary Westerman,” said Miss Darkness. “And may I pass, please? I'm almost late for a dinner appointment.”

    There wasn't room on the stairs, of course, for Mr. Barry to step aside and bow, but he approximated it pretty well. He stood there watching as she went on down the stairs and out the door. In the sitting room Miss Wheeler looked at Miss Games and Miss Games looked at Miss Wheeler. And the dinner bell tinkled. An hour later Miss Darkness returned and went directly to her room. Going upstairs shortly after that, Miss Wheeler saw that the light was out in Miss Darkness' room and wondered. It was scarce eight o'clock.

    That was Tuesday.

    It was Thursday night, at dinner, that gossip grew. Oh, you may be sure that she had been discussed Tuesday night and Wednesday night, but mildly and with reservations because young Mr. Barry had been present at both of those meals and had shown an inclination to leap to the breach in defense at the slightest word against the new guest.

    It was Thursday night that Miss Gaines said, “There's something wrong with her, Mrs. Prandell. She's afraid of something. She's even afraid of the light.”

    “Of the light?” Mr. Anstruther asked. “What do you mean?”

    “She sits in the dark, up in that room. And she stays away from our sitting room downstairs here. Why, the first night she was here, I went past her door at eight, and she was sitting in the dark, and again last night. You can see the crack of light under that door when it's on inside the room, you know.”

    “Perhaps,” said Mrs. Prandell, “she goes to bed early.”

    “Not that early, surely. At least, she'd turn on the light to prepare for bed, and she didn't, I know because I went up to my room for a handkerchief last night just a minute after she came in, and she was in the dark in there.”

    “How strange,” said Miss Wheeler. “Mrs. Prandell, did she say anything to you that would explain . . . ?”

    Mrs. Prandell shook her head wonderingly.

    “What could explain it?” Miss Games asked.

    Mr. Anstruther cleared his throat pontifically. “Oh, there are any number of possible explanations. I could think of half a dozen offhand. She might have trouble with her eyes, for one thing, and be ordered by a doctor to avoid electric lights.”

    “Then wouldn't she wear dark glasses—at least, when she wasn't in her room?” asked Miss Gaines. “No, it couldn't be that, Mr. Anstruther. Why, last night, when she was coming down the stairs she stopped to think, part way down, as though she was deciding whether to go back or go on, and she was staring right into the bright light at the foot of the stairs while she stood there. She wouldn't have done that.”

    “Or perhaps,” said Mr. Anstruther, “she is afraid, hiding from someone. And hers is a front room. Yes, I know there's a shade on the window. Does the shade work properly, Mrs. Prandell?”

    “I believe so, I'll check tomorrow.”

    “Or perhaps,” said Mr. Anstruther, “she is a religious fanatic, given to meditation whenever alone. . . . No, I don't really think that, I was just suggesting possibilities.”

    “And you have three to go,” said Miss Gaines. “You said you could think of half a dozen.”

    “Perhaps she works or is associated with blind people, or expects to be. She is learning, deliberately, to get their point of view, as it were, by practicing being blind when she is alone.”

    “She isn't working with or for the blind,” said Mrs. Prandell. “She isn't working at all. And she volunteers no information about herself.”

    “She could avoid the window,” said Miss Wheeler, “without having to stay in the dark. Even if the shade is broken.”

    “Number five,” said Mr. Anstruther. “She is a believer in spirits. She is trying to establish contact with someone she loved who has just died. Perhaps she thinks she has powers as a medium. And darkness is conducive—”

    The outer door opened, and Miss Wheeler, seated at the end of the table opposite Mrs. Prandell's end, turned her head so she could see into the hallway. She turned back and whispered, “Here comes Miss Darkness now,” and nothing more was said until they had heard her footsteps go on up the stairs.

    Miss Gaines pushed her chair a little. She said, “I do believe—”

    “That you have forgotten your handkerchief, again,” said Mr. Anstruther. “Am I right, Miss Gaines?”

    There was a general laugh at the table, and Miss Gaines reddened very slightly, but she went upstairs. When she came back, everyone at the table looked at her, and she nodded.

    There was a moment's silence after that and before the topic was reopened, young Mr. Barry came in, which was a shame. Mrs. Prandell's boarders hadn't had so mystifying a thing to talk about in years.

    That was Thursday. On Friday at the earlier of the two breakfast times Miss Wheeler glanced across the table at Mr. Anstruther and said, “Have you heard the latest about the bank robbery last Tuesday?”

    “No, Miss Wheeler. What is it?”

    “One of the two bandits was caught at the time, you know, and the other got away—with the money. Now they think a woman drove the getaway car.”

    “Indeed?” said Mr. Anstruther, and his graying, bushy eyebrows rose a full centimeter. “And do they have a description of the woman?”

    Mr. Barry put down his fork.

    “No,” said Miss Wheeler, and you could tell there was disappointment in her voice. “The witness who thinks he saw the car start up, around the corner from the bank, was quite a distance from it. He thinks that it was a young woman, though.”

    “Indeed?” said Mr. Anstruther, more hopefully. “And that was Tuesday afternoon, was it not?”

    Mr. Barry asked, “What do you mean by that, Mr. Anstruther?”

    Mr. Anstruther's eyebrows climbed back down again. But before he could formulate an answer, Miss Gaines saved the day by asking for details of just what had happened during the robbery; she hadn't read about it.

    “Two men entered the bank, with guns,” explained Miss Wheeler. “They wore masks; they must have put them on in the entryway, between the inner doors and the outer doors. One of them had a small valise and they held up the bank and put all the bills from the cashiers' cages into it, and got away—got outside, anyway. Of course the alarm went in while they were leaving.”

    “And one was caught right outside?”

    “Not right outside, no. But the police cars, closing in, picked up a man known to be a bank robber two blocks away, on foot. One of the police recognized him. He had a gun, although he'd got rid of the mask, and he wasn't the one who had the satchel of money. They arrested him, of course, and they're holding him, but only on the charge of having the gun; they can't prove any more than that, unless they can find the other man—or the woman.”

    “And this witness?” asked Mr. Anstruther, glad that attention had been diverted from his remark about Tuesday.

    “Someone the police found the next day. A man who, from some distance, remembers seeing a man carrying a small satchel get into a car parked around the corner from the bank, right after the holdup. He says there was a woman behind the wheel, but he couldn't identify either man or woman. But the police figure the two men split up right outside the bank, one going one way and the other— the one with the money—to where a getaway car had been waiting. That, I believe, is what they call it—a getaway car.”

    Mr. Barry smiled at her. He said, “Yes, Miss Wheeler. That's what they call it. I think you missed your vocation, Miss Wheeler.”

    “That isn't true, Mr. Barry. I would have made a very poor detective, if that's what you meant.”

    Mr. Barry smiled at her and stood up. He said, “You'll excuse me, Mrs. Prandell? And, Miss Wheeler, that wasn't what I meant.”—

    That night after dinner, Mr. Barry sat on the porch steps until the others had gone to their rooms, except Mr. Anstruther, who went downtown to a movie.

    Miss Darkness, he thought, that's what they call her.

    Oddly, the name seemed, to him, to fit quite well without a sinister connotation. Miss Darkness, with dark hair and dark eyes.

    But, too, there was a dark mystery. Why did she sit in darkness, evening after evening? It wasn't because she retired right away; she'd been heard moving about the room. Hiding?

    Mr. Barry rose from the steps and strolled down to the corner and back so he could see her window without seeming to. It was dark all right, and the shade was down. But the shade alone would have been sufficient, especially for a second-floor room.

    He saw a cat padfoot across the shadowed yard. Cats, he thought, see in darkness. And he could think of Mary Westerman as a cuddly kitten, if not a cat, but that still explained nothing. Surely she could not actually see in the dark. . . .

    Saturday morning, in the sitting room, Miss Gaines watched Miss Darkness go out to eat her lunch, wherever she ate it. Then Miss Games strode resolutely into Mrs. Prandell's kitchen.

    “She just went out,” Miss Gaines said. By this time, of course, the pronoun needed no antecedent.

    Mrs. Prandell glanced at the clock. “Well, it's almost noon. She always goes out a while at this time, doesn't she?”

    “Yes, but— Far be it from me, Mrs. Prandell, to suggest snooping, but have you thought that she really might be— somebody dangerous to have around? What if she has the money from that bank robbery, for instance?”

    “She hasn't, Miss Gaines. Don't you think that I didn't— for the protection of all of us—search her room and her belongings the first chance, after what Miss Wheeler told us.”

    Miss Gaines leaned forward eagerly. “And—?”

    “Just a few cheap things in a dime-store cardboard suitcase. That's all. But just the same she's leaving Tuesday, when her week is up. I don't like mysteries, Miss Gaines. I won't take another week's rent from her.”

    “I'm glad of that, Mrs. Prandell.” Miss Gaines leaned forward confidentially. “Did Mr. Anstruther tell you? About yesterday?”

    “No. What?”

    “Why, he just happened to leave here, at noon, about the time she did. Just after her. He was walking right behind her for several blocks. Then she turned around and saw him and acted as though she thought she was being followed. She stared at him and then turned a corner and walked fast and was out of sight by the time he got to the corner.”

    Mrs. Prandell sniffed. “Just what I'd have thought,” she said. “Well, after next Tuesday—”

    It was that night, Saturday night, that Mr. Barry passed up his dinner in order to be sitting on the porch steps when Miss Darkness went out.

    “Good evening,” he said. “Beautiful night out.” It wasn't; it wasn't actually raining, but the sky was a bit cloudy and the air was hot and muggy.

    She actually smiled at him, but she answered briefly and went on before he could think of what to say, or ask, next. He watched as she went on down the street, and saw that she looked around behind her, twice. He thought, something is wrong; she's afraid of something. She's in danger, somehow.

    It was Sunday evening that Death came to Mrs. Prandell's rooming house. It rang the doorbell at eight forty-five.

    Mrs. Prandell was just coming into the sitting room from the kitchen when the bell rang. Mr. Anstruther and Mr. Barry had both stood up to go to answer the door, but she said, “I'll get it,” and walked on past them. Miss Gaines put down her magazine to listen.

    They heard the door open and Mrs. Prandell's voice say, “Yes?” and a lower, nimbly voice say, “I'm William Thorber, city detective. Do you have a Melissa Carey staying here?”

    Nobody in the living room made a sound. They heard Mrs. Prandell say, “Not under that name, Mr. Thorber. But— Won't you come in?”

    The detective said, “Thank you,” and came in. Mr. Barry stood up again, then, and started for the hallway, but Mrs. Prandell and Mr. Thorber were heading for the sitting room, he saw, and he sat back down again.

    Mrs. Prandell said, “We do have a mysterious young lady here whom we—well, whom we suspect of not using her right name. Will you tell us something of this—uh— Melissa Carey? She might be the one. And won't you sit down, Mr. Thorber?”

    “Thank you, Mrs.—”

    “Prandell.”

    “Thank you, Mrs. Prandell. Melissa Carey is five-five, slender, dark, twenty-three.”

    “Miss Darkness,” said Miss Gaines, a bit breathlessly. “I was sure, Mrs. Prandell, that—“

    “Darkness?” the detective interrupted. “Is that actually the name she gave?”

    “No, Mr. Thorber,” said Mrs. Prandell. “She is using the name Mary Westerman. We call her Miss Darkness because she always sits in the dark upstairs.”

    “Sits in the dark?” Mr. Thorber frowned. “I don't see— Uh, when did she come here?”

    “Late Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after the bank robbery downtown. Is she wanted in connection with that, Mr. Thorber? Is she the woman who drove the getaway car? We read about that, of course.”

    Mr. Thorber smiled. “Not quite that bad, ma'am. She was a clerk in the bank that was robbed. We need her as a material witness.”

    “A clerk?” Miss Gaines looked disappointed. “You mean she only worked there? But why would she run away and hide here?” A more hopeful look came into her face. “Perhaps she was an accomplice?”

    “We're afraid her running away might indicate that, ma'am. Is she here now?”

    “Please tell us a little more about it,” Miss Gaines begged. “You mean you think she—tipped off the robbers, or something like that?”

    The detective frowned. “We're a bit in the dark ourselves, ma'am, just why she ran away like that, from the police. But here's what we do know. The two robbers stopped between the inner and the outer doors to put on the masks they wore into the bank. Miss Carey was working where she, alone of all the people in the bank, could see into that entryway, and she saw the two men as they were putting on their masks, so she alone can identify them. She admitted that right after the robbery, when the chief was talking to her, just before I got there.

    “Then we learned Garvey and Roberts had picked up a suspect called John Brady a couple blocks from the bank and had taken him to headquarters. The chief asked Miss Carey if she'd go around to headquarters to see if she could identify him, see? She said sure, and it was only a few blocks and on account of the excitement and everything she'd like some fresh air, and could she walk? And the chief said sure, because we had some more to do at the bank and weren't ready to leave. So she never got there.”

    Miss Games leaned forward. “She disappeared between the bank and headquarters?”

    “That's it. And she never went home. She has a little apartment on Dovershire Street, but she never went there either. We been looking for her since, and got a tip tonight that led us here.”

    Mr. Anstruther, who had been silent until now, cleared his throat. “Is there any reward, Mr. Thorber?”

    The detective looked at him. “You're Anstruther? Well, there may be if it turns out that she is implicated, and this leads to recovery of the money. That's up to the insurance company.”

    “Look,” said Mr. Barry. They looked at him, but he reddened a little and couldn't think of what to say. “Are you sure? I mean—”

    “We're not sure of anything,” said Thorber. “But I'll have to take her to headquarters. If she can explain her actions, of course we won't hold her. And we must have her look at John Brady and either identify him or not. It was lucky for us he had a gun on him, or we couldn't have held him this long.”

    He stood up. “Is she here now, Mrs. Prandell?”

    “Yes, her room is just opposite the head of the stairs. She's up there now, sitting in the dark.”

    “Thank you,” said the detective. He stood up and so did Mr. Barry, Mr. Anstruther, Mrs. Prandell, and Miss Games. “Uh—will you all please wait here?”

    All of them sat down again except Mr. Barry. He took a step toward the door and his hands clenched at his sides as the detective started up the stairs.

    Mrs. Prandell said sharply, “Don't be a fool, Mr. Barry.”

    But a higher power than Mrs. Prandell had already made Mr. Barry a fool. He stood there, glaring at the staircase, until he heard the detective knock at the door upstairs, and then, as though something was pushing him, he started for the staircase, and up.

    Had the carpeting on the stairs not muffled the sound of his footsteps, although he had not tried to walk quietly, things might have happened differently. As it was, he was making the turn in the stairs when the door of Miss Darkness' room opened—to darkness, with a slim, terrified girl silhouetted against it, the back of her hand going to her mouth as though to stifle a scream.

    But what propelled Mr. Barry up the last few steps was that he saw both of the detective's hands come out of his pockets as the door opened, and there was a gun in each of them. There was a flat thirty-two automatic in his right hand and, almost hidden, a smaller fancier revolver—a woman's pistol—in his left.

    There are tunes when one asks questions afterward, and for Mr. Barry this was one of them. Thorber was pushing Melissa Carey back into the darkness and three things happened almost at once—Mr. Barry's headlong tackle of Thorber's left hand, and Melissa Carey's scream.

    The roar of the other gun was seconds later, while the others from below were fearfully coming up the stairs, fearfully led by Mr. Anstruther, who might never have reached the top had not Miss Gaines kept pushing him from behind. The automatic roared again, and that was the last shot of the melee, and there was silence in the room of darkness.

    “I still don't understand all of it,” Mrs. Prandell was saying the next evening at dinner. “And I do wish you weren't going to leave us, Mr. Barry. I know we all judged the girl wrongly, but after all, she did give a false name and all, and—how could we have known?”

    Mr. Barry, with a bandage across his forehead where the chopping blow of a pistol barrel had removed an area of epidermis, looked quite dashing and romantic despite, or perhaps because of, a badly blackened eye.

    He said, “My dear Mrs. Prandell, I don't blame any of you in the least. It is merely that I want to find a room on the other side of town, because—well, because Miss Carey lives there, or will live there again as soon as they release her from the hospital, where she is being treated for shock, in a few days. I am going to see her again this evening and, in fact, if she accepts a suggestion I have to offer, I won't even need to hunt a room, as she already has an apartment there.”

    “You—you don't mean—”

    “No, I don't mean,” said Mr. Barry patiently. “I merely mean that Melissa Barry would be a very nice name, and there is a shortage of apartments, you know.”

    “We all wish you luck,” said Mr. Anstruther. “But I still don't see why this detective Thorber, bank robber or not, brought the two guns with him.”

    “He had to make it look as though she were resisting arrest,” said Mr. Barry. “He had to kill her to keep her from identifying him or this John Brady, because—well, even if she wasn't able to identify him as one of the robbers, she might have identified Brady and Brady might have squealed.”

    “I see,” said Miss Games. “You mean that Thorber, even though he was a real detective, had planned the robbery with Brady, who was a bank robber. Using, I suppose, information he could obtain as a detective?”

    Mr. Barry nodded. “And, unluckily for her, Miss Carey was in a position to see them come into the bank entry, without their masks. And after the robbery, when the cops were coming around in droves, she saw Thorber, and thought but wasn't absolutely sure, that he was one of the men who robbed the bank.” . “But why didn't she just say so?”

    “She wasn't absolutely sure,” Mr. Barry explained. “And that put her on a terrible spot. Either she had to accuse a man who might be innocent, or else her life was in terrible danger, because Thorber knew by then that she'd seen him and his partner, and that if she identified Brady, he was pretty likely to be sunk, too. The only thing she could think of doing was to hide out until—well, her brightest hope was that the police would solve it without her and leave her safe again.”

    “But the two guns—?” asked Miss Wheeler.

    Mr. Anstruther said, “I see that part now, Miss Wheeler. He came prepared to kill her, and to make it look as though she had resisted arrest, and that she'd had the smaller gun and fired at him with it first. So he would be in the clear, on self-defense.”

    “Oh,” said Miss Wheeler, a bit faintly. “Well, I'm glad, Mr. Barry, that you killed him.”

    Mr. Barry colored faintly. “I'm not sure that I did, Miss Wheeler; you see we were fighting for the gun, and it was in his hand and his finger was on the trigger, but I had an armlock on him with the gun pointing diagonally up his own back, and I guess—well, he probably didn't pull the trigger on purpose at all, just a spasmodic reaction from the pain of his arm being broken. I guess it's lucky I did wrestling in college.”

    For a second or two there was silence broken only by the sound of Mr. Anstruther's celery. And then Miss Wheeler remembered.

    “Mr. Barry,” she said. “We still don't know why Miss Dark—Miss Carey sat in the dark all the time in her room. You talked to her this afternoon, you say. Did she tell you that?”

    “Of course she told me. When she ran away from danger that afternoon, she didn't dare go back to her room, you know. Thorber might have been wailing for her there. She had only twenty dollars with her, and for half of it she managed to buy a cheap case and a few things that would let her get by for a week, and when she came here, Mrs. Prandell, she had only exactly ten dollars left. That's why she took only breakfasts.”

    “You mean that's all she's been eating?”

    “Of course. She took walks around, right in the neighborhood, so you wouldn't know that she wasn't eating. She was too proud to let you know that. Or to borrow or steal fifteen cents.”

    “Fifteen cents?” asked Mrs. Prandell blankly. “For what?”

    “For a light bulb,” said Mr. Barry.

    I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen

    I HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS COMING DOWN the hall and I was watching the door—the door that had no knob on my side of it—when it opened.

    I thought I'd recognized the step, and I'd been right. It was the young, nice one, the one whose bright hair made so brilliant a contrast with his white uniform coat.

    I said, “Hello, Red,” and he said, “Hello, Mr. Marlin. I—I'll take you down to the office. The doctors are there now.” He sounded more nervous than I felt.

    “How much time have I got, Red?”

    “How much— Oh, I see what you mean. They're examining a couple of others ahead of you. You've got tune.”

    So I didn't get up off the edge of the bed. I held my hands out in front of me, backs up and the fingers rigid. They didn't tremble any more. My fingers were steady as those of a statue, and about as useful. Oh, I could move them. I could clench them into fists slowly. But for playing sax and clarinet they were about as good as hands of bananas. I turned them over—and there on my wrists were the two ugly scars where, a little less than a year ago, I'd slashed them with a straight razor. Deeply enough to have cut some of the tendons that moved the fingers.

    I moved my fingers now, curling them inward toward the palm, slowly. The interne was watching.

    “They'll come back, Mr. Marlin,” he said. “Exercise— that's all they need.” It wasn't true. He knew that I knew he knew it, for when I didn't bother to answer, he went on, almost defensively, “Anyway, you can still arrange and conduct. You can hold a baton all right. And—I got an idea for you, Mr. Marlin.”

    “Yes, Red?”

    “Trombone. Why don't you take up trombone? You could learn it fast, and you don't need finger action to play trombone.”

    Slowly I shook my head. I didn't try to explain. It was something you couldn't explain, anyway. It wasn't only the physical ability to play an instrument that was gone. It was more than that.

    I looked at my hands once more and then I put them carefully away in my pockets where I wouldn't have to look at them.

    I looked up at the intern's face again. There was a look on it that I recognized and remembered—the look I'd seen on thousands of young faces across footlights—hero worship. Out of the past it came to me, that look.

    He could still look at me that way, even after—

    “Red,” I asked him, “don't you think I'm insane?”

    “Of course not, Mr. Marlin. I don't think you were ever—” He bogged down on that.

    I needled him. Maybe it was cruel, but it was crueler to me. I said, “You don't think I was ever crazy? You think I was sane when I tried to kill my wife?”

    “Well—it was just temporary. You had a breakdown. You'd been working too hard—twenty hours a day, about. You were near the top with your band. Me, Mr. Marlin, I think you were at the top. You had it on all of them, only most of the public hadn't found out yet. They would have, if—”

    “If I hadn't slipped a cog,” I said. I thought, what a way to express going crazy, trying to kill your wife, trying to kill yourself, and losing your memory.

    Red looked at his wrist watch, then pulled up a chair and sat down facing me. He talked fast.

    “We haven't got too long, Mr. Marlin,” he said. “And I want you to pass those doctors and get out of here. You'll be all right once you get out of this joint. Your memory will come back, a little at a time—when you're in the right surroundings.”

    I shrugged. It didn't seem to matter much. I said, “Okay, brief me. It didn't work last time, but—I'll try.”

    “You're Johnny Marlin,” he said. “The Johnny Marlin. You play a mean clarinet, but that's sideline. You're the best alto sax in the business, / think. You were fourth in the Down Beat poll a year ago, but—”

    I interrupted nun. “You mean I did play clarinet and sax. Not any more, Red. Can't you get that through your head?” I hadn't meant to sound so rough about it, but my voice got out of control.

    Red didn't seem to hear me. His eyes went to his wrist watch again and then came back to me. He started talking again.

    “We got ten minutes, maybe. I wish I knew what you remember and what you don't about all I've been telling you the last month. What's your right name—I mean, before you took a professional name?”

    “John Dettman,” I said. “Born June first, nineteen-twenty, on the wrong side of the tracks. Orphaned at five. Released from orphanage at sixteen. Worked as bus boy in Cleveland and saved up enough money to buy a clarinet, and took lessons. Bought a sax a year later, and got my first job with a band at eighteen.”

    “What band?”

    “Heinie Wills'—local band in Cleveland, playing at Danceland there. Played third alto a while, then first alto. Next worked for a six-man combo called—What was it, Red? I don't remember.”

    “The Basin Streeters, Mr. Marlin. Look, do you really remember any of this, or is it just from what I've told you?”

    “Mostly from what you've told me, Red. Sometimes, I get kind of vague pictures, but it's pretty foggy. Let's get on with it. So the Basin Streeters did a lot of traveling for a while and I left them in Chi for my first stretch with a name band— Look, I think I've got that list of bands pretty well memorized. There isn't much time. Let's skip it.

    “I joined the army in forty-two—I'd have been twenty-two then. A year at Fort Billings, and then England. Kayoed by a bomb in London before I ever got to pull a trigger except on rifle range. A month in a hospital there, shipped back, six months in a mental hospital here, and let out on a P. N.” He knew as well as I did what P. N. meant, but I translated it for us. “Psycho-neurotic. Nuts. Crazy.”

    He opened his mouth to argue the point, and then decided there wasn't time.

    “So I'd saved my money,” I said, “before and during the army, and I started my own band. That would have been—late forty-four?”

    Red nodded. “Remember the list of places you've played, the names of your sidemen, what I told you about them?”

    “Pretty well,” I said. There wouldn't be time to go into that, anyway. I said, “And early in forty-seven, while I was still getting started, I got married. To Kathy Courteen. The Kathy Courteen, who owns a slice of Chicago, who's got more money than sense. She must have, if she married me. We were married June tenth, nineteen forty-seven. Why did she marry me, Red?”

    “Why shouldn't she?” he said. “You're Johnny Marlin!”

    The funny part of it is he wasn't kidding. I could tell by his voice he meant it. He thought being Johnny Marlin had really been something. I looked down at my hands. They'd got loose out of my pockets again.

    I think I knew, suddenly, why I wanted to get out of this gilt-lined nuthouse that was costing Kathy Courteen— Kathy Marlin, I mean—the price of a fur coat every week to keep me in. It wasn't because I wanted out, really. It was because I wanted to get away from the hero worship of this red-headed kid who'd gone nuts about Johnny Marlin's band, and Johnny Marlin's saxophone.

    “Have you ever seen Kathy, Red?” I asked.

    He shook his head. “I've seen pictures of her, newspaper pictures of her. She's beautiful.”

    “Even with a scar across her throat?” I asked.

    His eyes avoided mine. They went to his watch again, and he stood up quickly. “We'd better get down there,” he said.

    He went to the knobless door, opened it with a key, and politely held it open for me to precede him out into the hallway.

    That look in his eyes made me feel foolish, as always. I don't know how he did it, but Red always managed to look up at me, from a height a good three inches taller than mine.

    Then, side by side, we went down the great stairway of that lush, plush madhouse that had once been a million-dollar mansion and was now a million-dollar sanitarium with more employees than inmates.

    We went into the office and the gray-haired nurse behind the desk nodded and said, “They're ready for you.”

    “Luck, Mr. Marlin,” Red said. “I'm pulling for you.”

    So I went through the door. There were three of them, as last time.

    “Sit down please, Mr. Marlin,” Dr. Glasspiegel, the head one, said.

    They sat each at one side of the square table, leaving the fourth side and the fourth chair for me. I slid into it. I put my hands in my pockets again. I knew if I looked at them or thought about them, I might say something foolish, and then I'd be here a while again.

    Then they were asking me questions, taking turns at it. Some about my past—and Red's coaching had been good. Once or twice, but not often, I had to stall and admit my memory was hazy on a point or two. And some of the questions were about the present, and they were easy. I mean, it was easy to see what answers they wanted to those questions, and to give them.

    But it had been like this the last time, I remembered, over a month ago. And I'd missed somewhere. They hadn't let me go. Maybe, I thought, because they got too much money out of keeping me here. I didn't really think that. These men were the best in their profession.

    There was a lull in the questioning. They seemed to be waiting for something. For what? I wondered, and it came to me that the last interview had been like this, too.

    The door behind me opened, quietly, but I heard it. And I remembered—that had happened last time, too. Just as they told me I could go back to my room and they'd talk it over, someone else had come in. I'd passed him as I'd left the room.

    And, suddenly, I knew what I'd missed up on. It had been someone I'd been supposed to recognize, and I hadn't. And here was the same test again. Before I turned, I tried to remember what Red had told me about people I'd known—but there was so little physical description to it. It seemed hopeless.

    “You may return to your room now, Mr. Marlin,” Dr. Glasspiegel was saying. “We—ah—wish to discuss your case.”

    “Thanks,” I said, and stood up.

    I saw that he'd taken off his shell-rimmed glasses and was tapping them nervously on the back of his hand, which lay on the table before him. I thought, okay, so now I know the catch and next time I'll make the grade. I'll have Red get me pictures of my band and other bands I've played with and as many newspaper pictures as he can find of people I knew.

    I turned. The man in the doorway, standing there as though waiting for me to leave, was short and fat. There was a tense look in his face, even though his eyes were avoiding mine. He was looking past me, at the doctors. I tried to think fast. Who did I know that was short and—

    I took a chance. I'd had a trumpet player named Tubby Hayes.

    “Tubby!” I said.

    And hit the jackpot. His face lighted up Like a neon sign and he grinned a yard wide and stuck out his hand.

    “Johnny! Johnny, it's good to see you.” He was making like a pump handle with my arm.

    “Tubby Hayes!” I said, to let them know I knew his last name, too. “Don't tell me you're nuts, too. That why you're here?”

    He laughed, nervously. “I came to get you, Johnny. That is, uh, if—“ He looked past me.

    Dr. Glasspiegel was clearing his throat. He and the other doctors were standing now.

    “Yes,” he said, “I believe it will be all right for Mr. Martin to leave.”

    He put his hand on my shoulder. They were all standing about me now.

    “Your reactions are normal, Mr. Marlin,” he said. “Your memory is still a bit impaired but—ah—it will improve gradually. More rapidly, I believe, amid familiar surroundings than here. You—ah—have plans?”

    “No,” I said, frankly.

    “Don't overwork again. Take things easy for a while. And. . . “

    There was a lot more advice. And then signing things, and getting ready. It was almost an hour before we got into a cab, Tubby and I.

    He gave the address, and I recognized it. The Carleton. That was where I'd lived, that last year. Where Kathy still lived.

    “How's Kathy?” I asked.

    “Fine, Johnny. I guess she is. I mean—”

    “You mean what?”

    He looked a bit embarrassed. “Well—I mean I haven't seen her. She never liked us boys, Johnny. You know that. But she was square with us. You know we decided we couldn't hold together without you, Johnny, and might as well break up. Well, she paid us what we had coming—the three weeks you were on the cuff, I mean—and doubled it, a three-weeks' bonus to tide us over.”

    “The boys doing okay, Tubby?”

    “Yep, Johnny. All of them. Well—except Harry. He kind of got lost in the snow if you know what I mean.”

    “That's tough,” I said, and didn't elaborate. I didn't know whether I was supposed to know that Harry had been taking cocaine or not. And there had been two Harrys with the band; at that.

    So the band was busted up. In a way I was glad. If someone had taken over and held it together maybe there'd have been an argument about trying to get me to come back.

    “A month ago, Tubby,” I said, “they examined me at the sanitarium and I flunked. I think it was because I didn't recognize somebody. Was it you? Were you there then?”

    “You walked right by me, through the door, Johnny. You never saw me.”

    “You were there—for that purpose? Both times?”

    “Yes, Johnny. That Doc Glasspiegel suggested it. He got to know me, and to think of me, I guess, because I dropped around so often to ask about you. Why wouldn't they let me see you?”

    “Rules,” I said. “That's Glasspiegel's system, part of it. Complete isolation during the period of cure. I haven't even seen Kathy.”

    “No!” said Tubby. “They told me you couldn't have visitors, but I didn't know it went that far.” He sighed. “She sure must be head over heels for you, Johnny. What I hear, she's carried the torch.”

    “God knows why,” I said. “After I cut—”

    “Shut up,” Tubby said sharply. “You aren't to think or talk about that. Glasspiegel told me that while you were getting ready.”

    “Okay,” I said. It didn't matter. “Does Kathy know we're coming?”

    “We? I'm not going in, Johnny. I'm just riding to the door with you. No, she doesn't know. You asked the doc not to tell her, didn't you?”

    “I didn't want a reception. I just want to walk in quietly. Sure, I asked the doctor, but I thought maybe he'd warn her anyway. So she could hide the knives.”

    “Now, Johnny—”

    “Okay,” I said.

    I looked out of the window of the cab. I knew where we were and just how far from the Carleton. Funny my topography hadn't gone the way the rest of my memory had. I still knew the streets and their names, even though I couldn't recognize my best friend or my wife. The mind is a funny thing, I thought.

    “One worry you won't have,” Tubby Hayes said. “That lush brother of hers, Myron Courteen, the one that was always in your hair.”

    The red-headed interne had mentioned that Kathy had a brother. Apparently I wasn't supposed to like him. So I said, “Did someone drop him down a well?”

    “Headed west. He's a Los Angeles playboy now. Guess he finally quarreled with Kathy and she settled an allowance on him and let him go.”

    We were getting close to the Carleton—only a half-dozen blocks to go—and suddenly I realized there was a lot that I didn't know, and should know.

    “Let's have a drink, Tubby,” I said. “I—I'm not quite ready to go home yet.”

    “Sure, Johnny,” he said, and then spoke to the cab driver.

    We swung in to the curb in front of a swanky neon-plated tavern. It didn't look familiar, like the rest of the street did. Tubby saw me looking.

    “Yeah, it's new,” he said. “Been here only a few months.”

    We went in and sat at a dimly lighted bar. Tubby ordered two Scotch-and-sodas—without asking me, so I guess that's what I used to drink. I didn't remember. Anyway, it tasted all right, and I hadn't had a drink for eleven months, so even the first sip of it hit me a little.

    And when I'd drunk it all, it tasted better than all right. I looked at myself in the blue mirror back of the bar. I thought, there's always this. I can always drink myself to death—on Kathy's money. I knew I didn't have any myself because Tubby had said I was three weeks on the cuff with the band.

    We ordered a second round and I asked Tubby, “How come this Myron hasn't money of his own, if he's Kathy's brother?” He looked at me strangely. I'd been doing all right up to now. I said, “Yeah, there are things I'm still hazy about.”

    “Oh,” he said. “Well, that one's easy. Myron is worse than a black sheep for the Courteens. He's a no-good louse and an all-around stinker. He was disinherited, and Kathy got it all. But she takes care of him.”

    He took a sip of his drink and put it down again. “You know, Johnny,” he said, “none of us liked Kathy much because she was against you having the band and wanted you to herself. But we were wrong about her. She's swell. The way she sticks to her menfolk no matter what they do. Even Myron.”

    “Even me,” I said.

    “Well—she saved your life, Johnny. With blood—” He stopped abruptly. “Forget it, Johnny.”

    I finished my second drink. I said, “I'll tell you the truth, Tubby. I can't forget it-because I don't remember it. But I've got to know, before I face her. What did happen that night?”

    “Johnny, I—”

    “Tell me,” I said. “Straight.”

    He sighed. “Okay, Johnny. You'd been working close to twenty-four hours a day trying to put us over, and we'd tried to get you to slow down and so did Kathy.”

    “Skip the build-up.”

    “That night, after we played at the hotel, we rehearsed some new stuff. You acted funny, then, Johnny. You forgot stuff, and you had a headache. We made you go home early, in spite of yourself. And when you got home—well you slipped a cog, Johnny. You picked a quarrel with your wife—I don't know what you accused her of. And you went nuts. You got your razor—you always used to shave with a straight edge—and, well you tried to kill her. And then yourself.”

    “You're skipping the details,” I said. “How did she save my life?”

    “Well, Johnny, you hadn't killed her like you thought. The cut went deep on one side of her throat but—she must have been pulling away—it went light across the center and didn't get the jugular or anything. But there was a lot of blood and she fainted, and you thought she was dead, I guess, and slashed your own wrists. But she came to, and found you bleeding to death fast. Bleeding like she was, she got tourniquets on both your arms and held 'em and kept yelling until one of the servants woke up and got the Carleton house doctor. That's all, Johnny.”

    “It's enough, isn't it?” I thought a while and then I added, “Thanks, Tubby. Look, you run along and leave me. I want to think it out and sweat it out alone, and then I'll walk the rest of the way. Okay?”

    “Okay, Johnny,” he said. “You'll call me up soon?”

    “Sure,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

    “You'll be all right, Johnny?”

    “Sure. I'm all right.”

    After he left I ordered another drink. My third, and it would have to be my last, because I was really feeling them. I didn't want to go home drunk to face Kathy.

    I sat there, sipping it slowly, looking at myself in that blue mirror back of the bar. I wasn't a bad-looking guy, in a blue mirror. Only I should be dead instead of sitting there. I should have died that night eleven months ago. I'd tried to die.

    I was almost alone at the bar. There was one couple drinking martinis at the far end of it. The girl was a blonde who looked like a chorus girl. I wondered idly if Kathy was a blonde. I hadn't thought to ask anyone. If Kathy walked in here now, I thought, I wouldn't know her.

    The blonde down there picked up some change off the bar and walked over to the juke box. She put in a coin and punched some buttons, and then swayed her hips back to the bar. The juke box started playing and it was an old record and a good one—the Harry James version of the Memphis Blues. Blue and brassy stuff from the days back before Harry went commercial.

    I sat there listening, and feeling like the devil. I thought, I've got to get over it. Every time I hear stuff like that I can't go on wanting to kill myself just because I can't play any more. I'm not the only guy in the world who can't play music. And the others get by.

    My hands were lying on the bar in front of me and I tried them again, while I listened, and they wouldn't work. They wouldn't ever work again. My thumbs were okay, but the four fingers on each hand opened and closed together and not separately, as though they were webbed together.

    Maybe the Scotch was making me feel better, but— maybe, I decided—maybe it wouldn't be too bad-Then the Harry James ended and another record slid onto the turntable and started, and it was going to be blue, too. Mood Indigo. I recognized the opening bar of the introduction. I wondered idly if all the records were blues, chosen to match the blue back-bar mirrors.

    Deep blue stuff, anyway, and well handled and arranged, whoever was doing it. A few Scotches and a blue mood, and that Mood Indigo can take hold of your insides and wring them. And this waxing of it was solid, pretty solid. The brasses tossed it to the reeds and then the piano took it for a moment, backed by wire-brush stuff on the skins, and modulated it into a higher key and built it up and you knew something was coming.

    And then something came, and it was an alto sax, a sax with a tone like blue velvet, swinging high, wide and off the beat, and tossing in little arabesques of counterpoint so casually that it never seemed to leave the melody to do it. An alto sax riding high and riding hot, pouring notes like molten gold.

    I unwound my fingers from around the Scotch-and-soda glass and got up and walked across the room to the juke box. I knew already but I looked. The record playing was Number 9, and Number 9 was Mood Indigo—Johnny Martin.

    For a black second I felt that I had to stop it, that I had to smash my fist through the glass and jerk the tone arm off the record. I had to because it was doing things to me. That sound out of the past was making me remember, and I knew suddenly that the only way I could keep on wanting to live at all was not to remember.

    Maybe I would have smashed the glass. I don't know. But instead I saw the cord and plug where the juke box plugged into the wall outlet beside it. I jerked on the cord and the box went dark and silent. Then I walked out into the dusk, with the three of them staring at me—the blonde and her escort and the bartender.

    The bartender called out “Hey!” but didn't go on with it when I went on out without turning. I saw them in the mirror on the inside of the door as I opened it, a frozen tableau that slid sidewise off the mirror as the door swung open.

    I must have walked the six blocks to the Carleton, through the gathering twilight. I crossed the wide mahogany-paneled lobby to the elevator. The uniformed operator looked familiar to me—more familiar than Tubby had. At least there was an impression that I'd seen him before.

    “Good evening, Mr. Marlin,” he said, and didn't ask me what floor I wanted. But his voice sounded strange, tense, and he waited a moment, stuck his head out of the elevator and looked around before he closed the door. I got the impression that he was hoping for another passenger, that he hated to shut himself and me in that tiny closed room. But no one else came into the lobby and he slid the door shut and moved the handle. The building slid downward past us and came to rest at the eleventh floor. I stepped out into another mahogany-paneled hall and the elevator door slid shut behind me.

    It was a short hallway, on this floor, with only four doors leading to what must be quite large suites. I knew which door was mine—or I should say Kathy's. My money never paid for a suite tike that.

    It wasn't Kathy who opened the door. I knew that because it was a girl wearing a maid's uniform. And she must, I thought, be new. She looked at me blankly. “Mrs. Martin in?” I asked. “No sir. She'll be back soon, sir.” I went on in. “I'll wait,” I said. I followed her until she opened the door of a room that looked tike a library.

    “In here, please,” she said. “And may I have your name?”

    “Martin,” I said, as I walked past her. “Johnny Marlin.” She caught her breath a tittle, audibly. Then she said, “Yes, sir,” and hurried away.

    Her heels didn't click on the thick carpeting of the hall, but I could tell she was hurrying. Hurrying away from a homicidal maniac, back to the farthest reaches of the apartment, probably to the protective company of a cook who would keep a cleaver handy, once she heard the news that the mad master of the manse was back. And likely there'd be new servants, if any, tomorrow.

    I walked up and down a while, and then decided I wanted to go to my room. I thought, if I don't think about I can go there. My subconscious will know the way. And it worked; I went to my room.

    I sat on the edge of the bed a while, with my head in my hands, wondering why I'd come here. Then I looked around. It was a big room, paneled like the rest of the joint, beautifully and tastefully furnished. Little Johnny Dettman of the Cleveland slums had come a long way to have a room like that, all to himself. There was a Capehart radio-phonograph across the room from me, and a big cabinet of albums. Most of the pictures on the walls were framed photographs of bands. In a silver frame on the dresser was the picture of a woman.

    That would be Kathy, of course. I crossed over and looked at it. She was beautiful, all right, a big-eyed brunette with pouting, kissable lips. And the fog was getting thinner. I almost knew and remembered her.

    I looked a long time at that photograph, and then I put it down and went to the closet door. I opened it and there were a lot of suits in that closet, and a lot of pairs of shoes and a choice of hats. I remembered; John Dettman had worn a sweater to high school one year because he didn't have a suit coat.

    But there was something missing in that closet. The instrument cases. On the floor, there at the right, should have been two combination cases for sax and clarinet. Inside them should have been two gold-plated alto saxes and two sleek black Selmer clarinets. At the back of the closet should have been a bigger case that held a baritone sax I sometimes fooled around with at home.

    They were all gone, and I was grateful to Kathy for that. She must have understood how it would make me feel to have them around.

    I closed the door gently and opened the door next to it, the bathroom. I went in and stood looking at myself in the mirror over the wash bowl. It wasn't a blue mirror. I studied my face, and it was an ordinary face. There wasn't any reason in that mirror why anyone should love me the way my wife must. I wasn't tall and I wasn't handsome. I was just a mug who had played a lot of sax—once.

    The mirror was the door of a built-in medicine cabinet sunk into the tile wall and I opened it. Yes, all my toilet stuff was neatly laid out on the shelves of the cabinet, as though I'd never been away, or as though I'd been expected back daily. Even—and I almost took a step backwards—both my straight razors—the kind of a razor a barber uses—lay there on the bottom shelf beside the shaving mug and brush.

    Was Kathy crazy to leave them there, after what I'd used such a thing for? Had it even been one of these very razors? I could, of course, have had three of them, but— No, I remembered, there were only two, a matched pair.

    In the sanitarium I'd used an electric razor, naturally. All of them there did, even ones there for less deadly reasons than mine. And I was going to keep on using one. I'd take these and drop them down the incinerator, right now. If my wife was foolhardy enough to leave those things in a madman's room, I wasn't. How could I be sure I'd never go off the beam again?

    My hand shook a little as I picked them up and closed the mirrored door. I'd take them right now and get rid of them. I went out of the bathroom and was crossing my own room, out in the middle of it, when there was a soft tap on the door—the connecting door from Kathy's room. “Johnny—” her voice said.

    I thrust the razors out of sight into my coat pocket, and answered—I don't remember exactly what. My heart seemed to be in my throat, blocking my voice. And the door opened and Kathy came in—came in like the wind in a headlong rush that brought her into my arms. And with her face buried in my shoulder.

    “Johnny, Johnny,” she was saying, “I'm so glad you're back.”

    Then we kissed, and it lasted a long time, that kiss. But it didn't do anything to me. If I'd been in love with Kathy once, I'd have to start all over again, now. Oh, it was nice kissing her, as it would be nice kissing any beautiful woman. It wouldn't be hard to fall again. But so much easier and better, I thought, if I could push away all of the fog, if I could remember.

    “I'm glad to be back, Kathy,” I said.

    Her arms tightened about me almost convulsively. There was a big lounge chair next to the Capehart. I picked her up bodily, since she didn't want to let go of me, and crossed to the chair. I sat in it with her on my lap. After a minute she straightened up and her eyes met mine, questioningly.

    The question was, “Do you love me, Johnny?” But I couldn't meet it just then. I'd pretend, of course, when I got my bearings, and after a while my memory would come the rest of the way back—or I'd manage to love her again, instead. But just then, I ducked the question and her eyes.

    Instead, I looked at her throat and saw the scar. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared. It was a thin, long line that wouldn't have been visible much over a yard away.

    “Plastic surgery, Johnny,” she said. “It can do wonders. Another year and it won't show at all. It—it doesn't matter.” Then, as though to forestall my saying anything more about it, she said quickly, “I gave away your saxophones, Johnny. I—I figured you wouldn't want them around. The doctors say you'll never be able to—to play again.”

    I nodded. I said, “I guess it's best not to have them around.”

    “It's going to be so wonderful, Johnny. Maybe you'll hate me for saying it, but I'm—almost—glad. You know that was what came between us, your band and your playing. And it won't now, will it? You won't want to try another band—just directing and not playing—or anything foolish like that, will you, Johnny?”

    “No, Kathy,” I said.

    Nothing, I thought, would mean anything without playing. I'd been trying to forget that. I closed my eyes and tried, for a moment, not to think.

    “It'll be so wonderful, Johnny. You can do all the things I wanted you to do, and that you wouldn't. We can travel, spend our winters in Florida, and entertain. We can live on the Riviera part of the time, and we can ski in the Tyrol and play the wheels at Monte Carlo and—and everything I've wanted to do, Johnny.”

    “It's nice to have a few million,” I said. She pulled back a little and looked at me. “Johnny, you're not going to start that again, are you? Oh, Johnny, you can't—now.”

    No, I thought, I can't. Heaven knows why she wants him to be one, but little Johnny Dettman is a kept man, now a rich girl's darling. He can't make money the only way he knows how now. He couldn't even hold a job as a bus boy or dig ditches. But he'll learn to balance teacups on his knee and smile at dowagers. He'll have to. It was coming back to me now, that endless argument.

    But the argument was over now. There wasn't any longer anything to argue about.

    “Kiss me, Johnny,” Kathy said, and when I had, she said, “Let's have some music, huh? And maybe a dance—you haven't forgotten how to dance, have you, Johnny?”

    She jumped up from my lap and went to the record album cabinet.

    “Some of mine, will you, Kathy?” I asked. I thought, I might as well get used to it now, all at once. So I won't feel again, ever, as I had when I'd almost put my fist through that juke box window. “Of course, Johnny.”

    She took them from one of the albums, half A dozen of them, and put them on the Capehart. The first one started, and it was a silly gay tune we'd once waxed—“Chickery chick, cha la, cha la . . .” And she came back, holding out her hands to me to get up and dance, and I did, and I still knew how to dance.

    And we danced over to the French doors that led to the balcony and opened them, and out onto the marble floor of the little railed balcony, into the cool darkness of the evening, with a full moon riding high in the sky overhead.

    Chickery chick— a nice tune, if a silly tune. No vocal, of course. We'd never gone for them. Not gut-bucket stuff, either, but smooth rhythm, with a beat. And a high-riding alto sax, smooth as silk.

    And I was remembering the argument. It had been one, a vicious one. Musician versus playboy as my career. I was remembering Kathy now, and suddenly tried not to. Maybe it would be better to forget all that bitterness, the quarreling and the overwork and everything that led up to the blankness of the breakdown.

    But our feet moved smoothly on the marble. Kathy danced well. And the record ended.

    “It's going to be wonderful, Johnny,” she whispered, “having you all to myself . . . You're mine now, Johnny.”

    “Yes,” I said. I thought, I've got to be. The second record started, and was a contrast. A number as blue as Mood Indigo, and dirtier. St. James Infirmary, as waxed by Johnny Marlin and his orchestra. And I remembered the hot day in the studio when we'd waxed it. Again no vocal, but as we started dancing again, the words ran through my mind with the liquid gold of the alto sax I'd once played.

    “I went down to St. James Infirmary . . . Saw my baby there . . . Stretched on a long white table . . . So sweet, so cold, so—”

    I jerked away from her, ran inside and shut off the phonograph. I caught sight of my face in the mirror over the dresser as I passed. It was white as a corpse's face. I went back to the balcony. Kathy still stood there—she hadn't moved.

    “Johnny, what—?”

    “That tune,” I said. “Those words. I remember, Kathy. I remember that night. I didn't do it.”

    I felt weak. I leaned back against the wall behind me. Kathy came closer.

    “Johnny—what do you mean?”

    “I remember,” I said. “I walked in, and you were lying there—with blood all over your throat and your dress— when I came in the room. I don't remember after that—but that's what must have knocked me off my base, after everything else. That's when I went crazy, not before.”

    “Johnny—you're wrong—” The weakness was gone now. I stood straighter. “Your brother,” I said. “He hated you because you ran his life, like you wanted to run mine, because you had the money he thought should be his, and you doled it out to him and ran him. Sure, he hated you. I remember him now. Kathy, I remember. That was about the time he got past liquor and was playing with dope. Heroin, wasn't it? And that night he must have come in, sky-high and murderous, before I did. And tried to kill you, and must have thought he did, and run. It must have been just before I came in.”

    “Johnny, please-you're wrong—”

    “You came to, after I keeled over,” I said. “It—it sounds incredible, Kathy, but it had to be that way. And, Kathy, that cold mind of yours saw a way to get everything it wanted. To protect your brother, and to get me, the way you wanted me. It was perfect, Kathy. Fix me so I'd never play again, and at the same time put me in a spot where I'd be tied to you forever because I'd think I tried to kill you.”

    I said, “You get your way, don't you, Kathy? At any cost. But you didn't want me to die. I'll bet you had those tourniquets ready before you slashed my wrists.”

    She was beautiful, standing there in the moonlight. She stood there tall and straight, and she came the step between us and put her soft arms around me.

    “I don't see, though,” I said, “how you could have known I wouldn't remember what really— Wait, I can see how you thought that. I had a drink or two on the way home. You smelled the liquor on me and thought I'd come home drunk, dead drunk. And I always drew a blank when I got drunk. That night I wasn't but the shock and the breakdown did even more to me. Damn you, Kathy.”

    “But, Johnny, don't I win?”

    She was beautiful, smiling, leaning back to look up into my face. Yes, she'd won. So sweet, so cold, so bare. So bare her throat that in the moonlight I could see the faint scar, the dotted line. And one of my crippled hands, in my pocket, fumbled open one of the razors, brought it out of my pocket and up and across.

    Town Wanted

    ON MY WAY IN, I looked into the back room. The boys were there.

    Alderman Higgins had a pile of blue chips in front of him and was trying to keep his greasy little mug from looking sap-happy.

    Lieutenant Grange was there too. He was half tight. He had beer spots on the front of his blue uniform shirt. His hand shook when he picked up the stem.

    The alderman looked up and said, “Hi, Jimmy. How's tricks?”

    I gave him a grin and went on upstairs. I pushed on into the boss's office without knocking.

    He looked at me sort of queerly. “Everything go okay?”

    “They'll find him when the lake dries up,” I told him. “We won't be around then.”

    “You covered all the angles, Jimmy?”

    “All what angles?” I asked him. “Nobody's going to investigate. A guy won't pay his protection, and Annie Doesn't Live Here Any More. Now the rest of them will lay it on the line.”

    He took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his bald spot. You could see the guy was squeamish. That's no way to handle things. It would be different, I figured, when I took over.

    I sat down and lighted a cigarette. “Listen,” I said, “this town is worth twice the take we're getting. Who do we move in on next?”

    “We're letting it ride a while, Jimmy. Things are hot.”

    I got up and started for the door.

    He said softly, “Sit down, Jimmy.”

    I didn't, but I went back and stood in front of him.

    “Well?” I asked.

    “About the boys you've lined up to buck me, Jimmy. When do you think you're going to take over?”

    I guess I'd underestimated him. You can't run rackets and be a shlemiel.

    I sat down. “I don't get you, boss,” I stalled.

    “Let's settle this, Jimmy,” he said. There were beads of sweat on his bald spot again and he wiped them off. I kept my yap shut and looked at him. It was his move.

    “You're a good guy, Jimmy,” he went on. “You've been a big help to me.”

    There wasn't any malarkey in that. But he was just winding up and I sat back and waited to see what he was going to pitch.

    “But six months ago I saw it couldn't last, Jimmy. You got big ideas. This burg isn't large enough for you to stay in second spot. Right?”

    I waited for him to go on.

    “You think you've bought four of the boys. You've got only two. The other two leveled with me. They're set to gum your works.”

    That was bad listening. He did know; four was right. And I didn't know which two ratted. All right, I thought, this is showdown.

    “Go on,” I said. “I'm listening.”

    “You're too ambitious for me, Jimmy. I was satisfied to run the slot machines and the joints. Maybe just a little on the protection societies. You want to run the town. You want to collect taxes. And your trigger finger's too jittery, Jimmy. I don't like killing, except when I have to.”

    “Lay off the character reading,” I told him. “You've called the shots. Add it up.”

    “You could kill me now, maybe. But you wouldn't get away with it. And you're too smart, Jimmy, to stick your neck out unless it's going to get you something. I'm counting on that. I'm ready for you. You wouldn't get out of here alive. If you did, you'd have to blow. And if you blow, what's it get you?”

    I walked over to the window and looked out. He wouldn't draw on me, I knew. Hell, why should he? He held the cards; I could see that now. He'd wised up a little too soon for me.

    “You've been a big help, Jimmy,” he went on. “I want to break fair with you. In the last year I've made more dough than I'd have made without you. I want you to leave. But I'll give you a stake. Pick a town of your own and work it. Leave me this one.”

    I kept looking out the window. I knew why he wouldn't bump me. There'd been too many killings; the cops were beginning to take it on the chin. The boss wanted to pull in his horns.

    And from his point of view, I could see it all right. He could even drop the protectives. The slots, the joints, the semi-legit stuff paid enough to suit him. He'd rather play safe for a small take. I'm not that way.

    I turned and faced him. After all, why not another town? I could do it. If I picked one that was ripe.

    “How much?” I asked him.

    He named a figure.

    And that was that.

    * * *

    You can see now why I'm in Miami. I figured I could use a vacation before I picked out a spot. A swell suite, overlooking the sea. Women, parties, roulette and all that. You can make a big splash here if you're willing to blow a few grand.

    But I'm getting restless. I'd rather see it coming in.

    I know how I'll start, when I've picked my town. I'll take a tavern for a front. Then I find which politicians are on the auction block. I'll see that the others go out. Money can swing that. Then I bring in torpedoes and start to work.

    Coin machines are the quickest dough. You pyramid that into bookie joints, sporting houses and the rest; and when you're strong enough, the protective societies—where the merchants pay you to let them alone. That's the big dough racket, if you're not squeamish. It's big dough because you don't have to put out anything for what you take in.

    If you know the angles and work it so you don't have to start liquidating the opposition until you've got control, it's a cinch. And I know the angles.

    Plenty of towns would do, but some are easier than others. If you pick one that's ripe, it goes quicker. If you can buy enough of the boys in office you won't have to get the others out.

    I'm looking them over. I'm tired of loafing.

    How's your town? I can tell if you answer me a question. Last time there was an election did you really read up both sides of things, with the idea of keeping things on the up and up? Or did you go for the guy with the biggest posters? Huh? You say you didn't even get to the polls at all? Pal, that's the town I'm looking for. I'll be seeing you.

    The Greatest Poem Ever Written

    RUPERT GARDIN SAID, “Ummm.” It was the only uneloquent statement he'd made in the half-hour I'd been interviewing him. But the question I'd just asked him had been a stickler.

    I remember how he inclined his huge handsome head as though giving deep thought to what he would say next. But when he spoke, it was merely to echo part of my question. “The greatest poem ever written?”

    I narrowed it down for him. “The greatest poem written originally in English,” I said. “Let's eliminate other languages and even translations.”

    He nodded gravely. And thought again; his eyes closed.

    I remember the awe I felt, just looking at him. I was just a cub then, and Rupert Gardin—dean of American literary critics—was my first really important interview. We sat in his hotel room, just the two of us, on a hot summer day. On the table beside him was a pitcher of iced tea, and we each held a glass. I remember the cool, smooth feel of mine.

    “The greatest poem,” he murmured.

    I remembered something I had forgotten, that he himself had published poetry. I added quickly, “Aside from your own poetry, Mr. Gardin.”

    He waved an impatient hand. “Mine? What I have written, young man, was writ in water, in blowing sand. As ephemeral as the smoke-writing of our aborigines.”

    He sighed deeply. He said, “It would be the poem by Carl Marney.”

    It was my turn to think, and it didn't do me any good. I said, “I'm afraid I don't know it, or him.”

    “I doubted that you would know his name, but it was fairly well-known for a while in the twenties. He was a very wealthy young man. His father had made a great fortune in real estate and had died while young Marney was in his teens, leaving several millions in trust. He was the only heir—an only child, and his mother had died while he was an infant.

    “He went to Harvard, then to Oxford—Balliol, I believe. He'd written a volume of verse—nice stuff, very sensitive, but not up to what he was to do later. More tea?”

    I nodded and held out my glass. Gardin went on talking even as he poured it. “At twenty-three, Carl Marney had everything. Youth, talent, a magnificent education, health-he was as strong as an ox—money, love, anything you can name. He had love of life, love of adventure.

    “He had the love of a woman, too, and he was mad about her. She was the daughter of an English peer; he'd met her while he was at Oxford. He was engaged to her and they were to be married the next year, when she would be twenty-one. Oh, Marney knew that the girl's father, the earl, wanted an American fortune, but the girl really loved him and that was all that mattered. He was head over heels in love with her, and if they'd married he could have spared a million to her father and never felt it.”

    “They didn't marry, though?”

    “No. There was almost a year to wait before she'd be twenty-one, and they'd definitely decided to wait till then. He had come back to America—partly, I gather, because he didn't trust himself near her and he was young and foolish; he didn't want to touch her until they were married.”

    “Was that foolish?” I asked.

    “Yes. Very. He had a year to wait, and he turned to another love for solace. His love of adventure. He bought himself a beautiful little one-man sailboat in Boston and started out to sail around the Horn.”

    “The Horn?”

    “Cape Horn, the tip of South America. His destination was San Francisco, the long way around, but he never got there. He was shipwrecked on a little island off Chile, a week after he had rounded the Horn. It was an uninhabited island not much bigger than a city block, and he was on it nine years.”

    “Nine years?” I said, “and he stayed sane?”

    “No. He went quite off his rocker toward the last; he's in an asylum now, if he's still alive . . . “

    I got the picture as he talked. First, of course, the shipwreck at night in a storm. Running before that storm into pitch darkness, Carl Marney's little yacht had taken the rocky south coast of the little island he hadn't known was there head-on, and it had taken the bottom out of his boat. The impact of it had thrown him out of the cockpit and into the shallow water; it was a sand beach with rocks sticking up out of the sand, and his boat was hung up on one of those rocks.

    Fighting the night and the storm, knowing that his boat would probably break up before the storm was over, he salvaged what he could off the boat—provisions, water (it turned out later that didn't matter; there was a spring on the island), his radio set, log and papers—and carried them to higher ground. And then there was nothing more to do but to sit beside them, shivering in the stormy dark until morning.

    And when dawn came, his boat was gone and he could see where he was. That is, he could see that he was on a tiny island. By roughest reckoning he knew it was a hundred miles at least, possibly two hundred, off the coast of Chile.

    And it wasn't in a steamer lane; he wasn't sure of that at first, but he became sure as the months went by, as the years went by. When a steamer did come, it was too late. Nine years on an almost barren postage stamp of an island, alone, is too long. But he survived.

    Oh, survival wasn't hard, at first. He had the supplies he'd taken off the boat, enough to eat for a month or so. His first major worry was shelter. There weren't any trees on the island, so he couldn't build himself a shack. He tried to weave something out of bushes, but he didn't have the knack. He finally dug himself a shallow cave in the little hummock—you couldn't call it a hill—in the middle of the island. It wasn't much shelter, but it was something.

    Food—after his supplies ran out—meant fish, when he could catch some. Fish for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Can a man live nine years on fish? Carl Marney did. When he could catch them, he ate fish; when he couldn't he went hungry. For the first six or seven years he cooked them and then ate them. The last two or three years he just ate them. It wasn't too bad for a while. For the first few months he had things to keep him busy. And he had hope. He kept a beacon fire going at night on top of the hummock as a signal to ships. But then he realized that there wasn't going to be enough brush on the tiny island to keep that fire going, and he had to stop. Besides, there weren't any ships. He didn't see one for nine years. Whatever ships rounded the Horn went well inside or outside of that island.

    There were storms, frequent rains. There was baking heat from the sun and there was intense cold. He had little in the way of creature comfort.

    But—the poem. He had a keen mind and a marvelous education. When he'd been on the island a few months—long enough to realize that it might be a long time before he was rescued—it came to him that he must do something to keep from going mad—at least to keep from going dull and stale and animal-like.

    He had writing materials from the boat, and he set about writing a poem. Not poems, he decided, but one great poem, one that would epitomize—well, the love of life that he felt so strongly, that he felt even more strongly in his temporary isolation and deprivation. It was to be something along the lines of the Rubaiyat, but without the gentle melancholy and bitter undertone of that hedonistic masterwork. It was to be rhymed and metrical, in quatrains.

    You must remember, you must keep in mind, that he had time. Even the few things—mostly fishing—that he could find to do did not occupy his mind while they occupied his body. He had the mind, the ability, the background, the sensitivity, everything that a poet needs to write a great poem, and he had time, all the time there was. He could spend a day, a week, a month if necessary, polishing a single quatrain. He could find the right word, then a better one, then the perfect one— the one that combined perfection of sound with perfection of imagery.

    He worked on that poem almost nine years, and he finished it.

    But meanwhile, so that you can understand the development and evolution of that poem, you must understand some other things that were happening.

    He had the radio—a receiving set only; the boat had been too small a one for the two-way sets that existed in the nineteen twenties—and it still worked after he had rigged it up in the cave. He had a considerable knowledge of chemistry and was able to find certain mineral substances that enabled him to keep his batteries charged, after a fashion. He couldn't, of course, have repaired a tube had one blown out or worn out, so he limited himself to half an hour's use of the radio out of every twenty-four. And then only late at night in clear weather when the hearing was good.

    He couldn't waste the precious life of those tubes on entertainment; he concentrated his listening on the news programs that kept him abreast of what was going on in the world. He learned of his own disappearance at sea and the brief search that was conducted for him—with planes flying along the coast line of Cape Horn and a bit each side of it, hundreds of miles away.

    A year and a half later he learned that his fiancee—the daughter of the earl, had married a prominent American career diplomat. At least, he reflected bitterly, she'd been true to America.

    That news had thrown him into a bit of a tailspin; he'd torn up most of the twenty-odd quatrains he'd written of the poem, and, salvaging a line here and there, had written them over again. There was a touch of cynicism in them. The touch was more than a touch; it was growing into bitterness by the time—late in 1929—when he learned of the stock market crash. He knew then that he wasn't rich anymore—if he ever got back. When he learned, a few months later, that the man who had had charge of the Marney estate in his absence had joined the procession of brokers who were walking on air out of skyscraper windows, he knew that he wasn't even solvent any more. Literally, he wouldn't have a penny.

    That was when he'd been there three years. The prospect of poverty, though, didn't bother him. as much as the loss of his sweetheart had. Either was bad enough, but he knew he was equipped to earn a living—even in the deep depression the radio told him about—and he knew that, even as a penniless young wage earner, he might find another woman whom he might love and who might love him. All wasn't lost.

    He managed to keep that note of hope shining through the changing form of the poem, through the bitterness that had become its dominating motif. It wasn't the same poem at all, now after three years, that it had started out to be, but it was still a great poem, maybe a greater one because it was a truer one, a more realistic reflection. It had changed in form to free verse; the artificiality of rhyme and meter had palled upon him. He concentrated on cadence, working, polishing, perfecting—while the days and nights fell upon him like the drip of drops in the water torture.

    He'd given up hope, now after four years, of ever being rescued. If no ship came this way in four years, probably none would come in forty.

    His radio finally died a natural death, and he lost all touch with the outer world.

    But he still kept working on the poem, the great poem. Not now, because he hoped to gain fame or recognition from it. It had become an end in itself, a thing that kept him going, that gave meaning to the cold and hunger and loneliness, gave expression to them.

    His health and strength were going now. You wouldn't have recognized him from one of the newspaper pictures that had appeared so often five years before. He was emaciated and he suffered terribly from scurvy as a result of his all-fish (and not too much of that) diet. He tried eating leaves of the bushes on the island, seaweed, but everything he tried had poisoned him a little. He suffered wracking pain from dysentery almost constantly. After five years on the island, he was twenty-eight, and looked nearer fifty.

    But he survived.

    The poem, the great thing that he was doing—if only for himself—kept him going and kept him alive. He'd decided on a shorter form, a strictly limited length and was trying to pack into that everything that he felt. Concentration. The bitter couplet. Yes, he'd gone back to rhyme and meter for a while. A poem—he had it finished almost to his satisfaction — of forty-eight lines, twenty-four cruel couplets that tried to wring out the last drop of venom from a poisonous world.

    It was six years then. Maybe by then he was going a little mad—except about the poem; he remained sane to the end about that.

    He kept working on it, improving it rather than lengthening it. His supply of paper was running low now, so he did his work on sand with a stick until he was satisfied— temporarily—and then and only then would he transfer the written word to one of his remaining sheets of paper. Always, when he revised, he destroyed what he had written before; he didn't want the ghosts of former versions to haunt him; he wanted only the shining perfection of the best he had done to date.

    It was seven or eight years—he'd rather lost track of time by then—when it came to him that he no longer wanted a boat to come. Never, now, would he want to go back and face again people he once knew. Partly because of the tropical diseases, you see. He was thirty or thirty-one then, and he was an old man, a slightly cracked old man, and a hideous one. He'd lost his teeth and his bald skull was cracked like pottery from the sun and his body was almost a skeleton, a naked skeleton. All his clothing had long since worn out. His skin was like rotting leather. He weighed about eighty pounds—and he was a tall man.

    He'd lost his hair, his teeth—other things—but his mind went last. It went after his strength and his love of life and his hope. It concentrated on the poem and kept itself alive.

    Distillation. It had come down to that now. He cut and pruned to combine two couplets into one; then to put the very essence of everything into a single quatrain, a master quatrain that would be the key to all expression. Slowly starving, dying, going mad, he survived by trying it in a hundred forms, none of them quite perfect.

    A couplet, perhaps. He tried that, worked on it, and tore up the quatrains when he had almost what he wanted. Distilling, always, down to the drop of essence.

    Yes, the ship finally came, but he had finished his poem first. He had finally discarded the couplet form, Rupert Gardin told me, as he refilled my glass with iced tea, just a short while before the ship came and rescued him.

    He'd distilled it at last to the final drop, the ultimate essence, the single syllable. He had it! Perfect at last, the expression of all that had happened to him. He shouted it in a high, cracked voice at the sailors in the dinghy as they neared the shore. He shouted it often, thereafter, but never any other word. Only the great poem that he and nine horrible years had made.

    And Rupert Gardin, the dean of American critics, leaned close to me ha his hotel room and recited the poem, the untitled poem, a single unprintable word of four letters.

    I still remember, after these years, the thrill I got when I went back to the office, wrote the story, and turned it in. I still remember waiting to see it in print, knowing for sure it would get me my first by-line, and I remember the disappointment and the anger when I came across the story the next day, just the story of the interview buried on page eight and without a by-line. There wasn't any mention of Carl Marney.

    I headed for the office of the city editor, stood fuming at his desk, and when he looked up I told him I'd quit.

    He grinned a little. He said, “Go out and have a beer and then come back and I'll hire you again, maybe. While you're there figure out how Rupert Gardin knew what happened on the island if Marney never said anything after he came off except his poem. Gardin took you for a ride, kid.”

    I said all I had to say without even opening my mouth, and the city ed chuckled. He said, “Get the hell out of here and have that beer,” and I did.

    Over the beer, while the redness went out of my face, I repeated Carl Marney's poem softly to myself, and suddenly I laughed out loud and the bartender turned and looked at me. And I think that with that laugh I quit being a cub and became a reporter, because I've never believed anything since—except the fundamental validity of Carl Marney's poem.

    Little Apple Hard to Peel

    THE APPEL FAMILY moved to our part of the country when John Appel was ten or eleven years old. He was the only kid.

    New kids didn't move in very often and, naturally, some of us took considerable interest in finding out whether we could lick him. He liked to fight, we found, and he was good at it.

    His name being John Appel, Jonathan Apple was the nickname we picked at first. For some reason, it made him mad, and there wasn't any trouble getting him to fight. He fought with a cold calmness that was unusual for a boy. He never seemed to see red, like the rest of us.

    He was small for his age, but tough and muscular. He could lick, we soon learned, any kid his own size. And he could lick most kids who were bigger. He licked me twice, and Les Willis three or four times.

    Les Willis, my best pal, was a little slow on the up-take. It took him that many lickings to find out that the Appel kid was too much for him.

    It was one of the bigger kids, a few grades above us in school, that first called him “Little Apple Hard to Peel.” Appel liked that nickname. He used to brag about it, in fact. Of course nobody called him that much, because it was too long.

    The first incident occurred when he'd been around only a week. He knocked a chip off Nick Burton's shoulder. Nick was only a few months older than Appel, but Nick was big for his age. Appel fought like a devil but he just couldn't handle Nick. After the fight was over, he got up and we dusted him off and he wanted to shake hands with Nick. That shaking hands after a fight was new to us; usually we kids stayed mad a few hours and tapered off, sort of.

    It was the next day at school that Nick sat on the nail and had to go home. He was in bed three days, and limped quite a while. Somebody'd driven a long, thin nail up through the bottom of his seat, so it stuck out almost two inches.

    We kids had often played tricks like that with thumb tacks, but this was something else again. It wasn't any joke. It was obviously meant to hurt badly, and it succeeded. There was quite an inquisition about it, but no one ever found out who had put it there. Somebody, though, had made a secret trip to the schoolhouse at night. Nick sat on it first thing in the morning after the bell rang.

    Those of us who knew about the fight Nick had had with Appel wondered a little, but that was all. It didn't seem possible a kid would do something as cruel as that.

    Then there was that dirty drawing on the blackboard. Not the usual comic caricature of a teacher that kids draw, but something pretty smutty. There wasn't any name signed to it, but it was done in yellow chalk, and Les Willis was the only one in the class who had any yellow chalk. The teacher believed Les' denial, finally, or at least she said she did.

    But Les failed that year in school and it put him a year behind the rest of us. He'd been sort of on the borderline of keeping up before; he might have made it, if it hadn't been for that. The drawing on the board happened a couple days after Les beat Appel in the tryouts for pitcher for our class team. Appel played second base. But next term he pitched, because Les was still back in the same grade and the rest of us had moved on.

    There was another thing. Appel never liked dogs, and dogs didn't take to him at all. There was the time Bud Sperry's little fox terrier, Sport, bit Appel in the leg. Two weeks later Sport died. He died in one of the most painful ways a dog can die. Someone had fed him, not poison, but a sponge pressed tight and coated with meat grease to make a dog gobble it quick. Then that sponge swells up inside the dog. Bud Sperry's uncle was a vet, and when Sport's agony started, Bud took him to his uncle. His uncle chloroformed the dog, and then cut him open—on a hunch —and found the sponge.

    Bud Sperry would have killed whoever gave Sport that 'sponge, if he'd known for sure. But there wasn't ever any proof.. Not then, or later.

    I think it would have been a good thing if Bud Sperry had killed Appel then, proof or no proof. That's a hell of a thing for a sheriff to say. But other things happened, after that, and not always to dogs.

    Appel was a good-looking kid about the time we graduated from high school. He was still small, but he was stocky. Despite his size, he'd made a good football player, and he had curly hair, and the girls were crazy about him.

    Les Willis had quit high school in his second year and was helping his folks on their farm, just outside of town. The Appel place was just down the road. John Appel wasn't doing anything then, just living with his folks and “looking around.” You got the idea, from the way he put it, that there wasn't anything in town good enough for him to do, but that he was looking anyway.

    And I was running errands for the sheriff's office, as a sort of quasi-deputy with the promise of a deputy's badge when I got “a couple of years older and a little less fat in the head.”

    We were all about eighteen then. Les Willis and John Appel were both in love with Lucinda Howard. She seemed to prefer Les at first, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that she was ever really in love with him.

    But Les was starry-eyed about Lucinda. It was serious with Les all right, the kind of love that happens only once in a lifetime and then only to someone who is as fine and clean a fellow as Les was. Les was the best friend I ever had, and he was a prince of a chap. But he didn't have any glamor. He didn't have curly hair and he wasn't a football player, and he worked pretty hard and didn't have as much time off to take her places.

    And besides, after the accident to his foot, he limped. And that meant he couldn't dance, and Lucinda loved to dance. Appel took her out after that and had the field pretty much to himself. Lucinda fell in love with him.

    Les's foot—well, it could have been an accident. He was in the habit of taking a morning plunge in good weather, in a creek half a mile back of the Willis farmhouse. He always ran along the path, both ways, barefoot and in just his swimming trunks, and one morning he stepped into a trap along the path. Just a small trap, but barefoot as he was, it cost him two toes and laid him up for quite a while. It was during that time that John Appel made the most progress with Lucinda.

    Lucinda fell for him hard. I know that she thought of herself as being engaged to him, although the engagement was never announced.

    Then, suddenly, John Appel wasn't around any more, and we learned that he'd taken the night train and bought a ticket for Chicago, and had taken all his clothes and things with him. All but Lucinda; he hadn't even said good-by to her. And he hadn't left a forwarding address, even with his folks. We didn't know that till later, though.

    It didn't make much of a splash. Nobody thought much about it except maybe to wonder whether Lucinda was telling the truth. She said, with her head up and her chin firm, that she'd heard from him by mail and he'd been offered a job that was too good to turn down. Bud Sperry's father was postmaster then and he didn't remember that Lucinda Howard had got any letter from Chicago. And he'd have noticed.

    A week later they fished Lucinda Howard's body out of the river. Yes, she'd been going to have a child. She didn't leave a note or anything blaming anybody. There still wasn't any provable charge against Appel.

    Les took it hard. Seemed to break him all up inside. He was just back from the hospital then; an infection had set in after his toes were amputated and almost healed. He'd been waiting a decent time for Lucinda to get over John and for him to be able to get around again, before he called on her. Yes, Les would have wanted to marry her anyway. He was that kind of a guy. And Lucinda had meant the whole world to him, and now there wasn't any world left. If he hadn't had a good strong religion, he might have followed Lucinda.

    Nobody in town heard of John Appel for a long time after that. Twelve years, in fact. I was sheriff then; at thirty I was about the youngest sheriff in the state. Couple of plainclothes men were down from Chicago, checking up on a pennyweighter who'd been down our way and gypped old Angstrom, our jeweler, out of some rings.

    I said to them, “Ever hear of a guy named Appel, John Appel? Local boy moved up your way. I was wondering £ he made good in the big city.”

    One of them whistled and shoved his hat back on his head. “Don't tell me Appel came from this freckle on the map.”

    “I've watched the circulars,” I told him. “Never saw his name or his mug. Tell me about him.”

    “Runs a chunk of the north side of Chi. If it's the same Appel. Short, stocky, about your age?”

    I nodded.

    The Chicago detective grinned. “They call him Little Apple Hard to Peel.”

    “Harry Weston gave him that nickname,” I told him. “Nearly twenty years ago. He liked it, and I reckon he started it himself where he is now. Used to kind of brag about it.”

    The Chicago man's eyes narrowed. “Ain't no charge from back here we could make stick, is there? My God, if there is—”

    I shook my head slowly.

    He sighed. “That was hoping for too much. Listen, there ain't a charge on the blotter against him. Just if there's somebody he don't like or that double-crosses him, something happens to them, that's all. Something not nice. They don't even die clean, mostly, if you understand what I mean.”

    “That's the guy,” I assured him,.

    “He's too smart. Even makes out his income tax returns right. Or right enough so they can't prove otherwise. He's a legitimate business man. Runs a chain of laundries!” He snorted.

    “Officially,” I said. “Outside of that?” His face wasn't nice to look at. There are square cops even from Chicago. “When someone thinks of something dirtier than peddling dope to school kids,” he said, “John Appel will back them. But if there's trouble they'll take the rap, not him.”

    “That his line?”

    “I couldn't prove it, but I'd say it was one of them.” The Chi men left town an hour or so later. I didn't say anything about that conversation to Les because it would have opened an old wound.

    One thing did occur to me though. Lucinda Howard might have been worse off than she was. Appel might have taken her with him.

    Les Willis had, in a way, gathered up the pieces of his life. He'd been pretty no-count for a couple of years, and then he had the full responsibility of the farm put on his shoulders when his pa got sick, and he plunged in and worked like a horse and the work seemed to do him good. He got to looking all right again, and he acted and thought all right, too, except there was a sort of blank in one part of his mind, as though he'd built up a wall there to shut off one corner. His love for Lucinda Howard was still there, I guess, in that walled-off corner.

    I think Mary Burton understood that part of him better than any of the rest of us. Mary was Nick Burton's kid sister, and she'd loved Les in a quiet sort of way, all through school. He'd dated her a few times when Lucinda had turned him down, but he'd never taken her seriously. But after his parents died, I guess it was lonesomeness made Les turn to her again. As a friend, at first. But Mary was wise, and she understood him.

    For a couple of years she was just a good pal to him. Then Les discovered that she was more than that, and they were married. He was twenty-five, then, and Lucinda had been dead six years. Mary was twenty-two.

    After their honeymoon Les fixed up the old farmhouse until you wouldn't have known it was the same place, and pretty soon he was painting one room light blue for a nursery. They had twins a year after they were married. A boy and a girl, Dottie and Bill. For Les and Mary the sun rose and set in those kids.

    The years rolled along, and the twins were in school, then in high school. No one here thought of John Appel much, except when his parents died, almost at the same time, and our local lawyer sent a routine advertisement for him to the Chicago papers.

    A lawyer from Chicago came down, then, with a power of attorney from John, and took over the farm. It wasn't put up for sale, nor was it used. A check for taxes came each year, and the fields lay fallow and the yard was choked with weeds. Plow and harrow rusted in a rotting barn.

    Occasionally a bit of news would reach us from Chicago. Appel was tangling in this racket or that Then there was a rumor that he was dipping into politics; another that he'd sold out all but his gambling interests and was concentrating on that and extending his territory.

    Then, utterly without warning, John Appel returned. He dropped off the afternoon train, alone, as casually as though he were returning after a week-end trip. It had been twenty years.

    He walked over to where I was standing talking to the station master and said, “Hello, Barney,” just as casually as that.

    He still had the same curly blond hair, and he looked scarcely any older than when I'd seen him last. He was heavier, but he hadn't picked up a paunch. His skin was tanned, and he looked as fit as an athlete.

    Then he noticed the badge I was wearing and grinned, “Glad to see you've made good,” he said. He was wearing a suit that had cost at least two hundred dollars, and there was a three-carat diamond ring on his left hand.

    “Coming back to show off to the home folks?” I asked casually. “Or hiding out from someone?”

    “You name it.”

    “For long?” I asked. “And if you feel that way about it, consider the question official.”

    But I'd noticed that the boys were unloading several trunks from the baggage car, and Appel was the only passenger who'd got off the train, so I didn't need the answer to my question.

    He took out a platinum cigarette case. I refused, but he lighted one himself. He blew a long exhalation of smoke through his nostrils before he answered, if one could call it an answer. He said, “Do you always welcome people so enthusiastically? Don't tell me you've been hearing stories about me?”

    “We don't want you here,” I told him.

    He grinned again, apparently genuinely amused this time.

    “Don't tell me that's official, Barney. If it is, I'd be curious to know the charge.”

    He turned away before I could reply. Which was just as well, because there wasn't any answer. He was a property-holder, and there wasn't a legal reason I could think of for taking official action. There wasn't a proven charge against him here; probably none in Chicago or elsewhere. But I'd let him know where he stood with me, and I wasn't sorry.

    Then I heard footsteps coming around the wooden platform from the other side of the station, and for a moment my heart slowed. For those footsteps limped; they were made by Les Willis.

    I thought for a moment he knew that Appel was here and that this was why he had come. Then I saw his clear eyes as he walked toward me and I realized he'd come to the station on some other errand.

    I put my hand on his arm and said, “Take it easy, Les.”

    He looked at me, puzzled, and then before I could explain he turned and flashed a glance up and down the platform as though he'd guessed. And he saw John Appel.

    I was holding tightly to his arm and I felt him start to tremble. I didn't look at his face; I thought it best not to, just then. That tremble wasn't because of fear.

    I spoke softly. “Take it easy, Les, I know how you feel, but there's nothing we can do. Nothing. There's not a scrap of evidence against him on any charge.”

    He didn't answer. I don't know whether he heard me or not. I said, “Go home, Les. Keep away from him. He won't stay long. Keep clear of him—for Dottie's and Bill's sake! He's a killer now, Les!”

    I guess it was the mention of the twins that brought him back. But he said, “He was a killer even when he was a kid, Barney.”

    I knew what Les meant. To me, too, those things that had happened more than twenty years ago seemed worse to us than the real murders Appel had undoubtedly committed since. Possibly because we were closer to them. Those things had happened to people we knew and loved. They weren't gangster stuff.

    I heard Appel crossing toward where we stood. I could tell by Les' face that he was coming too. I said, “Les, for God's sake, go—”

    He said, quietly, “I'm all right, Barney. Don't worry.” His voice was so calm that I took my hand off his arm. Appel said smoothly, “If it isn't Willis. You look older, Les. Golly, you look twenty years older'n Barney here. Been misbehaving?”

    Les Willis showed better sense than I'd dared to hope he would show. He didn't answer, but turned on his heel and started off.

    Appel's face got ugly at that. I think if Les had got mad and cussed him out, it would have amused him, but not speaking at all managed to get under his hide. He said, loud enough so Les would hear it, “Barney, there's gratitude for you. I go off and leave him a clear field to get that little tramp he was in love with—what was her name? Lucinda something—and here he—”

    Thinking it over afterwards, I guess Appel had never heard what had happened to Lucinda Howard. He was merely trying to bait Les into an argument. Otherwise he would have been prepared for what happened.

    Les was a few steps beyond me, he whirled and was back past me almost in a single leap, so suddenly that I wasn't able to stop him. His fist caught Appel flush on the mouth, and Appel went down—not knocked out, but sun-ply carried over backward by the momentum of the blow. He started to scramble to his feet. Les, his face filled with cold fury, stood over him, fists clenched. I got between them.

    “Les,” I said sharply, and took him by the arm and shook him. “Get out of here. Remember Dottie and Bill— your kids. You can't start trouble! For their sakes!”

    I shook him harder. He didn't answer, but he turned and walked off like a man in a daze. His footsteps limped across the platform toward the steps.

    I whirled on Appel. And I had my hand on the butt of the gun in my pocket as I whirled. He'd just got to his feet. His face was a gargoyle mask. He took a step as though to push past me, but I stopped him. I said, “Cut it out. This isn't Chicago.”

    His face returned to normal so suddenly that I thought I had misread the expression that had been on it before. His fists unclenched. He said, “That's right. This isn't Chicago.”

    I said, “You had that coming; you know it. The matter's over, unless you want to bring an assault charge. If you do—”

    He grinned. “Maybe I had it coming. Nope, I won't bring any charge, sheriff. I won't hurt your little boy, Les, if he stays away from me from now on.”

    Yes, I was fool enough to believe him. I sighed with relief. I knew I could talk Les out of ever going near him again, and I thought I'd avoided trouble. Sure, I remembered the way Appel had held grudges before, but that was when he was younger. He'd grown up now, he was interested in bigger game and bigger money. Besides he'd admitted he was in the wrong.

    I even relented enough to walk with him to the hotel, although I refused a drink. I heard him order the best room they had.

    The next day a dozen workmen went out to the old Appel place. Carpenters, painters, decorators, gardeners. They worked three days putting the place in shape. His orders, I learned, had been to repair and restore—not to change anything. To make it as nearly as possible like the place it had been twenty years ago when he'd known it last. I've never understood that. A strange sentimental streak in a man who hadn't come back for the funerals of his own parents.

    But he insisted that same furniture be retained, placed just as it was, except that it should be refinished and re-painted.

    No, I never understood that about John Appel, any more than I understood why he came back at all or for how long he had originally intended to stay.

    I was fool enough to think that maybe it meant that he was tired of crime, that he was coming back to try to find himself. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Having no legal excuse for ordering him out of the county, I made a virtue of a necessity by telling myself that possibly it was for the best.

    I saw him but a few times—and then only casually—before the end of the week when the work on the old Appel farm was done, and he moved his trunks out there from the hotel. He took no servants to live with him, and said he was going to do his own cooking, but he made arrangements with a woman to come in three tunes a week to do cleaning and laundering.

    Meanwhile, of course, I'd talked to Les Willis. He'd listened to all I had to say, and had answered. “All right, Barney.” But I could see that he'd changed, almost over night. That wall across one section of his mind had broken down again. He was remembering. I don't mean that he'd ever forgotten, actually, but he'd managed not to think about certain things. Now those memories were back with him.

    It was two weeks and four days after Appel had stepped off the train that Les Willis' house burned down.

    The fire must have started about midnight. Les had driven Mary over to her mother's to spend the evening. The twins were in high school then and they'd been left at home to study, as they had final exams the next day.

    As it happened, the Burtons' mare was foaling that evening. Les was a good hand with animals and knew quite a bit about vetting. He'd stayed to help, and that was why he and Mary didn't leave until after twelve o'clock.

    It was a bright moonlit night. As they drove their car out of the Burtons' driveway they saw the red glow against the sky.

    Right away they knew it was a fire somewhere near their place, and for a minute they were going back in to the Burton house to phone town for the fire apparatus. Then, through the still night, they heard its clanging bell and knew that someone else had phoned already.

    Les put the accelerator to the floor and held it there. When they got home the fire department was already on the scene. And there wasn't much left of the house.

    It had been an old, weathered frame building that had gone up like tinder. The twins, Dottie and Bill, slept in bedrooms that had been partitioned off in the attic. Apparently smoke had smothered them in their sleep and they'd never awakened.

    I got there rather late.

    Chet Harrington, the fire chief, called me over. He said, “Barney, maybe this is a case for you. Looks like this fire was set.”

    He pointed toward where a shapeless piece of candle-stub lay in a puddle of water alongside one corner of the house.

    “My guess,” he said, “is that that could be the joker. Someone could'a splashed some gasoline on this side of the house—it went first—and stuck that piece of candle against the house and lit it. Look, what's left of that candle is gutted along one side like it burned horizontally, and then dropped off. It rolled out from the house then when it hit, and—”

    “Where's Les?” I interrupted.

    “Mary sorta collapsed. They took her into town. Guess Les went along.”

    “Les see that candle? Did you tell him about it, Chet?”

    He nodded. “I didn't show him, but I saw him looking queerly at it once.”

    I ran over to the people by the gate. “Did Les go into town with Mary?”

    There were conflicting answers at first. Then it was decided Les hadn't gone in that car. But Les' own car was gone . . . No, there it was, still on the road. Who'd seen Les last?

    While they were arguing about that, I started running across the fields to the Appel farm.

    From some distance away I could see that there was a light on downstairs, and I tried to run faster.

    Then I saw Les Willis coming across the porch, from inside the house. It was dark in the shadows of the porch, but I knew him by his slight figure, and by the limp. I knew, of course, that he'd killed Appel, and that was bad enough, but I'd figured it would be the other way. That Appel would have had another self-defense killing to his credit.

    No, I hadn't expected to see Les Willis alive again. He came down the porch steps into the bright moonlight, holding onto the rail. And I saw that he wasn't alive, really. He stood there holding onto the post of the railing to keep from falling. I saw that he was covered with blood. I could see where at least two bullets had hit him. And with bullets in those places, he had no reason to be alive. But all that blood couldn't have come from those wounds.

    I said, “Les?”

    I wouldn't have known his voice. I had to strain my ears to catch the words. He said, “He wasn't too hard to peel. But he died . . . too soon.”

    His knees buckled, and as he crumpled slowly something fell from his hand. It was a knife—the kind used for skinning game.

    It was minutes before I got up the nerve to enter the house, to see what was in that lighted room.

    Les' funeral was one of the biggest our town had ever seen, but only the coroner and I attended the other one. I imagine, though, that we could have had a tremendous gate for the funeral of Little Apple Hard to Peel if I hadn't announced that the coffin was nailed shut and would stay that way.

    This Way Out

    THE DETECTIVE-SERGEANT was big and slow moving, but he was not stupid. He knew a suicide when he saw one, but he also knew better than to take anything at all for granted. Even on something like this you checked every tiny detail, and once out of a thousand times there might be something wrong. This could be the thousandth time; any case could.

    He said, “Okay, take it,” and the two men with the stretcher rolled the one hundred and sixty pounds of cold meat that had been John Carey onto it, picked up the handles, and went out of the door.

    The manager of the hotel had been hovering anxiously outside the door; now the Detective-Sergeant told him to come in. The manager came in quickly and closed the door behind nun even more quickly. He averted his eyes from the huge red stain on the beige carpeting.

    The Detective-Sergeant took a notebook out of one pocket and a pencil out of another. He nodded to the manager. “Have a seat, Mr. Weissman.” His pencil hovered over the notebook. “This John Carey, Mr. Weissman. Did you know him, outside of his staying here?”

    “Well, indirectly. He was a friend of a friend of mine, Lee Wheeler. Maybe that's why he decided to come here to live. In fact, Mr. Wheeler told me he recommended the Colbrook to Mr. Carey.”

    “How long ago was that?”

    “Mr. Carey moved here three months ago, right after his wife and son were killed in an accident. He sold his house and came to live here, in a hotel. This is a residential hotel; all of our guests are more or less permanent.”

    The Detective-Sergeant looked up from his notebook. “Wife and son both killed at the same time? Carey . . . Say, was that the case three months ago of the auto that got hit by the Limited and carried a mile before the train could stop?”

    “Yes. The boy—he was eighteen—was taking his mother out for a Sunday afternoon drive while Mr. Carey was out of town. It was a horrible thing.”

    “Oh. They were his only living relatives, if I remember right. I read about the case, but I didn't connect the name Carey.”

    “Yes, I never talked about it to Mr. Carey, of course, but my friend who was a friend of his told me. The boy was his only son, and he had no other relatives.”

    The Detective-Sergeant nodded. The note John Carey had left on the dresser, in handwriting that was presumably his own—but that would be verified—had been merely a request, addressed to no one in particular, that he be buried in Lot 4, Section 7 of Parkhill Cemetery, beside his wife and son.

    That fitted, too. When you've checked on several hundred suicides you get to know psychology.

    The physical factors had fitted at sight. Now the psychological ones were becoming equally obvious. The motive, too. Not motive, exactly; one doesn't have a motive for committing suicide, one has a reason, or a set of reasons.

    He said, “And now about this morning.”

    “The maid came at ten o'clock—that's about the usual tune she gets to this room—and found the door locked. I mean, she found it locked from the inside, so her pass key wouldn't work. When a guest goes out and locks his door, her pass key works. So she knew that Mr. Carey was still in his room, you understand. But in the three months Mr. Carey had been here he'd never once slept late on a week day. So the maid phoned down to me and asked me if maybe she should knock on the door.

    “And you told her. . . ?”

    “I told her I'd give him a ring. I went over to the switchboard and was about to tell the operator to ring 816, when I saw her push a plug into the 816 hole. He didn't answer. I waited a minute until she pulled out the plug and then I asked her if that call had been completed and she said no, that 816 had not answered. So then I got really worried.”

    “And went up to his room?”

    “Well, I did one other thing first. I figured there was a good chance the call was from his office, to find out why he hadn't come in. You see, nobody else, no friend of his, for instance, would expect to find him in around ten o'clock of a working day; they'd expect him to be at his office as he should be. So I thought maybe his office was calling him. And I called up his office.”

    “Where is that?” The Detective-Sergeant poised his pencil.

    “In the State Bank Building. The firm is Carey & Greene; they're export and import brokers. I asked for Mr. Greene and he was in so I told him who I was and why I'd called. He said yes, it was he who had just phoned for Mr. Carey. He'd wondered why Mr. Carey hadn't come in, because he'd missed two appointments that morning already. Then I told him about the door being locked from the inside, and he said maybe I'd better break down the door.”

    “Did suicide seem to have occurred to him? To Mr. Greene, I mean?”

    “From how worried he sounded, I'd say it had. And I can see why. Mr. Carey had been despondent lately and acting queerly. Frankly, it was the first thing I thought of, and I imagine Mr. Greene would have thought of it for the same reason I did. Of course, he'd know about Mr. Carey having lost his family all at once and—well, you see what I mean.”

    The Detective-Sergeant nodded.

    “I got Dr. Deane,” the manager went on, “and Joe, the janitor, and we came up here. I knocked and when there wasn't any answer, I told Joe to break in. He didn't have to break the door down; he knows how to hit the lock with a hammer so as to break that.”

    “And all three of you came in here?”

    “Just Dr. Deane. Joe didn't come in at all, and I just stepped inside the doorway and watched Dr. Deane bend over the—over Mr. Carey. When he told me Mr. Carey was dead—not that I couldn't see that at first glance from the doorway—I called the police. And that's all.”

    “Thanks,” said the Detective-Sergeant. “Well, guess I'll run along. I'll have a talk with his partner, Greene. Thanks for your help, Mr. Weissman.”

    At the door the Detective-Sergeant stopped and looked at the broken lock. The manager went past him into the hallway. Then the Detective-Sergeant joined the manager outside. A plain-clothes man was leaning against the wall just outside the door. The Detective-Sergeant told him, “Stick here till they get a new lock put on the door and the room is sealed. Then you can report back in. Tell the Chief I got one more call to make.”

    “Okay. Straight suicide?”

    “Sure.”

    Riding down in the elevator with the manager, he thought of one more thing. He said, “You said this Carey had been acting queerly. How?”

    “Well, it's hard to put my finger on it. Sort of a listening look on his face, like he was hearing something or expecting to hear something. Just a guess, but I'd say he thought he was hearing voices.”

    “A lot of them do,” said the Detective-Sergeant.

    * * *

    A lot of them do. John Carey had. Not voices, exactly, but a voice. One voice, and it had taken him quite a while to place it and to know for sure whose voice it was.

    And then he learned that it was his own, and everything was clear to him.

    The first time he had heard it had been three weeks after the funeral, the double funeral that had marked the end of everything in his life that he had really cared about.

    He'd wanted to kill himself then, right after the funeral, but he'd lacked the courage to do it. It was doubly hell not to want to live, and still to lack the courage to die. But then the voice . . .

    It had startled him the first time he'd heard it. It had been right in the middle of a conversation, while he'd been trying to get rid of an obstreperous redheaded book salesman. He was stuck with the salesman because he'd been alone in the office; Dave Greene had been away and the stenographer had been out to lunch. He'd finally convinced the fellow he didn't want any books and had got him shut up and ready to leave, and then—in the welcome silence— the voice had said, “Kill yourself, John Carey.”

    Of course it had startled him; he'd been looking right at the book salesman and although he was a little nearsighted he could see well enough to be sure the book salesman hadn't said it. And obviously, too, the book salesman hadn't heard it.

    He had thought, “Am I going crazy?” and that had worried him for a while. Then he accepted that he was, and it was merely a matter of screwing up his courage to the action. The voice had helped.

    The second time he'd heard it, over a week after the first, he'd been out in the open in a park, the park he always crossed on his way home, and there'd been no one near but a bum asleep on a park bench. The third time had been once while he was crossing the lobby of his hotel.

    It was after that third time that he had placed the voice as his own. There'd been something familiar about its intonation all along, but he hadn't guessed for a while. One's own voice is not as familiar as one thinks, for one hears it quite differently from the way other people do. But a little trick of emphasis that he knew to be his own gave him the clue the third time he heard the voice.

    He'd heard it once in a theater lobby, once in the office when only Dave had been there with him—and of course Dave hadn't heard it—once on the street, just after he'd given an unshaven duty-looking panhandler a quarter, once on a streetcar. A dozen tunes in a little over two months.

    He'd have gone to a psychiatrist if he'd thought it really worth while, if he'd really wanted to live. But why not welcome insanity if it helped him get the guts to do what he really wanted to do, anyway?

    Finally, the courage. The razor. The end.

    * * *

    The Detective-Sergeant said, “My name's Weston. Police. You're David Greene?”

    “Yes. Sit down, Mr. Weston. You—you just came from the hotel?” When the Detective-Sergeant nodded, Greene asked, “May I ask how it happened?

    “A razor.”

    “How horrible. And yet. . . I can't help thinking maybe he's better off. He's been living in a nightmare for three months since—you know what happened?”

    “Yes, his wife and son were killed. His reason for doing it's clear enough. Something like that, happening all at once and unexpectedly, preyed on his mind until—well, he did it.”

    Greene asked, “There's no doubt at all that—that it was suicide, is there?”

    “Not a shadow. Locked in his room from the inside. Even the window locked, not that anyone could have got in an eighth-story window, anyway. Motive clear. Left a note telling where he wanted to be buried. There were even trial marks on the side of his neck.”

    “Trial marks?”

    “That's what we call them. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that; it's not nice to think about when it's somebody you knew. Trial marks are shallow, preliminary cuts on the side of the neck of a suicide who cuts his throat. Almost always find 'em in a genuine suicide who cuts his throat. They almost never have the courage for a full sweep of the razor the first time. There's anywhere from one to half a dozen of them. He had three. Not nice to think about, but well, they were there. Did he have any other worries besides the loss of his family? Financial, I mean?”

    “I don't think so. I don't know whether he had much saved up, if any, but he was solvent. I'm reasonably sure he wasn't in debt. Probably a few thousand dollars ahead, at a guess. Does the state get it, by the way?”

    “If he didn't leave a will and no relatives come forward.”

    “There won't be any relatives to come forward. Odd thing, both he and his wife were foundlings, each brought up in an orphan asylum. And I doubt if there's a will. A new one, I mean, made since his wife and son died. The one he made before that wouldn't mean anything now; it left everything to his wife.”

    “Would you have known if he made a new will?”

    “I think he'd have mentioned it. He did tell me that he was letting all his personal insurance policies lapse because there wasn't any point in keeping them up. I imagine he felt the same way about whatever money he had.”

    “Unless he decided he'd rather have it go to some charity instead of the state.”

    Greene shrugged. “I believe he was too despondent even to think of that. I could be wrong, of course. If he did make a new will it'll be in his safety deposit box in the bank downstairs and you'll find it when you open the box.”

    “Don't think I'll do that,” the Detective-Sergeant said. “The state will appoint an executor, anyway. Let him take care of the court order to open the box. Unless you think there's something in it that might have a bearing.”

    “I don't know what.”

    “Oh, by the way, I've been wondering whether to put it down as suicide while of unsound mind or whether to leave that open. It doesn't really matter, I guess. The manager at his hotel, though, thought he'd been—uh—a little off the beam lately. Like he was hearing voices. A lot of them do. What's your opinion, Mr. Greene?”

    “Well, he had been acting strangely. But then he's been— had been, I mean—in a daze ever since the accident. I mean, since he learned of it. Just going through the motions of living and working, like an automaton, like a man walk-big in his sleep, if you know what I mean.”

    “Sure. But do you think the hotel manager is right about the voices business?”

    “Well—once when he and I were alone in the office, he asked me suddenly if I'd heard anything. I asked him what he meant and he said to skip it. That's the only thing I can think of. It could have been that, or it could have been that he did hear some sound from outside the office that I didn't hear. He had pretty acute hearing; his eyes were rather bad, but his hearing was much better than average. Better than mine.”

    “Just one more thing, Mr. Greene. Routine. Did anyone benefit financially by his death? Or is anyone harmed by it financially? How does it affect your business?”

    “I gain by it, I'm afraid. In fact, I'm glad—that's a hell of a word to use; I don't mean it the way it sounds—that, since he did kill himself, he did it behind a locked door and left a note. If there was any suspicion of—of foul play, I believe you call it, I'd have a pretty strong motive in our partnership insurance.”

    “Life insurance, you mean?”

    “Yes. As part of our partnership agreement we each carried a rather large insurance policy on the other, so the survivor wouldn't be handicapped in carrying on the business alone. It's customary in partnerships. Incidentally, that's what I meant when I said he'd dropped his personal insurance. That was the policy on which his wife was beneficiary. The policy on which I'm beneficiary—and it's a pretty big one—wasn't dropped, of course; it was a business obligation.”

    The Detective-Sergeant nodded. He, too, was glad that a motive didn't matter and that the whole thing was purely routine and that he was now through with it, except for turning in his report.

    The Detective-Sergeant's feet hurt and he wanted to sit there a minute longer, so he asked, “Partners pretty long, you and Carey?”

    “Eight years. He got me in this business, and it's a funny business for me to be in, after all the knocking around I did and the things I tried before that. With a carnival, in vaudeville when there was still some vaudeville to be in, bit parts on the legitimate stage—and here I end up a merchant, and with a business of my own. Have a cigar, Mr.—Sorry, I've forgotten your name.”

    “Weston. Sure, thanks.” The Detective-Sergeant struck a match and leaned forward to hold a light for Greene's cigar and then lighted the one Greene had just given him.

    It was a good cigar, probably a quarter one.

    Greene said, “You know I've always had a kind of hankering to be in your business. Or, more likely, to be a private detective. Suppose I'll never get a chance to—I'm making too much money to change to anything else.”

    “Not much money in being a private detective.”

    “I suppose not. But I think I'd be good at it. I have a hunch I'd be pretty good at shadowing and things like that. And I know damn well I'd be good at disguises. The bit parts I used to handle on stage were character roles and I got 'em because I was so good at make-up. And voice control, so I could sound like a doddering old man or a pansy or what have you. Or imitations. I used to be able to do Winchell so you couldn't tell him from Walter.”

    Through fragrant smoke, the Detective-Sergeant said, “You wouldn't get much chance to use disguises or do imitations as a private detective. Probably not a damn bit more chance than you get in the business you're in. That what you did in vaudeville—mutations?”

    “I had a vent act. Ventriloquism.”

    The Detective-Sergeant sighed and stood up. He said, “And I used to play trombone once and be pretty good at it. And look at me now. Well, thanks for the cigar. And so long.”

    “So long,” Greene said.

    A Little White Lye

    DIRK CAME INTO THEIR hotel room with excitement shining in his eyes. He grabbed Ginny and kissed her.

    After the kiss, she pulled back a little to look at him. “Dirk, have you—”

    “Yes, Angel. Found just exactly the place we've been hoping for. In fact, better than we had hoped to find, really. The house is smallish but not too small. Five rooms. But a big yard and no near neighbors, all the privacy and quiet in the world. On the edge of town, almost out in the country.”

    “It sounds—but can we afford it, Dirk? How much?” “Believe it or not, only seven thousand. And one thousand down. Come on and give your okay so we can grab it before the agent finds out he's being gypped!”

    It sounded to Ginny as though all their troubles were over, if only she liked the house.

    Dirk's car was being repaired at the garage and they took the bus. The agent, Dirk told her, was to meet them there.

    Ginny held her thumbs all the way out, hoping that she'd like it. A hotel is fine for a honeymoon, she thought, but it gets awful once you're back and want a place of your own. They'd been back a week now from their brief but ecstatic trip. Brief because Dirk had wanted to save his money for a down payment on a place of their own. The honeymoon had been as short but wonderful as the courtship that had preceded it. It seemed almost impossible to believe that she'd known Dirk only a month. It seemed impossible to believe that so much had happened in only four weeks.

    Then they were off the bus, and walking, and after a few blocks Dirk said, “That's it, Angel!”

    It was a nice house, or seemed to be from the outside. A bit lonely with the nearest other residence a full block away and screened by trees. But that didn't matter much. There was a little picket fence around the front yard, and the lawn was in excellent condition. The house had green shutters and plenty of windows.

    A friendly agent met them on the porch and showed them through. Ginny's eyes brightened as she planned just what furniture she would need to put in each room.

    The agent seemed to be ignoring Dirk; he concentrated on Ginny as though Dirk was already in the bag, and he did a shrewd job of selling her. They came, finally, to the kitchen. This was the agent's hole card, this was the clincher.

    It had windows over the sink, low windows, the kind that swing open. It had a nook for a refrigerator, and cabinets. Cabinets enough for anybody.

    Ginny looked around once more, and took a deep breath. It did seem impossible that a place like this would go for such a price. She looked fearfully at the agent, wondering if Dirk could have misunderstood. She asked, “And —how much?”

    “Seven thousand, Madam. And excellent terms, of course—”

    They'd seen places for ten thousand, even twelve, that were worse.

    The agent was hemming and hawing now. He said, “It's only fair, of course, to tell you—” He cleared his throat again. “Uh—you'll remember that it has an unfortunate history. That is the reason it's being sold so reasonably. The former tenant rented it, and—uh—you've heard about it, undoubtedly.”

    Ginny didn't seem to have anything to say at the moment, and Dirk said, “I don't believe we understand. What happened here?”

    “The—uh—the newspapers called it the Love Nest Murder, Mr. Rogers. Undoubtedly, you read about it, just a few months ago.”

    “I think I remember the headlines,” said Dirk. “I never read that kind of story unless—You say it happened right here?”

    The agent nodded, his eyes troubled. He said, “I never met Mr. Cartwright, the—murderer. I was working for another agency then. But I've read about the case. And I can assure you that the bathtub you just saw is a brand-new one.”

    “The bathtub?” echoed Ginny a bit blankly. And then suddenly, “I remember now, reading about it. After he strangled her he tried to—he put her in the bathtub and filled it with lye—”

    Dirk shuddered a little.

    He said, “The Love Nest Murder. It sounds—ugh!”

    There was a curiously stubborn look on Ginny's oval face. She said, “Dirk, let's take it.”

    There was a strange twist to Dirk's lips. He said again, “The Love Nest Murder. Angel, I wish they'd named it something else. But I suppose we can forget about it. If you say so, we'll take it.”

    And they did. They moved in just five days later, and in the chaos of buying as much furniture as they could—on the installment plan—they almost succeeded in forgetting about “it.”

    But there were neighbors, even though they were a block away. They were neighborly neighbors, and Ginny got to know them. She told Dirk at dinner one evening: “That Mrs. Platt in the next house—the widow—told me all about this house today.”

    Dirk merely grunted, and Ginny looked at him suspiciously. “Aren't you interested?”

    He shook his head. “Look,” he said, “we're here, but the less we think about whatever happened—”

    “Sissy,” Ginny interrupted. Then her face became serious. “I think it's wrong to—to ignore it. To think about 'whatever' happened instead of knowing the whole thing. It's the unknown that gets people down. Just thinking of it as the Love Nest Murder instead of—”

    “Don't,” said Dirk, putting down his knife and fork, “use that awful phrase. All right, go ahead and tell me about it and get it off your mind.”

    “Well,” Ginny began, “this woman had some money. At least, that's what everybody thought. Well-to-do and a bit eccentric because she didn't believe in keeping whatever money she had in banks and people said she hid it. She was thirty-six.”

    Dirk grunted. “Trust the neighbors to know that.”

    “Why shouldn't they know it? The marriage license applications in the papers show people's ages, don't they? And this Cartwright man was younger, and handsome in a way, and—”

    “And he married her for her money,” Dirk supplied wearily.

    Ginny nodded. “And then he tired of her, I suppose, or maybe he couldn't get her money, so he strangled her in—”

    “You told me about that part,” Dirk said quickly. “But her bones wouldn't dissolve,” Ginny went on. “And he hadn't even finished getting rid of—uh—the rest of her, when some of her friends got suspicious and—called the police.”

    “What made them suspicious?”

    Ginny said, “I don't know exactly. But he got scared, and got away in time. When the police came they found— they found the mess in the bathtub.”

    “Well,” Dirk said. “Now I know. Now let's not talk about it any more.” He picked up his knife and fork, and then put them down again.

    “This Cartwright,” Ginny said ominously, “hasn't been caught—yet.”

    “He will be,” Dirk said. He looked at Ginny thoughtfully. “Do you really feel better now that you've talked about all the sorry details?”

    Ginny's lower lip was trembling. “I thought, maybe, I would; maybe if I said it all out loud I could forget it.” There was moisture, suddenly, in her eyes. “Oh, Dirk—”

    Swiftly he rose and came around the table. Tenderly he tilted her chin and kissed her. “Now quit thinking about it,” he said. “Or bargain or no bargain, we move out of here quick.”

    Ginny wiped her eyes with an absurdly little handkerchief. She said, “All right, Dirk. But honestly, I'm not sorry we bought it. But—I'll feel better when that man is caught.”

    “And don't let that Mrs. Pratt next door talk to you about it. You—you just tell anybody that wants to talk to you about it that you don't.”

    Ginny nodded dutifully. Of course Dirk was right. He'd been right all along and she'd been a dumb-bunny to think the way to forget something was to talk about it. She felt so humble she didn't even correct him on his mispronunciation of Mrs. Platt's name. And that was quite something for Ginny, because she loved to correct people who made mistakes.

    That had been Tuesday, at dinner, and it had spoiled the dinner.

    There'd been a bad moment Tuesday night, around midnight. Ginny, who was usually a very heavy sleeper, chanced to wake up then. She rolled over—and found she was alone in the bed. Dirk was gone.

    For an instant she was startled, then she remembered that Dirk often got up around that time to raid the icebox. He was a restless sleeper, and seldom slept soundly for more than an hour or two at a stretch.

    She listened for sounds that would indicate that he was out there—the scrape of a chair or the opening or closing of the icebox door. Or—

    But the sound she heard was a muffled tapping. It kept on a moment and then changed tone, as though Dirk—if it was Dirk—had quit tapping on something and started tapping on something else.

    Tap—tap—tap. Tap—tap—tap. Not a familiar sound. It wasn't the noise Dirk's pipe made being knocked out, because that was a succession of more rapid taps. Faster and sharper.

    Wide awake now, and a bit afraid without knowing what she was afraid of, Ginny slid her feet out of bed and into the slippers on the floor beside it. She slipped a bathrobe over her shoulders and went through the bedroom door, which led into the dining room.

    Yes, the kitchen light was on. The kitchen door squeaked when she opened it, and Dirk, standing in front of the built-in cabinet over the sink, looked over his shoulder and then turned.

    His voice was casual. “Did I wake you, Angel?”

    “N-no. I just woke up. But what was that funny tapping noise?”

    Dirk grinned a bit shamefacedly. “I imagined something. It looked to me as though this cupboard wasn't as deep on one side as on the other, and I just got curious. But I was wrong.”

    Ginny said, “Oh,” a bit blankly. What if the cupboard were deeper on one side than the other?

    “Something to eat, now that you're up?” Dirk asked. “I was just getting the crackers out of the cupboard, and there's some swell cheese. Just the thing for a little mouse like you.”

    She was hungry, a little. Neither of them had eaten much dinner, she remembered now, because—But no, don't think of what they'd been talking about, she told herself, or it would spoil her appetite now, too.

    And Dirk, with a sharp knife in his hand, but smiling, was already slicing the cheese. . . .

    She didn't see the widow until late afternoon of the next day, when she walked by on the way to the grocery. The widow was working at the flowerbed just inside the fence, and Ginny said, “Hello, Mrs. Platt.”

    “Pratt,” corrected the widow, smiling. “How are you, my dear?”

    “I'm fine,” Ginny told her. “Sorry I got your name wrong. And my husband had it right, then. I didn't know he'd met you.”

    “He hasn't,” said Mrs. Pratt. “These zinnias are going to be beautiful here, I think. No, I've seen your husband only at a distance, when he's driven by. You must bring him over sometime.”

    “I will,” Ginny told her. “But I wonder how he knew your name, when I told it to him wrong. I—” And then realizing that, by implication she sounded as though she were doubting Dirk and Mrs. Pratt both, she said quickly, “Yes, zinnias will go nicely there. What have you planted in that other bed, back by the porch?”

    “Gladioli. But about your husband—I'll bet the agent he bought the house from talked about me to him. I rent from him, too. And he probably said, 'Mr. Rogers, you want to be careful of that awful widow, Mrs. Pratt, who lives in the next house.'“

    Ginny laughed heartily at the very thought of anyone saying that. But undoubtedly it was—in a way—the explanation. The agent had brought Dirk here first and had talked to Dirk alone. He might easily have mentioned the name of the nearest neighbor, since he knew her.

    Mrs. Pratt was taking off the cotton gloves she'd been wearing. She said, “Well, that's enough gardening for today. Will you have a cup of tea with me?”

    “I really haven't time—” said Ginny hesitantly. But she did.

    She wasn't, of course, going to talk about “it.” That is, she thought she wasn't, until all of a sudden there was the subject, big as life, being talked about. And Ginny listening with both ears.

    “My dear,” Mrs. Pratt asked her, “have you searched the place since you lived there? The police did, of course, and they didn't find anything, but I've often wondered—”

    “Searched it?” Ginny wanted to know. “For what?”

    “Why, for the money, of course. Everybody says it was hidden there, somewhere, and nobody knows whether he got it or not. He left in an awful hurry you know, after—after he found the police were coming.”

    Ginny said hesitantly, “But he—he wouldn't have killed her, would he, unless he knew that he could get the money?”

    Mrs. Pratt shrugged complacently. “Don't forget, my dear, he tried to dispose of the body. If he'd succeeded, he could have had time to take the house apart, practically, afterwards. I'd say he knew it was in the house all right, but he may not have found it.”

    “You say the police searched, though?” Ginny asked. (Why, Dirk had known about this and hadn't told her. That was why he had been searching in the kitchen last night. That was why she'd seen him wandering about the house so much, and with that curious, inquisitive expression on his face. Why hadn't Dirk told her?)

    “Oh, they went through the place,” said Mrs. Pratt, her manner clearly indicating that she didn't think much of either the police or their methods. “But I think they sort of assumed he had it already.”

    “Oh,” said Ginny, feeling vaguely uneasy at the mere possibility of money, big money, being hidden in the house over there. It seemed almost worse, more dangerous, than —than the other. That was past. Maybe the money was still there.

    She said, “But if he didn't get it wouldn't he have come back while the house was empty?”

    Mrs. Pratt shrugged again. “He might have, of course, but if he did it was taking an awful chance. He's wanted now for murder. And all the while it was empty the policemen on the beat kept an eye on it, and the squad cars went by. And I told the police if I ever saw a light there at night I'd phone them.”

    “And there was no sign that he ever came back?”

    “Narry a sign,” said Mrs. Pratt. “What I think is that he ran far when he ran. That he's miles away from here and will stay away until it's all blown over, and then some day when he thinks it's safe he'll—Oh, I shouldn't say this, my dear.”

    Ginny found that her lips were tightly pressed together. She relaxed them with an effort and forced herself to smile. She said, “I'm afraid you've already said it. And I won't lie to you, I am a bit frightened. But I won't let it scare me out. It's our house now, and I'm going to live there no matter what.”

    “Does your husband have a revolver?”

    “Yes,” said Ginny. Dirk didn't have one, but she made up her mind then and there that he would buy one the next day, so she might as well answer in the affirmative now, hadn't she? (Oh, Dirk, you should have thought of that yourself. You knew about the possibility of the money being there, or you wouldn't have been hunting for it. Why didn't you tell me?)

    Mrs. Pratt said, “And if I were you I'd be very, very careful about agents, and vacuum-cleaner salesmen and people like that. You know he was an actor, I suppose?”

    “No, I didn't,” said Ginny, faintly.

    “Well, he was. He could probably disguise himself so you wouldn't know him at all. I wouldn't let anybody in the house, unless he was short and fat, maybe. Even an actor couldn't do that with make-up.”

    “He was tall and thin, then?” Ginny asked.

    “Not really tall,” said Mrs. Pratt. “But an inch or two above average. Five foot eleven, about. Slender, but not thin. You have a telephone, of course, haven't you?”

    “Of course,” said Ginny, and then resolutely changed the subject and, ten minutes later, got away.

    It was too late now to go to the grocery after all, and Dirk would have to be satisfied with eating something that was already in the house. But Dirk was good about such things, he seldom complained.

    (Dirk, dearest, were you trying to spare my feelings by not telling me what you were searching for? I'd rather know. I'd rather know the worst, any day.)

    Dirk was sitting in the Morris chair, reading, when she came in. Had he been sitting there all along, or had he been searching again, while she was out, and run for the chair and the book when he heard her coming? He said, “Hi, Angel. What's for grub?”

    “Dirk, I'm so sorry. I didn't get to the store at all. Mrs. Pratt asked me in for a cup of tea and we talked so much I looked up at the clock and—”

    “Ummm-hmmm,” Dirk drawled. “Baked beans, I suppose.”

    “No, I can make a salad except that it won't have any celery in it, and we've got some boiled ham left, enough for a sandwich apiece.”

    “Swell,” said Dirk. “A loaf of bread, a slice of ham, and thou, beside me sitting in the wilderness—”

    “Dirk, do you—don't you think it would be a good idea for you to get a revolver? Tomorrow?”

    “Why—I've been arranging to get one, Angel.” He looked at her, and the laughter was out of his eyes. “Matter of fact, I'm going to get it this evening, from a friend of mine who has a spare one.”

    He put the book down on the arm of the chair, shutting it without marking his place. “Have you been talking to this widow-woman about—you know what?”

    “N-no,” said Ginny.

    Dirk smiled, surprisingly, and said, “Tsk, tsk. Never stutter when you tell a lie. But I'm glad to know you're not a good liar, Angel. First time you ever tried it, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Now I can trust you.”

    He reached out and caught her wrist, pulled her into his lap and kissed her soundly.

    (And this, Ginny thought, is the time I should take him to task for lying to me. About the cupboard last night and —But he didn't really he, did he? No, he just didn't tell all the truth, and that's not quite as bad. But—Dirk, can't we be frank with one another?)

    But she didn't say any of it. Dirk had stopped kissing her and his voice was very serious.

    He said, “Ginny”—and it was seldom he called her that instead of Angel—“you do know the whole story about this house now. That Mrs. Pratt told you. Are you still sure you want to live here?”

    “Yes,” said Ginny, and again a bit fiercely, “yes. It's our house, Dirk, ours! If we'd rented it, it might be different. But we're going to stay here, forever.”

    And she jumped up from his lap and ran out into the kitchen to get supper ready for them.

    It was getting dark out, and she turned on the kitchen light and scurried about getting the salad put together.

    Dirk was an awful dear not to complain when she treated him like this, and from now on she'd keep things on hand so he could have a real meal, even if she didn't have time to go to the store.

    When they had eaten, Dirk yawned and stood up. He said, “Well, Angel, guess I'll pop over to see Walter Mills and get that pistol. He's letting me have it for twenty bucks.”

    “Could—could you teach me how to shoot?”

    “Why not? We can set up a little range in the basement. I'd like a spot of practice myself. I'll take the car and be back in—oh, an hour and a half at most.”

    Ginny washed the dishes and straightened up the kitchen as soon as he'd left, and that still gave her an hour to wait before he'd return. Or maybe he'd be later than he said, if he stopped to talk. Who was this Walter Mills? She hadn't heard his name mentioned before.

    She went into the living room and sat down in the Morris chair. It was becoming Dirk's favorite chair, and she'd resolved to sit in it only when he wasn't there. Giving it up to him when he was there gave her a comfortable feeling of being a dutiful wife. After all, a man should have a chair all his own.

    The book—a mystery novel—was still on the arm where Dirk had left it. She opened it to the first page and tried to read, but found that the words didn't mean anything to her.

    She sighed, put the book down again, and let herself think.

    Was there money hidden in the house? If so, it wasn't hers or Dirk's, and it wouldn't do them any good to find it, because they'd have to turn it over to the police, so why was Dirk so interested?

    But wait—it would do good to find it.

    Of course—that was why Dirk was hunting for it! There wouldn't be any danger, then. They'd give it to the police, and be sure that the story got in the papers, all the papers. And that man would read it, and he'd know the money wasn't here and there wouldn't be any reason for his coming back, ever.

    Of course! The end of danger, the end of worry and fear, if the money was found. (Dirk, now I understand. You knew that, but you didn't talk about it because you didn't want to scare me about the danger while the money might still be here.)

    But where would it be hidden? Could she find it, where the police and Dirk had failed? Well, she had one edge on them; she was a woman, and the money had been hidden by a woman. She said, “Let's see, let's pretend I've got some money I want to hide.”

    And she closed her eyes. A compartment in a cupboard, or something built into a wall? No, because I'd have to have someone build it for me and then I wouldn't be the only one who knew. I can't use tools, so probably poor Mrs. Cartwright couldn't.

    But I wouldn't just put it in a drawer. I wouldn't put it in a mattress or anything like that because that's where somebody would look first. I think I'd hide it down in the cellar somewhere. I don't know just why, but a cellar seems somehow permanent. There seems more security in something hidden in a cellar, doesn't there?

    Ginny got up out of the Morris chair and went through the kitchen to the head of the stairs leading down to the basement, and turned on the lights down there. And slowly, thoughtfully, went down the steep steps, looking around.

    In or around the furnace? Oh, no, there's heat there. I wouldn't want my money to burn or to char from heat. Well away from the furnace.

    Those dusty shelves? There were some old cans standing on them, things left there that hadn't been thrown out yet. In one of these cans, maybe? No, I wouldn't put it there, she thought. Because a can might get thrown out by mistake when I wasn't around.

    But just the same, Ginny went over and looked at the shelf. There was a paint can, with the lid stuck on so tightly that she couldn't get it off, and it wouldn't be in there anyway. There was a little paint sloshing around in it, and she wouldn't put money in a messy paint can anyway.

    The next can had some nails in it, rusty second-hand nails that had been salvaged and saved.

    The next can—why, that was a new one! Dirk must have put it there. The label was turned the other way, and in idle curiosity she picked it up, The lid was loose and fell off as she took it down off the shelf.

    And then, with horrid fascination, she was staring into the white powder that filled the can three-fourths of the way up, and she knew somehow what it was even before she turned it around to read the label. Lye.

    What on earth had Dirk been doing with lye?

    And then, because it was important that she have an answer to that at once, she stood there until she found it. Of course—he'd been here alone the second day, while she'd been downtown buying curtains. And he'd cleaned out the basement here with a hose.

    And he must have had trouble with the drain, and got some lye from the store and fixed it. Of course.

    And he hadn't mentioned it to her because of the horrible connotation that lye had, in that house they lived in. Probably he'd intended to throw out the rest of it, and that was why he hadn' bothered to put the lid on tightly again.

    Her hand shook a little as she put the can back on the shelf.

    And besides, it would take more than one can of lye to—

    But she caught herself up quickly before her mind could complete that hideous thought.

    (Dirk, why don't you hurry? Come back quickly, my dear, so I won't think the things I'm thinking. So I won't keep remembering now that I've known you only a month, and that I've never known much about your affairs, and that you found this house and brought me to it. And that you knew better when I called Mrs. Pratt by the wrong name, and that you've avoided meeting her, and that the agent you bought the house from hadn't known him.

    (And, Dirk, that you're slender and within half an inch of being five feet eleven, and that you didn't mention buying lye, and you didn't tell me why you were searching the house. .

    (Come back quickly, Dirk, so I can look at you and know how silly all of that is.)

    That was part of Ginny's mind, and the rest of it was frantically following her eyes around the cellar, looking for a hiding place for money, a hiding place a woman might have used, that she, Ginny, would use.

    Concentrate on that to keep from thinking about the other.

    The meter box, there on the wall. Why not? It was metal, and it had a permanent look, and it was something a man wouldn't think about because it belonged to the electric company and not to the house, and it had a hinged front. If inside it there was a place where—

    Ginny crossed to the box and opened it, and the money, of course, wasn't there. A silly place, come to think of it; any meter reader might find it.

    But between the box and the wall? It didn't look flush on one side, room even for the tips of Ginny's fingers to reach in. They touched paper, but couldn't pull it out.

    Up higher, and she found the top corner of whatever it was, pushed down gently, and it came out. A dirty white envelope, with something in it. And the something proved to be banknotes, about twenty-or twenty-five of them, new, and in denominations Ginny had never seen before.

    And then suddenly she was aware that she was alone in the house, and with fingers that trembled she pushed the envelope back where it had been and hurried up the stairs to the living room.

    The clock showed her she'd been down there longer than she'd thought. It was time for Dirk to be back. (Dirk, please hurry. Why, tonight of all nights, did you stay to talk to your friend?)

    Maybe she could see his car coming now. Quickly she crossed over to the window that opened off the hall, the window that showed the vista toward town, the direction Dirk had gone.

    Up there past the first corner, opposite that patch of trees, there was a car parked at the curb. Half a block past Mrs. Pratt's place. Odd that a car should stand there; there wasn't a house within half a block of it. And it looked like Dirk's car.

    But it couldn't be. Why would he have parked it there?

    Moonlight shone brightly on the front of the car, but the back end of it was in the shadow of the trees. At that distance almost any sedan, she told herself, would look like Dirk's. But—

    Dirk's field glasses! She ran and got them, and peered at the car through them. Yes, it was Dirk's car.

    And Ginny, feeling cold all over, knew the terrible truth. Not the details yet. But the main point. Her wild guesses hadn't been so wild. Dirk was—the man! The murderer. It all fitted now, almost.

    And there was only one thing to do. Feeling as though she were commanding somebody else's body instead of her own, Ginny walked—she couldn't run—to the telephone. She'd have to call the police, tell them she'd found the money and—to hurry.

    The receiver to her ear, she jiggled the hook nervously, waiting for the “Number, please,” that would let her ask for the police, quickly. But the “Number, please,” didn't come, and it came to her slowly that there wasn't the familiar buzzing sound of a live telephone connection.

    He'd cut the phone wire.

    Stunned, Ginny sat there by the phone for seconds before the hand holding the receiver dropped from her ear, and the receiver itself clattered to the floor.

    The noise it made frightened her. It reminded her that she was utterly alone. Or was she?

    Alone—or worse.

    Because she heard the footsteps now on the walk outside. Heavy footsteps of someone who made no effort to walk silently.

    Coming here. There wasn't any house beyond this. Coming here. For the money? For her? For—

    The footsteps turned in at the walk, came up the wooden steps and resounded across the wooden porch, and the doorbell rang.

    Should she run, out the back door and across the back yard, across the field behind it, run—?

    But her feet were taking her, instead, to the side window of the porch, whence she could see without being seen. She peered through the curtain, and then sobbing with relief ran to open the door.

    It wasn't Dirk. It was a policeman, and never before had she been so glad to see a blue uniform.

    He took off his hat a bit awkwardly and said, “You're Mrs. Rogers? The chief told me to stop in. Is your husband—”

    She didn't let him finish. “I've found the money! The money Mrs.—Mrs. Cartwright hid.” And in breathless haste, her words were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to get it out, because now she was safe.

    “. . . down cellar. Come on and I'll show you, and then —you can go with me to headquarters and we can turn it in, and—”

    Her heels clicked down the cellar stairs, and heavier footsteps followed and the envelope with the money in it was in her hand and she gave it to him. And caught her breath—and lost it.

    Because the man in the uniform looked less and less like a policeman as she stared at him. He was just under six feet tall, and he'd looked heavy, but she could see now in the light that that was because the shoulders of his coat were thickly padded.

    He stood there right under the light, looking into the envelope with greedy eyes, and she could see that there was make-up on his face. He stuffed the envelope into his pocket and turned to her.

    Ginny screamed, because there was murder in his eyes.

    There was a service revolver bolstered at his belt, but he didn't reach for it. His hands were reaching for her throat, and he was between her and the stairway.

    She backed away, and he came on. In a moment now, she'd be backed into a corner and it would be over with. She backed away, and then she couldn't back any farther because something was against her shoulder blades.

    The shelf. And with desperate hope, her hand closed around the can. The lye.

    His hands were almost on her throat when she threw it, can and all, with the white powder flaring out of the open can, into his face. Into his eyes.

    And it was his turn to scream, then, a scream of agony as he backed away. Too blinded with pain now to think of anything else, and unresisting as Ginny's trembling hands got the gun from his holster. . . .

    Dawn was different. She was sitting beside Dirk's bed in the hospital, and he was conscious now, and even cheerful, although he was careful how he moved his head.

    His story had been told now. On his way back from Walter's house, and a block and a half from home, a policeman had waved him to the curb. He'd obeyed and the policeman had come up and slugged him with a blackjack before he could even raise a hand to defend himself.

    And Ginny and the real police finished the story for him from there. Dirk had been tied and gagged, shoved down out of sight in the back of the car and Cartwright had come on to the house. Probably his original intention had been to overcome Ginny and tie her up, then have a full night to search the place at his leisure. He'd known that the house, unoccupied, had been watched. But he'd waited his first opportunity once they'd moved in and the police surveillance was lessened. . . .

    “But, Angel,” Dirk said, wincing as he moved his head to look up at her again, “I know you did swell, and you're a heroine and I was a washout. But aren't you getting your story confused? You said once that you knew right away he wasn't really a policeman and you figured your only chance was down there—where you could get at the lye while he was opening the envelope. And then something about being so glad to see him that—”

    Ginny put her fingers across his lips. “Doctor said you mustn't talk too much, Dirk.”

    Yes, she realized she had got a bit mixed up in telling it. But there was one part Dirk must never know. She must never let him know what she had suspected and then actually thought during those awful moments before the killer came. She'd have to get her story straight so he'd never catch her out on that.

    “Of course I knew right away, Dirk. I mean, when I went to the door. But first I looked out the window, and I didn't know then and that was when I thought he was a real policeman and I'd just found the money so I was glad. And out the window I saw—”

    “My car? Didn't you see it parked down there?”

    “I saw a car,” said Ginny, “but I didn't guess it was yours.” And she resolved to put the field glasses away quickly, the moment she got home, before he could find she'd used them.

    And then, because he was going to ask another question, she bent down and kissed him, and there were tears of penitence in her eyes.

    She said, “Oh, Dirk, let's not talk about it any more. It's all over, and it's our place now, and I'll never be afraid again.”

    And she thought, “I'll have to be such a good wife to him to make up for those suspicions I had. And he'll never know.” And she smiled, because a rather silly pun had just popped into her head: a little white lye had saved her life last night; and from now on a little white lie would help keep her marriage happy. Dirk would never, never know.

    The Dangerous People

    MR. BELLEFONTAINE SHIVERED a little, standing there on the edge of the platform of the little railroad station. The weather was cool enough, but it wasn't the cold that made him shiver. It was that distant siren sounding off again. A far, faint wail in the night—the wail of a tortured fiend.

    He'd heard it first half an hour before, while he'd been getting a haircut in the little one-man barber shop on the main street of this little one-horse town. And the barber had told him what it was.

    “But that's five miles away,” he told himself. It didn't relieve his mind, though. A strong, desperate man could travel five miles in less than an hour, and anyway, maybe he'd escaped some time before they'd missed him. He must have; if they'd seen him go, they could probably have caught him.

    Maybe, even, he'd escaped this afternoon, and had been free for hours. What time was it now? Not much after seven, and his train didn't get here until almost eight. Got dark early these days.

    Mr. Bellefontaine had walked a bit too rapidly from the barber shop to the station, more rapidly than a man who has asthma should. The steps up to the station platform had taken what little wind remained in him and he had put down his brief case to rest a moment before he crossed the platform to the station.

    He was still breathing hard, but thought he could make the rest of the distance now and get in out of the darkness. He picked up the brief case and was almost startled by its unaccustomed weight, until he remembered the revolver that was in it.

    Odd for him, of all people, to be carrying a revolver—even one unloaded and wrapped in paper, with the box of cartridges for it wrapped separately and in the other compartment of the case. But Mr. Murgatroyd, the client he had come out here to see on legal business, had asked him as a personal favor to take the gun back to Milwaukee with him and give it to his, Mr. Murgatroyd's brother, to whom Mr. Murgatroyd had promised it.

    “Awfully difficult thing to ship,” Murgatroyd had said. “Wouldn't know how to send it, parcel post or freight or what. Might even be illegal to mail one; I don't know.”

    “Couldn't be,” Bellefontaine had told his client; “because they sell the things by mail. Maybe, though, they have to go express.”

    “Well,” Murgatroyd had said, “you're going straight through to Milwaukee anyway, so it won't be any trouble, and you won't have to take it to him or anything. Just call him up and he'll come around to your office and get it. Fact, I already wrote him I'd ask you to take it.”

    So there hadn't been any out, without offending a client, and Mr. Bellefontaine had brought the pistol along, little as he had cared to have such a thing in his possession.

    “Damn this asthma,” he thought as he opened the door of the little railroad station and stepped inside, “and damn a small-town drugstore that doesn't have any ephedrine for it in stock. Next time, I'll bring a few capsules with me. . . “ He blinked to get his eyes used to the light, and looked around.

    There was only one man in the station besides himself, a tall, thin man, shabbily dressed, and, with bloodshot eyes. He'd been sitting with his head in his hands when Mr. Bellefontaine came in, but now he looked up and said, “Hullo.”

    “Hello,” said Mr. Bellefontaine, tersely. “Getting-uh— colder out.”

    The clock in the wall over the ticket window said seven-ten. Forty-five minutes to wait. Through the ticket-window he could see into the inner room of the station where the gray-haired station agent was pecking something on an ancient typewriter at a table against the far wall. Mr. Bellefontaine didn't go to the ticket window; he already had his return ticket.

    The tall man sat on one side of a potbellied little coal stove near the wall at the far side of the waiting room. There was a comfortable-looking rocking chair on the other side of the stove, but Mr. Bellefontaine didn't want to cross the room and sit there just yet.

    He was still breathing hard from the effect of the brisk walk on his asthma and he wanted to get all his wind back first. He'd probably have to talk as soon as he sat down there, and if he had to talk in short jerky sentences he'd have to explain about his annoying infirmity.

    So, as an excuse for standing there a while, he turned around to stare out through the glass pane of the door as though he were watching something outside.

    He saw, though, his own reflection in the pane. A chubby little man, very pink-faced, and going bald, although that didn't show with his hat on. But his shell-rimmed glasses gave him a very serious look, which fitted him well, for Mr. Bellefontaine took himself very seriously. He was forty now, and by the time he was fifty he was going to be a very important corporation lawyer.

    The siren wailed again.

    Mr. Bellefontaine shivered slightly at the sound, and then went over and sat in the rocker by the coal stove. His brief case thunked heavily on the floor as he put it down.

    “Taking the seven fifty-five?” the tall man asked.

    Mr. Bellefontaine nodded. “Through to Milwaukee.”

    “I get off at Madison,” said the tall man. “We got a couple of hundred miles to go together; might as well get acquainted. My name's Jones. Bookkeeper for the Saxe Paint Company.”

    Mr. Bellefontaine introduced himself, then added, “Saxe Paint? I thought it was in Chicago.”

    “Branch office in Madison.”

    “Oh,” said Mr. Bellefontaine. It was his turn to say something, but he couldn't think of anything to say. In the silence, the siren wailed again. It sounded louder this time, and he shivered. o

    “That thing gives me the willies,” he said.

    The tall man picked up the poker and opened the door of the stove. “Cold in here,” he said, taking a poke at the fire. “Say, what is that siren?”

    “Asylum for the Criminally Insane,” he said. “An escape.” Unconsciously, he dropped his voice. “Probably a homicidal maniac. That's the kind they have in that place.”

    “Oh” said the tall man, rather blankly. He poked harder at the fire, then slammed the stove door shut and sat back down in his chair, still holding the poker.

    It was, Mr. Bellefontaine noticed, a very heavy poker for so small a stove. His long legs spread apart, the tall man swung it meditatively up and down between his knees. He watched the swinging poker instead of Mr. Bellefontaine's face. Suddenly he asked, “Is there a description out? Know what the maniac looks like?”

    “Uh—no,” said Mr. Bellefontaine. His eyes were suddenly caught by the arc of that heavy poker.

    What if —he thought. He caught himself abruptly. No, that was silly. Or was it? There was something—

    Suddenly he knew what it was. He'd thought the tall man was rather poorly dressed; now Mr. Bellefontaine realized, looking at him, that it wasn't that at all. The clothes were of good—at least average—quality. Only they didn't fit him.

    That suit had been made for a man of average height, and so had the topcoat. The cuffs of the trousers were turned down, although they'd been pressed to stay up, and still showed the fold of the pressing. That was why they hung so peculiarly about the ankles. They were still an inch or so too short; so were the sleeves of the topcoat and the suit coat.

    Mr. Bellefontaine sat very still, and pretended not to look, but out of the corner of his eye, he continued his examination furtively. The tall man's shirt was undoubtedly too big around at the collar. It had been made for a man with a much thicker neck. Jones' scrawny neck stuck up through it with wide clearance on all sides.

    And his eyes, wild and bloodshot—He would head for a railroad, thought Mr. Bellefontaine. Some little station like this, a good distance from the asylum. On the way he'd burgle a house to get clothes in exchange for his uniform. Or maybe he'd even kill a man he met to get those clothes. And the clothes, of course, wouldn't fit him.

    Mr. Bellefontaine sat very still, and could feel his face become cool as it drained of color. Of course, he could be wrong, but—

    Jones, he thought. The very name a man would be likely to give if he hadn't thought about what name to use until time to introduce himself. Saxe Paint Company, a big, widely advertised outfit, just the sort he'd think of first.

    And he slipped there, on the Madison part, but covered up by saying it was a branch office.

    And he didn't seem to have any suitcase. Only the clothes he had on, and they weren't his own. Stolen clothes, and maybe he'd killed to get them! Killed a man only an hour or less ago. A short stocky man with a thick neck—

    Slowly the poker swung up and down in that hypnotizing arc. Slowly the bloodshot eyes of the tall man swung up from it to Mr. Bellefontaine's face. He said, “Do you think—” Then his voice changed; “What's wrong? What's the matter?”

    Mr. Bellefontaine gulped, then managed to say, “N-noth-ing.”

    The bloodshot eyes kept on looking at him for a long minute and then slowly dropped to the swinging poker. The tall man didn't go on with whatever he'd started to ask.

    He knows, thought Mr. Bellefontaine dully. I gave myself away. He knows that I know who he is. If I try to walk out of here now, he'll know I'm going for the police. He can get me with that poker long before I reach the door.

    He wouldn't even need the poker. He could strangle me. But no, he'll use the poker. The way he swings it and looks at it, he's thinking of it as a weapon.

    But will he kill me anyway, even if I don't make a move? He might; he's mad. Madmen don't need reasons.

    The inside of his mouth was very dry. His lips seemed stuck together, and Mr. Bellefontaine had to run his tongue between them before he could open his mouth to speak. He had to say something—something casual, to try to reassure the madman. Carefully he worked out each word, so he wouldn't stumble or stutter.

    He said, “Getting c-colder out.” Only when he'd said it, did he remember that he'd said the same thing once before. Well, people often repeat themselves.

    The tall man looked at him, then looked down again. “Yeah,” he said. No inflection, nothing to show what he was thinking.

    Suddenly, then, Mr. Bellefontaine remembered the revolver. If only it were loaded and in his pocket, instead of being unloaded, wrapped up, and in the brief case. How could he possibly—?

    His eyes, darting about in frantic search, saw the door marked “Men.” Could he make it? Would the killer stop him if he walked toward the door?

    There were beads of perspiration on his forehead as he stood up slowly and picked up the brief case. A shred of courage came back and he managed to make his voice almost calm as he said, “You'll excuse me a minute?” and walked around behind the stove and behind the chair the madman was occupying toward the door of the washroom.

    Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the tall man turned to watch him. But he wasn't getting up!

    Mr. Bellefontaine closed the door of the washroom quickly, and looked for a key in the lock. There wasn't one; nor was there a bolt. His hands trembled as he jerked the zipper on the brief case.

    His eyes roamed about, but saw nothing helpful. No window he could get out of—just a tiny one up high in the wall, well out of reach. No way he could barricade the door. There was a flimsy bolt on the door of the toilet booth, but a man could shove that door open with one hand.

    No, no safety here. All he could do was load the revolver and have it in his pocket ready when he went out again. And he couldn't stay too long. He must hurry. . . hurry . . .

    Mr. Jones stared curiously a moment at the closed door of the washroom, then shrugged his shoulders and went back to doodling with the poker.

    What a goof that guy was. Definitely off his rocker, that was obvious. He'd hoped he'd have someone to talk to on the train, but if that was the best company available, he'd take vanilla. Well, he'd try to sleep on the tram.

    He could sure use sleep, after last night. You wouldn't expect a wild party like that, way out here in the sticks. But Madge, his sister, had been in the mood to celebrate and so had Hank, his brother-in-law. The liquor had been bad, but plentiful. It had been an anniversary party, all right. What saps those neighbors of theirs, the Wilkinses, had made of themselves.

    But, Mr. Jones thought wryly, no more of a sap than he had made of himself, staggering out into the barnyard for some fresh air and falling flat on his face in gooey mud. Lord, would his suit look the same again when it came back to him? Here he was having to wear some of Hank's clothes till he got back to Madison.

    It would be a long tune before he drank that much again. Fun at the time, but Lord how you felt the next day, even the next evening. Good thing he hadn't had to go to work today, with his eyes looking the way they did. The gang at the office would razz hell out of him.

    Tomorrow—oh, damn Saxe paint and all bookkeeping! He'd quit tomorrow if Old Man Rogers, the branch manager, hadn't told him that in a few more months he'd be able to put him on the road. Selling wouldn't be so bad. And he did know paint, so it would be worth sticking to the books a couple of months more.

    The door of the washroom opened and the funny-looking little guy came out. Mr. Jones turned around to look, and—yes, he still had that crazy look on his face. A sort of tightened-up, stiff look, as if his face were a mask glued on him.

    He walked oddly, too, coming back—carried that brief case in his left hand this time and had his right hand stuck deep in his topcoat pocket.

    What the devil had he taken the brief case with him for, anyway? Surely he hadn't thought someone would run off with it in the few minutes he'd been in there. Unless, of course, he had something valuable in it, jewelry or something. Nope, too heavy for jewelry, the way it had thudded against the floor the first time he'd put it down. More like hardware samples, only hardware salesmen didn't carry their samples in brown leather brief cases.

    He watched curiously as the little man sat down in the chair again, without taking his hand out of his topcoat pocket, and again put the brief case down on the floor. Only this time it didn't thunk. It looked and sounded lighter, as if it contained nothing, or only a few papers. As though there were nothing to weight it down, it fell over, and the little guy picked it up again and leaned it against the side of the rocker to keep it from falling. It was empty, or at least something heavy had been taken out of it.

    Still idly curious, Mr. Jones looked up from the mysterious brief case to the tense white face above it.

    Was the guy crazy? Really crazy?

    Faintly, in the silence, came the wail of the siren. And at the sound, the little man started; his face went slack with fear, and then froze again.

    Mr. Jones' scalp prickled. Pretending not to have noticed, he looked down again quickly at the poker in his hand. His knuckles tightened about the handle of it as he realized that it was his only weapon against a homicidal maniac.

    Lord, why hadn't he guessed it sooner?

    He came in here panting and out of breath; he'd been running. He turned around and watched through the glass of the door to see if he'd been followed.

    Then he'd acted rational for a while. Madmen did; they had periods when you couldn't tell them at all from normal people.

    A homicidal maniac, he thought. Does he intend to kill me; is that why he's acting that way? Getting crazier by the minute, working himself up to a kill?

    But he's a little guy. I ought to be able to handle him, although maniacs are supposed to be terribly strong. But I know how to handle my dukes a little. Unless he's got a gun!

    Suddenly, and beyond all doubt, Mr. Jones knew what had been in the brief case; he knew why the madman had gone to the washroom—to transfer that gun from the case to the right-hand pocket of the topcoat, where his hand right now was gripped around it, his finger on the trigger.

    Still pretending to look down at the poker, Mr. Jones glanced sidelong out of the corners of his eyes at the bulge in the topcoat pocket. A gun, all right. It was a much bigger bulge than just a hand would make, and besides, he could see the outline of the barrel of it making a raised little ridge toward the end of the pocket. A revolver, probably, with a five or six inch barrel.

    // he were an escaped maniac, he tried to tell himself, he wouldn't have told me what that siren was. But then, I asked him what it was. He might have thought I knew already, and suspected him because of the breathless way he made his entrance. So he had to tell me the truth, in case I already knew. And that screwy name he gave—Bellefontaine—a name out of a book. Real people seldom have names like that.

    But those were just arguments; the gun was a fact. You can't argue around a gun aimed at you by a homicidal maniac.

    Why was he waiting?

    From a long way off came the sound of a train whistle. Mr. Jones managed, without turning his head, to cast a sidelong glance at the clock. Fifteen minutes too soon for the passenger train, the seven fifty-five; must be a freight train going through, probably in the opposite direction.

    Yes, he could hear it coming now and it sounded like a freight. It wasn't slowing down. He heard a door close, in the other room of the station and guessed what it was. The station agent was going out on the platform. Yes, there were footsteps on the platform, and then the rumble of the coming train drowned them out.

    When the engine was directly opposite the station, right outside the window—Of course, that was what he was waiting for. That rush of deafening, roaring sound that would drown out the sound of the shot!

    Mr. Jones tensed, tightened his grip on the poker until his knuckles went dead white, and shifted his weight forward. He could make it in one step, raising the poker as he did so. If the muzzle of that pistol, outlined through the cloth of the madman's topcoat, started to lift—Roar of the coming train, louder, nearer—a crescendo rushing roar of obliterating sound—louder, louder—

    And as Mr. Jones leaned forward the muzzle of the gun was lifting.

    The man in the blue uniform with the brass buttons closed the door carefully behind him and turned to the two men sitting on either side of the stove. They looked funny, sitting there in such awkward, strained attitudes; as if they were scared stiff.

    Should he? No; it would be too dangerous. He had the uniform now, and it would be so easy to get on the train and make his getaway, far from the search zone. But it would be so damned easy to kill those fellows, with the gun bolstered at his belt—a gun that the uniform gave him the right to wear openly and without fear.

    He said, “Evening, gentlemen,” and one of them mumbled something back; the other didn't answer at all. The tall one, who was playing with the poker asked, “Have they caught the—maniac?” and he glanced out of the corners of his eyes at the little plump fellow, almost as though he were trying to signal something.

    He laughed. “No, they haven't caught him yet,” he said. “I don't think they will.”

    It was so funny, so excruciatingly funny. He said, “They'll have real trouble getting him now. He killed a policeman at Waynesville and stole his gun and uniform. And they don't even know it yet!”

    He laughed again, and was still chuckling when he reached for the gun in his holster.

    But the gun wasn't even out of the leather before a blasting, unexpected shot that seemed to come from inside the little man's pocket whizzed by his ear, and the tall man with the poker was already halfway across the room toward him. He didn't even have the gun raised before a second shot from the little man's pistol hit him in the upper arm and the poker was already smashing down at his head. He tried to duck and succeeded only in avoiding the full force of the tall man's blow. . .

    The freight tram was whistling far off when he came to. Someone was excitedly using the telephone in the station agent's side of the station building.

    He was tied hand and foot. He struggled, briefly, and then relaxed and sighed, looking up at the two men standing over him. He thought back.

    Why, they'd been ready and looking for trouble when he'd walked in! The little one must already have had his hand on that pistol, and the big one had been swinging the poker, ready. People usually have to build up to making a sudden attack, but these guys had gone off like a charge of dynamite.

    Lord, if there were people as dangerous as that running around loose, he'd be safer back in the asylum where they'd take care of him. Why, they'd almost killed him. They must be crazy!

    Cain

    IN THE CORRIDOR the new guard, the redheaded one, didn't like the sound of muffled sobbing; he didn't think he was going to like his new job. You had to be tough, like Joe who was on duty with him tonight. Joe jerked a thumb; he said, “That's Kiessling. Killed his brother. You read about the trial?”

    “Yeah,” said the redhead. “What time is it?”

    “Three,” Joe said. “Two more hours.”

    In the cell Dana Kiessling lay rigid on the cot, face down to bury his mouth in the small pillow that would not quite stifle the sounds he made. He was ashamed of those sounds; he wanted to be brave. Why couldn't he? He'd made such a horrible mess of his life; why couldn't he find the courage to be calm for the last few hours?

    He was a coward and now, beyond all doubt, he knew it. But knowing it didn't help to fight it. Would he completely break up, he wondered, at the last minute tomorrow morning? Would they have to drag him off, screaming like a madman, hold him down and strap him into the chair from which he'd never get up alive?

    That was a horrible picture, but not so horrible as the picture of himself, actually strapped down in that contrivance of horror, the black hood over his head, and then the jerking of his body as the current came.

    He wanted to scream at the very thought of it. And within hours now, it wouldn't be a thought; it would be fact, searing fact. The current going through him, jerking him, convulsing him. He thought of the frog's leg in chemistry lab, the instructor poking two wires, the sudden jerk of the leg. The frog had been dead; it had felt nothing, yet it had jerked. But he would be alive when the current came.

    Would he be alive after? That would be the horror of horrors. He knew, from having read the descriptions of other executions, that sometimes a second, even a third or fourth application of current was necessary. The first didn't always kill.

    Electricity wasn't predictable; you read of linemen on high-voltage transmissions lines who had taken frightful shocks, shocks that had charred parts of their bodies black, and yet had lived.

    He might live, too. But if he did, there would be a second paroxysm of pain, of charring, of fire through his guts, through every fiber of him. And if that failed a third. Ad infinitum, until they pronounced him dead, until the life that was in him, the life that was he, was gone from his body.

    And after pain, the eternal night of death. He was afraid of that, too; he didn't want to die. He was afraid to die.

    The fear of that never-ending nothingness gripped him so hard that he bit the pillow between his teeth to keep from crying out. He'd always been afraid of dying. The fear had been with him as a child, as soon as he knew what death was. He'd dreamed about it. And the fear had diminished only slightly when he grew up. Now it was back with all the vividness it had had when he had been ten years old and the death of a friend with whom he had played every day after school had suddenly bludgeoned his mind with the fact of its own mortality. Grief for the loss of his friend had been a mere bagatelle compared with the awfulness of the thought: This can happen to me.

    He had sobbed all night that night, as he sobbed tonight; he had fought off panic as he tried to fight it off now, and with as little success. But then, that night, his parents had heard and come to console him and to help. True, they had thought that grief for his friend had been cause; they had mistaken fear for grief. Yet his mother had sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand, and it had helped him not to be alone. As he was utterly alone, utterly alone, on the most fearful of all nights. For one who has every night feared that death might come, is not the ultimate horror to know that it will come, at dawn?

    He bit the pillow and found it wet and soggy. He rolled over to his back, but kept the back of his hand to his mouth to keep from screaming.

    Execution was unbelievably cruel, he thought. Why couldn't the law be as merciful to a murdered as the murderer had been to his victim. George hadn't suffered; he hadn't even known he was going to die. Much as he'd hated George, he'd done him that kindness; he'd struck suddenly and unexpectedly, mercifully. There had not been even a second, not a fraction of a second, of fear or anticipation.

    Only after George was dead, beyond fear or pain, had he run the car over him, fixed everything to look so perfectly like a hit-run accident. And he had planned so carefully, driving the stolen car, wearing gloves, being sure nothing could be traced back to him, nothing, once he had safely got rid of the car and gone home in his own.

    What ghastly luck it had been to get caught in a minor auto accident, a mere affair of crumpled fenders, only two miles from the scene of the murder and while he was still in the stolen car. It had not even been his own fault—or possibly slightly so, for he had, of course, been nervous. But it had been mostly the fault of the other driver, trying to pass him on a hill, then swerving as the truck came in sight at the top of the rise. Still, he might have avoided the accident had his judgment been better, had he stepped on the brake to let the passing car cut in ahead of him instead of stepping on the accelerator to pull ahead and let it fall in behind until the truck was past. The other driver had done as he did, stepped on the accelerator first and then, to avoid the head-on collision with the truck, had swerved into him, crumpling a right front fender against his left back one and then locking bumpers and dragging both cars to a stop.

    Not his fault at all, although better judgment might have avoided it. And then the state patrol car coming along so quickly, and the state patrolman asking to see his driver's license after he'd given a phony name. . . .

    He tried desperately to keep his mind on that night, awful as it had been, instead of on tomorrow morning. He tried to concentrate on the trial—parts of it vivid in his mind as though it were this afternoon, other parts blurred. He tried desperately to think of the past, anything, however unpleasant, in the recent or distant past, to keep his mind away from the horribly near future, the future within a few hours.

    Even the murder he had committed. Was he sorry that he had done murder? Yes, yes! And yet he did not know, if he was honest, whether it was genuine repentance or whether it was regret because of the consequences that had been and the consequence that was to come, the chair, the electric chair, the searing, sizzling . . .

    He wrenched his mind back to George. Why did they, people, make such a horrible thing of killing one's own brother? Why did they think it worse than killing a stranger? When he, George, was so utterly different that he wasn't a brother at all? A despicable, smug little tyrant, always lecturing, always finding fault, quibbling over little sums of money owed him, narrow, opinionated, spiteful, hateful.

    Above all, or below all, stingy. With a successful career, his own house, twenty or thirty thousand dollars in the bank, hadn't George refused—point-blank, almost insultingly—to lend him, Dana, the paltry five hundred dollars he needed to square off the mess of debts he'd gotten into, through no real fault of his own, and get back on his feet to take a new lease on life? It had been such a ghastly mess, hounded on all sides, tormented, persecuted. . . .

    It would have been a temptation to kill George just for that thoughtless cruelty, that selfishness, particularly for telling him that it was “for his own good”; it would do him more harm than benefit to lend him money until he “learned to order and organize his life.” His own brother, and his younger brother, talking like that. A little prig if there ever was one, a self-righteous little snob who never bet on a horse race in his life, who watched how much he drank, who steered clear of women just because he was afraid of them.

    And that, of course, made him just the type of guy who'd be caught by one sooner or later. He, Dana, knew women and knew how to handle them; that was why, in his early thirties, he was still a bachelor. Maybe he'd liked them too well, maybe that was partly why he'd never made very much of himself, but at least it had kept him from getting caught in the shackles of matrimony. When you like them all, no one of them catches you.

    But poor simple George! Getting richer and more successful all the tune, and still only in his late twenties—it would have been only a matter of time till a woman grabbed him off.

    And then—well, he wouldn't get even any petty loans from George, the ten bucks or the twenty bucks that would tide him over till pay day when he'd had a bad break some time during the week and had gone flat. And, God, how he'd hated to ask George for those little sums that had I meant nothing at all to a man who was earning fifteen or twenty thousand a year and was so goody-goody that he didn't know how to spend it, except on, of all things, a house of his own—and what did a bachelor want with a house?—that had cost twenty thousand dollars, and a fine car, and a servant to keep up the house, and paintings. The little cluck actually liked paintings, and in a way a painting had killed him.

    He'd had the guts, the very night he'd turned down Dana's request for a five-hundred-dollar loan, to show Dana a painting he'd paid nine hundred dollars for. A French modern that looked like vegetable soup to Dana. And he'd gone on talking about art and the finer things in life when he, Dana, was two months behind in the rent on his apartment.

    It was tough to get by on five thousand a year; hadn't he done damned well to keep his debts and troubles down to the point where only five hundred would square him off and give him a new start? And then to be shown a painting, and what a painting, that his kid brother, his smug, dumb kid brother who wouldn't lend him money to get out of a temporary jam, had paid nine hundred dollars for. Of all things, a painting. Not even an etching; he himself had etchings in his apartment; it was a nice gag to have etchings, but he hadn't paid a fourth of nine hundred dollars for all his etchings put together—and a few hunting prints besides.

    Yes, it had been that very evening that he'd decided to kill George. He knew that George had never made a will; and, since their parents were dead and there were no other close relatives, he knew that he was George's only heir. Say, thirty thousand in the bank, a house worth twenty thousand with ten thousand dollars' worth of stuff crammed into it, a car—even with inheritance taxes and funeral expenses off, there was going to be a lot of hay left over. Maybe fifty thousand. Anyway, forty thousand. Eight years' income in one grand chunk. What couldn't he do with that?

    Yes, that night he'd decided to kill George. He'd taken a full month to work out every little detail, because there wasn't going to be the slightest slip, not a thing to make the police even suspect that George's death wasn't an accident. Oh, he'd worked it out fine.

    And everything had gone perfectly until that damned fool had tried to pass him on the hill. . . .

    And now, tomorrow—today! How long now? One hour, two hours, three hours? Surely at least one hour. There'd be breakfast, the breakfast at which he'd be given anything he wanted—as though he'd be able to eat! As though a single bite of anything wouldn't nauseate him! And the chaplain to try to give him comfort—as though that could help. And the prison barber to shave the round patch on top of his head and to shave the hair off his leg where the other electrode would go. And the guards staring curiously at him through the bars.

    The electrodes through which the searing current. . . . He heard himself screaming, and got the back of his hand over his mouth again, and that didn't stop the sound so again he buried his face in the pillow and found the screams turning into racking sobs.

    A coward, sure. But why shouldn't he be a coward if he was a coward? The men you read about who walk calmly to the chair or to the hangman's platform, weren't they merely lacking in imagination? A cow feels no fear when it is led to the slaughtering pen, for it does not know what is coming. Those men who walk calmly are almost like that—they know what is coming, but only as an abstraction; they cannot imagine it.

    Wouldn't any sensitive man, with imagination, feel as he did? Those guards outside—he could hear a faint murmur of their voices now and again—would they be any braver than he?

    How long? Three hours—two? Not long, at any rate.

    And then the corridor, the walk (would he walk of his own accord?), the room, the chair. The hot squat, the prisoners called it. One had said to him, “Pal, you're going to fry.”

    To fry. Literally to fry, jerking spasmodically against the straps, the blood boiling in his very veins; the searing, charring, agonizing pain. . . . The jerking leg of the dead frog in the chemistry lab. . . .

    The pillow was between his teeth again, but he was screaming despite it. Then, out of breath, he stopped, and the silence was even more terrifying than his screams had been.

    Death. Pal, you're going to fry. And if the current doesn't kill you the first time, they give you another jolt, lightning striking twice in the same place, and a third time, your body jerking horribly . . .

    He screamed again.

    In the corridor the redheaded guard, the new one, said, “Gee, Joe, that gives me the willies.” He thought, I'm not going to like this job. I'm not going to like it at all.

    Joe, the hard one, grinned. He said, “You'll get used to it. He does that every night and all night. Six years ago he beat the rap—by going screaming mad because he was afraid of the chair. Before they even tried him. Only he thinks he's tried and sentenced and every night's the night before.”

    The redhead shuddered; he said, “Six years. That's . . .”

    Joe had already figured it; he said, “About two thousand two hundred nights so far, and every one of them the night before he burns. Sure, he beat the rap.”

    The redhead didn't say anything, but he felt sure he wasn't going to like working in a nuthouse.

    The Death of Riley

    RILEY IS DEAD. THEY gave him the biggest funeral Carter City had ever seen. Nobody got excited about Riley while he was alive. You can't blame them for that because Riley —alive—was just another flatfoot, and flatter than most. And the life of Riley, reports to the contrary, never amounted to much.

    But there's Riley Park in Carter City now, and the Riley Theater with Bingo twice a week, and there's a statue—believe it or not—in City Hall Square that's a statue to Riley.

    The life of Riley was a washout. But ah, the death of Riley! You don't believe it? Listen.

    Riley's first name was Ben, and Ben Riley was a big, awkward guy with more hair on the back of his hands than on top of his head. Built on the general lines of a beer truck. Inside and out, if you know what I mean.

    There are good Irishmen and bad Irishmen. Ben Riley wasn't either; he was just an Irishman. He lived to play rummy and drink, and he hated to walk and he hated to work. You can't blame him for hating to walk because he had corns and bunions. And you can't blame him for hating to work because working meant—for a detective-either walking or thinking. And he wasn't well equipped for either.

    Maybe the fact that he was a third cousin of Mayor Crandall had something to do with the fact that he hadn't been fired off the force long ago. I don't mean to imply that Carter City politics were crooked; I mean merely that there were politics in Carter City.

    The life of Riley? He'd roll out of bed, groaning, at six forty-five in the morning when the alarm went off. That gave him an hour and a quarter to be at work, and his feet hurt him already by the time he got there.

    He'd sink down into a hard chair in the assembly room and begin to wish it was five o'clock and his shift was over.

    So with a jaundiced eye he'd look over the line-up, and he wouldn't have to strain his memory to remember them because he knew most of them already. The clientele of the Carter City jail wasn't large but it was consistent. The same petty crooks, over and over, going up for a few months and then taking up business at the same old stand.

    After the line-up, he'd wait around in the assembly room and maybe shoot a little craps—for not more than quarters—with some of the other boys who were waiting. And he'd hope like hell that nothing would happen and that they'd forget about him for just one morning, but he was always wrong.

    “Hey, Riley.”

    “Yeah, Cap. What?”

    “Moskewicz Jewelry Store. A pennyweighter took him yesterday.”

    “Again? And he didn't find it out till this morning?”

    “Nope, not till he got the trays out of the safe this morning. You get out there.”

    Riley would groan. Moskewicz's was only four blocks off and no use asking Cap for a car for that distance. He'd walk, every step hurting him like the little folk were sticking needles in his toes and the arches of his feet. And he'd look at the dune store ring the pennyweighter had managed to substitute for a diamond one, and say, “Yeah,” wisely as though the ring told him something.

    And he'd thumb through his notebook to a blank page, the latest entry in which was “R 2.25” indicating he'd lost that much at rummy the night before (he always lost), and on that blank page he'd painstakingly write a detailed description of the missing ring, “Wh. Old. V4 Karrot Dmnd . . .” and an equally painstakingly description of the man who'd looked at that tray yesterday and who might be the pennyweighter, “Av. Ht., Av. Bld., Clshven, wore . . .”

    And then he'd push his hat to the back of his head and say, “Yeah, Mr. Moskewicz, we'll watch the pawnshops and send out the description. Yeah, that's all we can do, I guess.”

    Not that Mr. Moskewicz, who was insured, cared a damn.

    And Riley would walk back to the station house, stopping in for a short one on the way to give him a chance to rest a foot on the brass rail. Funny, his feet never hurt so much when one of them was on the floor and the other on a brass rail.

    And then back to the station house on aching feet to write up his report by poking one key after another on an antiquated typewriter in a corner of the assembly room. If the report was a long one, he could dictate it to a stenographer in the outer office—the one with gray hair and thick glasses—but if it was a short report, he had to type it himself . . .

     

    “Finished with that damned report, Riley?”

    “Almost, Cap.”

    “Let it go till you get back from this one. Go with Carson over to 919 Whig Street. Family trouble of some kind—couldn't get much out of the dame over the phone.”

    And it would turn out at 919 Wing Street that the old man had come home drunk and pugnacious, but he was now asleep and you couldn't wake him with an ax. And Riley would have to listen to three-quarters of an hour of tirade, never getting any further than, “Yes, lady, but—”

    Right after lunch—

    “Riley, got a nice juicy assignment for you this afternoon.”

    “Yeah, Cap?” Riley wouldn't like the tone of that one.

    “Pickpockets working out at Luna Park. You and Wolters go out there. Walk around the boardwalk all afternoon. If you get any, turn 'em over to the harness boys out there and keep on walking around. Phone in at five.”

    And Cap Mason's eye would say, “Just squawk, Riley. Just squawk.” And Riley would know he didn't dare because Mason didn't like him and being third cousin of the mayor wasn't everything. In fact, it wasn't much, since Mayor Crandall hardly knew him. He'd got him the job, but he wouldn't help him hold it.

    Five o'clock and the aching pain that had been Riley would hobble for a home-bound bus (and probably have to stand all the way) and then stop in at Greasy Joe's on the corner to eat too much again.

    Then, in his room, he'd take off his heavy brogans and groan as he wriggled his toes. Tonight, he'd stay home.

    But by the time he'd sat on the uncomfortable edge of the bathtub for half an hour soaking his feet, they felt better, and he didn't feel sleepy any more, and it was so darn lonesome up here in his room all alone—He wouldn't stay late this time.

    But raw whisky would warm out of his guts the logy, lead-like feeling that had been there since lunch. And time doesn't exist when you're playing cards. All of a sudden, one o'clock.

    “R 3.45” in the well-thumbed notebook.

    One-thirty to bed, with the bed rocking gently, and five and a quarter hours to sleep before the alarm clock went off like a bomb, and the fly-specked wallpaper and then greasy soggy eggs for breakfast, and assembly.

    Sleepy, head fuzzy, dull-aching stomach, and Oh Lord, his feet!

    If only Cap Mason didn't—

    “Hey Riley. Ramsey's warehouse, fast. Some stock's missing, and get the lead out of—” That was the life of Riley.

     

    But the death of Riley; that was something. Hundreds of people saw it, thousands heard it, and millions read about it and talked about it.

    It came about on a hot June afternoon that should have been in August, for the sun was blazing and the pavements underfoot—under Riley's tender feet—were hot enough to fry the very soles of Riley's shoes.

    Riley had been dreading that afternoon for weeks, for it was the afternoon of the election parade, with the Governor of the state in town campaigning for re-election on the same ticket as Mayor Crandall, also running, and all the other local officers.

    Everybody running except Riley, it seemed to him. And Riley would have to walk.

    “Riley and Carson; one of you'll walk on each side of the car the Governor and the Mayor ride in. And keep your eyes open, see?”

    “Yeah,” sighed Riley.

    “Not that we're expecting trouble,” said Cap Mason, “but we don't want you mugs walking along looking like you were asleep on your feet. And after the parade—”

    After the parade, thought Riley, he'd probably just curl up and die. He didn't guess it might be sooner than that, and high heroism was farthest from his mind, unless it was high heroism for him to walk alongside that car at all. And maybe it was.

    Heroism is a funny thing; it happens suddenly and unexpectedly sometimes.

    Cap Mason was always glad afterward that he'd relented a little at eleven o'clock. Riley had just come in from his fifth hike since eight o'clock. And Riley's face couldn't have looked any longer without his chin scraping the floor.

    Mason looked at him and shook his head. For the glory of the department he didn't want Riley falling flat on his face three blocks from the start of the parade.

    “Riley,” he said, “the parade assembles at two; you know where. You're free till then, and if you feel like you look, you better rest up.”

    Riley, who felt twice as bad as he looked, said, “Thanks, Cap,” and staggered out.

    Not far, just to the nearest tavern. A cool glass of beer was what he needed, and to hell with lunch. To hell even with standing at a bar. In defiance of all precedent, he sat down alone at a table and let the bartender come to him.

    “Hi, Riley,” said the bartender. “Kind of hot, ain't it?”

    “Yeah,” said Riley reminded again of his misery. “Bring me a shot and a beer.”

    He hadn't meant to order the shot, on an empty stomach. Particularly, he hadn't meant for Baldy to bring the whisky bottle and leave it on the table.

    Even then, he didn't intend to pour himself a second one, until he'd drunk the first. Or the third until he'd drunk the second.

    Baldy brought him another beer. “Hell of a hot day,” Baldy said, “gonna watch the parade?”

    “Yeah,” said Riley bitterly. “I'm gonna watch the parade.”

    “Me, too. I'll close for an hour. My daughter's in it.”

    “Yeah?”

    “In the Civic Virtue float.” Baldy grinned. “Got a cute little costume comes down to here.”

    “The hell,” said Riley. He hoped the float in question would be in range of his vision. Maybe it'd help him keep his mind off his arches.

    “Forty girls on that float,” Baldy told him. “One of Crandall's daughters—she'd be a relative of yours, wouldn't she?”

    “Fourth cousin,” said Riley proudly.

    “And the Governor's daughter!” said Baldy proudly.

    “Nuh-uh. Say, you mean a Crandall girl and the Governor's daughter are going to be in a float with costumes like them? I dunno the Governor, but I wouldn't think Crandall'd let a girl of his.”

    “Why not?”

    “Uh—it ain't modest, or Crandall wouldn't think so. Didn't he close down the only burleycue show in town just because—”

    Baldy was laughing. “You kidding me, Riley? The oldest girl on that float is ten—that's the Crandall kid. My kid's seven; they had contests in the first grades of all the schools for the brightest girls, to decide for places on that float.”

    “Oh,” said Riley. He didn't care now whether the float was in his range of vision or not.

    “Want a sandwich, maybe, Riley?”

    “Nuh-uh,” said Riley. “I ain't hungry.”

    More customers came in and Baldy went back to the bar.

    Riley thought he could take one more without showing it. His head felt a bit better now, and his stomach bothered him less. With infinite care he lifted his feet off the floor and onto a chair. They hurt less that way. Why, he wondered, did people have to have feet? Worms and snakes got along without them. Riley wished he was a worm or a snake.

    Or a bird, even. Birds have feet but they can get places without having to walk on them.

    So, for that matter, could people with money enough to afford cars. But even if he had a car of his own, he thought, Cap Mason would give him mostly assignments he'd have to do on foot. Like the parade—

    And at the thought of the parade, Riley had another drink.

    “Gonna close up now, Riley,” said Baldy.

    “Huh?”

    “Yeah, the parade. Told you I was going to close an hour or so. It's about starting and I want to see it. Want to come along?”

    Riley looked at the clock and the clock said it was two.

    Riley stood up and ran like hell out of the door and toward the block back of the city hall where his section of the parade was to form.

    He was so scared he forgot all about his feet while he ran. He forgot the drinks, he forgot the heat. He just ran.

    Fortunately for Riley, no parade—since the victorious return of the Roman legions from Gaul—has ever started on time. Riley got there just as the car was starting.

    He stopped running and started to walk. His job was safe, and what little breath there was left in him exhaled in one grand sigh of happiness before everything hit him at once.

    The heat, the whisky, and his corns and bunions. Not to mention his arches. That four-block sprint from Baldy's to the parade's starting point was just what those four things needed. His suit was wet with sweat, his head went in circles, and his feet—as he started that three-mile walk-were as boils at the ends of his wobbly legs.

    He kept one hand on the handle of the car door to guide him so he could walk straight. And by that means he walked straight. For a while, blindly. Blindly because of the pain of his feet and because the perspiration ran down his forehead into his eyes and he was too utterly horribly miserable to reach up and wipe it off.

    There in the back of the car were the two most important men in town, the mayor and the governor, each with a silk hat in his hand, bowing and smiling, but Riley never saw them.

    Nor did he see the Civic Virtue float just ahead, with forty pretty little girls from six to ten years old posed ever so cutely in a papiermache wonderland. It was a beauty, that float, even though its virtue as symbolism may have been a bit obscure. But what does that matter? The forty kids were cute in their own right, and if girls under ten haven't Civic Virtue, then who has?

    For blocks, Riley didn't even see the paving underfoot, nor the crowds at the sidewalk's edge, nor hear the cheers or the stirring martial music of the band just ahead of the float. He just walked, and if the car alongside which he plodded had been driven off the end of a dock, Riley would have walked right with it into the water. And not cared.

    Down Commercial Street to Dane Avenue, past the courthouse and the public library. The glaring sun was baking the alcohol out of him as sweat, and he wiped his eyes and could see.

    Past Cordevan Park and onto Saratoga Street where beyond the crowded sidewalk ran the railroad tracks with puffing little switch engines trying to drown out the band ahead.

    Maybe it was the noise that fully wakened Riley. He saw the float ahead of him and heard the band and found he was walking in time to it.

    Then he looked across at the sidewalk, and suddenly stopped walking. Suddenly he ran, diagonally forward toward the curb and plowed his way ruthlessly through the people standing there five or six deep. Not many noticed him; most were looking at the Governor, smiling and waving his silk top hat. Those he jostled aside noticed him, of course, and a few others. The governor looked curiously at the sudden dereliction of his bodyguard— and then smiled again and kept on waving his hat.

    The mayor, smiling the other way, hadn't noticed at all.

    Then from back of the sidewalk somewhere came the tin can, arcing high through the air over the heads of the people lining the curb. A tin can with a bright tomato label, a very ordinary-looking tin can that anyone could have carried under his arm without arousing suspicion, it he had so carried it that its too great weight would not be noticed, and kept downward the end with the little fuse.

    A nice job, that fuse. Sputtering away in a little hollow tubular coil flat against the end of the can. Encased so that, once lighted, it couldn't be pulled out to render the bomb a dud.

    High through the air it arced toward the car of the mayor and the governor. Not a bad throw, but not a good one. If it hadn't glanced off the light pole it would have hit the radiator of the car at which it was aimed.

    But it did glance off the light pole and landed, with a thud that told of iron or lead within the tin, smack in the middle of the float of Civic Virtue.

    In the middle of a group of forty little girls from six to ten years old it landed and sputtered.

    There were others—besides the little girls—nearer to it than Riley, but none of them moved faster, nor started off so suddenly.

    Only a few had seen Riley charge his way through the people at the curb, but hundreds saw him charge his way back. Those in his way at the curb were scattered like ninepins and it is told that his progress from the curb to the float was like nothing but a streak of blue serge. Just a streak, that's all.

    He didn't try to pick up the bomb; he fell upon it, flat, pinning it between his body and the floor of the float. A fifth of a second later, it exploded.

    Yes, hundreds saw the death of Riley. Thousands— those lining the streets for blocks away—heard it. And millions, through the newspapers and the radio, heard of it.

    Not one of the children in the float had been seriously injured.

    It was a fine funeral they gave Riley, don't doubt it. There were four carloads of flowers to follow the hearse. And to speak at his funeral, a mayor and a governor each of whom had a daughter whose life Riley had saved. You'd be surprised how many relatives forty little girls can have, and how many friends Riley turned out to have, now that he was a well-known hero.

    It was a fine sight, that funeral. With a police guard of honor, and only a fraction of the crowd able to get into the biggest cathedral in town. Hundreds of cars driving to the cemetery, including the cars of all the important city officials. They closed the courthouse and the city hall.

    The mayor himself, a wealthy man, paid for the funeral.

    A popular subscription engineered by the leading newspaper financed the statue to go in City Hall Square. And since the dedication of the new park was scheduled for the following night, with the governor to do the dedicating, they had no trouble naming it Riley Park.

    A lot of ink it got, the death of Riley. Glory and to spare, with an election coming up and Riley a relative of the mayor and a member in good standing of the political party in power. To hear some of the speeches, you'd think it was the party that had dived on that bomb instead of Riley.

    A hero's death and a niche secure in Carter City's hall of fame forever. What more could any man want?

    And then two days after the funeral and two days before the election, a man walked into Mayor Crandall's office. A big man who limped painfully and looked much bedraggled as though he'd slept for several nights in his blue serge suit with the shining buttons.

    Crandall looked up.

    “Uh—Mr. Crandall—” said the big man.

    “Ri—” Crandall bit off his words and, almost, his tongue with them. He got up and shut the door.

    “Uh, Mr. Crandall,” said the big man. “I-uh—know I'm going to be fired the minute I report back to headquarters, but honest I'm sorry as hell and it won't happen again if you can tell 'em to give me one more chance.”

    Crandall was breathing hard. He said, “Anyone see you come in here to my office?”

    “Uh—no. I came here first thing. Mr. Crandall, the minute I got back. They'd rolled me, see? So I didn't have money nor identification either, and I hadda walk back except for one lift, and—Can I sit down, Mr. Crandall?”

    The mayor, without taking his eyes off the apparition before him, picked up the phone on his desk and said to someone, “Send Inspector Brady up here, quick.”

    Then he took a deep breath and said, “Sit down.”

    Riley sat down. Rather, he almost fell into the chair. He said, “I shouldn't ever have drunk on an empty stomach just before the parade, but I had two drinks—just two— and then all that heat and the marching hit me, and—”

    The door opened and closed. Inspector Brady stood back of the chair, only the back of Riley's head in his range of vision.

    Crandall said, “Brady, how far have you got on that bombing?”

    “We know now who did it, Mayor. Screwball named Wessa. Crazy. We found the proof in his room that he made the bomb. But he's taken it on the lam. We're putting out his description all over the country. We'll get him.”

    “Yeah?” said Mayor Crandall. “Inspector, there's a friend of yours here.”

    Riley stood up and turned around. Brady's mouth fell open.

    “Listen, Inspector,” Riley said plaintively, “I was just telling Mr. Crandall. It was the heat and the marching and everything. I'm sorry, but I couldn't help—”

    “You didn't go after the guy with the bomb?”

    “What bomb?”

    Mayor Crandall cleared his throat. He said, “Brady, was this Wessa about the size and build of Riley, and could he have been wearing a blue serge suit?”

    The inspector nodded slowly. “My Lord, Crandall, you mean it was him we buried? That he threw his bomb at your car and then when he saw it ricochet into the float among all the kids, he ran after it and—? Oh, God!”

    Crandall turned again to Riley. He said, “But man, it's been four days. Where on earth—?”

    “It was the heat hit me Mayor; honest. I'd had only two or three drinks. But it hit me sudden, and I had to yorck, and I couldn't do that out in front of all those people, so I ran into the freight yard there and climbed into an empty. And I was dizzy and fell, and got up and then the car musta started with a jerk and I hit my head on the wall of it, and when I came to again it was dark and the train was going like a bat out of hell so I couldn't get off till the next morning. And somebody'd rolled me while I was out, my badge and wallet and everything. I didn't have nothing in my pockets but a handkerchief, and honest, I had a hell of a time getting back here. But I'm sorry, and I won't ever again take even one drink on duty. If I'm not fired.”

    Mayor Crandall laced his fingers and looked at Inspector Brady and Brady stared back at Crandall.

    Crandall said, almost as though he was talking to himself, “We'll be the laughingstock of the whole damn country. Riley Park. Statues. Four hundred and fifteen floral pieces. Our campaign speeches. We'll be laughed out of office; they won't even have to vote. The Governor—” He cleared his throat.

    “What about the Governor?” Brady asked, horrified.

    Crandall shuddered. He said, “We'll have to leave town, Brady. Leave the state, the country. Grow beards and live in caves in the Amazon Valley. Unless—unless—”

    Sudden hope dawned upon the landscape of despair which had been Brady's face. He said, “Unless what?”

    Crandall opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a check book, a fat check book with three rows of checks in it and a balance in six figures that represented only a fraction of his accumulated wealth.

    He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a decanter of Haig and Haig, and glasses. He said gently, “Riley, I've got a proposition for you. But let's have a drink first—all of us.”

     

    Out in California there's a man who lives the life of Riley. A big man with more hair on the backs of his hands than on top of his head. Built like a whisky keg, inside and out, if you know what I mean. He's retired; a steady income from an annuity pays for his modest bachelor apartment, the main feature of which is a well-stocked bar.

    And it's on the ground floor so that on the occasions when he goes out instead of having his friends in to play cards at the apartment, the only walking he has to do is from his door to the curb where the taxi awaits him.

    All the sleep he wants, the best of food and drink, cards every evening, and no walking.

    The life of Riley; that's what his friends call it. But they're wrong, of course. That's just an expression. His name is Williams, for one thing. And the life of Riley, as I've told you, was a washout. A life of pounding pavements on corns and bunions, not getting enough sleep, drinking only furtively, and in constant fear of his job. That was the life of Riley. You can have it.

    The death of Riley! That's for me.

    Don't Look Behind You

    JUST SIT BACK AND RELAX, now. Try to enjoy this; it's going to be the last story you ever read, or nearly the last. After you finish it you can sit there and stall a while, you can find excuses to hang around your house, or your room, or your office, wherever you're reading this; but sooner or later you're going to have to get up and go out. That's where I'm waiting for you; outside. Or maybe closer than that. Maybe in this room.

    You think that's a joke of course. You think this is just a story in a book, and that I don't really mean you. Keep right on thinking so. But be fair; admit that I'm giving you fair warning.

    Harley bet me I couldn't do it. He bet me a diamond he's told me about, a diamond as big as his head. So you see why I've got to kill you. And why I've got to tell you how and why and all about it first. That's part of the bet. It's just the kind of idea Harley would have.

    I'll tell you about Harley first. He's tall and handsome, and suave and cosmopolitan. He looks something like Ronald Coleman, only he's taller. He dresses like a million dollars, but it wouldn't matter if he didn't; I mean that he'd look distinguished in overalls. There's a sort of magic about Harley, a mocking magic in the way he looks at you; it makes you think of palaces and far-off countries and bright music.

    It was in Springfield, Ohio, that he met Justin Dean. Justin was a funny-looking little runt who was just a printer. He worked for the Atlas Printing & Engraving Company. He was a very ordinary little guy, just about as different as possible from Harley; you couldn't pick two men more different. He was only thirty-five, but he was mostly bald already, and he had to wear thick glasses because he'd worn out his eyes doing fine printing and engraving. He was a good printer and engraver; I'll say that for him.

    I never asked Harley how he happened to come to Springfield, but the day he got there, after he'd checked in at the Castle Hotel, he stopped in at Atlas to have some calling cards made. It happened that Justin Dean was alone in the shop at the time, and he took Harley's order for the cards; Harley wanted engraved ones, the best. Harley always wants the best of everything.

    Harley probably didn't even notice Justin; there was no reason why he should have. But Justin noticed Harley all right, and in him he saw everything that he himself would like to be, and never would be, because most of the things Harley has, you have to be born with.

    And Justin made the plates for the cards himself and printed them himself, and he did a wonderful job—something he thought would be worthy of a man like Harley Prentice. That was the name engraved on the card, just that and nothing else, as all really important people have their cards engraved.

    He did fine-line work on it, freehand cursive style, and used all the skill he had. It wasn't wasted, because the next day when Harley called to get the cards he held one and stared at it for a while, and then he looked at Justin, seeing him for the first time. He asked, “Who did this?”

    And little Justin told him proudly who had done it, and Harley smiled at him and told him it was the work of an artist, and he asked Justin to have dinner with him that evening after work, in the Blue Room of the Castle Hotel.

    That's how Harley and Justin got together, but Harley was careful. He waited until he'd known Justin a while before he asked him whether or not he could make plates for five and ten dollar bills. Harley had the contacts; he could market the bills in quantity with men who specialized in passing them, and—most important—he knew where he could get paper with the silk threads in it, paper that wasn't quite the genuine thing, but was close enough to pass inspection by anyone but an expert.

    So Justin quit his job at Atlas and he and Harley went to New York, and they set up a little printing shop as a blind, on Amsterdam Avenue south of Sherman Square, and they worked at the bills. Justin worked hard, harder than he had ever worked in his life, because besides working on the plates for the bills, he helped meet expenses by handling what legitimate printing work came into the shop.

    He worked day and night for almost a year, making plate after plate, and each one was a little better than the last, and finally he had plates that Harley said were good enough. That night they had dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria to celebrate and after dinner they went the rounds of the best night clubs, and it cost Harley a small fortune, but that didn't matter because they were going to get rich.

    They drank champagne, and it was the first time Justin ever drank champagne and he got disgustingly drunk and must have made quite a fool of himself. Harley told him about it afterwards, but Harley wasn't mad at him. He took him back to his room at the hotel and put him to bed, and Justin was pretty sick for a couple of days. But that didn't matter, either, because they were going to get rich.

    Then Justin started printing bills from the plates, and they got rich. After that, Justin didn't have to work so hard, either, because he turned down most jobs that came into the print shop, told them he was behind schedule and couldn't handle any more. He took just a little work, to keep up a front. And behind the front, he made five and ten dollar bills, and he and Harley got rich.

    He got to know other people whom Harley knew. He met Bull Mallon, who handled the distribution end. Bull Mallon was built like a bull, that was why they called him that. He had a face that never smiled or changed expression at all except when he was holding burning matches to the soles of Justin's bare feet. But that wasn't then; that was later, when he wanted Justin to tell him where the plates were.

    And he got to know Captain John Willys of the Police Department, who was a friend of Harley's, to whom Harley gave quite a bit of the money they made, but that didn't matter either, because there was plenty left and they all got rich. He met a friend of Harley's who was a big star of the stage, and one who owned a big New York newspaper. He got to know other people equally important, but in less respectable ways.

    Harley, Justin knew, had a hand in lots of other enterprises besides the little mint on Amsterdam Avenue. Some of these ventures took him out of town, usually over weekends. And the weekend that Harley was murdered Justin never found out what really happened, except that Harley went away and didn't come back. Oh, he knew that he was murdered, all right, because the police found his body— with three bullet holes in his chest—in the most expensive suite of the best hotel in Albany. Even for a place to be found dead in Harley Prentice had chosen the best.

    All Justin ever knew about it was that a long distance call came to him at the hotel where he was staying, the night that Harley was murdered—it must have been a matter of minutes, in fact, before the time the newspapers said Harley was killed.

    It was Harley's voice on the phone, and his voice was debonair and unexcited as ever. But he said, “Justin? Get to the shop and get rid of the plates, the paper, everything. Right away. I'll explain when I see you.” He waited only until Justin said, “Sure, Harley,” and then he said, “Attaboy” and hung up.

    Justin hurried around to the printing shop and got the plates and the paper and a few thousand dollars worth of counterfeit bills that were on hand. He made the paper and bills into one bundle and the copper plates into another, smaller one, and he left the shop with no evidence that it had ever been a mint in miniature.

    He was very careful and very clever in disposing of both bundles. He got rid of the big one first by checking in at a big hotel, not one he or Hartley ever stayed at, under a false name, just to have a chance to put the big bundle in the incinerator there. It was paper and it would burn. And he made sure there was a fire in the incinerator before he dropped it down the chute.

    The plates were different. They wouldn't burn, he knew, so he took a trip to Staten Island and back on the ferry and, somewhere out in the middle of the bay, he dropped the bundle over the side into the water.

    Then, having done what Harley had told him to do, and having done it well and thoroughly, he went back to the hotel—his own hotel, not the one where he had dumped the paper and the bills—and went to sleep.

    In the morning he read in the newspapers that Harley had been killed, and he was stunned. It didn't seem possible. He couldn't believe it; it was a joke someone was playing on him. Harley would come back to him, he knew. And he was right; Harley did, but that was later, in the swamp.

    But anyway, Justin had to know, so he took the very next train for Albany. He must have been on the train when the police went to his hotel, and at the hotel they must have learned he'd asked at the desk about trams for Albany, because they were waiting for him when he got off the train there.

    They took him to a station and they kept him there a long long time, days and days, asking him questions. They found out, after a while, that he couldn't have killed Harley because he'd been in New York City at the time Harley was killed in Albany but they knew, also, that he and Harley had been operating the little mint, and they thought that might be a lead to who killed Harley, and they were interested in the counterfeiting, too, maybe even more than in the murder. They asked Justin Dean questions, over and over, and he couldn't answer them, so he didn't. They kept him awake for days at a time, asking him questions over and over. Most of all they wanted to know where the plates were. He wished he could tell them that the plates were safe where nobody could ever get them again, but he couldn't tell them that without admitting that he and Harley had been counterfeiting, so he couldn't tell them.

    They located the Amsterdam shop, but they didn't find any evidence there, and they really had no evidence to hold Justin on at all, but he didn't know that, and it never occurred to him to get a lawyer.

    He kept wanting to see Harley, and they wouldn't let him; then, when they learned he really didn't believe Harley could be dead, they made him look at a dead man they said was Harley, and he guessed it was, although Harley looked different dead. He didn't look magnificent, dead. And Justin believed, then, but still didn't believe. And after that he just went silent and wouldn't say a word, even when they kept him awake for days and days with a bright light in his eyes, and kept slapping him to keep him awake. They didn't use clubs or rubber hoses, but they slapped him a million times and wouldn't let him sleep. And after a while he lost track of things and couldn't have answered their questions even if he'd wanted to.

    For a while after that, he was in a bed in a white room, and all he remembers about that are nightmares he had, and calling for Harley and an awful confusion as to whether Harley was dead or not, and then things came back to him gradually and he knew he didn't want to stay in the white room; he wanted to get out so he could hunt for Harley. And if Harley was dead, he wanted to kill whoever had killed Harley, because Harley would have done the same for him.

    So he began pretending, and acting, very cleverly, the way the doctors and nurses seemed to want him to act, and after a while they gave him his clothes and let him go.

    He was becoming cleverer now. He thought, what would Harley tell me to do? And he knew they'd try to follow him because they'd think he might lead them to the plates, which they didn't know were at the bottom of the bay, and he gave them the slip before he left Albany, and he went first to Boston, and from there by boat to New York, instead of going direct.

    He went first to the print shop, and went in the back way after watching the alley for a long time to be sure the place wasn't guarded. It was a mess; they must have searched it very thoroughly for the plates.

    Harley wasn't there, of course. Justin left and from a phone booth in a drugstore, he telephoned their hotel and asked for Harley and was told Harley no longer lived there; and to be clever and not let them guess who he was, he asked for Justin Dean, and they said Justin Dean didn't live there any more either.

    Then he moved to a different drugstore and from there he decided to call up some friends of Harley's, and he phoned Bull Mallon first and because Bull was a friend, he told him who he was and asked if he knew where Harley was.

    Bull Mallon didn't pay any attention to that; he sounded excited, a little, and he asked, “Did the cops get the plates, Dean?” and Justin said they didn't, that he wouldn't tell them, and he asked again about Harley.

    Bull asked, “Are you nuts, or kidding?” And Justin just asked him again, and Bull's voice changed and he said, “Where are you?” and Justin told him. Bull said, “Harley's here. He's staying under cover, but it's all right if you know, Dean. You wait right there at the drugstore, and we'll come and get you.”

    They came and got Justin, Bull Mallon and two other men in a car, and they told him Harley was hiding out way deep in New Jersey and that they were going to drive there now. So he went along and sat in the back seat between two men he didn't know, while Bull Mallon drove.

    It was late afternoon then, when they picked him up, and Bull drove all evening and most of the night and he drove fast, so he must have gone farther than New Jersey, at least into Virginia or maybe farther, into the Carolinas.

    The sky was getting faintly gray with first dawn when they stopped at a rustic cabin that looked like it had been used as a hunting lodge. It was miles from anywhere, there wasn't even a road leading to it, just a trail that was level enough for the car to be able to make it.

    They took Justin into the cabin and tied him to a chair, and they told him Harley wasn't there, but Harley had told them that Justin would tell them where the plates were, and he couldn't leave until he did tell.

    Justin didn't believe them; he knew then that they'd tricked him about Harley, but it didn't matter, as far as the plates were concerned. It didn't matter if he told them what he'd done with the plates, because they couldn't get them again, and they wouldn't tell the police. So he told them, quite willingly.

    But they didn't believe him. They said he'd hidden the plates and was lying. They tortured him to make him tell. They beat him, and they cut him with knives, and they held burning matches and lighted cigars to the soles of his feet, and they pushed needles under his fingernails. Then they'd rest and ask him questions and if he could talk, he'd tell them the truth, and after a while they'd start to torture him again.

    It went on for days and weeks—Justin doesn't know how long, but it was a long time. Once they went away for several days and left him tied up with nothing to eat or drink. They came back and started in all over again. And all the time he hoped Harley would come to help him, but Harley didn't come, not then.

    After a while what was happening in the cabin ended, or anyway he didn't know any more about it. They must have thought he was dead; maybe they were right, or anyway not far from wrong.

    The next thing he knows was the swamp. He was lying in shallow water at the edge of deeper water. His face was out of the water; it woke him when he turned a little and his face went under. They must have thought him dead and thrown him into the water, but he had floated into the shallow part before he had drowned, and a last flicker of consciousness had turned him over on his back with his face out.

     

    I don't remember much about Justin in the swamp; it was a long time, but I just remember flashes of it. I couldn't move at first; I just lay there in the shallow water with my face out. It got dark and it got cold, I remember, and finally my arms would move a little and I got farther out of the water, lying in the mud with only my feet in the water. I slept or was unconscious again and when I woke up it was getting gray dawn, and that was when Harley came. I think I'd been calling him, and he must have heard.

    He stood there, dressed as immaculately and perfectly as ever, right in the swamp, and he was laughing at me for being so weak and lying there like a log, half in the dirty water and half in the mud, and I got up and nothing hurt me any more.

    We shook hands and he said, “Come on, Justin, let's get you out of here,” and I was so glad he'd come that I cried a little. He laughed at me for that and said I should lean on him and he'd help me walk, but I wouldn't do that, because I was coated with mud and filth of the swamp and he was so clean and perfect in a white linen suit, like an ad in a magazine. And all the way out of that swamp, all the days and nights we spent there, he never even got mud on his trouser cuffs, nor his hair mussed.

    I told him just to lead the way, and he did, walking just ahead of me, sometimes turning around, laughing and talking to me and cheering me up. Sometimes I'd fall but I wouldn't let him come back and help me. But he'd wait patiently until I could get up. Sometimes I'd crawl instead when I couldn't stand up any more. Sometimes I'd have to swim streams that he'd leap across.

    And it was day and night and day and night, and sometimes I'd sleep, and things would crawl across me. And some of them I caught and ate, or maybe I dreamed that. I remember other things, in that swamp, like an organ that played a lot of the time, and sometimes angels in the air and devils in the water, but those were deliriums, I guess.

    Harley would say, “A little farther, Justin; we'll make it. And we'll get back at them, at all of them.”

    And we made it. We came to dry fields, cultivated fields with waist-high corn, but there weren't ears on the corn for me to eat. And then there was a stream, a clear stream that wasn't stinking water like the swamp, and Harley told me to wash myself and my clothes and I did, although I wanted to hurry on to where I could get food.

    I still looked pretty bad; my clothes were clean of mud and filth but they were mere rags and wet, because I couldn't wait for them to dry, and I had a ragged beard and I was barefoot.

    But we went on and came to a little farm building, just a two-room shack, and there was a smell of fresh bread just out of an oven, and I ran the last few yards to knock on the door. A woman, an ugly woman, opened the door and when she saw me she slammed it again before I could say a word.

    Strength came to me from somewhere, maybe from Harley, although I can't remember him being there just then. There was a pile of kindling logs beside the door. I picked one of them up as though it were no heavier than a broomstick, and I broke down the door and killed the woman. She screamed a lot, but I killed her. Then I ate the hot fresh bread.

    I watched from the window as I ate, and saw a man running across the field toward the house. I found a knife, and I killed him as he came in at the door. It was much better, killing with the knife; I liked it that way.

    I ate more bread, and kept watching from all the windows, but no one else came. Then my stomach hurt from the hot bread I'd eaten and I had to lie down, doubled up, and when the hurting quit, I slept.

    Harley woke me up, and it was dark. He said, “Let's get going; you should be far away from here before it's daylight.”

    I knew he was right, but I didn't hurry away. I was becoming, as you see, very clever now. I knew there were things to do first. I found matches and a lamp, and lighted the lamp. Then I hunted through the shack for everything I could use. I found clothes of the man, and they fitted me not too badly except that I had to turn up the cuffs of the trousers and the shirt. His shoes were big, but that was good because my feet were so swollen.

    I found a razor and shaved; it took a long time because my hand wasn't steady, but I was very careful and didn't cut myself much.

    I had to hunt hardest for their money, but I found it finally. It was sixty dollars.

    And I took the knife, after I had sharpened it. It isn't fancy; just a bone-handled carving knife, but it's good steel. I'll show it to you, pretty soon now. It's had a lot of use.

    Then we left and it was Harley who told me to stay away from the roads, and find railroad tracks. That was easy because we heard a train whistle far off in the night and knew which direction the tracks lay. From then on, with Harley helping, it's been easy.

    You won't need the details from here. I mean, about the brakeman, and about the tramp we found asleep in the empty reefer, and about the near thing I had with the police in Richmond. I learned from that; I learned I mustn't talk to Harley when anybody else was around to hear. He hides himself from them; he's got a trick and they don't know he's there, and they think I'm funny in the head if I talk to him. But in Richmond I bought better clothes and got a haircut and a man I killed in an alley had forty dollars on him, so I had money again. I've done a lot of traveling since then. If you stop to think you'll know where I am right now.

    I'm looking for Bull Mallon and the two men who helped him. Their names are Harry and Carl. I'm going to kill them when I find them. Harley keeps telling me that those fellows are big tune and that I'm not ready for them yet. But I can be looking while I'm getting ready so I keep moving around. Sometimes I stay in one place long enough to hold a job as a printer for a while. I've learned a lot of things. I can hold a job and people don't think I'm too strange; they don't get scared when I look at them like they sometimes did a few months ago. And I've learned not to talk to Harley except in our own room and then only very quietly so people in the next room won't think I'm talking to myself.

    And I've kept in practice with the knife. I've killed lots of people with it, mostly on the streets at night. Sometimes because they look like they might have money on them, but mostly just for practice and because I've come to like doing it. I'm really good with the knife by now. You'll hardly feel it.

    But Harley tells me that kind of killing is easy and that it's something else to kill a person who's on guard, as Bull and Harry and Carl will be.

    And that's the conversation that led to the bet I mentioned. I told Harley that I'd bet him that, right now, I could warn a man I was going to use the knife on him and even tell him why and approximately when, and that I could still kill him. And he bet me that I couldn't and he's going to lose that bet.

    He's going to lose it because I'm warning you right now and you're not going to believe me. I'm betting that you're going to believe that this is just another story in a book. That you won't believe that this is the only copy of this book that contains this story and that this story is true. Even when I tell you how it was done, I don't think you'll really believe me.

    You see I'm putting it over on Harley, winning the bet, by putting it over on you. He never thought, and you won't realize, how easy it is for a good printer, who's been a counterfeiter too, to counterfeit one story in a book. Nothing like as hard as counterfeiting a five dollar bill.

    I had to pick a book of short stories and I picked this one because I happened to notice that the last story in the book was titled Don't Look Behind You and that was going to be a good title for this. You'll see what I mean in a few minutes.

    I'm lucky that the printing shop I'm working for now does book work and had a type face that matches the rest of this book. I had a little trouble matching the paper exactly, but I finally did and I've got it ready while I'm writing this. I'm writing this directly on a linotype, late at night in the shop where I'm working days. I even have the boss' permission, told him I was going to set up and print a story that a friend of mine had written, as a surprise for him, and that I'd melt the type metal back as soon as I'd printed one good copy.

    When I finish writing this I'll make up the type in pages to match the rest of the book and I'll print it on the matching paper I have ready. I'll cut the new pages to fit and bind them in; you won't be able to tell the difference, even if a faint suspicion may cause you to look at it. Don't forget I made five and ten dollar bills you couldn't have told from the original, and this is kindergarten stuff compared to that job. And I've done enough bookbinding that I'll be able to take the last story out of the book and bind this one in instead of it and you won't be able to tell the difference no matter how closely you look. I'm going to do a perfect job of it if it takes me all night.

    And tomorrow I'll go to some bookstore, or maybe a newsstand or even a drug store that sells books and has other copies of this book, ordinary copies, and I'll plant this one there. I'll find myself a good place to watch from, and I'll be watching when you buy it.

    The rest I can't tell you yet because it depends a lot on circumstances, whether you went right home with the book or what you did. I won't know till I follow you and keep watch till you read it—and I see that you are reading the last story in the book.

    If you're home while you're reading this, maybe I'm in the house with you right now. Maybe I'm in this very room, hidden, waiting for you to finish the story. Maybe I'm watching through a window. Or maybe I'm sitting near you on the streetcar or train, if you're reading it there. Maybe I'm on the fire escape outside your hotel room. But wherever you're reading it, I'm near you, watching and waiting for you to finish. You can count on that.

    You're pretty near the end now. You'll be finished in seconds and you'll close the book, still not believing. Or, if you haven't read the stories in order, maybe you'll turn back to start another story. If you do, you'll never finish it.

    But don't look around; you'll be happier if you don't know, if you don't see the knife coming. When I kill people from behind they don't seem to mind so much.

    Go on, just a few seconds or minutes, thinking this is just another story. Don't look behind you. Don't believe this—until you feel the knife.