DANE GREGORY
Hear That Mournful
Sound
THERE ARE A number of unsung pulpsters—writers of considerable talent who, because they never graduated to books or the slick-paper magazines, and therefore never developed a readership outside the pulps, have languished in undeserved obscurity. John Lawrence is one such unsung author; G. T. Fleming-Roberts is another. But the best of them all, at least in this writer's opinion, is Rob Robbins.
Robbins, who wrote primarily under the pseudonym of Dane Gregory, was a prolific contributor to the pulps in the thirties and early forties. He was equally adept at humor, light sex fiction, crime stones, Westerns, and shivery weird menace yarns. But his finest work was in the mystery field; the bulk of it was sold to Rogers Terrill at Popular Publications and published in Detective Tales.
Under Terrill's editorship, Detective Tales (1935-1952) was a cut above the average crime pulp.  The conventional tough private eye, so prevalent in the pages of rival magazines, was conspicuously absent from DT during Terrill's tenure; instead, he gave his readers off-trail stones with emphasis on character and atmosphere as well as fast-paced action. Since quality stories of this type were not easy to come by, he was quick to encourage the talent of the man who signed himself Dane Gregory, often featuring Gregory stories on the covers and praising them in interior blurbs. Curiously, Terrill was not enthusiastic about "Hear That Mournful Sound" when it was submitted; he felt it was too subtle for the pulp audience. But it is a mark of his editorial acumen that he recognized its obvious merits, and bought and published it anyway. It appeared in the November 1942 issue of Detective Tales, under the title "Lynchville Had a Barber." Despite Terrill's reservations, which perhaps unfairly underestimated his readership, it is Dane Gregory's most accomplished story ("The Mandarin's Thirty-Third Tooth" and "The Silver Bell of San Gee," two fine novelettes with Chinatown settings, rank as close seconds). A masterful blend of honor, atmosphere, and unusual characterization, it is reminiscent of Cornell Woolrich at his most spellbinding. Once read, neither it nor its final sentence can be easily forgotten.
Rob Robbins made his first pulp sales in the mid-thirties, to Breezy Stories and Droll Stories—work he refers to as "haymow literature, but so dewy-eyed in its approach to sex that today any Boy Scout could read the stories to his mother." Later, after working as an itinerant newsman on the Pacific Coast, he settled in San Francisco and began writing for the pulps full-time, publishing more than 100 stones under a variety of names. His pulp career ended in 1942 when he took an air traffic job with the Civil (later Federal) Aeronautics Administration in Alaska, where he remained until his retirement from the FAA in 1970. Since then, he has returned both to the Pacific Coast and to freelance writing, mostly of nonfiction. In the past decade he has contributed unusual feature material to publications in the US, Canada, and England; some of his articles on psi phenomena and historic murder cases have recently been collected by a British publisher. He now makes his home in Oregon.

CHAPTER ONE
HELL'S ORCHARD
When she is murdered, let no one mourn.
This was destined when she was born:
But save your tears for the slayer who
Weeps on the very blade that slew.
	—Red-inked entry in Claybaugh's
	Giant Scrap Book—probably by
	Claybaugh his own-self.

 WELL, I DON'T know. They held the services the second day after all this took place up on the Hill; but while that's crowding things a little for these parts, I suppose it was thought best on account of the unseasonable weather. Anyhow, the news had traveled far enough so there was a very good attendance.
Miss Eubanks had been a pleasant woman, given to a few whims in her later years (as who is not? I always say) but highly thought of by all.
After the main service there was a long procession out to the cemetery and then a brief graveside service where they tell me the widowed Mrs. Crownover—she'd been Miss Eubanks' dearest friend—created a little excitement by offering to throw herself in the open vault.
I wasn't there for that part of it, however. It being a Saturday morning, I had to get back to the barber shop.
Most of the time the shop kept me pretty busy on a Saturday, and that had been especially true since Copeland Powers put away his apron to take a houseman's job over at the Club. Not that I minded, you understand. I've always been one to like lots of company and baseball talk around me; and anyhow, it was just as Tookie used to say.
That was the wife: her folks had named her Tucker after some relation on her mother's side, but everybody called her Tookie.
"Chigger," she used to tell me in her laughing way, "a chink in the till is worth two in the plaster."
But I don't know. It may have been the strange weather or it may have been that a big funeral procession always seems to drag the quiet of death through a town. Whatever it was, I never passed a longer, slower Saturday morning.
It was not seeing Charlie at the shine-chair that got to me the worst. I put a good stiff edge on the razors and then I moved the Lucky Tiger calendar over to the south wall, but it seemed like the rest of the time there was nothing to do with my hands. Under the circumstances, I guess it was only natural I should think quite a bit about Charlie.
Let's see, now, he'd been working for me every Saturday—oh, it must have been all of six years—till the day he got his big hands on that axe. Charlie always did like sharp things, but of course nobody thought much about it then. It was six years, all right, because it comes back to me now that it was that terrible hot summer right after Tookie went to Wichita, Kansas.
Well, I don't know. As I was going to say, this particular Saturday morning I felt about as sorry for him as I had when he first came bawling into town with the slats of his dad's whip across his forty-year-old shoulders.
It's not that I'm taking up for murder-most-foul, as Colonel Murfree likes to call it. Whether by Charlie or by Adam's off-ox, it's a crime against nature and I guess we all see eye-to-eye on that. But Charlie had been a great outdoor man, you know; and we don't have Court Week here until late September. It gave me a shut-in feeling myself to think of spending three months in jail.
I made up a little package out of some funnypaper books and then I put on my hat and coat and hung up the "Back Soon" sign. I went upstreet toward the county jail, which is four blocks south along Main in what some call the old pecan grove. That way the wind was in my face.
It seemed like the wind would never let up. Six days steady now it had been blowing in from the south; but not hard and not hurried and not even hot enough that a man could break out in a good clean sweat. It had the smell of dying flowers on it, and it was slow and smooth. You could open your hand against it and it would run like a woman's hand through your fingers; and in the night when it slipped along the eaves it was like a woman's voice.
Even the sheriff seemed to feel it a little, though Claybaugh is scarcely what anyone would call an edgy sort. He was working away at a crossword puzzle. His coat and vest and shirt were thrown across the back of his chair.
"Chigger," said Sheriff Claybaugh. "Eight-letter word beginning with H and ending with E and meaning 'capital offense.' Any ideas?"
I said no; then added: "I brought Charlie some funny books, Clay. Animal Antics—they're the only ones that don't make him cry."
"That's thoughtful. Strange about Charlie going berserk on us, ain't it? Everybody knew he was a little turned, but nobody thought he'd ever turn completely berserkwards."
"Claybaugh, that ain't funny!"
"I know it ain't, Chig." The sheriff turned his blue eyes up to me and they were soft. "I'm fond of Charlie my own-self, and I just can't hardly see him taking the wrong side of an axe to a gentle old soul like Miss Eubanks. Nope. I can't hardly see it happen."
"Well," I said, "he likes sharp things, Clay. No getting around it, Charlie always appreciated a good cutting piece. And there's weather."
Claybaugh huffed out his cheeks. "Tell a man there's weather. She's a sirocco for fair."
"Come twice?"
"You ought to do some word puzzles your own-self. Sirocco is what they call it in the tropical places when a wind blows in from the south this way. Makes people jumpy as cats, somehow, and now and then one of 'em goes on the hunt like Charlie. It's like the same chord of music played over and over till it runs through your bones like a scream."
"Say, don't it?"
Claybaugh said, "But it don't come often here. Last bad spell was six years ago. I remember the time because that was the year somebody boiled up crow meat and ate it to pay off a mid-term election bet. And that was the year—"
He unhooked the star from his uppers and began to pick away at a little spot of egg-yellow that had hardened into the groove.
"Well, I can talk about it now," I said. "That was the year Tookie packed up her duds and left me."
Claybaugh shook his head. "Pretty little thing. Cute as a cardinal with all that red hair—but, Chig, she'd been a flirting girl from the first." He put his key-ring on the desk. "Guess I can trust you with these, boy, but you watch Charlie real close."
"Tell a man I will."
Claybaugh came clear out of his chair and slapped the roll-top like someone killing bugs. "Homicide!" he yelled. "Homicide! Dam' it, Chigger, all this time it's been plain as the nose on your face!"
I edged away from him a little and ran one finger up to the nerve that sometimes draws at my lip. "Come twice?" I said.
Claybaugh dipped his pen in the bottle of red ink. He sat down and began to scratch letters across the word puzzle. "Begins with H and ends with E, don't it? You watch Charlie, boy—never can tell what may be in a man's mind."
I went in there to Charlie's cell and Charlie said through his balled hands, "I just couldn't seem to eat 'er, sheriff. You can warm 'er up for my supper, though, can't you?"
I said, "It's me."
He took his knuckles out of his eyes and they were tender. "I said all the time you might come and see me, Mr. Deems. I told the sheriff so."
"Well, and why not, Charlie? I brought you a slight something, too."
He brightened his eyes at the funnypaper books. "Cub bear ones?
"Miss Eubanks thought maybe I could learn to puzzle out the short words. She said so, Mr. Deems. But they wouldn't let me go to the service—oh, no, not them! Wasn't usual, the sheriff said."
"Charlie," I said, "it really ain't. Claybaugh tries to be fair."
"But I didn't chop her!" said Charlie. "Not one lick, I didn't. Mr. Deems. I need some new clothes awful bad, but you just couldn't have hired me to chop Miss Eubanks."
I sat down on the edge of Charlie's bunk and loosened my collar some so I could breathe better. "Seems like you were up there on the Hill, though," I said.
"On'y because Miss Eubanks likes flowers."
"Come twice?"
Charlie said, "She was gonna put in a big rock garden there, people talked. She was gonna stump out that old crabble orchard she taken over from the bank. So I says I'll go up there and offer to chop for Miss Eubanks. I figured she'd leave me chop, Mr. Deems, because everyone knows how handy I am with—"
His face bleached tow and I thought for a minute he was going to yell. "But not that way, Mr. Deems," he whispered.
"Maybe we better talk about the cub bear books."
"The wind was on the back of my neck," said Charlie. He was shaking a little and hunting a place for his hands. "It was like someone breathing on me, Mr. Deems, and it was dretful up there and I wanted to turn at the gate. But that was when I heard the scream. 'Jim sang his'n purty!' it screamed. 'Jim sang his'n purty!' "
"Come twice?"
He said it again.
"Charlie," I told him, "that's wild. Miss Eubank never owned a talking crow in her life."
"Wasn't no crow that screamed it, Mr. Deems. It was pore Miss Eubanks her own-self."
"Charlie," I said, "that story would be plain poison in court. Miss Eubanks had taught school all her life, and everyone knows she made a chore of her grammar."
He clenched his big face and went on talking. "I wanted to go the other way, but Miss Eubanks had been my dear friend. I run and I run towards the house, and direc'ly I got to the door it was bad, Mr. Deems. She set there with her head up against the door and I thought right away something might be out of whack because the axe was in her— The axe was in— The axe, Mr. Deems."
"Charlie."
"And I was crying a little, I guess, and I says, 'Miss Eubanks,' I says to her, 'how come anyone would want to chop you?' " Charlie put his mouth too close to my ear. "And then there was The Sign," he whispered.
"The Sign?" I asked.
"It was dretful," whispered Charlie. "Dead as she is, up jumps her arm like this, Mr. Deems; and she points Out There! She points Out There to that old crabble orchard—and then down goes her arm like this. It on'y made a soft little spank on the step, though."
It was the way he told it, somehow. I said, "Charlie!"
"And I took up the axe and I mogged for the trees, but the wind could mog faster than me. It was dretful when I got to the orchard. There was a shadow sixty-five miles long that run through the grass like a snake, but I could have stood that, maybe." He put his mouth to my ear again. "On'y thing I couldn't stand was The Women."
"Women?"
Charlie whispered, "It don't get in the books, I guess, but maybe the millionaires have got some reason for keeping it from us. When that south wind shook the leaves, I knew. It blew the moon all silver and green through the crabble trees; and the trees kep' saying at me, kep' saying: 'Oh-h-h, Charlie! Ah-h-h, Charlie! Tell the boys hello-o-o, Charlie, and don't do a thing I wouldn't do."
He pecked at my knee with his forefinger then, but I don't suppose I jumped more than two or three feet at the outside. "You tell Colonel Murfree and maybe he'll put it in the Democrat," said Charlie. "Them crabble trees up on the Hill, Mr. Deems, they're dead women lifting their pore lean arms to fluff out their hair and try to look purty again."
"Charlie," I said, "not another word! A man can stand so much and no more."
"That's what I know," said Charlie. "I couldn't have gone on into them trees if I'd been bare-naked and Pop behind me with the gad. I yapped like a pup and I made for the road, and there I was swinging that dretful axe and running off at the head when the Allisons come uphill in their car." His mouth reached for his ear-lobes again. "How's Mrs. Allison today? Hate to think of her being down sick."
"Now, Charlie, you don't want to be a cry-baby all the time, do you? Look, Charlie," I told him, "you haven't even opened up your funnypaper book."
He unrolled the funnypaper books and out rolled that old Navy Colt of mine—the one I got from Copeland Powers when he bet on the wrong sheriff.

CHAPTER TWO
LYNCH TALK
CHARLIE COOLED OFF his fingers on the leg of his cords. His mouth opened wide then closed very slowly. He leaned close to me, whispered: "Gun?"
"Gun," I agreed.
"No," whispered Charlie.
I rattled the key-ring at him and said, "The Allison boys are taking their mother up north awhile—they think maybe she'll get over her breakdown sooner there. Well, Charlie, they've got a nice cool cyclone-cellar where you could hole up for weeks. Would be a nice cozy place."
He turned his face to the window and whuffed like a dog. "But maybe you'd get in bad with—"
"I'll have a yarn for Claybaugh—don't you fret about that. Charlie, maybe you're guilty as sin, but other-hand maybe you're not. One way or the other, I wouldn't keep a cannibal shoat cooped up in weather like this. Not when the south wind is blowing."
Charlie moved his feet. "The sheriff give me a big cavalry sword oncet."
It was muggy as a swamp in that little cell, and the nape of my neck began to draw at the hairline. "Damn it," I said, "you don't think I'm telling you to shoot at him, do you? All you've got to do is pour enough lead around the place to keep him interested in his word-puzzle. And then you mog, understand? Man comes in here offering you a chance and you stand around thinking up crazy things instead of mogging."
Charlie coaxed, "Don't lay 'er on my old sore back, Mr. Deems." He took the gun and he took the key-ring and he opened up the door and he went.
I lay down on the floor near the cub bear books and looked up at the long crack that ran across the ceiling. The funnybooks had the root-beerish smell of Bigler's Pharmacy.
I guess ordinarily the Colt would have made a terrific boom, but in all that soft heat the shots had a lazy, rolling sound like a cowbell heard at dusk. I lay where I was and listened to Claybaugh's chair lean hard against the wall and something heavy turn over once to scratch at the floor like a Badger. Then things were quiet.
Claybaugh came in sweating a little and dragging Charlie along by the scruff of his shirt. "Dam' it, Chigger," he scolded. "I told you to watch him. Remember I warned you."
Charlie had never been much to look at, of course, but he was worse than ever with his shirt front stained red clear down to the old trunk strap he used for a belt. I came up onto my hands and knees and shook my head a little to put things back where they belonged.
"I was watching him like a hawk," I said, "but even a hawk can't see backwards. And who'd ever have thought he knew the rabbit punch?"
Claybaugh threw Charlie onto the bunk and wiped off his fingers with the cub bear books. "You didn't even say you were toting a gun," he complained.
"Tell a man I was. Think I'd call on Charlie without side-arms of some kind?"
"Well," said Claybaugh, "all I wish is he hadn't made me do it. What'd the poor stiff want with a gun, anyhow? He threw every one of his shots straight at the floor."
Charlie's feet looked only a little bigger than gravestones with his toes turned up.
I shut my eyes and said, "Well, there'd have been a lot of loose talk if Charlie had broke out of jail. I hate having this happen, Clay, but I guess you handled 'er the only way you could."
"The only merciful way, after all," said Claybaugh. He blew his nose and heaved a great sigh. "Dam' it, though, I'm going to give Charlie particular hell when he comes out of this! That bottle of red ink I slapped him with went all over my word-puzzle, Chigger."
Well, I'll say this for the shots: they warmed up trade a little. People usually come to my shop for the fresh news, and it made things even better that I'd been right there in the thick of the fray when Charlie put on his jailbreak. By first-coke time that afternoon I had a better than fair crowd.
"Oh, Charlie's not really a bad sort," I told them. "Another sheriff might have played 'er different, but I'm kind of glad old
Claybaugh is the easy-going type. I wouldn't want anything to happen to Charlie. I'd hate to think of Charlie stopping a bullet from Clay's gun."
Cotton Maxey made the noise he makes with his lips. That's the blonde Maxey boy—the one that wears the green suit and the old Settler's Day button reading: I Love My Wife, but Oh, You Kid.
"Charlie can't help from liking sharp things," said Cotton Maxey. "They tell me his mother once jumped on his head because he forgot to dig up a fresh batch of eating-clay."
"Well," I said to the stuffed raccoon up on the setback, "you can't hardly blame her for that. I understand she'd been planning a big charity supper for the Maxey family."
There was a sort of embarrassed silence after I said it. Neither the 'coon nor anybody else wanted to break out a smile, because Cotton packs around a barlow knife only a little less wicked than the razor I was holding. He decided to let it ride. But the look he gave me wasn't friendly at all.
We were most of us somewhat on the peck, I guess. The southerly wind had blown in all day, shaking the dry catalpas along Main so that they danced like fingers on a piano. I'd closed up my shop tight against the sound; and as Les Turnidge came in, the air in that place was scarcely a day deader than Adam.
"She's thinning out on top, Les," I told him.
"I'm paying you to cut it, not wear it." He looked up at the 'coon in the setback as if he would like to shoot it again. "So Charlie goes faunching in there with a couple of big guns and Claybaugh slaps him with a book. Wears a gun his own-self, don't he?"
"Oh, it wasn't quite like that, Les. Anyhow, Claybaugh hates to shoot at people he knows."
I oiled up the clippers a little; they had a baby-chick sound that wore on my nerves. "It's not that I'm saying anything against Miss Eubanks," I said. "There wasn't a better woman or a finer teacher in the world. I'll leave that to Cotton Maxey, there—he must've got to know her pretty well those five or six years he spent in the Fourth B. She taught your little ones, most of you, and I guess she'd have taught mine if Tookie and I— Well, she was a fine woman."
"Set up with my wife once," said Les. His strawberry mark had a hot, chafed look under the clippers.
"Set up with everybody's wife. Fed hungry bellies and clothed naked Maxeys—whether they wanted to be or not. Asked nothing more of life than the right to raise a few little flowers. But like I say, she's gone now—couldn't even smell the beautiful floral offerings at her own service—while poor old Charlie sits up there healthy enough to tear the neck off a horse. And it's the living we've got to think of boys. Remember that."
Cotton Maxey bent over to stare at the sleepy June bug that had blown in from the street. There was a sound of breathing in the room, thick and slow like the wind. Crabby old G. D. Harvison Murrow balled his hand on Cotton's new issue of Ginger Snaps and peered at me out of eyes that were only a little more glassy than the stuffed raccoon's.
"You'd have to take up for Charlie! Sure—you hired him in the first place. Well, it ain't gonna do you a lick of good, Chigger! He'll get his next Court Week, the axe-murdering—"
"That so, G. D.?"
"Ain't it?"
I blew on the clippers. "Few months from now," I told them all, "we'll look out there and see old Charlie swinging downstreet with a grin on his face from here to the Hollow. Yes, and his big old cavalry sword clunking along at his side. Well, that's all right. Charlie ain't a bad man at heart, you know."
Les Turnidge's neck twitched under the lather. "How do you mean, Chigger?"
"Why, man alive," I said, "there ain't a single one of those big-upstate-millionaire-lawyers who won't be fighting for the chance to take Charlie's case! Just for the fame of it, I mean. And then what happens? With the exception of Cotton Maxey, there, every man-jack of you would have to tell the truth on the stand."
Cotton opened up his barlow knife and began to strop it softly on the sole of his shoe.
Les Turnidge said, "What truth? Or maybe we ain't got the right to know. We're only taxpayers! It's root-hog-or-die for the poor man, but some big-fat-upstate millionaire-lawyer— Ouch!"
"You leaned on the blade your own-self, Les. Why, Charlie's a little different, that's all, and you'd have to say so, wouldn't you? They'll send him away to a place for a while, and in three-four months—oh, maybe six—back comes Charlie to his grindstone and his tools. Well, hell, I like Charlie. I'd hate to think of him being cooped up for the rest of his days."
The June bug tottered over to the fallen Ginger Snaps and looked at a row of letters reading: Babes in the Woodshed, by Dodo Dare. Cotton's knife went whickety-whack on the quiet. G. D. Harvison Murrow bawled:
"Released as cured, you mean? You mean a bunch of big-fat-bloated-upstate millionaire-lawyers can come down here and—"
"It's how things are done, G. D. Right or wrong, it's legal, and we've got to stand by the law. I'll always say the crowd done the wrong thing in that beast-man case up north.
"What beast-man case?" said Les. "Ouch, damn it!"
"Criminy, don't jump around so! Well, some of the papers called it the Frenzied Frankenstein case. Seems this poor stiff had just been released from a place—been there three-four months. He thinks, 'Well. Nothing like having a license to kill, is there?'  So they were having a sort of Settler's Day like the one we have in October, and— Oh, I hate to talk about it."
The June bug had turned west and crawled along a crack in the floor. He was trying to find air, I guess. "Tell it!" screamed G. D. Harvison Murrow. "Tell it, Chigger!"
"Well, it was the little girl's death that got the town worked up so bad. The other eight people were all adults, and they should have had sense enough not to get in the way of a killer armed with a scythe. But the little yellow-haired girl— Anyhow, they called on Mr. Killer that night and they took him out of the jail. No fuss, no ceremony—they just took him right out and hung him higher than Haman's headache on the nearest tree."
Les said, "But how did they—"
"Oh, the jailhouse was a small one—not much bigger or stronger than ours, I guess. And then it seems the sheriff was an easy-going sort of man, too. You know the kind of man that wouldn't shoot an egg-sucking dog or a ditto Maxey."
Cotton tested the edge of the knife on a match he'd had clamped between his teeth. It still wasn't sharp enough to suit him, though. "You mean there was no trouble at all?" said G. D. Harvison Murrow.
"Well, I guess a couple of rich lawyers blew off a little, but the county officials winked at each other and let 'er ride. Some people thought it would have been better if they'd handled it that way when the gorilla-man drew his first blood—but like I was saying in the first place, I don't hold with none of that. Men shouldn't take the law in their own hands, not even when it's a matter of protecting their homes and dear ones."
"I've got four little tykes of my own," yelled Lester Turnidge, "and, Chigger, I'm just sort of curious to know why! Yes, and one of 'em's a little yellow-haired girl, too! Little Sunshine, we call her, and only the other day she was saying, 'Papa,' she was saying, 'don't call me Little Sunshine any more because sometimes the sunshine— sometimes the sunshine goes—' "
"Well, Les?"
" '—out,' " whispered Les. "Why, Chigger? Why? Why?"
"Just ain't right, that's all. Shows poor spirit. . . . There you are, Les—clean as the rim of a bowl. Next pair of ears to be lowered!"
G. D. H. Murrow ground his footprints into one of those sporty-looking women they have in the magazine. "Poor spirit, says Chigger! Poor spirit! But it's fine and dandy for a whole slough of big-fat-bloated-plutocratic-multimillionaire-corporation-lawyers—yes, and upstate ones on top of that!—to come down here and lay every horror in the handbook on us! That's all right, now ain't it?"
"Easy does it, G. D. You don't want to go around talking like a sorehead."
G. D. shook his two fists at the stuffed raccoon. "Just like Clay-baugh, that's his trouble! Red-handed Frankensteen monster goes screaming in there with a gun in each hand and that big old cavalry sword in the other—and Claybaugh he's too timid to do any more than spank him with a word-puzzle! Afraid to buck The System! Well, he's a part of The System, that's why—and I ain't voted for him any of these past sixteen years without wondering when he'd show his hand!"
He got in the barber-chair panting a little. It was stuffy in there, you know.
I said, "You hadn't ought to talk that way about Claybaugh, boys. Clay's all right—it's just that he don't like to shoot at people he knows. Why, if a crowd of you was to go up there tonight and say, 'Claybaugh, we can't sleep a wink till we've taken care of Charlie'— well, like I say, what would happen? Why, Claybaugh he'd just only shake his head sadly and tell you: 'Guess it's your right, boys, but I hate to think of what the millionaires will say.' She's thin on tap, G. D."
"Why wouldn't it be? I'm only a poor man, not one of these big-fat-baldheaded—"
"But of course," I said, "we don't live in that kind of town. And Claybaugh probably wouldn't be there, anyhow—he comes in at ten o'clock for his Sunday shave. Reminds me, I understand he may see Cotton Maxey's pa tomorrow and make him promise to use a lighter bullwhip when his crippled old mother drags the plow."
I picked up the straight-edge again. "And personally, boys," I told them all, "I'm glad to be living in the kind of town where a sheriff can safely leave his jail. I'm glad for Charlie's sake if nothing else—I wouldn't want anything to happen to poor old Charlie. . . . Something bothering you, Cotton?"
Cotton crouched low and put the point of his barlow knife slowly through the June bug's middle. Just in time, too—another second and the bug would have found that crack in the door.

CHAPTER THREE
"HERE COMES TOOKIE!"
WELL, I DON'T know. This is a kind of quiet little garden spot where nothing much ever happens after dark, though we do manage to scare up a bit of excitement at the fall street dances, and I guess there's little or no point in my keeping the shop open so late on a Saturday. The twilight was nice. At dusk the wind had turned off to a whisper.
Cotton Maxey came upstreet putting one yellow shoe ahead of the other with the particular care of a cat on a clothesline. He was wearing an old carnival streamer around his green hat,—Out For a Good Time, was what it said—and even with the wind going north I could smell the green choc smell that came south.
"Chigger," said Cotton. "Don't mean to tell me you're missing the party."
I didn't say aye-yes-or-damn.
"Chigger," said Cotton. "I figured of course you had your invite, him being a special friend. I even brought him a something my own-self."
It was a fudget I guess he'd picked up on the wheel o' fortune for not more than ten or twelve dollars—a little black ball-shaped tiepin with the numeral eight on it.
"Wouldn't want him to go tacky," said Cotton. "When a man wears a tie only once in his life, seems like he'd ought to wear something on it."
"Cotton," I told him, "I hope some day you'll drop around and open your barlow knife close enough to me so I can make twins of my favorite barroom poet. And bring your dog. If there's a flea-trap cur sick enough to like your smell, I'll provide a cur for each poet."
The light of his cigarette blew across his eyes and they were crazy. "Oh, will you?" said Cotton. "Oh, peachy!" He crooked his wrists like an edgy girl and went on up towards the grove.
That would have been about half after nine, I'd judge. Yes, I remember it well now—I looked at the clock when I went back inside.
It was quiet and stuffy for a while after that, and there was nothing much to keep me interested but the new supply catalogue.
It was 9:55, as I recall, when I heard the first of the sounds. Smack! it went—smackety-smack!—about like that. It probably would have sounded much louder up-wind, but coming all four blocks downtown it merely had a kind of soft, flat note.
That soon shaded off into nothing at all; and it must have been anyhow five minutes before I heard this heavier noise which was more like someone beating the top of a barrel.
A man yelled once above the noise, but the wind had cracked his words to pieces long before they reached the corner of Main and Seminole. Or maybe he didn't say anything in actual words; it sounded like G. D. Harvison Murrow uncorking a little rage. For the most part, however, there was only this tunkety-tunk effect and the various small sounds in the trees.
I sat where I was and didn't say aye-yes-or-hell; but of course it was something a man couldn't gloss over altogether. Even the 'coon in the setback appeared to be edgy. The jailhouse was bound to give in before long.
Take it all in all, I was pretty well pleased when Claybaugh came in for his shave. A man likes company around him at such times, you know. That was close on 10:10, I believe, though Claybaugh insisted the clock was four minutes slow by evening alamo time.
He hung up his coat and his vest and guns and he got in the chair. "Not too heavy on the hot towels, Chigger. Seems like it's hectic enough already with this bad harmattan going night and day."
"Come twice?"
"Tramontane, mistral, levanter or sirocco," said Claybaugh. "The wind that walks in the leaves, as the poet says."
I laid on the towels and boiled him only to a scolded baby blush. I took off the towels and said, "You slung the bolts and came up through the skylight, I gather. Well, personally, I think you done the right thing. No use a man's going the roundabout way for trouble."
We couldn't very well pretend to ignore it, you know: that would just have embarrassed the both of us. Somewhere the boys had scared up what sounded to me like a crowd-sized ridgepole; and on that sleepy breeze it made a firm, whanging noise only a little more noticeable than the late drought. Dum-dum-dum—like that.
"Guess you're right, Chigger," sighed Claybaugh. "Anyhow, Charlie'll soon be out of it all."
"That's how I look at it, too."
"And it seems to be a good orderly crowd," said the sheriff.
"Well," I told him, "I could see 'er coming this afternoon, Clay— there was some talk against Charlie right in here. But after all, what's a man to do?"
Claybaugh huffed out a scallop of lather. He drummed his fingers on the sides of the chair and said: "Not much of nothing, I guess. And how I look at it is this: if the jail can be torn down, county needs a new jail bad. Well, it'll be a whole lot easier to talk up a bond issue when Charlie's out of his misery at last and people start feeling low-down about the whole thing."
"That's a businesslike way to look at 'er, all right."
"Blade seems a little dull, Chigger," said Claybaugh. "I'd feel sort of easier in my mind if Charlie had done more damage with his shooting-piece today; but there's this much about it, Chig—a hang-rope jerks practic'ly any murder case out of the road. I don't know—eves the courts usually assume that the dead man was guilty as charged. Well; that's human."
They were really drumming old Charlie out of there for fair. A broken window-pane tittered high on the gust; but the only windows in the jail were well above a tall man's reach. The thing that seemed to draw on your nerves was the steady beat of that big old ridgepole fighting at the door.
It worked a little on Claybaugh, too, though Claybaugh has never been the edgy sort. He traded stares with the stuffed raccoon and began to drone through his nose while I whipped a little new into the razor. It was that tired old down-country Johnny Allen tune that goes in one ear and always has such a hard time finding its way out the other.

Johnny, oh, Johnny, oh, poor Johnny Allen—
Why does he shudder and what does he fear?
Only a voice calling over and over,
Crying: Oh, Johnny, my bonny, my dear!
Crying forever to poor Johnny Allen:
Johnny, oh, bonny, oh, dear,
My dear,
My dear

"Clay," I told him, "that's plain morbid for a Saturday night."
"Don't blame you much," said Claybaugh. "Is kind of lonesome, ain't it? There was another song you hated bad, as I remember. That was the one Cotton Maxey used to coo on the various pool-hall programs: 'Looky, looky, looky! Here comes Tookie! See you later, boys.'.... Wup! Nicked me a little."
"That's a bad mole, Clay. It ought to come off."
"Didn't it?" said Claybaugh. He twiddled his thumbs. "Well, Tookie was a pretty little thing, Chigger. Never forget how she used to dance her way downstreet with all that bright hair burning on her throat and just the right do on her mouth to make it look like fireweed honey tastes . . . Oh, she was pretty! But, Chig, there was more than once I wanted to reverse the order and spank her till she barked like a fox—and I guess maybe it was even worse for an edgy kind of man like you."
I tapped a spot of lotion onto Claybaugh's nick. "Tookie has her faults," I told him. "As who does not?—I always say."
"Still and all, Chigger, it couldn't've been a whole lot of fun for you when Tookie came sneakfooting in with choc on her breath and her nice rozberry lipstick worn down to the quick. I felt for you, Chigger—I really did."
I didn't say aye-yes-or-what of it. It was like that line in McGuffey's reader: The barber kept on shaving.
Claybaugh said: "Must've been particular hell, I should think, with the south wind singing that old, old song: I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now. You remember it, don't you? Tookie used to whistle it sometimes when she played the piano .... And you remember the wind, don't you, Chigger?—that strange wind six summers ago—the slow dark wind that poured over the world like sorghum over a cake. . . . Oh, by the way, Chigger, where is Tookie?"
"Puff out your cheek a little, will you? There. Oh, she went to Wichita, Clay—thought you knew. Understand she's going with some big-millionaire-lawyer now.

CHAPTER FOUR
CRIMSON SPLOTCHES
THE CROWD UPSTREET seemed bigger and noisier now. While I wasn't there at the time, of course, I have an idea the boys at the Club had broken up their pan game in a great big hurry when the news scattered out on the wind.
Cope Powers has always been quite an organizer, you know— he's president of the Hustle Up dinner group here in town—and now you could hear somebody with Cope's voice yelling: "Way-y back, fellows! Way-y back!" Then it would be whoom—rest—whoom— over and over that way till it seemed like the slam of old Charlie's heart against his ribs.
"Can't be much longer now," I said.
Claybaugh pulled in a cheek muscle under the scrape of the blade. "And I'll never forget the night Tookie left you, Chigger. 'Claybaugh,' you told me, bawling like a kid, 'my Tookie's gone and done 'er at last.' Didn't surprise me a whole lot, of course."
"Wish you wouldn't talk so much when I'm trying to make you presentable for—for church. Sets me on edge a little."
"There was something kind of odd about the house, though." said Claybaugh. "Queer. I didn't even notice it at the time, Chig, but later on it came back to me and plagued me now arid then for years. Sort of like an old word puzzle you've had to put away unworked. . . . If Tookie was going to leave him, I says, why would she have bothered herself to drag that big hooked rug out from under the divan and move it clean over to yonder side the room?"
I gave the straight-edge a lick and a promise. "Women are strange things, ain't they? Like Pa Deems used to say: Never marry a woman."
Claybaugh said: "A man's mind keeps on playing with problems even after something dark spills over his word puzzle. I think I solved that one tonight at half-past eight by evening alamo time."
"Did you, now, Claybaugh?"
"Yes. That was when I found myself all-a-sudden moving an old scatterrug over to hide that great big red-ink stain on my office floor. It looked so much like blood."
The wind ran in the brown catalpas and clashed them together like rattlebones ticking off the beat of a song. Bonny, oh, dear, my dear. I hate those old sad pieces. Give me something lively every time.
"Must have been a bad spot on your parlor floor," said Claybaugh. "Oh-h, it must have been bad—and especially so if lye and sandpaper and a porcupine brush wouldn't scour it out of your thoughts. . . . Where is she, Chigger? Where's Tookie cooling off her little heels, Chigger Deems?"
I said: "Wish you wouldn't talk about her like that. She knew how to laugh, Clay. She knew how to play the piano. I don't know— maybe she knew how to live."
"And it's too dam' bad she had to die in order to prove it. I guess you know you're under arrest, Chigger."
"And I guess you know you're under a razor," I said.
It went—whoomety-whoom—sort of like that. Practically any barber might have a bad accident with so much noise going on upstreet. And then, too, people around here know I'm the nervous type. Have been for years. As Colonel Murfree sometimes says, "He jests at scars who was never shaved by Chigger."
Claybaugh's hands lay big and flat and still on the arms of the chair. He turned his blue eyes up to mine and they were chiding. "Chig," said Claybaugh, "alongside you the meanest Maxey smells sweeter than baby's breath to me. You're a wicked little man, Chigger Deems."
"She's been quite a sirocco, Claybaugh."
"That's like a man blaming his weakness on the liquor he drinks to get weak on. I could excuse you Tookie, maybe—she was the kind of girl that whistles her way to a lonesome grave. But there's old Charlie, a man that thought more of you than of Bolivar Bear."
Whoom went the maul.
"And there was Miss Eubanks up on the Hill, a poor old thing trying to fill her life with jonquils because she had a set of teeth that once scared Harvison Murrow witless in a kissing game. Never got over it, either—listen to him howl!"
I opened a button on his shirt. "I tried to reason with her, Claybaugh."
"And I never saw a more convinced corpse."
"Wish you wouldn't talk like that, Clay. 'Miss Eubanks,' I says to her kindly, 'you don't want to stump out all those lovely crab-apple trees. Why, there's good rich shade there,' I says to her. 'Plant you some ginseng roots between the trees and you can make yourself a mint of money when the Chinese market opens up again."
"And then?" said Claybaugh.
"Oh, no, not Miss Eubanks! It was posies or nothing for her. 'Ginseng isn't pretty,' she kept insisting. 'Ginseng isn't pretty!' she screamed and I guess she was still screaming it some even when I—"
"Take note you'd fetched up her axe from the chopping-block just in case. So Tookie's under the crab-trees, is she? Thought so."
"Won't have people digging there, Claybaugh."
His eyes were round and steady on mine. "Seems like you'd have done a little digging your own-self when you lost that piece of land to the bank."
"I'll tell you, Clay. I hate all this like billy hell, and maybe you'll think less unkindly of me if I—if I tell you the whole thing before I— It's Tookie's voice. It lives on and on in the crab-tree, Clay, and I know it's there because Charlie Weller heard it his own-self."
"The wind that walks in the leaves," said Claybaugh. "When a man's fear is too big for his brain, it always takes a voice outside him."
"It wasn't fear that sent me kiting home with my spade. 'Chigger,' says Tookie. 'No! No!' And, Claybaugh, I knew what she meant. There was something she didn't want to spoil for me, you see."
He was watching me dry off the blade; but his hands were quiet. I kept an eye on them, I'll tell a man I did. "That don't sound a whole lot like Tookie," said Claybaugh.
"Sometimes she's still in the house with me," I said. "And don't you go looking at me like I'm crazy! I know it ain't real. There's one part memory of how she was and five parts memory of how she should've been. But, Claybaugh, it was my own tears that finally washed the stain off the parlor floor. It's away to hell-and-gone better than nothing."
The shadow of my hand stopped like a spider on his face. "And that was what she didn't want to spoil for you, Chigger?"
"That was it. She was always so proud of how she looked, you know. She wouldn't want anyone—and me least of all—to see her with her long hair tangled in the— No one can dig around up on the Hill, Clay. Not while I  live above ground."
His eyes were only a little softer than smoke. "Dam' it, Chigger, I'm almost sorry for you!" The ridgepole went whoomety-whoomety-whoom. He added, "Not quite, though."
"Think I wanted to turn old bear-loving Charlie into a millionaire-corporation-lawyer? There's a kind of a thing called fear, Clay, though you wouldn't know what it's like."
He watched the blade turn slow in the light. "You're the best little teacher in the world, Chigger Deems."
"I've got to do 'er," I said. "It ain't the way I'd have had it, Clay, but we quit being old acquaintances when you started working out the wrong kind of puzzles."
"Still don't think you can do 'er, boy. Not to me."
The jailhouse let go at last. You could hear the long, thin scream of the hinges tearing down-wind like a cross-cut tearing through a knot in a Judas tree. Scre-e-e!—sort of like that.
"Get the cowardly axe-killer—" yelled Cotton Maxey. And even above the tunk of the door, his voice had a bright wet edge like the thing that leaned on my knuckles.
"The years roll on," said Claybaugh. "Don't they, Chigger?"
It burned red and white and red on his neck, the ragged old scar he'd picked up from somebody's sunken drag-line long before the dark winds blew. That had been the afternoon he scraped me off the sticky bottom of the Bear, where I'd just settled down for the second time and had made up my mind to raise particular hell with a tradition.
"Won't do you a lick of good to talk," I told him. "She's got to be done."
I could sweat a little now, though the wind was still heavy with unshed heat. I swung the razor and put plenty of arm behind it. I threw the blade at the stuffed raccoon and put out one of its eyes. "Seems like a man as tight as you would get himself a safety-razor, anyhow," I said. "Guess there are things even a bad coward is worse afraid of than his fear, Claybaugh. Old Man Deems was quite a hellion his own-self, but I guess he never raised that sort of Cain."
Claybaugh huffed his way out of the chair and began to fiddle around with his shirt-buttons. "Hoped you'd put it like that," said Claybaugh. "Wanted to get the straight of things from your own lips, of course, but I think maybe that was the big reason why I came over for my regular close shave." He drew the back of his hand across his forehead and added: "Dam' it, though, Chigger, couldn't you have said it a little sooner?"
Up in the old pecan grove there was a kind of dull, dark boom and then we could hear a man's scream raise up and scatter out and die to nothing on the wind. While I wasn't there at the time, naturally, I sort of figured Les Turnidge had brought his new shotgun along.
"Sounds like we're a little too late to do anything for Charlie," I said.
Claybaugh said, "Sounds like Cotton Maxey to me, I hope. Though Copeland Powers would do 'most as well—I been dreading his talk on good fellowship at the club dinner Monday noon. I had a shotgun trap loaded with rock salt and mustard seed in Charlie's cell."
"Well," I said. "Well. But—"
"Oh, I let him out hours ago—soon after he shot three times right square at the floor and didn't even leave any bullet-holes in that. He's close by ... Charlie!"
Charlie came in through the north door dragging that big old cavalry sword Claybaugh had given him; and it seems he'd been standing there all this time with his elbow cocked for the throw. He was always so handy with sharp things, too.
"I'd have hated to do 'er, Mr. Deems," he bawled, "but I'd have hated worse to see you do 'er to your own brother!"
"Well," I said. "Well."
I knew they were going to take me away; but I felt easier in my mind already, somehow. Maybe the south wind had turned off a little, or—well, it may have been such a relief to get the thing out of my veins at last. It had all been a terrible chore from the first. But I don't know, it seems like once a man gets started he just can't stop.