Corpses at Indian Stones

by Philip Wylie

POPULAR LIBRARY books are carefully selected by the POPULAR LIBRARY

Editorial Board and represent titles by the world's greatest authors.

POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

Copyright, 1943, by Philip Wylie

Published by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.

Holt, Rinehart & Winston edition published February, 1943

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. All Rights Reserved CHAPTER 1

At the curb of a New York side street--a once fashionable street now dowdy and ostentatious--stood a vintage limousine. It was a well-preserved automobile and its chauffeur had the look of one who had driven carriages in his younger days. He was assisting a thin colored girl in the placement of luggage. They were particular about the chore--as if the owner of the car had an eagle eye for error.

It was a lovely afternoon, balmy and clear. Passers-by, had they stopped to examine the pieces of baggage, could have guessed something about the two people on the verge of departure; but passers-by on that street seldom stopped to examine anything, for most of them lived in bland, contented retrospect. One guess, if such a guess had been made, would have been correct: the bulge and fustiness of brassbound portmanteaus and hatboxes described old-fashioned gentility--and a lady. The other guess--would have been difficult. That section of baggage consisted of a mélange: wooden boxes, steel trunks, peculiar cases--battered and labeled thickly by hotel porters in far places-together with a solitary, brand-new leather suitcase on which were burned the initials "A. T. P." A man, without doubt, but what kind, would have been impossible to say.

A white door opened under a baroque fanlight and two people emerged--and a cosmic female voice said, "Well, Aggie, we're off! You can't imagine how happy this makes me!" The owner of the voice, a huge woman whose costly, outmoded clothes immediately marked her as the owner of the limousine, inspected it before she moved far enough forward to allow the exit of the man behind her. She went right on talking--this time to her chauffeur: "Windle! For the love of heaven, where's your memory? We've been voyaging in that jalopy for years and you know the portmanteaus go on top in the rack and the spare tire cover must be tied or the snaps will blow loose!"

Windle whispered to the colored maid, "No fooling, Chillie, she was born to be a major! She could spot a tarnished button in a cavalry charge!" His tone was affectionate rather than bitter. Servants, like all the rest of the world, loved Sarah Plum.

The man who appeared behind Sarah Plum would have been classed as "rabbity"

by most persons of his age and social station. He wore a beard--a wispish Vandyke--but, instead of making his appearance "distinguished", it served to suggest that his chin was doubtless "weak". His hair, a bleached henna in color, grew casually on his overlarge skull. He was not under average height, but gave the impression of being so; he was not thin, either, but he looked thin, because his cheeks were somewhat gaunt, and his posture, which was as relaxed as his walk was indifferent, gave the impression of debility.

A close observer of Agamemnon Telemachus Plum might have perceived that his shambling movements were executed smoothly. Anybody who gripped his shoulder would have been in for a shock. But Aggie's voice was dry and fading, and his interest seemingly of a flagging sort, so nobody noticed him carefully and nobody at all gripped his shoulder. People who met him usually thought he was wizened, and went away with the notion that he wore glasses--which he did not. His brown eyes, in the presence of company, were usually averted or downcast and always partially concealed by long lashes and tangled brows. He was the "professor type", and the fact that he actually was a professor of anthropology, an archaeologist, and something of a hobbyist in vertebrate paleontology by no means diminished the illusion that he was a misty man and a social loss. If people had bothered to guess, they would have decided he was about forty-five years old. And if they had noticed the faint series of parallel. scars at the nape of his neck, they would have thought he had been operated on for a bad lymph node. Again, he suggested that species of man who has minor glands which require removal--and not the sort upon whom plastic surgeons have labored to erase traces of a gorilla bite, incurred while rescuing an African native with no better weapon than a spading fork.

Aggie Plum came out on the street behind his aunt, muttering like a drugged frog.

"Deuce of an idea," he was saying. "Hate crowds. Hate summer resorts. Hate society.

Hate cocktail parties. Hate picnics. Hate old women rocking on the front porches. Hate fuddy-duddies who remember you when you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Hate the whole damned idiot business!"

His aunt, who knew perfectly well the tenor of his words, said, "Aggie, get in the car! Of course you'll have a delightful time!"

She put a foot on the running board and the limousine leaned to receive her.

Aggie deposited himself lightly at her side. Windle put the car in gear. The motor settled to a roaring purr which was inefficient and noncontemporary. It carried the four passengers into the natty traffic on Fifth Avenue, through the June greenery of Central Park, and out to the roaring riverside, where other New Yorkers were pouring themselves north toward the mountains.

For half an hour, neither Aggie nor his aunt said a syllable. He smoked his pipe.

At length, she spoke. "I've got a sore throat!"

Aggie brightened. "I'll tell Windle to turn around--!"

"You'll do nothing of the sort! I've spent ten years and more trying to get you out of that mildewed museum for a summer with me. I know perfectly well you'll escape if we stop for a flat tire. I'd go on through to Indian Stones if I had double pneumonia!"

The professor's luminous glance contained affection and humor--but he was careful not to let his aunt see that. "Anyway, I'm not giving up the museum. That's for winter. Classes and the lab. I'm giving up a trip with Grubb--he's the Britisher--to Patagorua--"

"Grubb," said Sarah. "What a marvelous name for an archaeologist! You know, you need a vacation! You're starving for one. You're seedy. I'll bet you haven't played--or relaxed--or taken a girl to a dance--for a decade."

Aggie folded his hands into a "church and steeple." He rested an elbow on the arm-perch in the car and put the points of his forefingers under his chin. "I'm glad you brought that up," he said musingly. "Ever since I got that mandatory letter, I thought you had my mating possibilities in mind. The last of the Plums! I suppose you have something in the nature of a female in mind for me?"

"I have," Sarah answered serenely.

Aggie was startled. "You can't be serious? I was joking'"

The ponderous woman nodded. "You're getting on, Agamemnon. Thirty-six, isn't it?"

"Thirty-four."

"Yes. Exactly. You're becoming quite desiccated. Quite. You're too old to be running off to all comers of the world digging up bones. To me, there's nothing exciting about a defunct tiger's teeth. You really must stay at home long enough to raise a family; You need a wife--"

"Granting I'm going to raise a family, yes. A wife, under such circumstances, would be the usual thing."

"I'm not fooling, Aggie--"

"Neither am I!" Professor Plum's tone was remarkably firm. "Look, Sarah. I am spending this summer with you because I love and adore you. Nevertheless, I deplore every idea that runs through your pretty gray head. It is a beehive of meddlesome inspiration. I am a bachelor. I was born to be one. I will stay with you only on condition that you do not force upon me a single member of the other sex. Your matrimonial-agency reputation is appalling! You should have been a fight promoter. And you never married yourself, so you're a doddering hypocrite. Who is the girl?"

"Beth Calder," said Sarah.

"Calder," Aggie repeated. "Out of the frying pan into the Calderon. I Calder but she didn't come. No good. Look. Whoever this Beth is, I will have none of her. In my mind's eyes, I can see her. A woman with aniline-auburn hair. A golf-and tennis-playing woman, with the voice of a macaw and a capacity for cocktails that would humiliate a steel salesman. A woman whose chief aim is to get into the lobby of a theater on opening night in a dress that will make several couturiers hang themselves. Phooie. Faugh."

"You wouldn't remember her," Sarah continued, unabashed. "You were--let me see--twelve?--the last time you went to Indian Stones. Beth is about--twenty-six-now.

That would make her four years old at the time--"

"I remember the name of Calder vaguely," he said. "And with some sort of shady connotation. What, I forget. As for a female Calder child, my association with infants at the age of twelve having been limited, I do not remember her at all. Thank the Lord."

"Jim Calder--Beth's father--ran away with George Davis's wife. There was a frightful scandal. And they didn't divorce and remarry. Mrs. Davis apparently found that Jim was no bargain--even when compared to cold-blooded Georgie--so she simply settled in California. Left Calder, and also her husband and her daughter, to shift for themselves."

"Delightful," said Aggie. "And you want me to marry into this shambles?"

"Beth is a charming young woman."

"So was Lucrezia Borgia," Aggie replied. "I am going to read and rest and meditate this summer, Sarah. I intend to write a monograph on the subject of preglacial animal migrations over the Aleutian Islands. I may do a paper for a friend of mine about the egg-laying monotremes. Otherwise, I shall have no active life. If you import into your cottage, which I remember and love, so much as one skirted creature--if you give me one welcoming party--if you make one single effort to sneak me into the social life of that pestilential colony--I shall pack my books, my specimens, and my trophies--and scram, as my Juniors say."

"Beth's a brunette," his aunt answered. ''The fever-giving kind. " Aggie's response was in Latin. From the sound of it, Sarah was glad that he did not trouble himself to translate.

The antique automobile bumbled along through the countryside. Afternoon was replaced by early evening. In a town far to the north, they stopped for dinner. Nothing more was said anent the matchmaking proclivities of Sarah Plum. Her nephew regaled her with a tale of certain events and customs which he had observed among the fire-worshiping natives'of a place called, as nearly as she could catch it, Galumbaloola.

The turn-off for Indian Stones was marked by a sign made of birch logs--a sign that had been there for twenty-two years--or a replica of the old sign. Birch rots pretty fast, Aggie thought, so it was probably a replacement. Nevertheless, it filled him with nostalgia, which surprised him, because his summers at the resort had been lonely. Sarah had done her best to compensate for his mother, who had died at the time of his birth, and his father, who had survived her by seven years. But nobody can make up for such destitution.

Route 665, where Windle swung the car, had been black--and tarry in the summer. Now it was cement. But the Indian Stones road was still unpaved. Hard gravel rained on the fenders. Mudguards, they'd called them in those days . . .

The luminous dial on his wrist pointed to ten o'clock. The car began winding and climbing; the air was fragrant with the scent of pine and a subliminal smell of near-by fresh water. They passed the Waite house and the Calder house--rambling, big, rustic, dimly familiar. They swung into the straight stretch between Upper and Lower Lake, past the first and last holes of the golf course and the clubhouse. Its rococo roof-jumble rose weirdly against the stars. Dr. Plum remembered the rooms in it, and the cellars under it, where he and some other kids had played pirate and Count of Monte Cristo--cellars of a hotel which had burned down. They'd built the club on the old foundations. And the date on the clubhouse, in scroll woodwork above the fieldstone supporting the porch, was 1885. There had been people-well-to-do people-at Indian Stones for many generations.

The road forked and forked again. Headlights touched calm water and swung away. They were nearing the drive of "Rainbow Lodge." Every house here was a "lodge."

He turned toward his aunt.

"I'm awake," Sarah said. "I've been watching you watch." She spoke with some difficulty.

"Your sore throat's worse!" he said.

"Nonsense! It's not a sore throat, anyway. Not exactly. My jaws feel stiff, that's all."

"We'll get you inside, Sarah." There was affection and worry in his tone. "Then--

if you like--I'll go for Dr. Davis. He's up here now, I suppose?"

"Of course. We've all been coming on the twentieth--for generations. Your father did. Our father did before him. George is here-but I don't need a doctor. I need a little rest

--that's all. I've worried myself sick for fear you'd refuse to summer with me--at the last moment. This is just let-down."

Aggie reached over and took her firm, large hand. He squeezed it. "You're a honey, Sarah! Woozy-brained--but your heart's all right." Lights glimmered through the trees. The car turned into a foliated tunnel. Sarah's cottage was the size of a summer hotel. On its front porch, beside the porte-cochère, stood old John, the butler who had been in Sarah's service a quarter of a century before, when Aggie was a noisy young master of the place.

The professor leaped out of the car and seized the old man's arms. "John! You haven't changed a particle! Sarah didn't tell me you'd be here! This is great! And--look.

Sarah's feeling badly--so you and Chillie get her inside, first. I'll take care of the bags, with Windle."

"It's mighty nice to see you, Mr. Aggie." He peered at the professor with the pathetic eagerness of the family retainer who has missed the steps between a childhood and a maturity. He could not seem to reconcile the bearded man with a memory which slowly faded from his eyes. He went down to aid Sarah, glancing back at Aggie. The pair, harried by Chillie, walked into the house. Windle began unsnapping, unstrapping, unbuckling and uncovering;

Aggie left him at the chore. He stepped up on the big, shadowy veranda. The light over the front door was not burning; Sarah had entered through· a side vestibule. In the gloom, he slid his hand along the railing to see if the initials he had carved long ago--and for which carving he'd had his ears boxed--were still tangible in the wood. They were. He fingered them. A.T.P. Something in old John's eyes had started him thinking.

Thirty-four years old. The letters had been there for twenty-two. A long time. Old John was disappointed in him, somehow. Aggie had never had occasion to be disappointed in himself, but he could see the butler's point of view. Mature. A scientist.

Renowned in his field. A popular lecturer. Slangy, contemporary, knowing--but a shy man, really, with a phobia about crowds and meetings and parties. A misfit in a well-to-do summer colony like Indian Stones. A bachelor. A chap with a wisp of beard and no golf game. One who would prefer a book to a tea dance, and an assorted stack of petrified bones to a pack of playing cards. A man who would be petrified on his own account in the presence of such a person as Beth Calder.

He'd teased Sarah about it--and he loved Sarah. He knew she was excessively loyal to him. Sarah financed his extravagant expeditions and she even tried to wade through his scientific treatises. But it was going to be hard for him, this summer. He could banter with one or two people at a time, so long as they knew and understood him; he could lecture; but with strangers, his tongue froze and his assurance vanished. An introvert. A misogynist. A self-made dry-as-dust. He'd have to avoid this Beth person--

and, if Sarah was serious, that act would hurt her feelings.

He shrugged and turned back toward the car. A shimmer at the side of the front door caught his eye. He walked toward it. Stuck into the frame of the door, impaling a small, white card, was a knife of the sort that is taken on hunting trips. Aggie himself had one much like it. He pulled it out and the card came away on its tip. He carried the card to the light. It said: "Henry H. Bogarty." Aggie looked from the knife, which was sharp and shiny, to the card. The handle of the knife was engraved and monogrammed. He put it on the rail of the porch and walked toward the automobile. Windle had carried the luggage indoors and was about to drive the car around to the garage. Aggie realized he had spent several minutes in maundering. He did not stop the chauffeur. Instead, he went into the house.

CHAPTER 2

Old John was coming from Sarah's room, which was on the ground floor, across the hall from the living room. Aggie beckoned with his head, and, when the old man came close, handed the card to him. "Know who that is?"

The butler read the name and nodded. "Why, certainly. Although I haven't heard much about him for-well-thirty years, I'd say. Not till this evening, that is."

"It was pinned to the door frame with a knife. A mean-looking knife."

"Knife, sir?"

"Yeah. I left the knife outside. Didn't want to alarm Sarah. It was biggish. Sort of-

-threatening."

Old John smiled. "I don't think it's that. Mr. Hank--that's Mr. Bogarty--was quite a gentleman--in a rugged way. He wired your aunt he was coming here. The telegram is in her mail--and she's going through it now. Mr. Hank probably had no way of leaving his card conspicuously enough for us to notice. He was like that, Mr. Aggie. I mean to say--

the rough--and-ready sort--"

"I see."

"Does it look familiar to you? The house?"

Aggie glanced around the room. It looked startlingly familiar. He recalled vividly the way the stones fitted around the fireplace--their size and their shape--and the Navajo rugs--and the opulently ponderous "rustic" furniture-Sarah had, always been what she called an "outsize." Only little things were new: stiff, white draperies, a chandelier, some bookcases. Aggie smiled slowly. "Yes," he said. "I do remember, John. It's a funny feeling."

He stepped across the hall and knocked on his aunt's door.

"Come in," she shouted from her bathroom. "John?"

"Aggie."

"Be right out. I'm fixing myself an ice bag." There was a sound of chopping.

"These darned cubes are harder to break up than an old-fashioned hunk."

"Need help?"

"No." She appeared, presently, en déshabillé. That is, she was wearing some sort of net over her gray hair--a purple net--and the most voluminous red silk kimono Aggie had ever seen. The ice bag had been lashed to her neck with a lurid batik. She walked across her room and dropped down on her enormous four-poster bed. She observed, after a sigh of relaxation, the activity of her nephew. "You make a practice of going through other people's mail?"

He glanced up from the bedside table. "Invariably. You know what you remind me of, Sarah? Sunset over Grand Canyon."

She whooped with laughter. That act seemed to hurt her throat and she spent a moment grimacing. Then she held out her hand for the telegram.

"That's from Hank Bogarty," she said, "'ARRIVING SHORTLY FOR NEW

GRUBSTAKE. LOVE. HANK.''

"I can read," Aggie answered. "Who's he?"

"Oh. An old friend. I can't imagine why he's coming. We haven't seen him around here for ages. Some of us grub-staked him once--lent him the money to go prospecting with--ever so long ago. It'll be nice to see him."

Aggie was satisfied.

For a moment, the sight of the knife in the doorjamb had startled him. There was something sinister about it. Like finding a medicine man's ouanga pinned on your tent.

Now, his momentary fear vanished. Foolish, he thought, to bring the associations of Congo voodooism to the United States. He was always doing things like that. The price you paid for being an anthropologist.

Sarah was settling herself for a talk. He helped her arrange the bedcovers. John knocked lightly on the door and came in. "Mr. Calder's outside," he said. "He wants to talk to you."

Aggie looked at his aunt with feigned dismay and said flatly to the old man, "His daughter Beth is with him, I suppose? Has he got a wedding license filled out in triplicate? A ring? Tell him I never marry except on Thursdays."

Old John was perplexed. "Miss Calder isn't there. He's alone. He seems disturbed."

Aggie glanced at his aunt--and his glance held. Something had happened to her.

She looked afraid--or worried. He said, "You'd better interview this cluck after you get some sleep. Isn't he the cad who ran off with the doctor's wife--and then left her in California--a fate worse than death?"

Sarah did not smile. "Tell him to come in, John. Aggie, beat it."

"I will not. I'm your guardian--for a change. I stay. What does this oaf want?

Why. are you suddenly full of hornets?"

"I'm not," Sarah said. "It's just that--well--nobody cares for Jim Calder--much. He rarely comes up here. His family does--his daughter--and his son--and his son's wife. But Jim has hurt so many people--that he's--"

There were steps in the hall.

The man who came in looked unlike either a home-wrecker or a robber of widows and orphans. He was a gaunt, weary-appearing person with a short, iron-gray pompadour and liver-spotted hands. Although it was a warm evening, he wore a dark, wool business suit and a stiff white collar. His dull plaid tie had too tight a knot in it. His face was sanctimonious; his eyes were blue, hard, and not particularly pleasant. He said, in a crackling voice, "Oh--Sarah--you had a wire from Bogarty--?" and then he saw Aggie.

He did not introduce himself, or wait for an introduction, or even allow Aggie to perform the amenities. He said, "John didn't tell me you had anybody here! The old fool is probably getting senile! I want to see you alone."

Sarah's gray eyes were placid. "Probably, Jim, you didn't give poor old John a chance to tell you anything. You generally don't. Your manners were always cheesy."

That did not disturb Jim Calder in the least. He stared at Aggie. "Will you leave the room, please?" He added, "whoever you are."

Aggie found himself angry. Calder's rudeness was of the deliberate, meaningless sort that evokes rudeness in others. He replied, after a second, "Why, I'm sorry. My aunt's ill. I'm a doctor. I was going to treat her. But you need treatment more--for too much gall."

A faint flush tinged Calder's pallid cheek. It increased as he perceived that Sarah was giggling. "Who are you?" he asked. "Sarah, are you sick?"

"Jim," she said, "for heaven's sake, sit down. You'd think, at your age, you'd have learned that you don't have to beat everybody on earth to the draw. Yes, I heard from Hank. Here's the wire. And this is my nephew--the famous Dr. Plum, of Brandon University. Make an obeisance, Aggie, and beat it."

Mr. Calder's expression was still uncompromising. "Oh," he said. "Yes. Heard of you. Excuse us."

Aggie wandered to the door. "Rudeness is pretty inexcusable," he said, "when you consider it abstractly. Nevertheless, Mr. Calder, inasmuch as I have no further desire to stay here--"

"Oh--for mercy's sake, man--get going!"

Aggie went. He found old John standing uneasily in the living room. "That man, "

said the servant, exercising the liberty of long habit, "always makes me boil!"

"Like dry ice," said Aggie. "Has he a daughter named Beth?"

"Oh, yes, Mr. Aggie. And a son. Bill. Neither of them anything like their father."

"I should think not. The impossibility of tribal survival for the completely misanthropic strain--"

"I beg pardon, sir?"

"I said, among savages, upon whom we so-called civilized people look down, such a man would have been taken outside the compound and knocked on the head."

"Plenty of people would applaud it."

"So Sarah said."

Aggie strolled over to the bookcases as if to discover what his aunt's reading habits were. He was thinking that be did not know much about Sarah. They corresponded--merrily--through the years. They saw each other fleetingly during winter vacations. At Indian Stones, and in New York, she was a social high priestess, a fabled meddler in the affairs of others, and a gossip without a peer. He knew, also, that she was generous to the point of vice, and that her heart was made of mercy. As old John went on talking, Aggie pretended to look at the book titles. But he did not see them. The attitude of Mr. Calder about the long-time unseen Mr. Bogarty was obviously one of perturbation--and Sarah was obviously connected with it.

"Mr. Calder," said John, "ruined the life of Mrs. Davis. And left the doctor with a young daughter--"

"So Sarah said," Aggie repeated.

"He is a broker. His family was one of the first to settle at Indian Stones. He managed the fortunes of many of us. Lost some--Mr. Browne's, for example. James Calder stripped him. Mr. Browne killed himself and his wife died shortly afterward. Mr.

Browne's son--Jack-manages the club, now. A very splendid young man, for all his tragedy. I mean--losing his father and mother and his inheritance--in one swoop, so to speak. Jim Calder's underhanded work cost your aunt money. And the Draymans and the Pattons. Lots of us.

Aggie smiled at the old man's inclusion of himself in the communal disasters.

"Too bad. But most of 'em could afford it."

"I couldn't," John sighed.

"You?"

The old man nodded tremblingly. "Even me. He has that preacher's face. Even when you know he's not to be trusted, he can make you trust him. He's very shrewd.

Positive--and sort of--hypnotic. He got to talking, one day, about how had I invested my life savings--"

"How much did he take you for?"

"Nine thousand three hundred and sixty-two dollars. All I had." John cleared his throat. "Your aunt knows nothing of it, Mr. Aggie. I'd rather you didn't tell her. It was my own fault--my own foolishness. Miss Sarah will take care of me of course--when I become too old to be useful. I realize that. I'd only hoped--before the incident--that I could be independent--at that time. You know how a man feels--"

Aggie glanced bitterly toward the hall. "Yeah. I know about men like Calder, too.

For fifty cents, when he comes out, I'd hang one on him--"

"I've felt that way myself. Very often. Indian Stones has been a tranquil place. A place of a good deal of affection. But, having him here all through the years is like--"

"--a ghoul at a feast."

At that point, the subject of their talk came out of the bedroom. He slammed the door without reference to Sarah's condition and stalked through the living room. At the front door he turned and said, "You're a doctor. Tell me something better than tramping the woods at night for insomnia."

Aggie looked at him. "A clear conscience." Calder did an effective piece of work with his second slam; the house shook. Aggie caught sight of John's wistful grin at the insult. He went back to Sarah's room. His aunt was manifestly upset. Her color was poor and she kept fiddling with the ice bag on her neck. "Some human beings," she said,

"ought to have been born inside the fur of jackals."

Aggie nodded. "Look. What's this all about?"

"Nothing. Nothing important. Things that happened long ago. Some day Jim Calder's past is going to catch up with him. Right now--he's worried. He wanted my moral backing for a little inhospitality, that's all. You go to bed, Aggie. It's late. You need sleep--and so do I. Whatever I've got, it feels like triple-grippe plus hangover, and a small case of crud, besides."

There was no use in trying to coerce or trap Sarah. He made an attempt--and gave up. After he had said good night to her and before he started up to his room, he felt Bogarty's card in his pocket. That reminded him of the knife he had left on the veranda rail, and, since there was no chance that Sarah would see him bring it in, he went out to get it.

The knife was gone. He hurried down the front steps and lit matches to search behind Sarah's ferns, but it had not rolled off the rail. Someone had taken it. He returned and asked John--but the old man denied having been on the porch.

"Well," Aggie said, "maybe Calder saw it and took it. He seems to have a habit of grabbing everything he can."

"No doubt," John said.

Aggie bade him good night, and started up the stairs. His eyes grew misty when he went into his room. The objects there--banners, pictures, trophies, knickknacks and books--had belonged to a twelve-year-old boy. The scientist sat down on his bed, trying to summon that youngster back to existence: a boy who'd been slight, sun-tanned, shy, knowing. An interested kid--one who was afraid of grown people. He still was, the man finally thought.

He undressed and put on faded flannelette pajamas. He turned back the covers of the bed, slid into it, and did not especially try to go to sleep, which was why he found himself waking from a deep repose at the sound of stair-creaks. Only his mountainous aunt could make such noises. He had a light on and was sitting up when she knocked.

"Come in."

Her face was blotchy. She was panting slightly. There was a diamond dust of sweat on her skin. "I'm a hysterical old woman," she said thickly. "But, Aggie, I feel extraordinarily ill. My jaws are like a vice. I was on the verge of sleep when I thought of tetanus. It scared me so, I popped awake--and I've worked myself into a first-class tizzie.

I hated to bother anybody--and yet--I found myself coming up to see you."

He was standing, then, pulling his trousers over his pajamas. "I'll drive over and get Dr. Davis right away. If he's here. If not, I'll push on into town and raise somebody."

He knew that she wanted him to do that--although she was protesting. "I don't think it's tetanus--I've seen a few cases. But I haven't any idea what it is. Do you still keep the car keys in the teapot?"

"The new ones-the shiny ones-are for the station wagon."

He helped her back to bed.

Outdoors, it was still pitch-dark. But he could have found his way around to the garage blindfolded. He switched on a light. The place had once been a stable--and somehow it still smelled like a stable, although there had been neither horse nor harness in it for more than a quarter of a century. He heard Windle's feet hit the floor in the servants' rooms above and called, "It's me, Windle! Sarah feels badly and I'm going for the doctor. Don't bother to come down." Then he was driving over the familiar roads--by memory-paths that he had not known were still in his brain.

The Davis house, much like Sarah's, was called "Medicine Lodge" in quaint if obvious adherence to the local tradition. There was no doorbell. He banged the door with his fist, waited, banged again, and waited again. From the vast interior he presently heard quick, sharp footfalls--the steps of a woman--and soon he saw a light moving inside.

Because that was not what he had expected, he looked into a window.

A woman was coming down the stairs; she carried a candelabrum. As she descended, she lighted more candles. Her mules--pale green--made the sharp steps, and her negligée--half green, and, crazily, he thought, half mauve--floated behind her. She had smooth, red-gold hair that curled at the ends--just below her shoulders. She was young and opulently beautiful. Aggie had no idea who she was, but he imagined that perhaps Dr. Davis had married again--and he thought that he would hate to be a man in late middle age with a wife like that.

The woman didn't ask, "Who's there?" She somehow was not that sort of person.

She merely opened the door and said, "Yes?"

"I'm looking for the doctor. My aunt--Sarah Plum--is ill. Very ill."

"Come in." She pushed back the screen and he moved around it. She held the candelabrum toward him. Her lips twitched slightly. "So you're the celebrated Agamemnon Telemachus Plum! How do you do? I'll call Father immediately."

She went away up the stairs. She knew his whole name. Of course, they all had--

all the Indian Stones people. That had been just one of his juvenile tragedies. His father, a Greek scholar, had chosen his name. His mother had just died and Sarah had been too worried about her brother's condition, at the time, to interfere with the naming of a hapless infant.

A second thought burst upon him expandingly, erasing the first. Her father. She had said, "My father." Then she was--he tried to remember her name. He could recall the grubby pigtails, the loud, raspy voice, and the quality that had passed for wit among children. She was the one who had started calling him Agriculture Telephone. It was Dorothea--Doreen--something more unique--boy's name--Danielle. Candlelight was eddying in the stair well again.

He found himself trying to be reserved and amused. He tugged his beard impressively. "How are you, Danielle?"

She came to the bottom step, smiling, and she looked at him for a moment.

"Father's probably still out in his darkroom. Working. Our electricity's off. Power line down--I guess. Anyhow--we got here this morning and we ordered it fixed--but the men didn't come. If you'll follow me--"

She led him through the kitchen and across the lawn. The garage--a converted stable, like Sarah's--served also to house Dr. Davis's photographic development room. It was on a short corridor off the main floor. Danielle walked along, trailing her greenish garments, carrying the candles, and staining the night with a subtle, insistent perfume that was like rhythm or a musical chord, in that it affected other senses than the one which perceived it. She knocked on a door.

The response was crisp. "Just a second! Who is it?"

"Me. Dr. Plum has come over. Sarah's sick."

"Be right out." There was a moment of silence. ''Tell him I've got to wash up--and get my bag." A lock clicked and the door opened. From the dark corridor, Aggie had a glimpse of a tight little room, crammed with photographic materials. A candle burned there, behind a red globe. He noticed one small window very high up over a sink. "I'll be only a jiffy!" Aggie could see nothing but the man's arm. He realized Dr. Davis did not know he was standing behind Danielle. She started back down the corridor.

When they reached the living room, she inspected him attentively. "I generally find these meetings--following a common childhood--extremely disillusioning. You, at least, have made a mark somewhere--even if the rest of us haven't."

He had no idea what she did, or whether she was married, or if she was widowed or divorced-or anything else. He had forgotten her. He could see that she was a beautiful woma--and no more. He nodded.

"You look, heaven knows, like Joe Academy, the Cloistered Wonder-boy! How many honorary degrees have you by now?"

That hurt him--and annoyed him intensely besides. He thought of a retort--which, as a rule, he failed to do. "The pigtails are still there--in a figurative sense. I remember them. Blonde--basically--but vertiginous from being a mite soiled. You were a vile child, Danielle. At six--anyway."

She smiled with what seemed to be pleasure. But he could also see the rise and spread in her cheeks of a faint wrath. There was a brisk step in the rear of the house and her father came into the room.

"Aggie, old man!" He slowed for a fraction of a second at the sight of the Vandyke. "Splendid to have you here! Heard you'd be up for the summer. What in heaven's name is wrong with Sarah? Got the constitution of a loggerhead!"

Dr. George G. Davis didn't look two decades older. Only one. Crisp and lithe.

Pince-nez and pin-striped suit. A really fine surgeon and neurologist--who could pass as a good banker or the director of corporations--anything successful and important. He was leading Aggie toward the door. "Got a car?"

Danielle came to the window with her branched candlestick to watch them leave.

Aggie glanced up from the controls. She stuck out her tongue. It took three noisy attempts to get the car in gear.

"My daughter's with me for the summer, too," the surgeon said. "First time since--

" he broke off. "About Sarah?"

"She thinks it's tetanus. I don't. No rigor. Not the look in the eyes--"

The other man chuckled. "We aren't diagnosing people by facial expression these days, Aggie."

"You ought to."

While the surgeon made his examination Aggie waited in a dismal circuit of anxiety for his aunt, and irritation at Danielle. Outdoors, the slow wattage of nature leaked bluely up into the sky with a hue that was not normal in daytime, but dawn's sickly counterpart of noon. He could hear his aunt's voice buzzing in her room--and once she laughed. She'd gossip on her deathbed, he thought. Presently he went out on the porch and examined the luminous murk, breathed the air, lighted his pipe. He sat quiet--

turning his head with consummate slowness when he heard a pattering sound on the road.

Dog, he thought straining his eyes. Black dog. Funny-looking one. Like a fox. Was a fox.

He puffed his pipe; the animal, seeing the eddy of smoke, also saw the man. It vanished.

Sarah's door was opening. Aggie heaved himself tiredly from the porch railing and hurried into the living room. Danielle's father was replacing things in his bag with hands so swift and dexterous it was interesting to watch him do even that.

"Got to quarantine Sarah," he said.

"How's that!"

"Mumps."

"Mumps?" Plum echoed.

"She gave a banquet to a slew of refugee kids. Right interval. Right symptoms.

Wouldn't stake my reputation on it--but I wouldn't bring her a pickle for breakfast, either.

Not if I valued my life. In a person of her age--mumps can be serious. Keep her in bed.

You had 'em?"

The bearded man was grinning with relief. "Me? Sure. Both sides." Then his left eyebrow lifted in an expression of solicitous mirth. "Boy, will that be a blow to Sarah!"

CHAPTER 3

Aggie slept late. When he came downstairs, he found old John preparing his breakfast. "Heard your shower," John said. Aggie gazed at the bright sunshine and the wind-ruffled trees. It was a fine day. He learned that Sarah was "up and swearing" and he carried a cup of coffee into her bedroom.

She was sitting in a mighty rocker, enveloped in the red kimono, and smoking a cigarette. "This," she said, looking at the cigarette, "makes me feel as if my jaws were full of hot wires. Mumps! Imagine it! Disgraceful!"

"You said something of the sort, early this A.M."

"Sit down, Aggie. Drink that coffee. I want you to summon your strength. I've got work for you."

"Good," he answered. "I mend pipes, spray flowers, build shelves, fix old rock walls, repair tools--"

"Not that kind of work. My grapevine's in operation and I need a field agent. A person can't snoop--with mumps!"

He chuckled and shook his head. "For you, Sarah--anything but that. No espionage. You forget. I'm the original social mouse. I hate people. I would rather face a juramentado than a hostess."

"And what is that?"

"A juramentado is a hopped-up holy man on a killing jag against infidels."

Sarah wrinkled her nose. "No. matter. You can't let your favorite relative sit here sweating with curiosity day in and day out. My grapevine has already been working by telephone. By servants' murmurs, carried to me from Windle and from Chillie. I have a host of inquiries in mind. Myriad things that must be known. Problems. Indian Stones is seething with enigmas."

He eyed her. "You're serious, aren't you? What enigmas?"

She cleared her throat. "Tell John to bring me more coffee. Never mind. I'll yell."

She yelled, and went on, "What did you think of Danielle Davis?"

"That she was the kind of woman about whom the less I thought, the better."

"Mmm. She was crazy about Bill Calder, once. At least, she led him along in a most sensational manner. Bill's married to Martha Drayman."

"Let me get this straight. Bill is the son of the evil-mannered Mr. Calder, who barged in here last night? Bill has a sister named Beth, whom I am supposed to marry and have children by? Right? How many children, incidentally? You carelessly forgot to let me know. And Danielle Davis, the menace type, once pursued the luckless Bill, or vice versa, but it came to nothing. Bill is now married to a girl with the nice name of Martha.

A local belle, too, if she is one of the Draymans that I feebly remember."

Sarah nodded. "That's it. Well, it happens that I know that Danielle has been eating lunch in odd nooks here and there with Bill Calder--in New York--for some weeks, now. Danielle's not married. She doesn't come up here, as a rule. Makes the summer rounds--Newport--Maine--you know. But she's here this year for the season--and I'll bet that she's out to make trouble for Bill."

"Put it the non-feminine way. Trouble for Martha. I daresay, wherever that copper-tinged blonde is, there's trouble."

"So--" said Sarah, "I'll want you to keep tabs on Bill and Danielle. I want to know what they're doing. Danielle's headstrong and she's able, potentially, to ruin Bill and Martha's lives--"

"Why," he asked, accepting another cup of coffee from John, "do we wantonly barge into that private matter?"

"Because. I got Martha and Bill married, and I propose to keep them married."

Aggie nodded as if the idea were acceptable to him. "What's next on our list of meddling and peeking?"

"Next," she said, without being fazed, "is--what has happened to Hank Bogarty?

He wired four of us. Jim Calder, George Davis, Byron Waite, and me. The wires were sent yesterday morning from Albany and delivered in the noon mail.

Plenty of time for him to get here-but he didn't. No one's seen him. He may have had an accident. I'm worried about him."

"I don't think he had an accident," Aggie said. He told Sarah about the knife and the calling card.

After he had done so, he wished he had not. His aunt tried to dissemble the fact that she was now very much concerned with the absence of Mr. Bogarty. He could see her intelligent gray eyes alive with numerous speculations, the nature of which he could not guess. Her knitted red bedroom slippers tapped for a full minute. Finally she said,

"Hank belonged to a family that lived here long before your time. He went to Harvard for a year-which was all he could stand. He was a cross between a sweetie-pie and a grizzly bear--even when he was a youngster. Loved the West. Jim Calder, Dr. Davis, Byron Waite and I--backed him on a prospecting trip--and he's lived in British Columbia ever since. You remember Byron Waite? You kids used to pester him--"

Aggie nodded. "Did Bogarty make out?"

"Ye-es," Sarah admitted. "Well enough. Very well, for years. He--he paid us back, all right. And I guess he'll turn up. He was full of fun--and full of the devil too. He's the very kind of person who would stick his card on your door with a knife--to give you a shock--and to make sure you'd see it. He must have called shortly before our arrival last night--and I suppose John was out in the barn, or somewhere." She hesitated. "You're sure the knife was gone?"

"Yes. Certain. Do you think Calder took it? He probably did."

"I can't imagine why. He wouldn't know whose it was."

Aggie started. "Yes, he would--if he examined it when he passed it. The darned thing was monogrammed."

"With Hank's initials?" Sarah was excited.

"Search me. I didn't look. I had the calling card--and I assumed the initials were the same."

"You're a big help," Sarah said. "For an archaeologist, you did fine! Aren't you supposed to observe things--and deduce from them?"

Aggie grinned. "I draw myself up with dignity," he answered. "I am a scientist--

not a Paul Pry. How was I to know you'd' be playing house dick this morning? Ask the local cops to trace Bogarty's car. I assume he didn't come here on foot?"

"It's not that," she answered. "Jim Calder didn't go home last night. He hasn't showed up since."

Aggie felt a recrudescence of the prickling sensation he had experienced when he saw the knife in the door. The undue worry his aunt had shown, and the urgent behavior of Mr. Calder, began to take form. Something was happening that Sarah would not talk about. At least-that she had not talked about. He waited for her to go on.

"The Calder cottage," she said, "is being done over. Jim's room is finished-and he was there last night--and the night before--with Gannon, his butler. The rest of the Calders, Beth, and Bill and Martha--are at the Draymans for the moment. That's Martha's mother's house. They didn't see their father last night. Gannon says, this morning, that Jim must have left the house after he'd gone to bed. He came over here, anyhow. What time was that?"

"Around eleven?"

"Maybe half past. He didn't sleep in his bed last night. He hasn't been seen since."

"And you think he picked up Mr. Bogarty's knife, walked off on our road toward his home, ran into Bogarty, attacked him, and that they both killed each other and hid each other's bodies?"

"I'm--worried--that's all."

"Look, Sarah. Have you got any reason to believe that Mr. Bogarty would do harm to anybody? Or that the unpleasant Mr. Calder--my prospective father-in-law--

would snatch up a sheath knife and disappear with it, after--say--poking it into somebody? If you have, I think you ought to tell me."

Sarah considered. "No."

"I can bank on that?"

"Well--plenty of people hated Jim. Even old John. Jim robbed him--virtually--and poor old John thinks I don't know it. There's a good deal of unforgotten injury and unrequited hate in every place that has been established for generations, and is as closely knit and as self-centered. But there's no definite reason--no." Aggie had risen. "Where are you going?"

"Out," he said. "As a matter of principle, I refrain from applying my undoubtedly immense analytical power to the problem of love triangles. Danielle versus Martha does not interest me. I don't know what Martha is like, but I'd say, offhand, that this Bill was a fool not to have married Danielle, if he ever had the chance. It would have been exciting.

But I will saunter around until I can reduce your worries about Mr. Bogarty, the missing Westerner, and Mr. Calder, the missing meanie. They bother me, a little. Telegram, knives in doors, people not showing up, people vanishing, knives vanishing--yeah. I'm going out."

Sarah smiled with relief and a certain small malice. "In the Plum blood stream,"

she said, "there's a gene of nosiness."

Aggie remembered the clubhouse foyer as accurately as he had the living room of Rainbow Lodge. Deer heads on the paneled walls. Mounted fishes. A prodigal fireplace.

A desk--like the desk of a hotel. A medley of furniture: Victorian mahogany, rustic hickory and birch, wicker and chintz. There were people sitting around in the foyer when he entered. Somebody was playing table tennis on the glassed-in porch. Waiters were serving luncheon to the early customers in the dining room beyond the archway.

Aggie walked to the desk, behind which stood a man of his own age, a powerfully built man with amiable features and eyes that were attentive and at the same time somber, as if he had resigned himself to living with an indelible disappointment. He regarded Aggie politely, although with a shadow of amusement at Aggie's oddity, and he asked,

"What can I do for you, sir?"

The professor leaned across the desk, tugged at his Vandyke, and said,

"Remember, Jack, when we sealed up the wasp nest with adhesive plaster and put it in Byron Waite's bureau drawer?"

The club manager stared uncomprehendingly.

"--or--the time you and I rigged up a bucket of water in the Patton bathhouse so it would spill on old man Patton--and then you went back in the dressing room for the hammer--and got the water yourself?"

Jack Browne gaped. "My Lord," he murmured. "You're not Aggie Plum? You can't be!"

"Then I've mistaken my own identity."

Jack gulped. "But--! Yeah--you've got the same color hair. It's that beard, maybe."

He raised his voice, then, to a loud cry that turned the heads of the older people. "Aggie!

You old scoundrel! Welcome home!"

Aggie chuckled. Jack started around from behind the desk. Three or four of the people in the room, hearing the name, hastened from their chairs to greet Aggie. He spent. a few minutes talking with them-but, as soon as he could, he wandered away with Jack Browne. Aggie wanted to ask questions, but he listened diplomatically to Jack instead.

"I suppose it would hurt your feelings if I said you'd changed. I mean--from what-we . all thought you'd grow up to be like. You were energetic--and inventive--and--cockeyed. Neurotic, they'd have called it. Now you look like old Professor Mossback. Hope it doesn't make you mad? You ought to shave off that beard for the summer. No kidding!

We have a lot of fun here--summers. Winters--aren't so much fun. Sarah told you about me?"

"Sketchily."

Jack sighed. "I spend too much time feeling sorry for myself. I had the bright years of college and a lot of Park Avenue--afterward. Then--Dad's business blew up--

and--"

"I know."

Jack Browne forged ahead as if he could not stop himself--as if the circumstances kept running constantly through his mind. "Dad was one of the many who went out of a high Wall Street window in 'twenty-nine. It killed Mother--eventually. I was broke--and the times were tough then. Remember? I tried marrying rich girls--but I could only get engaged. I was seriously thinking of following in Dad's footsteps--when Sarah got me this job--and I've been up here ever since. Year round."

Aggie looked with sympathy at his one-time playmate. "It's too bad. But none of us turns out to be-just what he'd imagined. I wanted to fight Indians and cannibals and explore the Poles--"

"You've come pretty close to it, haven't you?" His eyes, resting on Aggie, were envious for a moment. "Seen the works! 'plenty of jack! I'd--" he chuckled--"I'd swap--

beard and all! Who do you want to meet? What do you want to do? The golf course is in swell shape. Ralph Patton's in there playing table tennis with Beth Calder. You remember Ralph? He's a big-time accountant now. Does all Calder's work--and damn Calder, too!

He's the guy who wrecked Dad--"

"I know. Beth's in there playing, eh?" Aggie frowned. "I'd like to take a look at her. Sarah says she's a rare flower."

"Up to her old tricks, huh? Beth's all right. It's only her dad. Incidentally--he's missing."

"I should think Beth would be out looking for him."

Jack shook his head. "If word went around that Jim Calder was drowning, hardly a person at Indian Stones would reach for a life preserver. He probably barged off on one of his confounded errands. Not merciful ones. And he never does leave an itinerary. He goes where he pleases when he pleases, and he likes to be secretive. He'll turn up.

Unfortunately."

"Sarah was worried. He called on us last night. She's also worried about why a chap named Bogarty hasn't shown up here, too."

"Bogarty?" Jack shook his head. "Bogarty. Name's vaguely familiar. Don't know anything about him. Bogarty." They had been walking slowly down the foyer. Now, Jack pointed through French windows. "Beth."

Beth's back was turned. A figure, Aggie thought, like a fashion model. She said,

"Eighteen-fourteen?" and Ralph Patton, a squarish, serious man, stopped to wipe the moisture from his glasses. Beth's voice was deep and delicious. Torch singer's, Aggie told himself. Wavy, long black hair, parted in the middle. She saw Ralph's attention lift from his handkerchief and she looked around. A strong, appealing face, with no sign of her father in it. Large eyes, very dark. Sensitivity in her lips and in her long, thin, curved eyebrows. "Hello, Jack," she said. "Introduce Exhibit A, will you? "

Aggie sat on an ottoman at Sarah's feet, late that afternoon. He was making his report. "I feel as if I'd been pushing around in things that were totally inconsequential. I bought a lunch for Beth and Ralph. He's obviously nutty about her. Or else--trying to worm his way from being Father's accountant to being his son-in-law. Both, maybe. After lunch, I watched them play tennis and I talked to as many of your cronies as I could. No sign of any Davises--or of Byron Waite. I dropped by the Davis house on the way home--

but they were out. Nobody else seems to know that Hank Bogarty was expected. Most people don't even remember him. Nobody's worried about where Calder is. It seems he's liable to shoot off on a business trip at the drop of a hat. He likes to hike around the woods--too. Likes walking in general. He might have walked clear down to Parkawan and taken a train to New York, for example."

"Without saying a word? Without any luggage?"

"He has an apartment in town, hasn't he? Search me. Beth says that if she doesn't hear from him by tonight, she's going to do something about it. I suggested that he might have gone for a stroll and got hurt. Jack Browne sent a couple of guys looking along the principal paths. I scurried around myself, a bit. But the paths haven't been used--

everybody just got here--and those people are so darned afraid Calder will turn up and make any excited effort look silly, that they won't bother. I'm beginning to feel that way, myself. I talked to Bill Calder. He's worried about his father--but he's a lot worse worried about Danielle."

"How do you know that?"

Aggie grinned. "Once I get going I'm shifty-and I'm enterprising. I decided maybe the State Police--they're apparently the law-enforcement guys for this area--ought to know about our possible problem. Just a short while ago. I was sitting in the club library.

I picked up the phone to call--and it was in use. Danielle was cajoling Bill into a date this evening before dinner on Garnet Knob. Quiet tête-à-tête was her idea. Bill balked and she pushed him. I don't know where she was phoning from. He agreed, finally, and I was still sitting with the phone on my lap when Bill came out of the office, where he'd been talking. Surprised both of us. He realized I'd been listening--didn't know who I was--and bawled sin out of me. It was very embarrassing. I made out I hadn't heard much--he had terrible fidgets--and we talked a minute about his missing father. Seems like a nice chap.

The Danielles of this world should not be allowed to communicate with married men."

"You then called the State Police?"

"Not yet. I then came down here to see my inquisitive auntie."

"You're going up on Garnet Knob, of course?"

"To watch a lovely creature force her illicit attentions on a harried, married male?

Nix!"

"But you're going, nevertheless."

He opened his mouth to refuse. He said, "Exactly. I'm going. Nevertheless."

Aggie went through the woods like a ghost. At the club, he was uncomfortable and unsure of himself. In the forest, he was at home. He moved swiftly, keeping near the trail that led up the peak. He heard the sound of a car laboring on a distant lumber road and knew that Danielle and Bill were on their way. He took a short cut that demanded a climb over a steep rock ledge and he came out, presently, on the Knob itself. It rose a thousand feet above the two lakes and afforded a fine view of the blue water, the surrounding hills, the tree-girt cottages, and the sinking sun. He found a place to hide among some wind-fluttered poplars.

After a while, Danielle and Bill came up the trail, panting. They stood on the eroded rock, which was hob-nailed with true but valueless garnets. Bill looked at the scenery, to avoid looking at the blonde girl. Danielle looked at Bill.

He spoke first. "What's it all about? I can't just rush off at suppertime and leave Martha because you insist on it. That woofly little Plum guy heard you talking to me, too.

He was listening on the phone. In about forty-eight hours it'll be all over Indian Stones that we were up here."

Aggie smirked at the indictment of his tact. When he thought of Sarah's penchant for gossip, his smirk subsided.

Danielle said, "You told me--in New York--that you were looking forward to the summer, because I'd be here."

Bill grunted. "Yeah. After ten cocktails. And--in New York. The more I thought about it the more worried I got. I was crazy about you. That's no lie. Any man who wasn't--if he had a chance--wouldn't be much of a man. But I'm happy. Martha's a fine girl. I could do without her mother--but that's the handicap for Martha's high score. You'll just make trouble--"

Danielle tossed her head. "Maybe--that's what I want to make! Nobody in this world has spared my feelings! Or my mother's--"

"You don't blame me for what my father did!"

"I'm bored. I've been engaged over and over--and I never loved one of them.

Nobody worries about my feelings. Danielle can take care of herself! That's how they think."

"You certainly never were--" there was a trace of humor in his voice--"exactly a dependent dame."

"No. Now look at me! I'm almost twenty-eight. It seems that I can't have affection. Men get scared of me. When I was a kid--I always imagined a man would come along who would tell me what to do and where to get off. Nobody did. Nobody can.

I've been gypped. Maybe I'm not meant for affection. But I certainly think I'm entitled to excitement--anyhow. Fun. I used to think you were pretty swell--when you played football--and later. If my having fun means trouble for people--then, there's going to be trouble!"

"A nice, wholesome attitude."

"And it's just beginning! I'm going to wreck homes and influence people-for the worse. Indian Stones is a monument to hypocrisy. One more generation, and everybody in it will be as dead and dried up as--Aggie Plum!"

There was a great deal more of that sort of conversation. The sun settled behind the hills that rimmed Indian Stones and its two lakes. Six-forty-five passed--and seven.

The two people were so engrossed that Aggie was able to move closer and to part the branches in order to look at them. A reddish glint of sunset shone on Danielle's smooth hair and silliouetted her vivid profile. It illuminated Bill Calder, lounging against a boulder, downcast, tormented. Aggie felt sorry for him; what the girl was doing seemed coldly deliberate. As if she were merely trying to keep him there as long as possible. That thought became so clear to Aggie that he wondered what it could mean. At last, however, Bill tore himself away and hurried down the trail.

Again, Aggie slipped into the woods and started back by a straighter, shorter route. He was determined to reach the club ahead of them. He took a series of steep rock ledges with the facility of a chamois. He hurried along under a growth of white pines. In his brain, recollection unfolded a map imprinted during his youth. There would be a brook with easy going for a while. Then a cut through a narrow burned area to another old road which would come out behind the Patton place.

The burn was now thick with a second growth that would become timber in a couple of decades. The old road wasn't a road at all, any longer, but a tunnel, sometimes discernible in the woods. Every here and there it was choked completely with young birches and pines, poplars and beeches. But, without mental effort, he knew the way it went and he saw long-forgotten landmarks--a balanced rock, a ledge marred in another century by logging sledges, a moss-grown chestnut, awesome even in decay. There hadn't been any lumbering for a long time--or any hunting to speak of. Good thing, he thought.

Nature had restored the primordial quality of this northern forest. The approach of twilight made the man seem small and his surroundings Gothic.

He followed a track of grass bleached wan by shade--a remnant from the time when the road had been more open. Then he plunged into a dense thicket--and stopped just before he emerged on the other side.

He looked at the ground. What held his attention would have terrified most persons, in that gray and silent place. But Aggie was not in the least frightened. Startled--

and no more. He pursed his lips and whistled one low, soft note.

Two logs lay across the vestigial road--one on top of the other. Long, vertical stakes held them together--stakes that had guided the upper log to drop on the lower.

Beyond the logs lay trigger, lever and bait--bread and honey, in this case. There were ants busy now in the honey. It was a deadfall--a big one--of a size suitable for bear. But the top log had closed, like the blade of a giant scissors, on a man. The man was Jim Calder.

CHAPTER 4

There was nothing new about the spectacle of death for Aggie Plum. In his researches among the ruins of many civilizations, he'd seen the remains of myriad deaths, violent and peaceful. In his association with primitive people, he had seen death under circumstances which most of· the members of the Indian Stones Country Club would have found insupportable. A social misfit, a wallflower, he was nevertheless no sissy.

He turned briefly to work out an explanation for the presence of the dead man in the trap. Calder had been coming in the same direction as Aggie. His footprints were there to show it--dim depressions, recent small disturbances. He'd ducked low in the tangle to avoid some festoons of bull brier. He'd stepped toward the bottom log-with the intention of going over it--and accidentally hit the trigger. Or, perhaps, he'd pulled at the bread and honey out of curiosity--not noticing the other log poised above his head. It could have been either way.

Aggie took a careful route to examine the man. There was no doubt that he had been dead for some time. The blood, at the base of the shattered skull, was dry and dark.

Broken-off leaves were not just wilted, but curled by the day's heat. There was evidence of reflex kicking around the man's feet. And--Aggie checked back a few paces--the man had been alone. He made a search next for the knife that had pinned Bogarty's card to Sarah's front door. It was not there.

He then inspected the deadfall itself. When he had finished, he whistled again, bemusedly. It was a pretty crude job. Correct in principle, but not expert. Too much friction in the trigger. Calder, to have set it off upon--himself, must have yanked hard--or lunged into it. The bear for which it had been intended would in all probability have robbed it safely without causing it to drop. Aggie wondered about that bear. He had not been noticing things especially as he had walked along; his mind had been occupied. But now he went back to the brook and skirted it. He satisfied himself presently. There were at least two bears in that part of the mountain. Bears had been scarce during his boyhood.

They were coming back--and some contemporary youngsters, probably, had undertaken to catch one of them.

Aggie returned and knelt in order further to study the victim. He noticed one other thing. The man had, on the back of his left hand, the marks of a dog's teeth. Aggie did not touch the body. It was beginning to get dark in earnest. He straightened up--and heard a crackling in the woods. The noise was faint and it was made by a person. He hurried toward it.

Through an avenue of tree boles, he saw Danielle coming along the old road, He allowed himself to appear, as if he had not been in concealment.

Danielle seemed completely calm. "I thought I'd find you," she--said. "You heard me make the date with Bill. And--coming back--I saw where somebody had walked up alongside the trail a ways. I let Bill go--and started looking for you. I know my way around here better than you--though I must say, you have a good memory."

He nodded calmly. "Yeah. I followed you."

"Why? Why did you listen to my call?"

He studied her. No use explaining that accident and a desire to satisfy his aunt were largely responsible for his first act of eavesdropping. No use, indeed, of trying to explain or apologize for anything--in Danielle's case. "I felt in the mood," he said.

She frowned. "What sort of oaf are you, anyway? Maybe the psychiatrists ought to have a shot at you." He ignored that. He asked, "You been around here--in these woods--in the last twenty-four hours?"

"I live here," she answered. "I'm a dryad."

"I mean--seriously. When did you and your father get up here?"

"Yesterday afternoon," she answered. "Anything else? Do you want to walk back to the clubhouse with me?"

"Maybe. Do you know how to make a deadfall?"

"Deadfall? I don't even know--oh! A trap! No."

"Who does--around here?"

"Look, ducky. It's been over ten years since I was a Girl Scout. What about a deadfall?"

Aggie pointed. "There's one back yonder about a hundred yards. A big, powerful one, that was counterbalanced with rocks. Jim Calder's in it--and he's dead."

Danielle stood still. She was shocked, but he could not discern how much or in what way. Her first words were peculiar, under the circumstances. "How--how long has he been there?"

"I'd say--since last night. Why?"

The girl was already recovering her self-possession--even her normal manner of venomous banter. "Alibis. Everybody will have to have them. Me--for instance. I was at home, alone, a good deal of last night--because Dad was out on a call. How about yours?"

"I didn't say Calder was murdered."

She was silent again. Then she shrugged one shoulder. "Oh, no, you didn't. One simply assumes--I guess--that if Jim Calder died--it would be because somebody had done· him in. He was marked for murder. There were times when I could have done it--

when I was little--and he went away with Mother. Dad could have. I wonder if he did?"

"Are you talking that way cause you think it's funny--or because you're rocky?"

"Because it's the way I talk. Can you say--offhand--just what is normal for this little meeting? Are you acting normally--popping out of the woods like a ghoul and telling me that Jim Calder, whom I've known and hated all my life, is dead in some sort of trap? Telling me as if you were giving the homework assignment for a class in biology? Let me look at him."

"That won't be necessary."

Her eyes still had color, even in the dusk, and it was a greenish color. Her lips smiled. "Maybe not. But two witnesses are better than one. Somebody else may find him after this--and change something, for instance. Besides, I've seen plenty of dead people and I'd like to see what I think myself. I inherit that quality from Dad."

He led her to the deadfall and leaned against a tree while she made a thorough reconnaissance. When she had finished, she said, "We better go down to the club and call the police."

"Yes."

"Somebody could have built that thing--heaven knows why--it doesn't look as if it would catch a cow, let alone a bear. He may have fallen into it. Or--somebody may have hit him, and carried him up here, and made that thing, and dropped it on him to cover up the original blow."

' Then there'd be two sets of tracks."

Danielle glanced at him. "Not if the somebody put on Jim Calder's shoes-and carried the body. You'd have to be awfully good to be able to demonstrate that. The ground's hard."

"Sophomore biology homework," he said.

"What?"

"You're talking like the professor. You're a peculiar girl."

"I'm the ruins of what was a good one."

"Let's go to the club. We can discuss your character all summer. I was eavesdropping on you and Bill just now. Interesting--when the female undertakes to become a cad. Interesting--but unconvincing."

They went down the hillside.

Danielle made the call to the police, whom, she said, she knew. In any event, when she asked for "Wes" she was put through. She told the story tersely. When she had finished she turned to Aggie. "Wes wants us to round up everybody we can hefe. He'll go up on Gamet Knob with some men--and then join us. I'll start by getting Dad--and pick up anybody I can, on the way."

They left the library. Aggie went across to the desk. Through the archway, he could see numerous people in the dining room--families who were eating at the club until their kitchens were in working order--and individuals who used the club dining facilities all summer. He beckoned Jack from work. He told him what he had found and what had been done about it and what the police had requested. He kept his voice low. Jack listened with a blank, meaningless look. His face perspired and he wiped the back of his hand across it.

"All right," he said finally. "I'll go into the dining room and make an announcement. I don't know exactly what Wes wants--but if he said he wanted everybody--I'll have everybody." He gazed for a moment at Aggie. "Was the old man killed by accident--or on purpose, do you think?"

"I couldn't say."

Jack's jaw muscles set. "I hope it was on purpose!" he--whispered. "I hope he saw it coming--and was frightened!" Then he drew a breath. "I'm sorry. I hated Calder." He shook himself. "Have to get into that old, soothing mood for the customers! You had the right hunch this afternoon when you had me send out guys to look for Calder, didn't you?" His expression changed once again. "Here comes Beth. You take care of her, will you? Her brother and the Draymans haven't come for dinner yet--and it would be rotten for her to find it out by me just stepping forward and announcing it."

Aggie said, "Sure."

He turned. Beth had come partway across the foyer. She saw him and smiled.

"There you are! All covered with burrs and Spanish bayonettes! Been on a nature walk!"

Her manner was a mockery of the most fatuous maternal patter--almost baby-talk. She was kidding him.

"Beth," he said, "I want to talk with you. Come on out to the solarium." Already he could hear Jack Browne's voice beginning his "announcement."

Her very dark eyes caught, fully, the expression in his. She looked surprised. Her voice dropped half an octave. "Is this going to be serious, professor? I've just heard the darnedest thing! Cynthia Symmonds says Sarah is going to promote a match, and who do you think between? You and me! Of course, I don't know a dinosaur bone from a piece of driftwood. But I'm nice in other ways--"

Aggie flushed darkly. This was tough. They were, by that time, on the threshold of the sun porch. He struggled with the self-consciousness she had thrust upon him and the incongruity of such a thing at this time. He kept looking at her. "I've got a shock for you," he said. "And it's not funny--and I hope you won't faint."

"Yes," she said in a still lower voice. "Something's the matter. What, professor?"

She was no longer teasing him.

"Your father's dead. He was killed in a--a homemade trap set for bears--in the woods--apparently last night, after he'd left Sarah's place. By accident." He added that gratuitously.

Beth sat down on a corner of the ping-pong table. "Got a cigarette?"

"Only my pipe."

"Never mind." She sighed unevenly. "Are you sure it was an accident?"

There was the same doubt--this time expressed by the dead man's daughter. "I think so. One can never be sure--offhand."

"I'm glad," she said presently.

"Glad?"

She nodded and slung her head in such a way that half her black hair was thrown back over her shoulder. "In a way. You wouldn't want to live with a father like that! To know some of the destructive and some of the sinister things he's done! To be afraid--

always--there were others--or that a new and worse one would be done any minute!" She hesitated. "Bill and Martha and Mrs. Drayman were coming right along behind me. I'll go and catch them. They won't want to eat dinner here now."

"The police want--everybody--they said--to be here. They're coming. You tell them--and bring them back."

"Thank you," she said.

Aggie nodded. "You're being pretty sound about this, Beth."

"I am sound," she said. "Perhaps--because Dad was so unsound--and neither Bill nor I ever approved of it."

Aggie watched her go--and prepared to kill time until the police arrived. He saw her come back, after a while, with her dinner party. He noticed that one man--a rather elderly man--had been thrown into a hidden funk by the news. He made a point of finding out that the man--who stayed in the bar drinking neat whisky--was Byron Waite. He saw, also, that Danielle and her father had a long, private conference after their arrival. He noticed that Bill Calder, son of the dead man, contrived to sneak out of the clubhouse and was gone for nearly half an hour, while Martha, his wife, and Mrs. Drayman, Martha's mother, made a not-too-evident attempt to cover up Bill's absence. Beth stayed outdoors--

alone--but within view.

Mr. Waite, also, took a shot at going out. Dr. Davis intercepted him at a side door.

"I think we all ought to stick around here till the police arrive," the surgeon said.

Aggie heard and saw most of that, from a small table in the dining room where he sat, reluctantly eating a sandwich which Jack Browne had pressed upon him with the reminder that he'd had no supper. Jack was doing an excellent job of maintaining morale among the older people. Aggie finished his sandwich and drank some milk and watched Waite accede ungraciously to Davis's insistence that everybody stick around. After that, Aggie returned to the main lounge. People asked him whispered questions--and the police arrived.

Aggie had expected that the police inquiry into the accident would be dramatic.

One by one, the people related to Calder in any way would be taken into a room--

probably the manager's office--and questioned by a bulldozing, beetle-browed, back-county sheriff--who might be either very shrewd or intensely stupid.

Nothing of the sort took place. Into the lounge came a tall, rugged young man, with an almost too good-looking face; he wore the uniform of the State Police and the insignia of a captain. As he slipped off leather gloves and tossed them, with his hat, on the top of a grand piano, he shouted cheerful greetings to many of the persons there. He called Mr. Waite "Byron," Dr. Davis "Doc," and Danielle by her first name.

Virtually everyone called the captain "Wes."

Aggie sat frowning in one of the hickory chairs which he had put in a shadowy corner. Ralph Patton noticed the frown and walked over to explain. "The state cop is Wesley Wickman--a kid from a town near here who used to bring the newspapers.

Everybody liked him. Davis--and your aunt Sarah--and a bunch of the others--sent him through college. They were disappointed when be decided to be a policeman--at first. But he rose fast--and he's got this district--and they're kind of proud of his record. That's why he's so easy-going now. He's sort of universal nephew of Indian Stones." Ralph talked as if the act were a sedative for his none too well-concealed nervousness.

"Oh," said Aggie. He couldn't help feeling a twinge at the phrase, ''universal nephew." It wasn't envy, exactly, but be compared his own life with that of the tall cop, and it did not seem that providence bad been quite fair. Captain Wes Wickman could walk into that roomful of fairly rich and reasonably snooty people without any embarrassment. He could grin and chuckie--and they'd eat out of his hand. Aggie could walk in--and they'd turn their faces away to snigger. Aggie flushed with frustration at the thought; he decided he didn't care much for men of the trooper's general type. Dumb Adonises.

Meanwhile, Wes bad pulled out the piano bench and seated himself on it. He turned to the manager and said, "Jack, just round up everybody here, will you? I want to talk a few minutes--and ask some questions."

Browne went out to the other rooms. Aggie saw Bill Calder slip unobtrusively into the billiard room--and be saw the captain observe that reappearance also. Stragglers arrived from the dining room, the terrace, and the bar. All the lounge lights were on, and the glass eyes of deer, moose and fish gleamed at the informal assembly.

CHAPTER 5

"Folks," the trooper began, "I'll make it as short and easy as I can. I've been up on the side of Garnet Knob--and I've had Jim Calder's body taken away. Our doctor'll look over the body and there may be an inquest. Probably will. You're all thinking one thing--

and I know what it is, of course. There wasn't much love lost on Jim--" He glanced over a row of heads. "Sorry, Bill--Beth--Martha--Mrs. Drayman!--and you're all wondering if it was an accident or if somebody did it on purpose."

He looked around the room. There was a general murmur. Some people were denying any such suspicion--others admitting it. The trooper evaluated that set of moods.

"I think it was an accident," he finally said. That brought another assortment of private discussions. "Here's why. Jim was a great fellow to stamp around the woods--even at night. We all know that. There's a good moon now--late, but good. I've known him to go to Garnet Knob for the moonlight-often."

Aggie heard somebody--some man--say sotto voce, "With a conscience like his--

who could sleep?" It was a thought Aggie himself had once expressed.

The officer's eyes bit into' the crowd, searching alertly but briefly for the author of those words. He went on: "Since you people have posted this whole reservation and the game has--come back thick, we've had plenty of trouble with poachers. Trappers and hunters. Mostly kids--high school age--from over in Parkawan and some men who work in the Lanting Mills. That bear trap was a semi-amateur job. It might have worked--

there's plenty of evidence of bears hanging out around there--but it wasn't any master-mind trap. It was built recently. Maybe yesterday--maybe last night--probably in the last three days or so. The bread in it was about three days stale-so it may have been baited that long ago. Last fall and winter, my men took a dozen trap lines out of your woods-and one set-gun that could easily have shot somebody's legs off. We've arrested twenty youngsters with out-of-season game, no licenses, and with birds that aren't supposed to be shot. Bill, when did your dad arrive here?"

Heads turned with the unison of tennis watchers. Bill tried to speak, cleared his throat, and answered firmly, ''Two days ago."

"And you and your wife?"

"This morning. We arrived about eleven, I'd say."

"Mmm. I stopped by your place before coming over here. You only had one servant in the house until this morning."

' That's right, Wes. We--Beth, too--were at Mother's."

The trooper took a small notebook from his pocket. "Name of Gannon. He says he went to bed last night about ten. Tired out. Your dad was still up. That's all Gannon knows. I mean to say--this morning, he found your dad's bed unmussed. Thought he'd stayed at some other house up here. Didn't even begin to wonder--as you people apparently didn't either--till late this afternoon."

"Father," said Bill Calder, "was headstrong and secretive. You never knew where he was going, or when, or how long he'd be gone."

The captain nodded. "Mmmmm. You were over at your house just now. What for?"

Bill flushed red and then began to lose color. He looked hopelessly at his wife. He stood up in the room, as if standing would help him to reply, People waited stiffly for his answer. "When I learned my father was dead," he began unevenly, "I--I--oh! you all know! Dad wasn't ever--well--idealistic. He was tough. He and I didn't get along--and you know that. I--I tried to persuade him not to come up here at all this year. Look, Wes.

I went over because I thought I'd like to get hold of any papers--business letters--that Dad has here--and hide 'em. There might have been something embarrassing in the stuff. But when I got to the porch--I saw a trooper inside --so I came back."

"You took a long time."

"I was--Lord!--upset. Can't a man be upset when his father gets killed in a horrid and unexpected way? Sure I took a long time! I was walking around--trying to get calm!"

He sounded frantic--almost tearful.

Wes nodded and said, "Sorry, Bill."

"Ralph?"

In answer, Ralph Patton stood up, looking serious and granite-like behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. He smiled fugitively at Beth. "Yes, Wes?"

"You know anything about Jim's finances at present? His income?"

The accountant shrugged. "I handle only part of his work. As we all know, Jim had been an in-and-outer--an up-and-downer. Right now, so far as I know, he's in good shape. I don't know very far." The admission seemed to hurt or to anger him. His temples showed stress. "Jim had a big income. Some people pay taxes on their incomes and some bury them. What condition his estate is really in--I couldn't say."

"Know anything about his will?" Ralph nodded. "His estate--whatever it proves to be--is evenly divided between Beth and Bill."

The captain glanced toward the place where Beth sat. ''You and Bill--Martha and her mother--were asleep all last night? No disturbance? Jim didn't stop by?"

"No," said Beth clearly. "Nothing happened."

"Sit down, Ralph. I'll see you later about Jim's property. . . . Aggie Plum."

Aggie found himself rising. The eyes were on him. He had a weak feeling in the pit of his stomach--as he'd had in school when the teacher had called him to recite on a subject for which he was not prepared. He had intended to tell the police about his spying--but he'd expected the telling would be done in private. The thought flickered through his mind that Wes Wickman's system of public inquisition had certain points in its favor--for the inquisitor.

"I just stumbled on it," Aggie said--so lamely that somebody snorted. He thought it was Beth, but he could not be certain.

Wes was eying him--incredulously. "You--too--were fond of tramping about the woods?"

"I--why, yes."

"You were here this afternoon?"

"I was."

"When did you go out--for a stroll?"

"I don't know--exactly."

"Anybody notice? Jack?"

The manager said uncomfortably, "Why, I think Aggie was here until about five, anyway. I saw him telephoning--"

Wes nodded. "You went for a stroll. You happened to take that particular road.

You found Jim. When did you get to Indian Stones?"

Aggie told him when--and how. He told about Sarah's mumps. Dr. Davis corroborated one or two points with murmured words.

The trooper presently said, grinning slightly, "So Sarah has the mumps! Tough!

I'll drop in and see her. Dr. Plum, did you know Jim?"

"I must have--years ago. When I was twelve."

"Never saw him afterward?"

"No."

"Never did business with him? With any of his companies?"

"Never."

"You were taking that stroll with Danielle--"

He dropped in that question--more as a statement than an inquiry--so unexpectedly that Aggie balked again, even though he had been preparing himself for it.

' With Miss Davis?" he repeated. "Strolling? Why--why--yes."

"That's a lie," said Danielle flatly.

Again the room refocused itself. The officer was looking at Danielle and there was a glint in his eye. "Is it?" he asked blandly.

Now Danielle stood. Aggie sat down. She stared at him for a moment. "Bill Calder is an old friend of mine," she said presently. "I asked him to take me up on Garnet Knob to see the sunset." She glanced at Martha, Bill's pretty wife, and her eyes were veiled. "We'd done it often--when we were younger." Then she looked at Dr. Plum.

"Aggie heard me make the date. He wasn't phoning when Jack saw him--he was listening in on me. He followed Bill and me up the Knob. He listened to what we said. Aggie doesn't approve of me, Wes. And he's the Peeping Tom type. I suppose he gets a kick out of poking into other people's affairs." Again her eyes touched Martha. "Anyway, I saw his tracks in the old road when I came down with Bill, and I left Bill and took· a short cut we kids used to know--and there was Aggie--and there, as he told me, was Jim Calder."

A considerable buzz followed that. A buzz that forced the officer to say, "Quiet, everybody." Then he turned to the miserable anthropologist. "Were you tagging Danielle?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because--" Aggie halted. He was surely not going to inject Sarah into this. And yet--how else could he explain? He finally blurted, "Curiosity. Just pure curiosity."

People laughed. People looked angry. Beth had sucked in her lips with an expression of fascinated amusement in which was mingled a profound disdain. He did not try to look at Danielle. He knew that his original hope of achieving a pleasantly inconspicuous niche for himself at Indian Stones was ruined. He was angry, suddenly. Angry at the people for misunderstanding him--and angry at the cop for exposing him to such humiliation. His anger lighted his eyes and at the same time darkened the color under their shine. His chin shook and that made his Vandyke quiver. He took hold of the chair in front of him.

"I suppose you noticed that Jim Calder had been bitten by a dog," he said.

The effect of that was remarkable. As a non sequitur, it startled the audience. As a change of pace and mood, it caused Wes Wickman to frown and at the same time to look slightly amused. "Yes," he said, "I did notice it." He glanced around. "Anybody know what dog? Bill, did you have one?"

"No."

' There's one at the club here," Jack Browne said. "Mr. Calder was over for dinner.

Played with it. Friendly dog, though. Belongs to the chef."

"What kind?" Wes asked.

"Mongrel."

The officer was impatient. "What size, then?"

"Oh--size of a fox."

Wes nodded. "That'd be about right. Well, Dr. Plum, so what?"

Aggie was still angry. He dismissed the dogbite. "I suppose, captain, you also noticed just what sort of yank or jar it would take to bring down that deadfall?"

The trooper's apparent amusement increased. He looked around the room. His tone was sardonic. "The professor's a regular Sherlock Holmes! Trails people. Notices things. Certainly, Plum. We set it up and tipped it off to try it. It worked hard. It was heavy. I suppose you noticed that a couple of rocks had been used for ballast? They'd rolled into the brush. With them on-it worked even harder. But not too hard."

Aggie said, "Yes, I noticed."

Wes thought a moment. "Okay. Anybody else think of anything? We'll try to get whoever built that deadfall, of course. There'll be an action in it. Not homicide, though, in the deliberate sense. You can sit down, Plum."

Aggie didn't sit. Instead, he said, "Where's Hank Bogarty?" That question obviously perplexed Wes Wickman. He frowned and said, "Hank who?"

Dr. Davis responded at that point. "I can explain, Wes. I know what Plum means--

though I think it's making a mountain out of a molehill. In fact, I'd say our friend here was doing his level best to push you off asking him any more embarrassing questions about his private traits."

"Exactly! Dead right, George!" The corroboration came from old Mr. Waite--the man who had been covertly terrified by the news of Calder's death.

Dr. Davis rose in a leisurely manner. "Plum," he began, "refers to an old friend and business associate of Calder's and Waite's and mine. Sarah's, too. A man named Hank Bogarty. A self-taught engineer and metallurgist. He spent a summer here-long ago. Long ago. I had a wire from him yesterday saying he was coming on to get another stake. I--well, I must say, I thought it was a joke. Not that I didn't think he was coming--"

"Why did you think it was a joke?" Wes asked curtly.

The surgeon hesitated, glanced at Waite, and then said casually, "Why, because it was our understanding, through the years, that Hank Bogarty had done very well in the West. Didn't need money. I imagined he sent the wire in a spirit of fun--to remind us of the old days--and nothing more."

Wes was looking thoughtfully from one face to another. "I see. And he hasn't checked in?"

Waite and Davis shook their heads and shrugged. The surgeon glanced at Jack Browne--who also shook his head.

Dr. Davis said finally, "He wired from Albany. Deliveries are late around here, as you know. He might have spent the night there. He was probably driving--since the train service is poor. Maybe he had an accident. Maybe he changed his mind and decided not to come. It ought to be easy to learn about Hank Bogarty--and I, personally, feel that Dr.

Plum is injecting a good many irrelevant matters into this discussion."

Several other people muttered the same thing. The investigation continued for another half hour. Then, rather abruptly, the captain dismissed them. "I think that will be all. I don't believe there's any ground for believing there was foul play. We'll do a thorough job on that deadfall, of course. Fingerprints, and so on. But if I were you, folks, I'd just try to forget it--and sleep well tonight."

Aggie heard Waite say, "With Jim Calder gone--everybody ought to sleep better!"

Then he walked out of the club. He knew Sarah would be waiting for him--and he had a great deal to tell her. Far more than she'd bargained for. He started walking briskly toward the cottage.

Behind him came Captain Wes Wickman, walking even more briskly. When Aggie perceived that he was being followed, which was very soon, he waited. The trooper came up and fell into step. They walked a hundred yards before he spoke--and Aggie had no intention of starting a conversation with him. The policeman's words startled him. "Say, Plum. Why in the name of sin were you tagging that Davis girl?

You're not the type--and don't go on trying to make out you are! I read your book about Primitives on the Tundras--had to, compulsory at school-and I know you're not the guy to trail blondes and indiscreet husbands. Or--" a thought struck him--"are you stuck on Danielle?"

Aggie then explained about Sarah, her self-appointed mission in life, and her inhibiting mumps. It was an explanation he had intended to make, anyway--in private.

The policeman choked with laughter. He leaned against a tree, slapped his thigh, and blew his nose. Finally he said, "Sarah! What a woman! I ought to have guessed it! Lord, Plum, the Indian Stoners are going to look down their noses at you for this! If they don't learn the facts, they'll think you're some sort of social monster!" Then he became calmer-

-quite serious. "You don't believe that guy just happened to shove himself into that trap, do you?"

"Do you?"

The trooper considered. "I think it's possible."

"Mmm. Yes. Possible."

"And darned unlikely."

"As you say--darned."

"See here, Plum. I tagged along to find out if you'd come clean with me-and you did. I questioned that Whole mob together because I wanted to see how they affected each other. I got the net impression that even if somebody had bumped off Jim Calder, the majority of our friends here would be for hushing it up. They don't like scandal or bad publicity. They're clannish. I daresay it's a good riddance. Waite--for instance--"

"What about Waite? He was in a sweat."

The policeman's eye again darted approvingly over the figure of the bearded man.

"You got that, eh? Well--in those papers Bill tried to get was a bunch of correspondence from Waite. I glanced at it. No time for anything but a glance. But, if ever one man hated another, Waite hated Calder. You know that Calder had a reputation for squeezing the blood out of even his best friends--"

Aggie nodded. "Heard about it."

"He must have bored into Waite. And Waite's a first-rate miser. Mean guy about money, anyhow. I remember driving a baseball through the windshield of his car, once."

The trooper smiled. "Anyhow, Waite's letters were full of stuff about what 'ought' to be done to Calder. Boiling him in oil was the gentlest I ran across. There were more threats than there are feathers on a goose."

"Too many," Aggie said. Then he frowned. "On the other hand, if you were going to push somebody over, it might be very ingenious to write a sheaf of wildly threatening missives. I mean--the police would assume that nobody would threaten so much, and then actually take the risk of doing the job."

"Thought of that. It's a possibility. If Calder was deliberately killed, the person who did it was darned imaginative. Darned. Imaginative to lure him into that trap---or to bang him one and carry him to it."

Aggie chuckled. They had reached the boundary of Sarah's place. "I thought, earlier this evening, that you were pretty stupid. I'm wrong."

Wes Wickman apparently ignored the praise. "You're my only problem, Plum," he said musingly. "You think somebody did kill Jim. I don't--not yet; my mind's open. But you do. And you're not the kind of person who will just let that thought lie undisturbed."

Aggie said, "Maybe I will. After all, he's not the first dead man I've seen. I've lived-here and there. Primitive people are apt to--liquidate--a relative or neighbor who troubles them. I'm a scientist--and I haven't any conscience."

"Don't make me laugh! You've got Sarah for a conscience! And the fact that you're a scientist is the one that will keep you meddling. I took a good long look at you tonight. I could almost read your mind. I know more about these people than you ever will--and that helped me. You thought that Waite might have done this. You considered Danielle. Bill Calder, of course. Beth--maybe. That trip to Garnet Knob might have had something to do with it all. Bill might even have intended to confess to the girl there--and lost his nerve."

"She suggested the junket up the hill."

"Oke. Maybe she was going to confess. Jim spoiled her mother's life. Then--you wondered about this Bogarty guy. Who was he? Where was he? I wonder about him too.

You were also scrutinizing Doc Davis in a most anthropological way. Why?"

"Because," Aggie answered, "I routed him out at approximately four A.M. this morning--and he was up and he was dressed. Working--in his darkroom. He gave you the feeling that he'd been doing something special. There weren't any lights on--no electricity--in his house. You'd think a person would go to bed, under such circumstances. I just wondered. As for Bogarty--" Aggie told about the knife, the calling card, and Calder's visit.

The trooper thrust out his lower lip and pinched it. "I tell you. I can't stop you from using your bean. So go ahead. Only--for heaven's sake--if you barge into anything more--tell me. Not your aunt--and not anybody else. You see, Plum, even if there was a murder here, I'd have to have ironclad proof--or these people would suppress it. They're that kind. So are a good many others. People think that any killing would throw them on the side of law and justice--but if the right guy is killed--and if an investigation would bring to light a lot of backbiting, gyppery, hate, and double-dealing--they'll raise heaven and earth to close the subject. I, for one, am going to take the line that it was an accident--

for the present, and until I can prove it wasn't--and above all, until we know about this Bogarty. I wish you would too."

"Of course," Aggie answered readily--and somewhat to the surprise of the officer.

Sarah looked up from her solitaire. When she saw it was Aggie, she beamed.

"This," she said, "is about my two millionth game. Not one has come out, yet." She gathered up the cards, absently reached for a large candy box on the table beside her chair, and bit into a chocolate. Her face immediately puckered and tears filled her eyes.

She snatched up a glass of water. "Strawberry!" she exclaimed. "Tastes like nitric acid!

It's killing me! Take these candies away before I forget again! What happened? Who were you talking to--just now--outside?"

"Captain Wickman--Wes Wickman."

"Well! Go ahead! Tell me about the evening! What was Wes doing around here, anyhow? Somebody get burglarized during the winter? Speak up! Here I sit--starving for conversation--!"

"He was here," Aggie answered, sitting on the ottoman at Sarah's feet, "because Jim Calder has been killed."

He watched his aunt react. She lost color--not much, but some. She thought for a long minute. "All right. Tell me."

It took him an--hour. She interrupted with short, breathless interrogations and exclamations, but she checked her own excitement in order to let him talk. When he finished, she said flatly, "Jim, the idiot, just blundered into that trap! I'll bet on it! Now, tell me more about Danielle and Bill Calder."

He began to tell her as much more as he could think of. But he realized that either Sarah wishfully thought Jim had died by accident and wanted to reinforce the wish--or else she had some other reason for deciding to avoid that phase of the discussion. What reason, he could not guess. After he had exhausted every other detail of the evening, she skirted the subject of Jim's death once more: "So Wes told you not to tell anything to me, eh? Scoundrel! And you're two people's stooge, from now on."

"Two?"

"His--and mine."

Aggie shook his head. He was beginning to feel a great fatigue--a reaction to the night and to the aimlessness of the quandary in his mind. "I'm nobody's stooge, Sarah, from now on. I signed up with you to do a little trivial espionage. I didn't agree to poke into the death of a manifest rascal."

"You will, though."

"No."

"Why not?"

He yawned. "Well, because I've already damaged myself enough, for one reason.

Every soul at Indian Stones except Wes thinks I'm a top-drawer pud. And Wes won't give me a good character, at my request; to do so would blacken your name and impute my senses. Another reason is, you haven't come through with all you know--or suspect."

"Me?" Sarah's hazel eyes were wide and innocent. Too innocent.

"You," he answered, rising from the ottoman.

She didn't deny it.

The next day, it began to rain at nine o'clock and it rained hard. There were occasional diminutions of the gray pall, but not for long enough periods to cause people to go outdoors voluntarily. Aggie stayed in. He unpacked his clothes and the contents of the rest of his peculiar luggage. He read books. He refused to go to the club for lunch or for dinner. He volunteered to play cribbage with his aunt, but she was so piqued by his lack of co-operation that she refused any such solace. Dr. Davis came, and she sent for her nephew, but he was reported by old John to be immersed in a bath. She tried to persuade Aggie after dinner that people would want to see him; he told her that anybody who wanted to see him knew where he could be found. He went back to his treatises at ten o'clock and made no further sound.

Sarah, waking in the thin, black hours of morning, saw by the reflection on the trees that her nephew still had a light on. Still reading. Or--more probably--holding up a book, and thinking. She grunted with the discomfort of her ailment and the discomfort of her mind and went back to sleep.

The day that came after that night was sunny and hot. Old John woke Aggie--on Sarah's orders--with the news that he was to be present at a coroner's inquest at ten. John would have let him sleep through anything of so trifling a nature. And so would Sarah, if she'd had a mind to do it. Aggie ate his breakfast in a cross and silent manner. He shot the station wagon through the stone gates noisily, and was gone for three hours. When he returned, he was still taciturn.

Sarah had a cold luncheon served to him in her room. "Death by accident," he said. "Warrant out for whoever built that deadfall." He forked up a mouthful of salad and she warned him it would drop on his beard. He scowled at her--and--the salad dropped.

"Most perfunctory thing you ever saw! Held in a room in the City Hall in Parkawan.

Doctor's reports--death by blow from log. He died some time the night we got here, definitely. I, personally, believe that deadfall was put up at the same time. Or in the afternoon of the day before we got here."

Sarah gazed at him. This was a tidbit of news. "You do? Why?"

"Plants!" he answered crossly. "The plants the two dead trees fell on--and the plants trampled around there. Juices still sticky. I imagine Wes noticed that, also. He notices most things. He's smart. Anyway, the doctors didn't find a thing that the blow wouldn't explain. They did an autopsy. Bill insisted on that. There were no fingerprints on the deadfall worth anything. Smears--that's all. Suspicious--but not conclusive. A lot of people wear gloves in the woods. Wes was wearing them himself, the other night.

They didn't go into the murder angle much more than that. Brushed it over."

"But, Aggie, there's not a scrap of evidence it was murder!"

"Et tu," he said, staring at her. "No. That's the trouble. Nothing but hints. Why was the bull brier growing so as to make it essential for a man walking on that road to lean and thus to lunge? Did the brier really grow that way--or was it festooned there to set the stage for an appearance of accident? Things like that. Maybe there isn't a perfect murder. But--I wonder--if there is ever a perfect accident, either? This one was absolutely pat. It had to happen that way. And yet--nobody can explain why Calder was there--

except that he liked to ramble." He shrugged. "I saw Wes for a few minutes. Asked him if he'd learned anything about this--this--"

He was watching her from under his hand--rubbing his face and yawning. She supplied the name fast enough--but with perhaps a trace of a quaver--and perhaps the quaver was due to her swollen glands. "Hank? Hank Bogarty?"

"Mmm. He hadn't. The Albany cops checked all the hotels and the tourist homes.

Nobody had registered by that name. Ads were put in the papers in quite an area. No response so fat. Of course, they haven't any description. Not yet. They've wired British Columbia for one. Nobody hereabouts bas seen him recently enough to say more than that he'd had curly black hair and gray eyes, very far apart. Stuff like that. But he wired he'd be here-and he hasn't shown. Isn't it quite possible that your man Bogarty did drive in at Indian Stones and right up to Calder's--after that man Gannon of his had gone to bed--and that--things happened, and Bogarty left these parts forever?"

"What things happened?"

"You tell me," he replied impatiently. "Since you've shut down on me--I'm licked.

The whole joint is crowded with mummers. Not a word out of a soul. They are burying Jim Calder tomorrow--but I'm going for a swim right now."

"It's too soon after lunch," Sarah said petulantly.

Aggie left the house a few minutes later. He carried his bathing suit--not just trunks, but a jersey also--in a waterproof satchel. The men and women of Indian Stones had adopted tropical winter fashions for summer wear: shorts of a Tahitian pattern for the former, and for the latter, quite similar shorts, and bras. They wore slack suits in the daytime; at night the men had commenced to try dinner jackets in a variety of pastel colors. This conventionality of unconvention was one which Aggie did not remotely understand. He was dressed then, as always, primarily for comfort.

His appearance at the boathouse was thus another occasion for mirth at his expense. He came down the tree-roofed road, bobbling contentedly, in worn moccasins, khaki trousers, a faded blue jumper-shirt, and a pith helmet--the last because of the hot sunshine. Less for jauntiness than from a long-standing field habit, he wore a scarlet bandanna around his neck. All this, taken together with his beard, his flashing black eyes, and his knee-bent, forward-leaning gait, made him look outlandish.

Beth, who caught sight of him first, struck the precise note when she called, "Dr.

Livingstone, I presume?"

People lying on the dock on air mattresses, people floating on them in the water, people on the imported sand, and in boats, looked at Aggie and broke into laughter. The recent nervous strain they'd undergone made that laughter unduly vehement. Aggie turned red to the roots of his hair. He pushed ahead, as if against tangible resistance, through the crowd and into the Plum family locker. He undressed. With a grimace of determination, he decided to eschew the jersey. He came out in blue trunks.

Beth had been waiting for him, maliciously. "We're going to initiate you into the Indian Stones free-style swimming and poker--" she began. Then she stopped.

Some men who seem powerful in their clothes are male caricatures in a bathing suit. Others are the opposite, and Agamemnon Telemachus Plum was such a person. His shoulders sloped steeply and his chest seemed rounded. Dressed, he gave the impression of being a little bit underweight. Undressed, he was revealed: a man knotted with lean muscle, a man with the build of an acrobat, a man of visible, formidable strength. His loose-jointed way of walking became graceful, almost sinister, like the sleek, precise movements of a big cat. It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, "at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, "dynamite in the physical culture department. "

Aggie knew that the sight of the man who subtended the professorial clothing was creating a sensation, but the knowledge did not remove his blush. He had wanted to join the people and swim with them. Now, he wanted to get away. There' were several canoes lying bottom up on a slide beside the dock. Aggie looked at them. "I wonder if I could borrow somebody's . . . ?" His voice trailed off.

"Take mine, Aggie," Ralph Patton said. "The blue one. How'd you get that brawn, boy?"

Aggie answered, "Thanks, Ralph," and no more.

They all watched him. They couldn't take their eyes away. His appearance was dramatic, very nearly appalling, in view of their previous ideas about him. He turned the canoe over and slid it into the water. He picked up a paddle. He stepped lightly aboard, dropped to one knee just forward of the stern seat, and dipped his paddle. The canoe came to life. It. flew in the water. Five strokes took him out of earshot and twenty out of sight, around the first of several small islands.

"Good Lord!" Ralph exclaimed. "Did you ever see anything like that!"

Beth was sitting quite still, staring at the widening wake. She pulled off her bathing cap and shook her black hair in the sunlight. "We've got that little guy all wrong,"

she said. "He's dangerous."

Mrs. Drayman agreed--in a way. "He isn't little, even."

Beth went on talking, as if to herself: "No. Not little. Not anything like what I thought. I wonder how he learned to paddle like that?"

Wes Wickman, the state trooper, who had read one of Aggie's books at college, could have given a partial answer; Aggie had learned it seal-hunting in kayaks, pushing dugouts into the Everglades and up the reaches of the Amazon, and raging through Alaskan white water in canoes like the one that had just vanished.

Jack Browne, off duty for the moment, lay back on the sand and said somewhat jealously--inasmuch as he had been an athlete, "One of those outdoor guys! Tum up their noses at tennis--and spend a month trying to get a snapshot of a tillagaloo-bird on her nest! No wonder he was so interested in the deadfall. Could have built it himself!"

Beth whirled. "That's no kind of thing to say! So could you! You're no slouch in the outdoors, yourself! So could I! I was Deerfoot, in the Girl Pioneers. I can pitch tents and make smoke signals. He's wonderful--and you're just envious!"

Jack chuckled. "Darned if I'm not! I think I'll have to get the professor to give me some lessons in paddling. He's gone after Danielle, I guess."

Beth stared at Jack. "I don't get it!"

"Before you came along-Danielle took off in her canoe--that way." The dark-haired girl put on her cap again. "Let's swim," she said, and she dove into the lake.

CHAPTER 6

Aggie was not looking for Danielle. He was looking for nobody and hoping to succeed in that quest. He paddled for a mile at his astonishing pace before the expenditure of energy had given him any release. Then he set the paddle across the thwarts and leaned back; the light craft coasted on its momentum. The sun relaxed him. A frail breeze swung the bow of the canoe in an arc, giving him a panorama of the lake. It lay in a tree-clad valley. Dark cottage roofs and the clubhouse gables penetrated the foliage. Garnet Knob broke craggily to the south. On lower and more rolling hills were stretches of the golf fairway and the vivid rectangles of several greens. Aggie let his mind dissolve.

Golf courses, he reflected, were very beautiful. Too bad he didn't play. A being from another world, landing on earth on a golf course, if he knew it was intended for a game, would surely think the human race was marvelous. Golf courses were like gardens, and to make a garden for a game was a noble piece of imagining.

He began to grin, thinking of the startled expressions of the Indian Stoners when they'd seen him in his bathing suit. Beth, especially. Beth, in her bathing suit, was another sort of surprise--more breath-taking than any man could be. Good old Sarah, in hopefully picking Beth for him, had at least credited him with an appreciation of beauty. Sarah hadn't chosen the glasses-wearing intellectual usually reserved for him by thoughtful hostesses. Beth had a bushel of beauty--and a figure you might see in the motion pictures, but not on many beaches.

He put the paddle under his left arm and idly sculled along with his right hand. He was still leaning back against the seat when he saw the other canoe. It was pulled up on the shore -hidden-and only a vigilant eye would have caught the glitter of a patch of enamel-caught it, and identified it as something not in nature. He sculled over that way in mild curiosity. As he drew near, the paint spot vanished behind leaves.

He beached his own canoe and set his bare feet ankle": deep in the sun-warmed water. The other canoe was right-side up. In it was a green bathing cap and a towel-but that little was much. The towel was monogrammed "DD." Aggie peered into the woods and saw nothing. He listened, and heard nothing. He looked at the ground and read there by the damp impressions the fact that Danielle had drawn her canoe out of sight, walked around to be sure it was hidden, and hurried off along the dim trail that skirted Lower Lake. She was wearing bath shoes.

Another grin flashed on Aggie's face. The doctor's daughter had once caught him on her trail by the tracks he had left. This--was his turn. He considered following Danielle's trail and guessed where it would lead. He decided to wait. He picked a spot under a hemlock; the ground was dry and soft. He lay down there, squinting through the green needles at the blue sky. He waited for a long time--perhaps an hour.

Danielle came quietly, but he heard her at a distance. She walked quickly, and she was breathing hard. She saw the canoe, and stopped dead. From his post under the hemlock branches, he observed that she was glistening with perspiration and that her bathing suit showed signs of haste in underbrush. A shoulder strap was broken. Threads were pulled. Her smooth hair was, for once, tangled and untidy, like the hair of a determined tomboy. She swung her eyes searchingly, saw him, and inhaled sharply.

Aggie stood up. "Hello. I noticed your canoe--beached here-and came ashore to investigate."

Her eyes were hard emerald. "Still--following me!"

"Not at all. Hadn't the faintest idea you'd be here. Chance."

She came a few steps closer. She was no longer alarmed. She noticed for the first time the interesting fact about Aggie's physique--considered it boldly--dismissed it. She said, "Will you help me put my canoe in? I'm tired."

"Certainly. I'll paddle you back, if you like--and tow your canoe."

"All right."

He pushed in both craft. Danielle dropped down on the bottom of one and held the other. Aggie's eyes searched the shore. "Looking for a vine," he explained. "Something for a towrope--brier--grape--"

"Tear up my towel."

He hesitated and then followed the suggestion. "Sarah," he said, "would be in a tizzie over waste like this." A short time later, they were moving down the calm lake.

Danielle sat amidships, leaning against a thwart. Her canoe towed on a painter that looked like a kitetail. She studied Aggie without especial interest and certainly without much emotion. He said nothing-waiting for her to talk.

"You really weren't following me," she said at last, as if it were the result of a thought train she had spoken aloud.

"Nope. I was trying to get away from people."

"Why?"

His eyes were candid. "I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former."

"Or vice versa. If you liked them, they'd like you. That's what my mother used to say to me." There was another long pause. "I presume you know," she continued, "that I'm not particularly popular around here either. Especially with the women. With a few of the men--it's different."

"I don't know anything about you. Sarah told me you weren't married--"

She cut him off by laughing shortly. "No. And I've had the very finest offers.

Bankers and brokers, young doctor friends of my dad's, kids in college, and middle-aged millionaires. Park Avenue and Newport, Palm Beach and Los Angeles. I've turned them all down and I don't know exactly why. There's something the matter with the men. With all men, these days. They aren't rugged. They haven't courage. Oh, they have plenty of nerve. It's not that. It's courage where women are concerned. Maybe they were brought up wrong: Bad mores, bad environment. The thing that makes people call America a matriarchy. Too much respect for women--in the worse sense of respect. A girl--wants a man in this world who can run her when she gets in a crisis with herself--and I have yet to see one."

Aggie paddled complacently. "It couldn't be--anything the matter with you?"

"No. It couldn't. Not fundamentally. Oh--superficially--yes. I've become disappointed about living, and maybe bitter, to some extent, and certainly I've become a pretty serious troublemaker--if it's possible to make trouble for people who don't care whether they get married or not, or stay married, or get divorced--people without any real feelings. I do it deliberately. I like to see dopes squirm, sometimes, and I don't mind admitting it. Everybody likes it--but most people are too damned soft to say so." Her expression concentrated into one of slight surprise. "Funny. I don't usually talk like this.

And you heard me say this anyway--to Bill." He shrugged. "I'm sort of neuter, I guess."

She stared at him and she, too, shrugged.

He went on paddling, slowly. She didn't seem to be in a hurry. She had been trying to tell him something about herself--to alibi her actions with Bill Calder, no doubt-

-but whether she had been trying honestly or not, he was unable to discern. He said in the same casual tone they both had used, "What were you up in the summerhouse for?"

Her head turned toward him quickly. Her muscles were tense. She relaxed bit by bit. "I wondered when you'd ask me why I was up there. What makes you think I went to the summerhouse? I haven't even thought of it for ages."

"A guess," he said. "If you'd gone around the lake, you'd have started from the boathouse. There's only one path up where you were besides the circuit around. One near where you landed, that is. Looking for Hank Bogarty?"

"That's supposed to make me jump, isn't it? You're fairly adroit, Aggie. Not just erudite, the way you were as a kid. Clever. And you have a marvelously fresh memory of the geography here. One might almost think you'd renewed it recently."

He raised his eyebrows. "Natural aptitude."

She thought again. "Are you stooging for Wes Wickman? Is there something odd about Jim's death that the rest of us don't know? Should we be frightened? Or what?"

"What do you think?"

"I think--if he was murdered--either you did it--or I ought to tell you something.

One of the two."

Aggie chuckled. "Nothing more logical than for a fusty pedagogue to rush fifteen hundred miles across the continent, kill a man he'd forgotten existed--kill him ingeniously, not to say miraculously, in a log trap--and then hang around the premises like the proverbial criminal who can't resist the landscape of his crime."

"Our house," said Danielle in reply, "is nearer Garnet Knob by maybe a quarter of a mile than yours. That night--around midnight--I heard somebody chopping--far away.

The wind blew the sound down--for a minute."

"You might have mentioned it at the inquest. High school boys don't build animal traps in the middle of the night."

"I thought of it afterward. Then--that night--our lights were off. I went to Mr.

Waite's house twice--to see if I could get a couple of flashlights. Mr. Waite wasn't there.

Not at seven--and not at eleven."

"How many Waites are there?"

"Just one. Him. A servant or two. He eats at the club." She considered. "Does Sarah--seem to be--worried--about anything?"

"Her mumps. I dunno. Why?"

"Mr. Waite is. Father is. They--with Sarah and Jim Calder--got that wire from Hank Bogarty."

"What do you know about Bogarty?" Danielle shook her head. "Nothing. He visited here before I was born. Before you were, I expect. Miner. Prospector. Made a lot of money. Borrowed from Dad and the others--and paid it back, I gather. But--"

"How come your father was working the night I called for him?"

Danielle looked angry. "I've waited for that-for a long time. He had a call in Parkawan. Consultation. He left toward the end of evening--and he didn't get back till a little while before you knocked. I'd just let him in--he'd forgotten his key-and gone back to bed-when you came rattling around with Sarah's mumps. He took an X-ray plate into his darkroom." She anticipated his next question. ''The emergency ought to be easy to check, hadn't it? Ask Dad. I'm sure I don't know what it was."

He dropped that. "How was it at the summerhouse?"

"Spooky," she replied absently. Then, realizing she had admitted being there, she gasped. ''That's mean! Tricky. All right. Dad is worried about something. He won't talk.

Somebody's dead. I'm worried. This person--Bogarty--is missing. I began to think that he might be hanging around here somewhere. Hiding. I thought over the places to hide. I remembered that summerhouse--good shelter--and nobody's been there for years and years; I decided to look at it. That's all."

"You've got nerve--going alone."

"I generally go alone in this world. And I sneaked up, besides. There was nobody in it--and there hadn't been--forever, just about."

Aggie paddled among the islands near the beach. They could hear voices and splashing. But they were still out of sight and the islands were very quiet, as was the water between them. He was thinking about what she had said. Up ahead, a hundred or more yards, he saw the bow of a rowboat. As he took another stroke, the boat's occupant came into view. It was Dr. Davis. He was making a long, minute search of the region opposite to theirs. A quality of furtiveness was so evident in the stare that Aggie automatically stopped the motion of his canoe with a silent backthrust of the paddle. He expected that the surgeon would search in the other direction and see them, but Dr. Davis had evidently assured himself of privacy in that quarter.

Beside the doctor, on the seat, was a tackle box. A casting rod lay across the boat's gunwale. He opened the box hastily, took out a tray, peered ahead again, and then lifted something else. As he did so, Aggie saw Danielle turn along the line of his gaze and look. She opened her mouth. Her father lifted the object--or objects--it looked like two--and hefted them. He then raised them to throw them overboard. Aggie was watching intently, because he felt sure that he could identify the things when they were in the air.

But he had no chance. Danielle saw his acute scrutiny and overturned the canoe.

As he felt himself arc toward the water, Aggie kept looking at Dr. Davis. He thought--but only thought--that the things thrown were shoes. Then the water closed over his head. He came up, swimming hard. He looked for the girl--and she rose near by.

"Sorry," she said, treading water. "I saw Dad--and lost my balance."

The surgeon, startled by the splash, had evidently spun around; seen them go under, and manned his oars. He coasted up to them. He looked shaky to Aggie--but Aggie's position in the water made accurate observation difficult. The doctor was certainly smiling, in any case.

He said jokingly, "Service de luxe! Rescue before you send out an SOS." Danielle grabbed one of his oars as he went on: "Haven't you been taught better canoeing than that, girl? Don't you know that when you wheel around like a dervish in a canoe--it tips?

Or are you as absent-minded as your old man--who's just thrown his anchor over without remembering to tie a rope on it?

"I saw you," Danielle said. "It was the old anchor, anyhow. The rusty one.

Stupid!"

Aggie glanced from one to the other. Then he swam to the canoe which had not been dumped. He scrambled aboard, over the bow. They were covering each other nicely, he thought. It hadn't been an anchor. Brown, low shoes, he was almost certain. But, ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have believed it had been an anchor, after that exchange, no matter what their first impression had been. Quick thinking. Too quick for comfort. Aggie said, "Maybe we can persuade you to row the derelict over to the beach, doctor? I'll take Danielle aboard for another trial--or--if she's afraid--she can go with you."

Danielle climbed into the canoe the way Aggie had. The doctor took the towel painter. They started. Danielle said, "I hope you aren't going to tell any of the stuff--you gathered from me this afternoon. It isn't really evidence, at all. Just nonsense."

He did not reply. She looked at her father for a moment and her face became paler. It was the paleness of anger, and of fear. "You wouldn't," she said, as if to assure herself. "You've got manners. And I'd cross you up! I'd deny I'd heard chopping the other night! I'd make you look like a fool--again! It's easy, you know. You wouldn't dare try it!"

It was a kind of moral cheating--an exercise of illegal, feminine force-and a threat. She was frightened because of what he had seen her father do. In her fear--

translated to wrath--she was insulting. He looked at her until she looked away. "I would,"

he said, "if I wished. And you know it."

When he reached Rainbow Lodge, he found Sarah bursting with news. "Wes stopped by," she said. "He asked for you. Had to go on. Hank Bogarty is dead."

Aggie's face was surprised and, in a moment, blank. He waited. His aunt seemed curiously relieved-and more like her old self.

"Some youngsters were fishing in Upper Lake--beyond here on the main road.

They fished up an automobile headlamp--and it wasn't rusty--so they told the state troopers. They grappled for the car and got it. Washington State license tag. They telephoned about it-and the car was Hank's, all right. He'd bought it quite recently. The road there is a sharp curve--and the lake is twenty feet deep where the road bends. People have driven in before. There's a new cable fence--but it's evidently too short. He went off beyond the end of it. The marks were clear enough--when they looked for them. Nobody had noticed until they did."

"Maybe now," Aggie said quietly, "you'll tell me about Hank." As he watched her consider that, he went on musingly, "Bum way to die. Drown in a car. Gives me the willies. Or was he cracked hard enough--?"

"They haven't found his body yet," she replied absently. "It must have been thrown out. They're looking now." She made a stifled sound. She looked at her nephew in abrupt dread. "Suppose they never find it? Suppose there-- isn't any body! Suppose he--

walked away from that wreck and--!"

"And what?" Aggie said with a voice that was blisteringly quiet. "I'm waiting for you to tell me that, Sarah."

CHAPTER 7

Aggie Plum stopped his Aunt's station wagon at the side of the road and scrutinized Upper Lake. It was a typical mountain lake--two miles long, possibly--

shoaling into an extensive sphagnum bog. On the end near the main highway there were miniature cliffs; the water below them had a blue luminosity that indicated depth. On the far side were several cottages. Two large rowboats were moving slowly upon the lake surface. Ropes hung over their stems. A truck was parked under a marginal grove of red pines and beside the truck stood a car that had been in an accident. Its wheels were wracked and awry. A headlight was missing. The top had been bashed. Along a cable fence that bordered the highway stood several persons interestedly watching the scene.

Aggie stepped from his car and spotted Wes Wickman. The two men came together at a spot some distance from the nearest spectator. "Found anything?" the scientist asked.

The state trooper shook his head. "Nobody. Not yet. It's Hank Bogarty's car, all right. Whoever he is. Or was."

Aggie nodded. "I've put the bee on Sarah about him--just now--but I can't learn anything. He was somebody--something--that she doesn't want to discuss."

"Waite and Davis were the same way. They had so much to say about how little there was to say--that I know there's more. Incidentally--!"

Aggie lifted inquiring eyes.

"I need you, Plum. Glad you came. There were some bones in the car."

"Bones!"

"Yeah."

"What kind of bones?"

"That's what I thought you could tell us. Bones--are your specialty--hunh?"

Aggie did not reply. He had a feeling that, if there were human bones in the coupe which Hank. Bogarty had driven from Seattle to the outskirts of Indian Stones, certain persons in that colony were going to find themselves in a horrid sweat. The thought gave him a moment of detached and somewhat sadistic amusement: a few human bones in the car of the man nobody wished to discuss ought to elicit the whole truth about Mr.

Bogarty.

They walked under the red pines. Captain Wickman pulled open the coupe's rumpled door. The bones were on the floor. Aggie bent over and the trooper waited intently.

"Veal," Aggie said presently. "Calf, that is." He picked up one of them. A little meat clung to it--waterlogged and pallid. "Here's the mark of a butcher's cleaver. This end--was sawed. And here--I think--" He smiled slightly. "Wes, make a note that Mr.

Bogarty had a dog--medium-sized--" He stopped talking. His smile vanished. He saw the look in his own eyes, reflected in the eyes of the officer. "Yeah. Calder was bitten by a dog that size. Size of a fox--as Jack said the other night." A memory flashed into his mind. "What color is the mutt the chef owns at the club?"

"All colors. Brindle--mostly."

Aggie dropped the veal bone back on the car floor. He wiped his fingers delicately on a bandanna. "See here, Wes. I'd forgotten this. Kind of thing you do forget. I saw a fox--at the crack of dawn--the night Calder was killed. Black one--or silver. I thought it was a dog, at first; I was sure it was--and I can't seem to recall why. I wouldn't make such a mistake once in a thousand times--" He broke off. The state trooper's face was urgent with the wish to speak.

"Bogarty raised silver foxes as a hobby! We had that in a routine report on him."

Aggie sat down on the running board of the coupe, which was still damp. He took out his pipe. "Exactly what did that report say? The whole business."

"Routine police stuff. Bogarty was well known in British Coluinbia. Well-liked, for that matter. Served in the last war with the Canadians. Got to be a captain. He was well fixed. Owned some good mines. Nobody has any complete information about his dough-which is the status of most wealthy guys. He's supposed to have found one deposit--long ago--that made him a fortune. But he worked it himself--exhausted it himself, possibly--because nobody knows whether that strike is included in his present properties or not. Those were sourdough days--and Bogarty wasn't talking any more than the others; He volunteered for this war and they wouldn't take him. Came down to the States to see what he could do to arouse interest in the British cause. He's been living in Seattle for a considerable time. Year or more. Liked--there. An Aid Britain' campaigner.

Nothing against him at all. Big man--gray hair--looks younger than his age--helped the Mounted Police once or twice. The kind of guy, judging from the reports, that you'd enjoy knowing. The kind, too, that you'd hate to cross up--or double-cross."

Aggie had listened to the recital with the seeming of incomplete attention. He knew what the trooper had said--but he was not thinking about it. "I can't imagine--" he began.

Wes flung an empty tobacco tin into the lake. He held out his hand for the scientist's pouch. "I can--easily. Your aunt--Waite--Davis--Calder---did business long ago with this honest son of nature. Calder--well, you know his reputation. Bogarty came on to see his old pals-perhaps to enlist their influence for the English--and arrived--say around eleven. Found nobody at Sarah's-pinned up his card-and reached Calder's after Gannon had turned in--"

Aggie was tapping the coupé with his pipe. "Didn't arrive. Went into the drink on this curve--"

"You know what I'm going to say! Bogarty arrived--and he eventually went to see Calder. Probably tried Waite after Sarah. Hung around. He knew the crowd would be here--because they always arrived--every year--on the twentieth. So Bogarty drove in at Calder's. I wish I'd done more looking at tire tracks the night we found Calder! Too much rain, since. Anyhow--Bogarty went in--and began to catch up with what had happened to his old friends in the last thirty-six years--"

"Long as that, eh?"

Wes nodded. "He went out--in 1905. They told me that much. He was about twenty-six or so, at the time. He'd be over sixty--now--and not showing it. So--he found out something about Calder he couldn't stand. Argued. Maybe even fought. Calder was a pugnacious devil. Maybe Bogarty banged him one. Killed him, anyway. Then--what?

Make it look like an accident. Bogarty is a woodsman. The deadfall dodge would naturally occur to him. He took an ax--and Calder's body--and pushed up on the side of Gamet Knob. There was a moon. He could have used a lantern or a flashlight, too.

Nobody around. He chopped down those trees--fixed up a deadfall--put Calder in it--

tripped it on him--"

Aggie looked annoyed. "Oh, sure. Then he drove away--ran his car off the road here--and beat it. Look, Wes. If he did that, how did he know we'd find his car-and assume he was dead?"

"Maybe he just didn't want us to find it at all. Wanted us to think, instead, that he'd never come to Indian Stones. That he'd vanished."

"How did he know you'd had enough trouble with local trappers to make the deadfall plausible in those woods? I've never seen one up here before."

"I have. Smaller ones. But--I said--Bogarty had lived in rugged country most of his life. A man stumbling into a deadfall would be his idea of a good cover-up for a killing. He's the sort who might easily kill his man. Perhaps he has before. Perhaps he's even seen somebody killed accidentally in a deadfall. It has happened, you know. He evidently doesn't care for cities and society--"

"A sound quality," Aggie muttered.

"--so--if we grant he killed Calder--we can assume that he would try to make it look accidental--erase his own tracks--like an Indian--and scram back to British Columbia--or some other end of the earth."

Aggie's lips were pursed and his forehead was wrinkled. "It could be," he answered. "But--since he called on Sarah before ten--and Calder left us, alive and kicking an hour and a half later--he 'hung around' somewhere a long time. Still--I Find Bogarty, hunh?"

"Absolutely."

The scientist frowned himself into abstraction.

"I'll insist on getting everything about him, now--whether we pull up his body or not. I've got photographs coming."

"Ever consider Calder and Bogarty might have both been killed?" Aggie asked absently.

"We'll skip that--till we have something to indicate it, hunh? What the devil are you dreaming about?"

"About why I thought that fox was a dog," Aggie replied. "Look. The bait? The honey--and the bread?"

The trooper grinned. "I was expecting you to come to that. The bread--half a loaf-

-sold locally. Popular kind. Some of the same in most of the cottages. My men worked on that through the servants, of course. The honey is the same. I mean--a common brand.

We didn't find an open bottle of that particular sort in any house. There was a full, closed bottle of the same kind--clover--at Waite's place. But there was also some at the club-where anybody could have borrowed it--in the big pantry. A dozen bottles. Untouched.

Ready for the season. And a dozen on the inventory. But an additional bottle could have been a carry-over from last year. Oh--hell. We can skip the bread and honey angle, because anybody with fifty cents could have both--and would likely get those brands, if he didn't specify."

Aggie had shut his eyes. Sun fell in slanted rays through the pines. It touched his face and accentuated the concentration there. Then, suddenly, one eyebrow twitched and his beard moved with the impulsion of a smile.

"I've got it, Wes," he said quietly. "It'll be easy to check the places Bogarty stopped en route here. A cinch."

"Yeah? How?"

"Because he was carrying in that car a silver fox with a collar. A thing people would notice, hunh?" The trooper's handsome face was indulgent. "And that brilliant deduction comes from what, doctor?"

"Deduction? Nonsense! You can't deduce facts like that! It's a memory. Why did I think the fox was a dog? I was sitting on the veranda rail and I said to myself, 'There's a dog.' I was sure of it. The beast saw my pipe smoke and turned. 'No,' I said to myself, 'it's not a dog. It's a fox.' Then Dr. Davis came from Sarah's room and I dumped the whole matter out of my head. Well--I've thought back. That fox had a collar on it."

"Collar!"

"Yeah. He came down the road in the early light--and he was wearing a collar. I must have seen the glint of metal--or the curve of leather. So I thought of dog. Anyway, I remember he had a collar. Then he turned, and I saw it was a fox, and I erased the collar from my mind. Foxes don't have collars. Because I became certain it was a fox, I assumed I'd been mistaken about the collar. That's how people think, Wes. At least--such loopy processes are what pass for thinking among us. Bogarty raised silver foxes--a hobby--and this one must have been a pet. Or a present. He brought it along--"

The trooper was impatient, again, to enter the discussion. "I'll check that at once.

And if Bogarty did have a fox along--and didn't shoot off into the lake here, in which case the fox might have escaped with its life but it would hardly have come around the lake to Indian Stones in order to bite Calder on the back of the hand--then Bogarty carried it into Calder's house--"

"Or led it on a leash--"

"--and they scrapped--and the fox bit Calder--and got away--" The trooper stared toward the water. One of the boats was moving into shore. "All right," he continued.

"We've doped out a lot. Bogarty did see Calder. The bite makes that pretty clear. Always assuming he was traveling with one of his faxes, of course. And you happened to spot the fox in the morning--which is lucky for me--because it means that I want to find out where this Bogarty guy is, in the worst way." He raised his voice. "Yes, sergeant?"

The man at the oars of the boat called back, "We've covered every possible inch, Captain!"

"Keep on, though. Might be a current that could move the body. I gotta be positive Bogarty isn't lying on the bottom of that lake."

"How is the bottom?" Aggie asked.

"Eh? Oh. Sandy. Some rocks. Muck--farther up. Snags. But when we quit, it'll be because we are pretty certain Bogarty isn't in that pond! I must say, Plum, I'm grateful to you. Sort of relieved, too. You know--those people are all good friends of mine. And they're pretty good people--as people go--excepting one or two. I hate to see 'em in a mess. And it gives you feathers in the stomach when you find yourself--in the line of duty--wondering which of your best friends might be guilty of a murder."

CHAPTER 8

Sarah had taken to her bed; her mumps were undoubtedly worse. It seemed to Aggie, however, that her physical decline was due more to mental causes. She greeted his statement that Bogarty's body was probably not in the pond with a sullenness he had never seen in her. She said she was too tired to talk. The afternoon had faded into a yellow sunset across which streamed bluish clouds in long, horizontal pennons. It was a northern sky. Aggie went to his room and looked at it awhile as he dressed for dinner.

He reflected that the act represented a complete change of his original program. A double change, in fact. He had at first been loath to dine at the clubhouse; he had agreed to do so because Sarah had wanted to know the minor scandals brewing there. Then he had revolted against that, because the scandals had risen to vast if shadowy proportions.

Now he was preparing to go voluntarily to the club because of his own consuming interest. He had become, indeed, a prototype of--his aunt--an enlarged prototype--full of curiosity, eager to pry into anybody's intimate life.

He went up the steps· of the clubhouse almost blithely. His absorption had submerged his social awkwardness. There were people in the dining room and people in the solarium. Jack Browne was standing near the front door, talking to Mrs. Drayman.

When he saw Aggie, he left her.

"Glad you're up," he said amiably. "Place' is like a mausoleum. I mean--rather--a haunted house. Everybody has the jitters." He grinned boyishly. "You know, Aggie, that beard of yours gave me a shock, the day you checked in. Did I show it?"

Aggie smiled back. "Moderately."

"I'm sorry as the deuce. Beth's around. Looking for you.

Talking about you like a windmill. You've made a conquest there, pal."

Aggie's grin precipitated. "Where is she?"

"Playing table tennis--with Ralph--as usual. I'll go out with you--"

Aggie shook his head. "I wanted a bearing on her--to go the other way. She intimidates me."

The club manager chuckled. "Beth's all right. Not what you'd call soft-spoken--

but--boy! If that raven, ravishing dream girl were waiting for me with the look in her eye she's got tonight--I'd run thither--and not at a dogtrot either!"

Aggie was embarrassed. "Speaking of dogs,"--he said, "that wasn't a dog that bit Jim Calder. It was a fox. Remember you suggested that the chefs mutt was the size of a fox?"

Jack seemed momentarily not to catch the drift of this new subject. Then he nodded brightly. "Yeah. A fox! How in the world can they tell?"

"A guess." Aggie wondered if he'd let out too much of the trooper's information--

or, rather, his suspicion.

"Do they think--that Calder was--killed?"

Aggie shrugged.

The other man's blue and slightly wistful eyes grew cloudy. "I hope he was! If I'd known what Calder was going to cause Dad to do--I'd have shot him myself. Which shows you that anybody--can kill a person, I suppose."

Danielle was entering through the French doors in the billiard room. Aggie watched her. His answer to Jack was offhand. "I can imagine how you felt. Still-your father shouldn't have done--what he did. I mean-- you made an adjustment to--not having money." He stumbled on his words. Here he was, again blundering into embarrassment with Jack. "Sorry, fellow. Don't mean to hurt your feelings."

Jack's eyes shone. "It's okay, Aggie. Sorry I popped it out."

Danielle was coming toward them. Her words, spoken to carry halfway across the lounge, were bold. "Hello, Aggie, my duck! You swim like one, anyhow! Sorry I tipped you over this afternoon."

Aggie had the feeling that Danielle wanted everyone to hear her apology. He was sure of it as she continued to talk--and to walk toward him--in a pale amethyst dress that made her hair seem extravagantly bright and burning-gold, brass, copper. "The rotten Davis temper! I'm proud of my education, and you shouldn't have insulted it--even if you have more degrees than Einstein."

He had not insulted her education. She was close to him now, and she spoke in a more normal tone. "Forgive me?"

He wondered if she was always alibiing herself in public with little, meaningless charades. "It would be hard to forgive you," he answered, "if I'd been unable to swim."

She stared at his black dinner jacket, his shoddy black tie, his stooped figure. Her head shook glitteringly. "Golly! Under there--all those muscles! Hard to believe!"

Jack winked at Aggie and wandered away. Danielle slipped her arm through the professor's and casually turned him around. They walked out on the porch together. Then Danielle said, in a whisper, "I'm scared!"

Aggie responded dryly. "Really?"

She walked to the porch rail and looked down, as if she wanted to make sure in an inconspicuous way that nobody was hiding in the lilacs. It was elaborate, like everything she did. "I told people I upset the canoe because I was mad at you. Because you'd insulted my education. You see--they saw Dad tow it in and wondered what had happened. They believed my story--" She shrugged. "Anything that sounds uncivil and impetuous--they believe about me. Just now--I was publicly nailing down that story."

"I don't see why."

"For Dad to hear. He's sitting in the library."

Aggie was surprised. He assumed that Danielle had known what her father had thrown overboard that afternoon--and that she had quickly invented the "rustiness" of the alleged anchor to conceal the brownness of a pair of shoes. Now, it seemed, her invention had been intended to convince the doctor. Or--possibly this was also an act. An attempt at fake conspiracy, for the purpose of learning just what he, Aggie, had seen.

She kept looking anxiously into the banks of lilac and sumac which grew all around.

"What scares you?" he asked finally.

"You don't trust me, do you?"

"Should I?"

Danielle considered. "I trust you."

"If you do--then go ahead and talk. You weren't very confident in me this afternoon when you threatened to make a fool of me if I disclosed what you'd told me."

"I'd like to quit beating around the bush."

"Me, too."

Danielle gazed at him intensely, shaking her head a little, as if in doubt about what she was thinking. In a moment, she chuckled, and the sound was, somehow, self-deprecatory and pathetic. "The people at Indian Stones," she began, "are used to authority and accustomed to taking matters of all sorts into their own hands. That goes double for the Davises, and triple for me. Dad has a fearful temper. Not many people know it. But most of those cold, concentrated men have tempers."

"Yes-?"

"He could have clubbed Jim Calder and carried him up on the hill and built the trap. Easily, I couldn't have. I don't want you to think I'm trying to establish an alibi in your mind--but--"

"I don't think it. Because it's no alibi."

Danielle was startled. "Certainly--"

"The woods were dry. The ground was hard. Did you ever hear of moccasins? Or sneakers? Anybody wearing 'em could have followed Calder that night and hit him from behind and then proceeded to rig up that trap. A woman, an old man, a kid. The wind blew all the next day. The body lay there all day. The presumptive murderer could have got up to the scene again and carefully removed any incidental signs of his or her presence. There were hours for that--hours in which we didn't know Calder was dead and nobody kept track of anybody. Such a murderer, wanting to be sure the stage was set correctly, might even have arranged a palpable reason to be in the vicinity the next day--

just to cover any possible chance of a clue he'd overlooked. A rendezvous on Garnet Knob, for instance--"

Danielle gasped faintly. "You can be very trying, Aggie!"

"All right. You didn't do it. Maybe Bill did. Maybe he welcomed your bid to him to go hiking before supper--in spite of pretending not to want to go."

"I never thought of that." She pondered. "Do you believe--philosophically--that killing a man is ever--permissible? I mean--would you hunt down a very useful man because he'd murdered a very dangerous one?"

"I dunno."

Danielle shook herself. "You always make me take the chances on you! It's very unsatisfying! Look here, Aggie Plum! The night Jim was killed, Dad went for a consultation to Parkawan. He left fairly late and he didn't get back till much later. There are three physicians in Parkawan. I phoned them all--this afternoon--when Dad was out in his darkroom. None of them called on Dad. The hospital didn't. That's thing number one that frightens me. Then--I had another thought. How long was Dad busy with Sarah that morning--to diagnose her mumps?"

"Maybe half an hour."

"Did he leave--right after that?"

"Yeah. Shortly."

"He didn't come home. I slept late--naturally. I'd been up most of the night, what with him out--and coming back--and you. But the cook says she's sure she heard him sneaking upstairs by the back way when she was getting up--and that was around seven--

long after daylight. The cook wasn't sure--she just mentioned it. I didn't think anything of it at the time--I just assumed he'd stayed a long while with Sarah."

"I see," Aggie said. "No wonder you're--scared."

Danielle said, "I'm telling you because I'm sunk. I don't know what to do. They shouldn't--certainly--take Father's life for Jim Calder's! He's not a very sympathetic man--

but he's a very valuable one! I never could love him--much--because I think he's always·

felt icy toward me--since Mother left him. As if I were contaminated, somehow. Then--

you saw him throw those shoes overboard--"

Aggie took out his pipe, held a match for her cigarette, and made no reply.

"They were shoes," she went on. "I've looked in his closet and they're gone. Shoe pacs--if you know what they are. Deerskin, or elkskin, or something. He always wore them for walking--and he kept some sort of oil on them that turned the rawhide brownish.

I didn't think of the importance of the fact that they have no hard soles and no heels at all-

-till you explained it just now. Do you suppose he was getting rid of them because there was some blood on them that he knew he couldn't get out thoroughly enough so that if Wes, or somebody, examined them with a microscope--?"

"A pretty fancy thing to prepare for."

' Dad has a pretty fancy brain. He'd think of microscopic examinations and chemical examinations-all that." She sighed. "I've told you--anyway. I'm glad I did."

"Why didn't you tell Wes Wickman?"

"I couldn't decide whether to go to him or not. I've got the jitters--the inside kind--

and that's the worst kind. Then--Wes was crazy in love with me, once--and I turned him down fiat. He was miserable for-ages. Maybe you won't understand--but a woman can hesitate about--turning in her own father--to a man who has loved her--a man she's hurt.

Maybe that's nutty. And, anyway, I didn't want to make the decision about whether all this should be forgotten--or whether it should be brought out, and Dad arrested. Because, after all, he did kill Jim Calder--didn't he?"

Aggie smoked. "It looks like it," he said. There was a long pause. "This doesn't explain anything about Hank Bogarty, though."

' They haven't found his body?"

"It seems as if they won't. You can't add anything about him to what you've told me?"

"Nothing," said Danielle.

"Want to eat dinner with me?"

"You're not going to call up Wes right away?"

"Not this minute. I want to think."

Danielle said, "I feel--better than I have--ever since it happened. Do you mind my--chucking the whole business on you?"

Aggie grinned. "Yeah. It's quite a load."

She sighed. "You're a very funny man. You look like a cartoon professor. In the club--you're about as comfortable as a rabbit in a lion's cave. And yet--the things you know!

The things you've done!"

"Nonsense. Sifting dust in ruined cities. Measuring the heads of native rug weavers."

"Nonsense, yourself! I had Dad borrow a couple of your books from Sarah.

You've got more nerve than Tarzan--and a vocabulary that makes a sap out of Webster's dictionary. Come on. Take me to dinner. It'll make people talk. Whoever I dine with--it makes people talk. You'll blush--and that's ridiculous--for a man that attacked a gorilla with a--garden fork."

Aggie blushed as they started into the club.

Danielle took his arm. "I wish things weren't like this," she said. "I wish I'd met you long ago--and some other way."' She laughed. "Or married you when I was six. Like those natives in India you wrote about. You'd make such an interesting husband. So nice to go on trips with. There's Beth! Are you as keen about her as the rumors say? She's extremely beautiful--and I suppose--having spent so much time in the tropics--you prefer brunettes."

She looked at him wickedly and his blush deepened. But the glimmer in her eyes faded back to anxiety. "I'm incorrigible," she said.

Aggie walked back to Rainbow Lodge in the early part of the evening. He had left Danielle at the club--with Ralph Patton and Beth and Bill Calder. Left her sitting with them, talking, killing time, listening to the radio. It seemed to Aggie that, having told all she knew, she had completely relaxed. The burden was now on his shoulders. He had no idea what to do about it. If Sarah were only a little less silent and truculent--more confiding--he would tell her. He decided, as he walked, that he would tell Sarah part of it, anyway. He needed help.

She was in bed. Around her were unopened books, unplayed games, unread.

magazines. She looked at her nephew with disturbed eyes and said, "If you want to learn patience and humility, try the mumps! What's afoot?"

"Well--for one thing--they haven't found Bogarty's body."

"I know it! Wes was here--making a sick call--and prying harder than a burglar's jimmy on the subject of Hank."

"I was wondering," Aggie said, "if you happen to have any old fox traps lying about?" Sarah squinted at him. "Thousands. Help yourself. Wes told me about the fox.

What good will it do you to catch it?"

He shrugged. "I just have a hunch I'd like to--that's all. Like to see that collar.

Like to check the teeth with pictures of the bite on Calder's hand. I'm not kidding."

"Well--if you really want to--I'll have Windle get you some, in the morning. I doubt if it will help you find out who killed Jim--"

"Oh, I know that. What I want to find out is--where's Hank?" Sarah was staring as glassily as he had expected. "you know--?"

He was almost supercilious. "Oh, yes. George Davis."

"Don't be an idiot!"

"He had reasons for doing it of which we are all aware.

He's strong enough and decisive enough. His alibi for that night is rotten.

Circumstantial evidence shows he was probably on the scene of the crime shortly after diagnosing you--removing traces of his original presence. A brilliant analytical mind--

broken down after years of morbid and vengeful brooding. Oh, yes. George is our man.

Question is--shall I turn him in? Danielle put it up to me."

"Danielle! What's she got to do with it?"

"Oh--she did the redhanded catching."

"You're not serious, Aggie!"

"Perfectly."

His aunt was silent for an unconscionably long time. "George didn't do it," she said finally. "I've known him like the palm of my hand--ever since he cracked his first speller. At least--if he did do it--he's gone crazy."

"People do," said Aggie.

"I'd suspect Danielle herself-before I'd dream of George! I'd suspect Byron Waite.

Or that strong, silent young Patton boy. Greed, there. Beth-who hated her father. Old John, here. Bill--or Martha--or Jack Browne even. Or myself. George is as rentless as rock! His sense of values wouldn't permit him to waste time thinking about murder. As a surgeon, he's seen too much of life and death to be interested in it in any but an intellectual way. Rubbish, Aggie! George never did it!"

"I wanted your reaction," he grinned. "And--boy!--did I get it."

Sarah grunted.

"Nevertheless, I'm going to phone Wes and tell him to come over right away. And you're going to hear a set of circumstances that will probably result in the immediate arrest of your physician."

Sarah sagged. She seemeo, suddenly, old and scared and uncertain. "I--" She shook her head. "Never mind. Go ahead. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm an old fool.

Maybe the confidence I have in my knowledge of people is wholly misplaced! Wholly.

All my life, I've been a Miss Foot. I haven't hesitated to use any stratagem I could think of to make people do what I believed was good for them. Usually--I've been right. But I could be wrong--fundamentally."

' There's something," Aggie said, "about not being your brother's keeper, in the Bible. A good program. I'm going to phone."

He did so. Wes Wickman, however, was not at Headquarters. He was not expected until morning. The sergeant offered to send up another man. Aggie decided to wait until morning. It was a terrible decision-not from Aggie's viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of chance. He went to bed awhile later and fell into a troubled sleep. A creaking of the stairs woke him up.

CHAPTER 9

Sarah pushed open his door as the lights clicked on. She was wearing a heavy wrapper--a velvet one. Upon her form it looked like a fur coat. A towel, under which an ice bag audibly squdged, encircled her neck. There was red on her cheeks-high and spotty--like bad make-up.

"You're worse!" Aggie exclaimed. "I'll get Davis--!"

She shook her head and sat down in the largest chair his room contained. She thrust out her feet, which were encased in lambskin boots. "Get me a stool. I want to talk."

Aggie shoved his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown. There was no stool in his room. He made one, of a box and a pillow. He arranged his aunt's feet, and stripped a blanket from his bed to tuck around her. Then he switched on a bridge lamp and sat down, facing her. He smiled, and she smiled back at him.

"Shoot," he said.

Her first words were an apology to herself rather than a prelude to a definite subject. "I can't ask you not to repeat what I'm going to tell you, Aggie, because it isn't that kind of information-and this is not a time when innocent people can be required to keep secrets. I must not say what I'm going to--and yet I've got to. I decided, only now.

I'm old and I'm ill and I'm not as astute as I used to be. I determined that you would have to judge about things just as Danielle evidently has done." She smiled again. "It's funny.

Nobody has done my thinking or my judging--ever."

Aggie reflected her expression and waited.

"It's about Hank Bogarty. Since he hasn't turned up, I'm going to tell you. Davis threatened me, if I talked. I had a long note from Waite yesterday in the same vein-and another today. I--personally--haven't anything much to lose. They have. Which is the reason I've kept my mouth shut.

"Aggie, this is going to sound a shade dramatic, and quite silly! To you, I mean.

To businessmen--it would seem more commonplace. Their lives are bound up in money.

Money means security to them. It also means power. Without power, such men lose their reason for living. Without security, they get panicky."

"A fact," he said, "that applies too universally, these days! Because security and power, as represented by money, always were, and always will be, illusions."

"If you have any moralizing to do," Sarah responded tartly, "do it some other time. I feel rotten and I have something to say."

"Sorry!"

"And don't, for heaven's sake, keep going through life saying, 'Sorry.' Who gives a damn if you're sorry! Listen. Thirty-odd years ago, Byron Waite was rich by inheritance, and a very promising Wall Street youngster. Jim Calder had shown enough of the ruthlessness that has made him unbearable to impress a lot of important people. His father, too, was rich, and Jim was coming up. George Davis had his inheritance--we all did, at Indian Stones--and Marilyn's money--that was his wife--and his skill. We were a clique within this Indian Stones clique. There were a couple of others in our crowd who have long since petered into their graves and I won't bother you with them.

"Jim and Byron Waite, naturally, did business for George and for me. George and I only put up capital--they ran things. We made money. And then the panic of 1907 came along. You don't recall that--but you do remember 1929."

"I was in Sumatra--mostly--"

Sarah scowled. "I mean--you've read newspapers. You're more or less cognizant of the fact that there was a depression after the crash. You can possibly recall the bank closings, the bonus marchers, the bread lines, the riots, the strikes and shutouts, the chimneys that were not smoking--all that."

"Vividly."

"Well, the 1907 panic wasn't exactly like that--but similar enough. It raised sin with Indian Stones. Calder was cleaned out. Davis lost most of Marilyn's money. The Pattonssold their Fifth Avenue mansion. I dropped a handsome chunk of the ancestral Plum fortune. Waite lost less, perhaps, than the rest of us. But he was the worst scared and the most bitter. He was older-by five years or more-than most of us. He's nearly seventy now. Anyway--we were very thick in those days. Entertained for each other in New York all winter. Had a whist club up here that met two nights every week--without fail. I mean to say--we'd grown up together--like this present generation here. We were in grooves together; we established habits--ruts. We knew each other as well as if we were in one family. Do you see?"

Aggie nodded.

"All right. Think of us. Then think of the people you knew who acted batty after the 1929 crash. People hoarded so much gold, for example, that the government had to call it in. Plenty of people, in 1932, were actually stocking their country places with supplies--as if for a siege. It was like that in 1907--exactly. And the worst feature--in 1907--for all of us was a scarcity of cash and liquid assets. A lack of cash wrecked Jim. A lack of cash cost Waite a whole railroad."

Sarah drew a deep breath. "That was where Hank Bogarty came in. He'd been up here in 1905. Distant relative of the Scotts--who have died out. They called him a wild kid and a black sheep--because he'd slammed out of Harvard his first year and gone to the Far West and done as he pleased. I never thought of him as wild. In fact--" she cocked an eyebrow at her nephew--"if Hank had made a proposal to me--instead of Waite and a few of his ilk—I daresay there would be other Plum heirs and assigns, besides you!" She grinned reminiscently. "I had too much tongue for Hank, I presume.

"Hank played whist with us and Hank talked mines. Gold and silver and lead. All summer long. He talked about canoes and portages, maps and lodes, white water, and living off the country. If he had a small capital to fit out an expedition, he said-Oh, you see the point! He was romantic as Satan--and plausible-and we were all flush. Putting up twenty thousand from four of us was a cinch. We dangled Hank all summer because we liked his company--and we sent him west with his 'grubstake' in the fall--and practically forgot about it. He didn't write much. In the 1907 panic, when we were scratching every private till to the bottom, we did try to get in touch with him. But he was out in the back country somewhere--and we dismissed any hope of collecting the twenty thousand dollars."

"And then--" Aggie said-"Hank came through."

Sarah nodded several times. "He came through like an Oklahoma gusher. He showed up here in 1909. It was gold and plenty of it, and he wouldn't hear of taking more than the fifth allowed him by his original deal. Nobody--" Sarah snorted--"nobody but me suggested it, in any case! The mine was in Canada. We'd felt the terrible penalty of a lack of cash. We were ambitious--that is, the men were--and imaginative. Rugged individualists. All that. Legality was not ever a chief concern of Waite or Calder--or Davis. We decided to use the proceeds from the mine to establish a joint cash reserve. We arranged to have the gold refined and molded and shipped--but not marked as gold. I don't know when we decided to keep it here--"

Aggie literally jumped. "Keep it here!"

She went on impassively. "Here. Calder didn't trust any bank. Waite didn't.

You've got to see us as we were--or them, rather. Scary, suspicious, determined--and possessed of a source of liquid funds that couldn't be checked exactly, ever. Half the proceeds of the mine went into regular channels. The other half came here."

"But why here?"

Sarah smiled. "When we decided not to use a bank--we talked and talked about what place to use. We'd formed, by then, one of those secret societies. Done everything but signed in blood. Sworn never to speak about our hoard. It was a lot of fun--at the time." She paused. "Aggie, you know that the club was built on the foundations of the old Sachem House."

"My God," he said softly. "The cellar!"

Sarah's voice sank. "You used to play in it. Part of it. Under that old hotel was the cellar for the heating plant and for wine. The one for tools. There was an exit, too: for those mauve decade beaux--the married ones--who wanted to hurry away when their wives appeared suddenly in fine carriages accompanied by furious mothers. Life then wasn't quite as dull--as this jitterbug generation likes to think. The Sachem House was a gay dog's paradise. Yes, Aggie, the cellar. When the hotel burned down, and your grandfather's generation built the club, only part of the cellar was known. I discovered another section. I found the architect's original drawings in the library--and when we were thinking of a proper hiding place--I got the drawings out. The men secretly broke through a wall one autumn. That's where we started depositing the gold."

Aggie thought for a long time in silence. "Well?"

"Hank wouldn't join in the scheme. He handled his fifth through his bankers. The mine paid off--handsomely--for almost twenty years. Waite and Calder dipped into our gold during the war. Again, in 1929, it was handy. What we took--we replaced. Then--a little later--gold was called in. We four held a meeting.

"I was for turning over the gold. Calder and Waite refused. They said we'd be branded as economic royalists. Said the mere fact would hurt their businesses. There wasn't any record of it. They said that if an inflation came--our gold was our only cushion. I argued. I like to be more or less lawful. Finally, it occurred to me to trade my quarter for platinum. That was legal. I made some indirect inquiries from people I knew, and, in the end, I bought platinum and I had it put in our joint cache, by George, and Jim, and Byron, too. They thought, as usual, that I was an old fool. Platinum wasn't stable.

They expected that gold would be remonetized soon. It hasn't been, yet--as you know.

Now, of course, they're scared to budge.

"Legally, if they turned in all that treasure, they could be sent to prison. Actually, I don't believe it would happen. But you can see how they might almost rather die than surrender that gold--if you stop to think what sort of men they are and how long they've depended on it. You can see why they're afraid to exchange it--these days. Let it sit.

That's their idea. You can also see why the wire about Hank's approach, his mention of a

'new grubstake', and the sudden, violent death of Jim Calder got all three of us in a tizzie.

It looked as if our sins would find us out. That's what Jim was razzled about when he barged in here!"

Aggie felt a need for his pipe. "I can 'see' everything you've said," he replied, after lighting it. "Except that I can't yet understand why none of you came out with it--under the present circumstances."

"I am coming out with it," Sarah said. "In doing so, I'm spilling private matters that have been in the dark for thirty-odd years. I'm betraying George Davis and Byron Waite. At least, they'd consider it betrayal. They haven't told this story to Wes Wickman--

or to the coroner--or anybody. I'm risking their hatred. I'm risking revenge, even. I've said to myself ten thousand times in the last three days that if I tell, and if it proves that Hank is still somewhere in the lake, and Jim did stumble into some youngster's deadfall, I'll never be able to hold my head up around here again. We felt mighty serious about that cache. Even Jim would never have dared to violate it, I--I--think."

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure," she answered after a moment. "Yes. Certain, almost."

"Couldn't you check?"

"I've got the mumps! I'm sick! I can't poke in cellars--"

"I mean--have George Davis check. Or Waite."

"It's difficult now; the club is constantly milling with people. Guests all day.

Employees at night. We made our deposits in the winter, when it was empty. Our own manager was in charge. We'd bring up what he thought was wine. We all had our own wine stock, and bins, in the cellars."

"Couldn't your 'other' cellar have been found by somebody else?"

Sarah shrugged. "Nobody living knows where it is--except the four of us. Three--

now. We made sure of that. It's cut in bedrock--and we're using an old safe which belonged to the Sachem House. It's beautifully hidden; it was meant to be. The smoothies in the seventies and eighties used that safe. In all these years-nobody has ever tampered with the place--or found the entrance--"

"What about somebody like Jack--who's up here alone all winter?" Sarah smiled.

"Jack? If he found the cellar--he'd tell the world! It would be a game for him. Fun. We'd get telegrams: 'Come up! Great mystery uncovered!' You know. He might love discovering such a place, but he'd never crack it open without permission. He's such a lamb! The truth is--he'd never find it. You'd have to blast. It isn't something you can stumble on. You've got to know it's there, and know how to get to it."

Old John's feet sounded on the stairs. He brought in a tray on which were coffee cups and a steaming glass container. He looked reproachfully at Sarah. "You should be in bed, Miss Sarah. Since you're not, I thought you might like some coffee. I heard you talking--"

"Yes, John. I'm going back, soon. I wanted to have a talk with my nephew. It's done me a world of good! And this is very thoughtful!"

Aggie nodded. "Genius, John."

They waited until John had gone downstairs again. Aggie dropped four lumps of sugar into his aunt's cup. "That puts a new face on what's happening here!"

"Does it, Aggie? Are you sure?" She stirred the coffee and drained the cup.

"I don't know exactly what I mean, myself. But--a fortune in gold stowed away in a cellar! That, somehow, is more in scale--with things." He smiled at his aunt. "I'm mighty glad you told me. At least--we know what to think about. What to check on next.

You better get back to your room--"

Sarah nodded, leaned ponderously forward, and tried to stand. The effort sapped the blood from her brain. She tottered, smiled rather foolishly, and fell back in a faint.

Aggie heard his voice shouting for John; the old man's feet clattered on the stairs. He wrapped one arm around his aunt's back and thrust the other under her knees. With a strain that enlarged the veins along his temples, he lifted his aunt and carried her to his bed.

"Call Dr. Davis, at once," he said, when John entered.

John hurried down the stairs again. Aggie listened to Sarah's heart. It was feeble and uneven, but not desperately so. Just a faint. Fatigue. Strain. Relief. Good old Sarah.

He unwrapped the cold, moist towel from her neck and began to wipe her face with it, roughly. Sarah stirred.

"Old fool," she muttered. "Old sissy! How'd you get me in this bed?"

Aggie grinned. "Levitation."

Sarah's answering grin was faint but game. "What a powerhouse! Well! All the Plums were dynamite in their day. I feel terrible, Ag."

"John's calling Davis." He heard feet again. "I can't get them," John said anxiously. "Wire out of order, the operator says."

Aggie dropped the towel on a chair beside the bed. He was immobile for a second-two--three. He became paler. Perspiration dampened his forehead. On a chair were his black trousers, casually folded. He' put them on over his pajamas. He stuffed in the tops as if they had tails, like a shirt. "I'll go over," he said quietly. "You stay with Sarah. Get her some water to drink. She's all right, but Dr. Davis should be here." He started for the door and came back for his pipe, tobacco and matches. Sarah was watching him and her eyes were scared.

He went through the steps he had taken on the night of the twentieth: getting keys from the teapot, reassuring Windle, starting the station wagon, driving swiftly through the blue dark, and banging on the Davis door. This time, lights flashed on. But Danielle came down the stairs in the same negligee. He sucked in his breath when he saw her. She swung open the door and said, "Yes?"

"Sarah's pretty sick. Your phone's not working--"

"Oh. I'll wake Dad."

She was gone. Sharp steps upstairs. Distant knocking. her voice, calling her father. A door squealing open. Then the steps--running. She talked on the stairs. "He's not in his room! Hasn't been there! He--! Come on!"

Aggie followed her through the house again--as before. She threw words over her shoulder. "He said something--when I came home from the club--about going to his darkroom for a while."

They went through the large, old-fashioned kitchen, a pantry, a woodshed. Down steps. Into the moonlight again. Danielle cried, "Yes! The light's on! Thank heaven! I was frightened!"

He could see a small square of light on the leaves of a maple. They entered the garage, passed the cars there, turned into the hall, and Danielle knocked on a door. No response. She twisted the handle. "Locked," she said. "Maybe he fell asleep." She raised her voice again. "Dad! Oh, dad!"

Aggie reached in front of her and tried the handle. The door was locked, all right.

And it was a sturdy door. He was trying to keep calm. "We could go out to that window--

and look in. He may be taking a stroll. Visiting somebody. Something."

She jerked her head affirmatively and they ran back outdoors. She led the way around the garage. The window from which the light streamed was small and high--

higher than Aggie could reach. Its panes were set in a hinged frame that was open so that light fell into the leaves of a big maple which grew near the barn, at a slight angle from the window. He could see black paint on the panes to make the room totally dark for daylight photographic development. He looked for a box, a wheelbarrow, a barrel--to stand on.

"Boost me," Danielle said.

He wrapped his arms around her knees and lifted. Her palms ran up the wall, like little slapping feet. She caught the sill and pulled her weight higher. He pushed on the bottoms of her feet. She looked in, then. And the sounds of night, the whispering of leaves and the trilling of insects, were obliterated by her scream.

CHAPTER 10

Danielle's scream did not last long-although it was the sort that begins hysterics.

Aggie could not be sure whether it was real, or a deliberate achievement. But he did not want the neighborhood roused. He could feel the girl wobbling above him, and he dropped her, catching her roughly by the waist.

That arrested the scream--left it hanging in the night--shrill, eerie, truncated. She opened her mouth to scream again. Aggie put his hand over it. She commenced kicking and biting, but she didn't make any more noise. He saw to that: he held her there, locked, gagged, waiting to see if a light would go on in one of the servants' rooms or one of the houses in the surrounding woods. There was no light; the girl was beginning to relax.

"Listen!" he said in a whisper. "If you yell, you'll wake up the neighborhood! If there's anything we can do about things--this is our chance. What did you see? Will you answer without making an uproar?"

She tried to kick him again. Then she nodded, because his reaction had been to hold her more firmly. He took away his hand. She spoke in a shuddering monotone: "It's Dad! He's lying in there--with a knife sticking out of him and blood all over the floor!"

"Yes?" He was commanding her to go on.

"We've got to do something--get the police--!"

Aggie shook his head. "Not yet. Whoever killed him--doesn't know he's been found and may be relying on that--"

Her answer was violent--although whispered. "Nobody killed him. He killed himself! You fool! The door is locked--a child couldn't crawl through the window--and it's the only one!"

Aggie's eyes were accustomed to the penumbral glow of the little window. He saw her well-tossing back her hair, shaking. He was still waiting for lights, but none came. One screl,tm-heard for a moment and at a distance-will pass as the sound of a door, of a tree, or of a rabbit caught by a nighthawk. It is the second and the third and the fourth screams that rouse all humanity. He thought of that. He thought, also, about the window and the door. It gave him a sense of frustration.

"I'll look." He began searching for something to stand on.

"There's a ladder inside the garage. To the left," she said.

He lit matches until he found it. A stepladder, but a long one. He carried it back. It reached to the window. He leaned it against the wall. Danielle stood by in silence and Aggie climbed swiftly.

Dr. Davis was lying on his back on the floor. His right hand was clenched around the hilt of what was, presumably, a knife; there was a blot of blood under and around him. No telltale expression marked his ashen face; it was like most faces in death: flaccid, meaningless. The knife had been plunged into his heart. He had undoubtedly died in a second. Two lights burned in the room--a red one on a stand on the drainboard of a sink and a bluish, "sunlight" bulb in the high ceiling overhead. There was a ventilator fan in the room, and it was humming. Water was running from a rubber hose into a tub; several photographic enlargements eddied in the current. Ranged about, on two deal tables, were porcelain pans and brown glass bottles--the accouterments of an ordinary darkroom. The place smelled of chemicals.

Aggie came down the ladder.

Danielle snatched his arm--startling him. "I just thought! Is he dead? Surely dead?"

"Yes. He is."

"He killed himself," she whispered. "Killed himself! It isn't the thing I'd--! And yet--he was so frightfully upset--!"

"He killed himself," Aggie repeated. As he said it, he wondered if Dr. Davis had killed himself. Any other idea seemed outrageous. There was the dead man in the small room, with the tiny window and the heavy door. Key inside: Aggie had seen it from the high angle at which he had stood. And a small, ordinary bolt shot, besides. There was the knife in his heart--and his right hand still closed upon it. Suicide. To think otherwise was preposterous.

Jim Calder had stumbled into a deadfall. George Davis had stabbed himself. Hank Bogarty had skidded into a lake. There was no black fox.

"A surgeon," he muttered, standing uncertainly beside the girl, "would hardly use a knife--that way--would he?"

"He'd know how," Danielle answered. "And he either would--or he wouldn't. If Dad had decided--he'd do it any way that was convenient. Convenient--and effective."

"We ought to get that door open," he said.

"Have you a cigarette?"

"No."

"I'm going to the house to get one. And to have the jitters." He shook his head.

"You're not going to get one. And to have the jitters."

"Yes. I am. I'm shaky inside, and sweating like an icebox. I'm going to lock myself in my room, and yell."

"No." He said it absently, but with such force that it was extremely compelling.

"You are going to get a cigarette, if you want. Then you're coming back. We'll go in there."

"How?"

"Do the servants sleep in the garage?"

"No. The top was an old haymow. The darkroom is where the chute used to be--

that's why it's so high."

"Oke. I'll shut the garage doors--and use an automobile jack."

She came back about ten minutes later. Around her, the woods and the dark houses were thick with sleep. She had changed into a dress and she was carrying cigarettes in her hands. On her feet were wedgies and her legs were bare. She was as pale as paper. Aggie glanced at her. He had turned on the lights of one of the cars to furnish a reflected radiance for his work. He had jammed a jack against the darkroom door and he was turning its crank.

"I stuffed a robe from the limousine in the little window," he said. "This is going to make a hell of a racket."

It did. The metal lock ticked under the strain, as if it were getting hot. The wood in the door frame began to crack and splinter. Aggie kept turning. Then there was a sharp, explosive sound as the lock itself bit through its iron socket and the screws on the bolt wore out. The door burst open, swung clear around, hit the wall, and rebounded almost shut again.

The jack blocked it.

Aggie went into the room. He yanked the car robe from the window by jumping for it. He unfolded it, and, after a long look at the body, he spread the plaid wool cover over it. Then Danielle came in--still holding the cigarettes in both hands.

"Smoke one," he said. "Here. Give me one, too." He said that because of the glassy expression in her eyes. He took two cigarettes from the package, poked one between her lips, and struck a match. She began to smoke automatically. He puffed on his as if it were a pipe. "It's a knife," he said. "Hunting knife. Heavy. The kind you wear in a sheath around your belt. Did he have one?"

She did not answer.

He stepped close to her. "I asked you--did your father have one? We have a lot to do, tonight. You've got to snap out of this. Your father is dead. All right. It's terrible. All right. You're shocked. But I need a witness to all I do right now--and I may need help. Is that clear?"

"I want to go back to the house," she answered raggedly.

"And you're not! You're staying here!"

She stared at him with zombie eyes. A little color crept through her pallor. She turned and started toward the door. Aggie grabbed her arm and whirled her around. He slapped' her cheek, hard. "I'll keep on," he said, "until you come to your senses." She did not budge. He shook her and slapped her again.

Tears slowly filled her eyes. She cast down her gaze. She shivered. Then she swallowed several times and drew a deep, quaking breath. When she looked up, there was a light of sanity in her gaze. "All right. I'll stay, Aggie."

"Good. Did your father have a hunting knife?"

"No. At least, I don't know. I never saw one."

"No matter. What was he developing?"

"Why don't you look?"

He had started toward the tub in which the white prints were revolving slowly. "I mean--what did he say he was developing?"

"He didn't say. He never did. He takes thousands of pictures. He is a camera fiend.

Was, I mean. Took."

Aggie dipped into the water and lifted a print. It was a close--up photograph of the ground--of leaves and pine needles and moss--and it showed the vague indenture of shoes. He frowned and dropped it back. He lifted another. It was a shot of a neatly chopped log. He felt that the picture should suggest something to him, but it did not, so he captured a third with wooden tweezers. That one made the others plain. It was a picture of the deadfall--taken-apparently--on the morning after the discovery of Calder.

The morning after Davis had gone on his early walk. The body was no longer in the trap. But stains around the dropped log were clearly discernible. It was an expert picture, technically.

Aggie returned that print. "Your father," he said, a shade unsteadily, "must have gone up there again the day after the discovery--that rainy day--and taken pictures as a final check on himself. Thorough--that. Crazily thorough. He wanted to be sure he'd left no signs." He pondered. "Probably sneaked up at dawn--and evidently before the rain started. That may be when he got blood on his shoes, and why he got rid of them this afternoon."

Danielle said glumly, "It just doesn't make sense."

"Not really. No, it doesn't. Sarah says your father wouldn't have done it--anyway.

No matter what the evidence."

"You've told Sarah!"

He nodded. He leaned against a cupboard marked "Plates for Portable X."

"X" meant X ray. "Suppose he didn't kill Calder. The fact that he's dead, himself, doesn't mean--necessarily--that he did. Could any conceivable set of circumstances explain--what we know? On that first night he went for a consultation. Was he called?"

Danielle nodded. "The phone rang and he answered. He could have faked his end of the call, though. Now that I think of it--he sounded surprised--lowered his voice--"

"Let's say he was called--somewhere--by somebody. He went--around what time?"

"Midnight. Maybe later. Between twelve and one."

Aggie had a recollection. "Was that about when you heard the chopping in the woods? Was it right after he'd gone?"

She said distractedly, "It was after. I don't know when! I wasn't keeping tabs on every second. I didn't know people were going to die! Wes asked me the times of things--

over and over--!"

"Steady. Suppose he heard the chopping when he drove away? Wondered about it-but went on and made his call, anyhow. At least, he brought back an X-ray plate. Took it out here that night and was presumably working on it when I arrived to get him for, Sarah! But--the power was off! He couldn't have done much about examining a negative without electricity."

"He could have developed it, though, and got it ready. If he'd been in a hurry, he could have done that so he'd be able to examine it by daylight."

' That's right. Then I came. He called on Sarah. After that--according to your cook--he was missing for a long while. Maybe he just took a walk--went down to the lake. And maybe he went up on the side of Garnet Knob, to see who had been chopping up there in the dark, and found Jim in the deadfall. Perhaps we'll never know--if he did either of those things. I'm still assuming that what he did not do was to kill Calder.

Anyway, after the deadfall had been found--early the next morning--he took these pictures. No doubt of that. And today--he sank some shoe pacs in Lower Lake. No doubt of that, either. He wasn't wearing shoe pacs the night he called on Sarah. I'm sure of that.

He was as smooth as a Park Avenue specialist can be. That hints that maybe he wasn't up on Garnet Knob when Calder was killed. Hints--but doesn't prove. Wes can dredge up the shoe pacs--and the shoe pacs probably won't show any more than we've guessed--that maybe, at some time or other, your father stepped into some blood of the same type as Calder's."

"Why torture your mind?" she asked dully. "He's dead too, now. There's every reason to think he killed Jim. And no use standing here to invent a perfect swarm of other possibilities."

Aggie's lips locked for a moment. "Plenty of use, Danielle. Suppose that your father had nothing whatever to do with the business on the hillside? Nothing, that is, except to take these pictures--the day after we all knew about it?"

"Then--why would he do that?"

"For a reason you made clear this evening--yourself. Because the people of Indian Stones take things into their own hands. Your father--as you said--twice as readily as anybody else. He was a self-confident, egotistical, resourceful man. He was worried.

Anybody could see that. He had a reason to worry. Hank's wire. The gold."

He had said that deliberately. The information about the gold would certainly come out now. Its secret had survived one apparently accidental death. It could not sensibly be kept in the face of another death. So, covertly, he watched Danielle.

She said, "Gold? What are you talking about?"

Aggie was quite certain, then, that Danielle knew nothing about the cache in the clubhouse cellar. "They had some gold," he said rapidly. "In a common store. Sarah--

your father--Waite--Calder. Gold they got by subsidizing Hank Bogarty. Hank's telegram--and the knowledge of the gold--and Calder's death--upset all of them terrifically. So--" Aggie lowered his voice as he came to the conclusion of his hypothesis-

- "I wonder if, maybe, your father was just trying to back up the efforts of the police by doing a little research of his own. By taking these marvelous photographs. By snooping around. The way you have been--and I have been. The way any other enterprising person would, in the face of fear and worry and tragedy."

"It sounds like Father," she said slowly. "Just like him. He never trusted anybody as much as he did himself. Still--if he's innocent--why did he take his own life?"

"I dunno," Aggie answered. "I dunno. But if he didn't kill Calder--then someone else did. That's my point!" She asked a perfectly natural question--but one that dumbfounded Aggie. "How much gold did they have?"

"Good God! I didn't think to ask!" He came as close to grinning as was possible in the little darkroom.

"Where's it hidden?"

He was on the point of rebuffing that, also, when he saw her eyes dilate with horror. They were looking at the floor; they had kept moving back toward it since she had entered the room; what she was seeing there made him whirl from the cupboard. It was a ghastly thing. Under the blanket was movement. She pointed and shrank into a corner.

Her mouth sprang open.

"Don't yell again," he said fiercely. He bent, and whipped back the covering. Dr.

Davis's hand had relaxed its hold on the knife and was slipping across his chest in a movement started, possibly, by the weight of a fold of the robe. That was all. Under the robe, such motion had been hideous. Revealed, it was shocking enough, but not devastating. The arm slid away from the knife, down across the chest, and flopped limply on the concrete floor.

Danielle had covered her face.

Aggie knelt by the corpse. He touched the skin of its face. It was not cold. Cool, but not cold in the way of yesterday's death, or death hours old. Rigor mortis had not set in. Not yet.

"We'll get out of here in a minute," he said to the girl. He reached again for the blanket and his eye fixed on the protruding knife hilt. A good knife-engraved. And initialed, he perceived, as he bent close. The initials were in fancy script: "H. H. B."

Hank--Henry--H. Bogarty. He cursed passionately. This was--in all likelihood--the knife that had pinned the calling card to Sarah's door. The knife he believed Calder had found and taken.

Aggie gazed at the door that had been locked, and the high, small window. Then he pulled up the car robe again. He rose and took Danielle's arm. "This has been rotten for you," he said. He led her out into the warm night. "Your father killed himself with Hank Bogarty's knife. He must have seen Calder that night! It begins to look as if--after all--!"

"Yes," she said. "I don't know what you're talking about--but I know what you mean. Father did it."

"Unless--" He was walking toward her house. "I better see how Sarah's coming along by now--if your phone's working again."

"It isn't out of order."

"It was. Old John tried to get your father before I came over." They went into the Davis house hurriedly. Aggie tried the phone. "Dead," he said.

"That's funny. It was all right when I went to bed. I called a couple of people just before." She switched on more lights and half smiled at the figure he made: pajama tops stuffed in his tuxedo trousers, pajama bottoms flaring below. "We've got to get the police," she went on. "And you ought to send for Dr. Smith. He's the best one--in Parkawan. Sarah may still need attention. We can go over and raise old man Waite. It's nearest. Golly! I feel sick and feeble."

Aggie's eyes had been preoccupied. Now they fixed on her.

"Do you know how the phone line comes in here?"

"From the barn to the house. The garage."

"Have you got a flashlight?"

"I'll get one."

With the flashlight, they went out again--by the back way. Aggie pointed the flashlight and found the place where two black wires were fixed to the house on glass insulators. He followed them in a long span to more insulators on the front of the converted barn and from there, around the side of the building, to a rear corner. At that point, the wires had been snapped from the glass. He turned the light to the ground and found the shiny end of one wire dangling from the maple tree.

"Somebody yanked 'em down," he said. "Must have had a long pole to do it with.

Or a ladder. Or shinnied the tree."

"Why? What does that mean?"

"I couldn't say. Everything I find out gets crazier and crazier. Was there a phone in the darkroom?"

"No."

"The garage?"

"No."

"But--somebody--took the trouble to pull the wires down. Who? Why? Danielle, I think that somebody--killed your father."

"Behind a locked-bolted door? Or by climbing through a window hardly big enough for chickens?" She had spoken quickly, but she went on sadly, "Why not quit all this? Dad did kill Jim--and himself. We--" She broke off.

Aggie gasped convulsively. "Come on! We're going to Waite's--and fast! Suppose somebody got him--too--and even Sarah--!"

He ran and Danielle ran behind him--through the yard and out into the road.

Their feet pounded dully on the dirt and softly on pine needles. Old leaves in the Waite driveway made their running noisy again. They stomped up on the porch. But Mr.

Waite was not dead. Aggie's clamor eventually raised him; he appeared at a window, thrusting out a head in a tasseled nightcap and bawling, "Who is it? Stop that noise!

What's going on?"

"It's me! Aggie Plum! Sarah's sicker! I came to get Dr. Davis, but--he can't go. I want to use your phone!"

The old man was slow to comprehension and, even then, unwilling. "Why didn't you go to the club and wake up that Browne puppy? Why bother me in the middle of the night?"

"Come down here, you cranky old idiot, and open the door!" Aggie said.

There was a long delay. When the old man descended he was dressed in trousers and a smoking jacket and he had taken the trouble to comb his white hair. Aggie asked the location of a phone and brushed him aside. Danielle hurried in Aggie's wake, giving him the number of Parkawan's "best" physician. Aggie rattled for the operator and barked another number. The girl was startled. Byron Waite, behind her, was still complaining.

They watched Aggie while the number was rung. "Hello!" he said. "John! Thank heaven! How's Sarah?" He nodded his head, as if old John could see him. "Why--if she feels like it." He swung around toward Danielle and Waite. "Sarah's coming to the phone." He did not turn all the way back, but kept the comer of his eye on his involuntary host. "Sarah! I want you to wake all the servants! Get them in the house! Lock every door and window!" He paused to listen. "I'll be home--yes--but I don't know when. . . . Why?

Because George Davis is lying on his garage floor with a knife through his heart! There's some kind of hell loose around here--and I want you to be careful. Yeah. 'Bye." He turned. "That goes for you too; Mr. Waite."

The white-haired man had reacted with a look of slight shock--and no more. Now he was standing in front of Aggie calmly enough. His marble-blue eyes--faded from a once more penetrating color-seemed to lack focus. He took a black case out of his jacket and set a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez on his large nose. "Davis is dead," he said.

"Murdered?"

"Suicide," Aggie replied. "That is--I think so."

"You found him?" Waite asked.

"I did."

"How, may I ask? Aren't you rather presumptuous, young man, to be poking into affairs that are no concerns of yours? On numerous occasions you have appeared in a--a suspicious light--and I think the spectacle of you and Miss Davis rushing about in the small hours--is outrageous!"

Aggie's left eyebrow cocked and he touched his Vandyke. These were the words of a querulous old man--an angry and alarmed old man. They might be, also, the words of a shrewd man, who relied on attack for his defense. Aggie tried a counterattack.

"Speaking of snooping, Mr. Waite, where were you the night Calder was killed?"

The other man stared glacially. "You do not hesitate to assume any prerogatives, I see! I haven't the remotest intention of answering. But I do have every intention of finding out how you learned of my absence. This is my home. You've invaded my privacy sufficiently!"

"Were you--by chance--in the cellar of the club?"

Aggie had counted upon the statement to have some effect. Waite's reaction was, however, an enlargement of that expectancy: The old man began to tremble. His face contracted into an expression of fury, of hate, of miserliness and fear. His pince-nez flickeringly mirrored the electric lights. "Curse Sarah!" he finally croaked. "Curse the blabbing old fool! Get out of here!"

Aggie turned to Danielle. "Come on." But the girl stood still. "Haven't you forgotten to call the police?"

Aggie looked at her, smiling faintly. "Damn! So I have!"

"Get out!" Waite repeated. In a hobbling frenzy, he rushed across his living room and snatched a vase from the mantel. He raised it. "Get out of here, I say!"

Aggie nodded toward the door. "We'll phone from Sarah's."

CHAPTER 11

The voice at state police headquarters was toneless. "Dr. Davis found dead.

Medicine. Lodge on the Upper Lake Road. We'll send somebody at once."

"The servants are waiting there for you," Aggie said. "I'll be at my aunt's house."

He hung up.

The room was flooded with light. Danielle was busy tucking Sarah into the inglenook. Chillie apprehensively took their order for more coffee. "They're coming,"

Aggie said unnecessarily.

Sarah instructed old John in the method of setting a match to the fire laid on the grate, although John had ignited a thousand in the same place. They wanted a fire for psychic comfort--not warmth. "Now, Aggie," she said, when she was satisfied, "tell me."

Aggie glanced at Danielle. She dropped into a chair, stretched out her legs, and nodded. "Shoot, Aggie. I'm all right now."

For fifteen minutes, Aggie talked. At the end of that time, he had given his aunt a complete description of the scene in the Davis garage. During the recital, Sarah kept touching her swollen neck with a tentative finger--and jerking it away. She seemed, nevertheless, to have taken a new lease on life; unburdened of her secret, she was very much her usual self. When her nephew finished, she said, "Hunh! George wouldn't kill himself in a million years! Too conceited!"

"But he did--apparently."

"With Hank's knife? Nonsense!"

"You think Henry Bogarty is alive--and around here--and killed him?"

Sarah grunted again. "Did I say so! I just said--Danielle's father hadn't a suicidal streak in his bones!"

' Then,'' Aggie tugged his beard, "maybe you can explain how the thing was accomplished."

"I don't attempt to explain! That's your business. Or Wes Wickman's. You're a scientist. He's a cop. You're supposed to be able to think! I'm merely a woman--who knows people. I say, somebody killed Danielle's father! What do you say?" She turned to the girl.

Danielle shook her head. "I don't know. He must have done it. There's no other way. There must be something--something else--besides the cache--"

Sarah glanced from the girl to her nephew, with a strange, luminous expression.

"You told Danielle?" His eyes were abstracted. "On the way back here. The salient points. I was thinking--"

Sarah made a scoffing sound. "Thinking out loud, practically! I saw you look over your shoulder toward the hill! You were thinking about that gold!"

"I was deciding I'd go up and check on it. If you'll tell me how to get to it--"

Both women were startled by that suggestion. Danielle looked at him with incredulity. Sarah was frightened. She spoke: "That, too, is Wes's affair! It's dark--three o'clock--and you can't go poking around in cellars! Suppose-- somebody else was there!"

"An additional reason for going! Besides, cellars are dark--even in daytime."

"I won't tell you how to get in!"

"Then I'll run up just to see if anybody is fumbling around there. If Dr. Davis was murdered--somebody might be. In a few more minutes, this place is going to be waked up by sirens and headlights. Attention will be on Danielle's house." He had risen. "I think this is an excellent time to be in that cellar. Besides--I used to play games in the wine cellar. It was fun."

Sarah glanced at the girl opposite her. Firelight emphasized the concentration with which Danielle was looking back at Aggie. The girl's head finally shook and she said,

"Don't go there, Aggie. It might be-dangerous. And this isn't the kind of business for a--a-

-person like you to--get into."

"Danger?" he repeated. "You mean--I should stay out of it because it's dangerous?"

Danielle nodded. "That's exactly what I mean! After all, you're a professor--not a cop. You can't go barging into a cellar at night."

He seemed perplexed. "But--I'm keen to! I'd enjoy beating Wes to it! I don't mind danger." He noticed the way in which his aunt was regarding the girl. "Right, Sarah. Send her out of the room--and give me the dope. And--Danielle. Remind me to tell you about the time I was lost on the ice floe for a week--and a night in Cambodia--and one thing or another. Danger! Good Lord!"

Sarah grinned. Danielle went reluctantly into the kitchen. Sarah pulled her nephew close. "You might shift from that pajama top," she said, "to a sweater. You look absurd." Aggie started, glanced at his clothes, and blushed. In a whisper, she told him.

Five minutes later, he left the house. The moon had vanished. Clouds covered most of the sky. In the east, a few stars still shone. Through the trees, in the distance, lights twinkled at the Davis house, where the servants were queasily waiting for the police. Aggie cut up the hill toward the club on a footpath. The building would be locked.

Jack Browne and the servants would be asleep on the upper floors. He did not wish to waken them.

He came to the edge of the trees, moved from.one lilac to another, and finally onto the side porch. There was not a light in the clubhouse. He swung out a screen. The first window was locked; the third was not. Aggie raised it and went in. He smelled moth flakes when he passed the stuffed moose head. He used a flashlight once, for less than a second, to find a way through the tables and divans in the main lounge. In the same manner, he passed through the dining room to the pantry and from the pantry into the steamy, institutional smell of the club kitchen. He found the door to the main cellar, carefully opened it, entered, closed it, and started down the steps.

When he was midway on them, he listened. An automatic pump was going somewhere below. It made a muffled, rhythmic noise, but, between its beats, there were minute silences. Aggie heard nothing in them. This cellar had windows--opaque squares that let in little light by day and none at night. He risked another flicker of light. Anyone who happened to be outside would have seen it-but he had to get a bearing through the place. He moved again in the dark--past the furnace and the bins of coal. Ashes gritted under his feet. A door at the end of the furnace room opened into a corridor. He found its handle. Beyond that door were no more windows, so he turned on his light and locked the switch. There was dust enough and cobwebbing enough to suggest that the passage had not been used for years. But the concrete floor was blurred with the evidences of feet going to, and coming from, the wine cellar.

Each inhabitant of Indian Stones who kept a private stock in that cellar had a key for it. Most of those keys were in the possession of servants, who made occasional trips for their employers. Old John had turned over Sarah's key to Aggie. He fitted it, now, into a heavy door at the end of a passage and turned a lock that was stiff with rust. The hinges of the door creaked awesomely. The flashlight showed a narrow flight of steps, carved in stone, winding down out of sight.

With a thought that an unarmed man was pretty helpless in that cool, dry spiral of carved, purplish rock, Aggie listened again and went ahead. The stairs made a complete revolution before debouching on a vast room that was crowded with bins. Two of its walls were raggedly cut from rock; the other two, from hard earth. The low ceiling was shored up by venerable timbers. Names were burned over sections of bins: Waite, Peters, Calder, Drayman, Sommerfield, Plum, and so on. Faded labels above the gleaming bottles denoted types of wine, vintages, and chateaux. Aggie read a few, and reflected in a hasty aside upon the luxuries of the rich. His childhood recollections of this place were not reassuring--now.

He moved past the long racks of almost-level-lying bottles to the far end of the room. There, the bins were built against the wall. A portion of that space--a large portion-

-was devoted to Davis. There was not a bottle in it. The timbers supporting the Calder shelves were massive, for they also served to hold up that part of the ceiling. He played his light full on them; they seemed too ageless and too immovable to permit even the thought of disturbance. They had been there from the beginnings of Sachem House--a century ago and more. A man, Aggie thought, might spend a week--or a month--in the wine cellar--even in search of something--without ever considering the possibility of getting behind those mighty beams.

That was why Sarah had said nobody would find the hiding place. It simply was not suspectible. And yet--the shelves themselves were bolts, and the paneling behind them was a door, hinged on the back of one of the beams, where it appeared to be buried in hard earth. Aggie inspected each shelf with his light. The dust had been agitated. But whether that had been done by somebody getting wine, or by somebody using the passage, he could not tell. One by one, he then slid each shelf to the right an inch or so; they moved along rusty iron brackets in which were the heads of corroded screws. Then he pushed hard against the whole thing, and it swung inward.

He stepped through and closed it. Ahead was another passage, another door. This door also was locked, and the keys for it belonged to four persons, only. He put in Sarah's key. The edges of the keyhole glittered slightly. Was that because it has been scratched by another key? The lock turned. The door opened--in, again.

Aggie stood in the secret vault of the old hotel. It was not a large room. It had been cut from the underlying, ferrous rock. An old, battered mahogany table and two chairs stood in the center of it--furniture condemned to that use, manifestly, after it had served its time upstairs in the Sachem House. The safe had been set into one wall. Its iron façade was taller than Aggie. He shut the door behind him again--and the lock snapped.

He was not afraid--intimidating though his surroundings were--but the darkness and subterranean aspect of his adventure gave him a feeling of urgency. Sarah had written down the combination of the huge old safe. He fished out the paper and went to work on the dials. It took him five minutes to get the ponderous thing open. He could hear nothing of the world above him--nothing from the club--nothing from the roads, where sirens ululated, and the ambulance had come with a winking red light.

The safe was empty.

Its interior was some seven feet in height, about eight feet deep, and four feet wide. If it had once contained pigeon-holes and strong boxes, they had been removed.

There was nothing in it. Nothing at all. He amended that. On the floor were sprinklings of saw-dust. Wisps of straw. A few chips and fragments of pine--bits that might have come from boxes. He had finished his journey. He was startled by his discovery, because it was dramatic. But it was not altogether unexpected. He swung his light once more around the interior of the safe, then he was stabbed by a desire to get out--out of the safe, the hidden room, and the wine cellar. He could imagine the great iron door closing on him. He leaped from the place. That relieved him, partially. He closed the iron door and spun the dials. His hands were shaking. He switched off his light and listened, realizing that his rigidity and concentration were less for good hearing than for recovery.

"Claustrophobia," he said soundlessly to himself. He hurried to the door, unlocked it, stepped into the passage, closed the door, and started toward the back of the wine bins.

His sense of agitation returned. He had thought of the cellar in terms of a forest, or a jungle, where he could hide and watch without being seen. Only when he had started down the winding stairs had he begun to consider his own exposure.

He hesitated, before pulling open the bin door. Finally, standing behind it, with his light out, he drew it back. It squealed dolefully. The wine cellar was black. Holding his torch at arm's length, and shielding his body, he pushed the switch. There was the vinous, moldy aroma. Nothing else. If someone were crouching behind the tiers of bottles, then Aggie had only to cut off his light and he, too, could so conceal himself. He would have as good a chance as the other person of making a run for it.

He shut off his light. He would stand there, in the blackness, behind the movable shelves, until he was ready. Then--a flash for a bearing and a rush into the vast, low chamber. He could feel sweat on his lips and inside his hands as he prepared himself.

There was not a sound anywhere--except one: his heart was audible in that absolute silence. He came around the door and stood in front, without closing it. He aimed the flashlight. He turned it on.

Instantly, he shut it off and dropped to his knees. The light, shooting down the aisle toward the entrance, had touched something that filled him with horror. In the center of the aisle along which he had come, stood a bottle of wine. A tall, thin, green one.

Hock. The bottle had not been there before.

Aggie was scuttling along soundlessly on his hands and knees--away from the Calder bins--away from the bottle; toward the far wall. He expected a light, then, at any instant. A light--and a shot. He swore at himself for not bringing a gun.

He agreed with Danielle--in a savage effort to right his senses by self--

condemnation--that he was a mere professor and no man to skulk through the night on the trail of a murderer. Somebody had followed him. He stopped and listened frantically--as if listening could be extended by passionate effort. Somebody had put that bottle in the aisle to let him know he had been followed. To scare him? Panic him? To make him race through the room--a perfect target? It hardly seemed reasonable. Anyone who wanted to kill him would not put out a warning sign. Such a person would merely hide, and wait for him to come back--walking upright--silhouetted by his light. That would be the thing.

This bottle" on the floor, then, was merely to let him know that he had been observed.

He reached the opposite wall and felt along it until his hands turned the corner of the stairway entrance. He was trembling from head to foot and moving with more regard to speed than to silence. As he wound his way up the stairs, however, he reversed those tactics. For half a minute, he stood at the top of the flight, mopping his face, and listening. There was no sound at all. Nothing. He opened the door with a push. He had not quite closed it. The same awesome squeal assaulted the night. A wink of his electric torch showed the corridor to be empty. He hurried along and, presently, he was in the main cellar.

There, he decided, the person who had set out the bottle would have his best chance-if, indeed, that person had any idea of attacking him. Aggie crouched low and moved among bulky, invisible objects toward the stairs. He hit something and felt it yield and fall away. The feeling was followed by a crash. He had tipped over a wheelbarrow loaded with broken flowerpots. He swore and recklessly switched on his light, from behind a pillar. He shot it around the vast, crowded, dusty furnace room. Nothing there.

He kept it on and raced toward the steps, past the furnace. He had nearly gained his objective when he stopped. His light held on the ash-strewn floor for an instant. A bone--

a veal bone--lay in the dust. A bone gnawed bare--or boiled bare--he did not have time to determine.

The cellar lights flashed on and a voice at the head of the stairs called, "Who's that?"

"Me! Aggie!" He felt enormously relieved. "It's me, Jack!"

The manager of the club was standing at the head of the stairs with a revolver in his hand. He was wearing a dressing gown and bedroom slippers. He grinned faintly.

"My God, Aggie," he said, "how you do get around! What in the world are you doing there?"

"Trying to get out," Aggie said honestly. "And somebody's in this hole--

somewhere." He was running up the stairs. He pulled Jack into the pantry, slammed the door, and locked it. "That ought to hold him. I'll call Wes and--"

He broke off. In the club kitchen, staring at him, were several people. Beth and Martha and Bill Calder. Ralph Patton and Byron Waite. Most surprising, Wes Wickman, in his uniform, looking extraordinarily disheveled. There were grass stains on his hands and there was dirt on his shoes. He was breathing hard but unobstrusively, as if he had recently been engaged in some form of work, and as if he were trying to make that fact unnoticeable. Loaves of sliced bread, a leg of lamb, mustard pickles, were ranged on the center table.

Wes said, "Who's in the cellar, Aggie?"

"I don't know. I--"

Beth said, "You look as if you'd been pulled through a knothole! A filthy knothole. Walking in your sleep, I suppose?"

Wes leaned against a huge refrigerator. "Just what in the name of sin does this mean, Aggie? You were first to find Calder. First to find George Davis. First to send out the alarm. And now--while I'm frantically at work over at the Davis place--I get a frenzied message from Sarah via old John saying to go save your life in the club cellar.

What's there?"

"Somebody," Aggie answered. "Look. For heaven's sake--get your men and have that cellar searched."

The state trooper considered. "All right."

Jack spoke. "There maybe was somebody down there, at that! Aggie-did you notice if the windows in the furnace room were open, when you went down?"

"No. They were not, that is."

"Open now. Two of 'em." Aggie swore. "I didn't see that. Then--the person's gone."

He looked from face to face. All the expressions were doubtful, accusative. Even the trooper's. That increased his feeling of frustration and of defeat. He needed sleep. He was weak and nervous. He was angry, too. "Hell. Why ask me what I was doing here?

What are all of you doing?"

Byron Waite said nastily, "I presume you expected me to go back to sleep after the racket you raised at my place? I went over to the Davis house. All the lights were on.

I sat with the servants."

"We went there, too," Beth said. "We heard the sirens, Bill and Martha and I. As soon as we could dress. We left Martha's mother asleep--at least--she didn't get up when we did. Wes shooed us away and so we all came up here."

"I was just getting up," Jack said. ''They began banging on the door. I let 'em in.

Nobody's going to sleep any more tonight--so we're making sandwiches. Heard a crash in the cellar. I got the club gun. The Lord knows we're all on edge!"

Wes said dryly, "I think, Aggie, that I ought to ask the questions. Don't you?"

Aggie was on the point of answering when the pantry door was shoved open.

Several more people in various stages of dishabille tramped into the club kitchen. They were asking, "What's wrong?" and "What's happened at the Davises?" with the ad-libbed unanimity of a stage crowd. Aggie looked at them disgustedly.

' You go down to your house, Aggie," Wes said. "I'll come along as soon as I take a squint in the cellar. Five minutes. I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you bad."

CHAPTER 12

When Aggie re-entered his aunt's cottage--at a dogtrot--he saw that Danielle had gone. It gave him a brief sense of dissatisfaction. Sarah had a good fire going. There were sandwiches on the coffee table-and cups. The old lady was lying back in the inglenook, and she greeted him acidly. "You've been gone a thundering long while!"

"I had a lot of ground to cover."

"Well?"

Aggie knew what she meant. He sat down on a bench and leaned over the coffee container. "Gone," he said. "Nothing in the safe."

Sarah pursed her lips. A thin, pensive whistle came through them. "Gone, eh?"

"How much was it, Sarah?"

She shrugged. "The last statement showed--around a million."

"A tidy sum to carry off, hunh?" He dumped sugar directly from a bowl. "I wondered. You know, I forgot to ask. I generally forget all the important things. I wondered if we were talking about a hundred thousand--or some horrendous sum--like a hundred million."

"Nobody around here has that sort of mazuma," Sarah replied. "And that gold and my platinum wouldn't just be 'carried off'--either. It weighed about--a ton, I should imagine."

Aggie thought a moment. "So it did! Hunh. Mean several trips. How was it--

packed? Or was it?"

"In sawdust--in starch boxes. The starch boxes were in wine cases-four to a case.

The whole thing was designed to weigh the same as a case of wine."

He sipped coffee. "I honestly think--at the moment--I'm Wes Wickman's principal suspect!"

"You!" Sarah leered. "And no wonder! Well, start talking!"

He told her. He told her sketchily, at first, and in detail, as Wes's "five minutes"

became ten and then twenty and at last, half an hour. They waited, when he had finished talking, with an impatience that blotted out fatigue and sleepiness.

Wes appeared, at last. He looked grim. His face was even more dirty. "There was nobody in that cellar. One window had been scrambled over. Look. I've hardly slept since Calder died. I was out last night on Bogarty leads. I went to bed this evening and I left word that I wasn't to be disturbed for anything. My lieut woke me when you called about Davis." He grinned shortly. "I'd have demoted him if he hadn't. Now, see here, Plum.

You found the doctor. You broke in where he was. You've rummaged all the way to that safe in the club cellar--yeah!--that's where I've just been. You're going to have the devil's own time explaining your actions--and I wish you'd begin now."

Wes drank cup after cup of coffee. He did not once interrupt. He showed amazement at the story about the cache. He gazed at Sarah. He muttered, when Aggie described the situation in which he had found Davis's body. But he did not talk.

After it was finished, he closed his eyes. "Aggie," he said at last, "I know darned well you're telling the truth. I'd have pushed along just about the same way you did.

Damn the torpedoes--or the cops-go ahead! Just the same, I suppose you--and Sarah--

realize that in the morning you're going to face a mob of reporters?"

"I've been thinking of it," Sarah said.

"They'll be all over the scene. Great story. A million in unlawful gold hidden away. Two peculiar deaths. A colorful, prospector missing. It'll crowd Hitler off the front pages. This place will be crammed with sightseers. Reporters will be trying to beat us--

the police--to an answer. What is the answer?"

"Somebody stole the gold," Sarah said.

Wes looked enraged and helpless. "If you'll just inform who--!"

"Hank, I imagine," she said. "It's hard to think of--but it must be! His knife killed Davis. He probably fixed the deadfall. He knew we had the gold--so he was the one who had the chance to learn where we kept it. Why don't you find him?"

"I've been trying to," said Wes. "Night and day." He turned to Aggie. "We've got a lot! He had with him a silver fox with a collar, when he drove east. Stopped at several places. I'm sure the knife that killed Davis is his."

"How?" Aggie asked.

"His initials on the car. Didn't you notice? Same script. He evidently liked script initials."

"Didn't see 'em," Aggie said.

"You were sitting right under them! Only thing is--how did he get out of that room--if he stabbed Davis?"

Aggie shrugged. "He couldn't have got out, man! Use your head! He may have visited Davis secretly in that darkroom. Good place-detached from the house. If Bogarty was in the woods waiting for a chance to see Davis-he got it tonight. Maybe he left his knife-and left some sort of news that made Davis use it on himself. Maybe he gave it to Davis to use on himself. You know. The way a disgraced army officer is given a gun."

Wes said, "Phooie!" He added, "Would you--kill a man with an initialed knife? Or leave one with your initials on it, for a man to kill himself with?"

"Perhaps, Davis wanted to kill himself and put the blame on Bogarty! Perhaps Davis was visited tonight by Bogarty and perhaps he stole Bogarty's knife--and used it on himself when Bogarty had gone. Perhaps--in the excitement of the moment--he forgot he had locked his door! Thought only of doing away with himself and leaving us a clue to Bogarty."

Wes gazed at. Sarah. "Good imagination, your nephew. I thought of that. At least-

-it makes sense. Nobody could be there to stab him. He still had the knife in his hand when you found him. Bogarty's knife. Maybe Davis knew he had to die--and used that way of pointing to Bogarty, so Bogarty wouldn't escape punishment either. What do you think, Sarah?"

The old woman answered, "Aggie, whose bin did that bottle come from? The one somebody put on the floor after you'd gone into the vault?"

"Lord! How should I know? I shut off my light and beat it!"

"I looked," Wes said. "Just now. It came from your bins, Sarah."

"It ought to have fingerprints, then. I put down my Hochheimer years ago. It would be exceedingly dusty."

"It was," Wes said. "And there were marks. Gloves. Or a handkerchief."

"Smart," Sarah said.

"Smart!" Wes rose and walked to the fire. He kicked a log. "I should say so!"

"Hank was smart," she said reflectively. "He had an extraordinarily good mind.

Clear and fast. Wonderful at whist. Chess too. I can't imagine him killing people--or making them kill themselves. If he did, Jim Calder has been a worse rascal than I ever guessed--and George Davis has been more than a clever surgeon and a stuffed shirt. Hank might-punish them. He had a strong sense of justice. His own sense of it."

"You're talking about a man," the trooper answered, ''you knew more than thirty years ago. He could have changed in that time!"

She smiled ruefully. "He would have. Look at me!" The trooper studied the professor. "How did Danielle act tonight?"

Aggie described the girl's behavior. He tried to avoid the matter of having slapped her. But Wes picked that up, with a grin. "So you what?"

"Well, I slapped her. Shook her."

Wes chuckled. "Golly! It's a wonder you're alive! She needed it. Bet she hasn't been slapped since her mother died. I feel sorry for her now--though. Her father a suicide.

Alone."

Aggie stared at the fire. His aunt gazed at him. Wes yawned, stretched, and shook his tremendous frame. "I deliberately poured it on you," he said to Aggie, "up at the club.

You see--when I tore up--after old John's message--everybody was yammering about how odd it was that you found out everything first. I mean--Indian Stones was waking up and learning all about this rumpus."

"Rumpus!" said Sarah.

Aggie chuckled. "Rumpus? At least! I thought you were really getting doubtful of me."

The trooper rose. "Only in one way. I don't believe you'd necessarily tell me all you know if you thought you could make something of it without my help. And that's not cricket. After all, I'm the cop. When two of the nation's big shots are killed peculiarly in your district, your superiors want action. If you're holding out so much as a crumb--!"

Aggie thought. "You noticed the Davis phone wires were yanked down?"

"Of course. Danielle showed me."

"I don't suppose it would interest you to know I spotted a small veal bone on the furnace-room floor? Like the one in Bogarty's car."

"Gnawed?"

"Couldn't tell. I was hurrying." Aggie's brown eyes were mocking. "I was nervous in that cellar, for some reason."

"I'll check. But I doubt if it means a thing. The club garbage goes down into the cellar in cans and out through the furnace room by a door that opens on the rear drive.

That door was locked tight tonight. The bone probably dropped from a can. You know how sloppy people are with loads like that."

"That's right. I didn't know about the garbage."

"I'm going back to the Davises," Wes said. "I'll leave word, after this, for you to be put through to me whenever you want me. And thanks again. Incidentally we'll make a try for Davis's shoes--tomorrow."

Aggie conveyed the trooper to the door. Then he turned back to his aunt. "You must be bushed."

She shook her head. "On the contrary. Now that my conscience is clear, I think I've passed the mumps crisis also. I feel full of fight."

"I don't," he said. "I feel as if I'd never been asleep in my life! It seems weeks--

even back to this afternoon."

The phone rang. Aggie went to it. "Hello? . . . No. Miss Plum is ill and can't talk. .

. . She can't see anybody--she's in quarantine . . . . This is her nephew, Agamemnon Telemachus Plum. . . . A-G-A-Lord! Look it up in Who's Who! . . . No, I won't see anybody this morning as soon as they can get up by plane! . . . I will this afternoon, and I don't care if it will be too late for the evening editions. . . . If you send a man, he will find I've thrown a guard around the house with orders to shoot! . . . Listen! I'm going to bed.

B-E-D. . . . Look up that in the dictionary! . . . Statement? . . . Well . . . Yes." He considered. "You can say that, in my opinion, James Calder died accidentally and George Davis by his own hand, after peculations that involved the missing million in gold." He was silent, for a moment, grinning. "You haven't heard about the gold, yet? Well--send your reporter to see Byron Waite. He'll be happy to supply the details, I'm sure!"

Aggie hung up. "That was Metropolitan News and Photo, in New York. They got a tip from a local reporter at State Police Headquarters. I hope--I earnestly hope--their man will rout out old Waite just as he is dropping off--say about nine or ten this morning!"

"Yours is a blithe, sweet spirit, Agamemnon! Why did you tell them that rubbish about accident and suicide and the libel about George stealing the gold?"

"Because," he answered, "I have a strong suspicion my statement will be regarded, eventually, as a singularly prophetic estimate of the conclusions to which everybody will come. By that I mean, unless Wes or you or I run into something new, we've come to the end of the trail. Bogarty--or whoever murdered James Calder and caused George Davis to die--is so many jumps ahead that we won't catch up. Maybe ever.

I predict a period of public fanfare--and a gradual dying out of excitement."

' That's an alarming idea," she said, "and I hope you're wrong."

Aggie yawned and started toward the stairs. "There's somebody in this vicinity so clever, and so intuitive, that the less I think about it the better I'll sleep!" He called down, a moment later, "Incidentally, Sarah, have Windle get me about three dozen steel traps, will you? I was serious about that. Fox traps. And good night!"

CHAPTER 13

On a day in the early part of July, a dazzling day, of the sort that makes people who cannot swim wish they had been braver, and people who can, hasten to the nearest lake, river or pool, Agamemnon Telemachus Plum, A.B., B.S., M.A., Litt.D., Ph.D.--and Phi Beta Kappa, as a matter of course--sat on the edge of Lower Lake at Indian Stones with his feet in the water up to the ankles. Two weeks in the mountains had made changes in the eminent paleontologist. The most readily discernible change was superficial: his skin was now as brown as a filbert, instead of the academy white which it had been. His beard was neater and shorter.

Another change was in his social station. That is to say, as he sat on the tepid margin of the pond, people spoke to him amiably and in such a way as to suggest esteem.

A child, aged about six, threw itself on his shoulders and shouted, "Dive in with me, Aggie!"

Aggie laughed and said, "Soon. As soon as I go overboard."

Another youngster--some years older--approached with diffidence and spoke after summoning up a modicum of boldness: "Will you make me one of those Nairobi fish spears like you make Fred? He got a pickerel with it, yesterday!"

Aggie laughed again. "I will, Johnnie, if you'll mend your grammar. A spear 'like the one you made for Fred'--or, 'as you did for Fred.'" Johnnie was pleased. "It's a duzie!"

he said with fervor. "Whammo! Fred don't miss--hardly ever!"

"'Doesn't,' " Aggie repeated with pain on his face.

The boy ran off yelling, "Hey! Socksie! I get one, too!"

Mrs. Drayman, who was sitting near by in a deck chair, clucked over her knitting.

"It gets worse and worse," she said. "Children these days don't pay the slightest heed to their grammar. When I was young--"

Aggie watched Johnnie skid off the dock into the water. "I dunno," he meditated.

"I can't recall that I had mastered the rhetorical irregularities at twelve. And I do know that at his age I was unable to hook up a radio. Or to send in code. He may never be a purist. But he ought to be a good engineer."

"I hope so!" She busied herself with her work in a way that suggested she had a problem in her mind rather than in the stitches. "I--I understand Sarah has asked Beth to keep house for you?"

Two weeks ago, Aggie would have blushed and stammered. Two weeks ago, the fact that a young woman had been invited to move in with himself and his aunt would have caused him to depart from Indian Stones. Now, his embarrassment was only moderate. "Why--yes. Company. Someone to run the place for us. Sarah's better--but convalescing slowly. And after all, Beth's at loose ends."

"Hunh!" said Mrs. Drayman.

Meaning, Aggie thought, that Mrs. D. is onto the fact that Sarah will go to any lengths to arrange things between Beth and me. Mrs. D.--and the rest of Indian Stones.

He let the insinuating syllable hang in the air for a while. He had almost packed up when Sarah suggested it. But not quite. He was uncertain why he had stayed. Perhaps out of scientific curiosity--to see how a young and very handsome woman behaved, from a proximate viewpoint. Or perhaps because he had grown somewhat more blasé, owing to the fact that he had recently been interviewed by reporters, policemen, detectives, coroners, and the like--the fact that the papers had been full of his name and his statements--and the fact that Indian Stones had changed its opinion of him. He was no longer regarded as a bearded, bookish anachronism.

He was thought of, rather, as something of a fireball. The sort of man who would ingeniously and calmly break in on a dead body in the middle of night, using an automobile jack. The sort of fellow who would barge into a secret cellar all alone and without a weapon, when there lurked in it a dangerous thief. A man in whom a captain of the State Police had implicit trust. A man, moreover--according to the testimony of numerous wide-eyed kids--who could tell the greatest stories on earth about Indians and Eskimos and African natives--every one of them true.

Aggie yawned. It was very restful. No more horror or alarm. Jim Calder buried--

and his family trying to forget. Danielle gone. .

He saw that Mrs. Drayman was about to cluck some more, so he overrode the topic. "An extraordinarily lovely day," he said.

She veered reluctantly. "Quite lovely. Quite."

"The lake," he continued, "is especially--vivid."

"I prefer Upper Lake," she replied, still wanting to hear further items about Beth's prospective residence with the Plums. "It's more private--and nearer our cottage. Still--

since the bay water's been spoiled--we've had to swim here. It's turned quite brown, you know. Algae--or some sort of weeds, I presume. Very nasty and nothing like it ever happened before. Where is Beth, by the by?"

"Changing her clothes," he answered calmly. "Going in with me." He looked at the other bathers. "Us." His dark eyes defied the upraised stare of Mrs. Drayman.

"Extraordinary, too, the way things have settled down," he said.

Since Mrs. D. was the mother-in-law of the son of the deceased Mr. Calder, her interest in the drama at Indian Stones was second to nothing else. "Isn't it? I was terribly upset for days. Our Bill's predicament was so embarrassing! He did disapprove of his father, you know. My Martha, too. And that Davis girl--practically forcing William up on Garnet Knob the night--Jim--was found! It was providential that you followed them--and listened! Otherwise--what could my poor daughter have thought?"

"The worst!" said Aggie solemnly.

Mrs. Drayman did not know she was being kidded. "Yes! Exactly! As it was, she's kept Bill in the doghouse practically ever since!"

"Hmmm," said Aggie. "She ought to let up, about now. Bygones. I find Bill Calder an extremely likable chap."

"I disagree," Mrs. D. responded. "Not about Bill; He's generous enough, as young men go. About Martha letting up. Danielle will be back shortly--"

Aggie sat up straighter. "That's news. I thought she was staying in New York. She wrote me a note-after the funeral--saying she didn't feel like a summer here, any more.

Understandable."

"Then she's changed her mind--as usual. Really! There ought to be some way to get legal protection against a woman of that sort! I told Martha--"

"Oh, come," the professor said. "Danielle's gaudy--but not wicked. She's unmanageable--but that's because she's spoiled. The Bills of this world spoiled her. I think she's quite nice--and I've missed her."

"Nice!" said Mrs. D. "Any word but-- nice!"

"Who's nice?"

Aggie turned farther on the bank. Beth was standing behind him in a magenta bra and shorts. Her hands were full of dark hair which she was twisting up so that it could be covered by her cap. She was a darker tan than he. Her posture made her mannequin's figure an unavoidable--and admirable--spectacle. He remembered he had once said to Sarah that Beth was the sort of girl you found yourself getting mixed up with when you least expected it. Now he found himself reflecting that such an involvement would have its merits. He grinned. "Danielle."

Beth was startled. "Danielle?"

"She's coming back." He made up reasons. "Hot in New York. She's lonely. Sat in the apartment getting morbid. Can't blame her."

Beth's face lost the animation that had marked her inquiry. "Let's swim, Aggie. It must be ninety in the shade."

"Oke," he said. He raised his voice. "Hey! Bugsie! If you want to dive on my shoulders--here's your chance!"

A juvenile chorus took up the offer. It was perhaps four o'clock--the sun was casting a blue shadow from Garnet Knob--when Beth, righting a canoe which she and some of the children had deliberately overturned, spotted Aggie in the water near by.

"Take me for a ride," she said. "Sure." He assisted in towing the canoe to the dock. He heaved himself ashore, drew up the boat, spilled out the water, mopped the ribs with a towel, and invited Beth to step in. He found a backrest and some cushions for her. They started toward the islands--through a flotilla of boats. Two teams of boys were practicing rowing for a race. Some girls were doing lifesaving. Fred, owner of the fish spear, was being propelled along the shore by a smaller boy. Fred stood in the bow of his boat, taut, ready--a figure of menace to frogs, water beetles, and small fish. In a distant cove, Byron Waite was casting for bass--annoyed, no doubt, at so much laughter and sound.

Aggie paddled fairly swiftly, although he was not hurrying. They were soon out of sight. Beth leaned back, trailed her fingers, absorbed the sun, and watched the man.

"It's swell," she said, "of you and Sarah to offer to take me in."

He nodded. "We heard you were about to strangle Mrs. D. Hence the missionary invitation."

"You're funny. You have the most convenient ear in the camp. Everything you want to know--you find out. Like--Danielle's coming back."

"The knowledge was thrust upon me."

"Are you in love with Danielle?"

He stopped paddling. There was a twinkle in his eyes. "Heaven forbid!"

Beth smiled. "That's no answer. Are you?"

"Not I. Not Plum. Not Agamemnon. Shall I swear it?"

"Wouldn't mean anything, either. You've thought about her a lot. Asked Sarah about her. Asked me, even."

"Just trying to figure her out," he answered. And he had been. He had been trying to assure himself that there was--or was not--a chance Danielle might have killed Jim Calder with her father's help--and caused her father to kill himself. The possibility had taunted him ever since she had gone back to New York with her father's body. Gone independently, sadly--refusing companionship or aid.

Beth watched him think. "She's easy to figure out. Too easy. Or--do you still believe we've had murder here as well as burglary? Do you still wonder if she did it? She could have, you know, if she'd wanted to. She's got spirit. Determination. Too much."

"Wes Wickman's satisfied that if he catches up with Hank Bogarty, he'll have all the answers. So am I."

"Honestly?"

"Honestly." Aggie smiled at her. "Want to turn back?"

"In a minute. Aggie!" Her voice had sunk so that it was difficult to hear, even in the drowsy quiet on the glassy water.

"Ho?" he said, when she did not go on.

"Are you shy?"

He felt shy, then--and nervous. He pretended to consider the question detachedly.

"Why--yes. Yes and no. Less so, every day."

"You know I'm kind of batty about you, I suppose? Everybody else does. You're damned romantic, Aggie."

' There were rumors," he replied. "Jack told me--one night--that you were selling my stock above par. He said, I believe, that you had been taken by my manly figger. It's misleading. I got this way doing hard work--not by the glamorous and athletic route of the boys in the advertisements. The boys like Jack himself. I study primitive people--and dig in ruins--which happens to keep me in shape."

"Yes," she said. "But it wasn't that--although that surprised me. It was a clue to the rest of you. Sometimes you pretend to be studious and eccentric--and sometimes slangy and familiar--like everybody. But behind that--"

' The pedant. The cold brain. The field worker--"

' The brain, all right. But a shy one. Old-fashioned. The kind girls have to lead around. Maybe all men have that kind. You notice things, even when you don't let yourself know that you've seen them."

He felt fearfully uncomfortable. "I don't expect to get married, ever, Beth. My work means too much. I wouldn't ask anybody to share the rough part--or to be alone while I went at it. I don't even know if I can love anyone."

"Nevertheless," she said quietly, "I still--feel that way. And you can do whatever you like about it. It's funny--kind of--since I thought you were such a lemon when I first saw you. I wouldn't dare say--what I think, these days."

Aggie cast his eyes about, seeking a way to change the mood and the subject of their conversation. "It's nice to have somebody like you around. I never did. You're very beautiful." His gaze touched the place where Danielle's canoe had once been drawn up.

' This is the second time I've been up at this end of the lake," he continued. "Gives me a funny feeling--somehow."

Beth did not respond for a long time. Then she said slowly, "Yes. You were here with Danielle. I saw you come back--remember? She dumped you! She was in a spin of some sort."

"She'd gone ashore here," he said, as if he had not listened to Beth. "Wonder why? I never thought to wonder about it enough--until now."

"Keeping another date with Bill--or somebody."

"I doubt it," Aggie answered. He turned the bow of the canoe toward the shallows. His eyes became--introverted. Beth watched the change with a face as expressionless as his. He looked at her, after a moment. "Would you mind--if I parked you for about twenty minutes?"

She shook her head.

CHAPTER 14

Aggie walked away from the shore. He saw Beth take his place on the stern seat and commence to paddle in random circles. When the woods had closed behind him, he ran. He had a long light stride, and an inexhaustible wind. Within six of his minutes, he had covered more than half a mile. The path forked away from the lake. Its branch was indistinct, like the old road down which he had hurried on his second night at Indian Stones. Leaves filled it in places; in others, ferns, plants, brush, pine needles. Aggie went on soundlessly. When he came near to the abandoned summerhouse, he slowed, and took care not to break a twig or let a branch fly back.

There was an opening. He stopped at its edge, behind a tree. The pergola--or gazebo--was made of fieldstone, part toppled, all grown with vines. It stood on a grassy rise, overlooking a vast valley at the end of which were rugged, hazy mountains. He surveyed it before leaving his sanctuary: the remnants of an apple orchard which the storms had left, and the stone fantasy itself--a Victorian incredibility built for almost no reason and abandoned for the same cause. His thoughts, as if elevated by the rise of his breathing, came in a quick sequence. There were three of them: One was the reiterated note that Danielle had said there was nothing at the pergola; but nobody, so far as he knew, had examined it to be sure. The second was a feeling--a pang--at the forgotten spectacle itself, the place where he had spent so many days in games both conventional and invented; this was the nostalgia he had felt when Sarah's limousine had turned onto the Indian Stones road. The third was an intuition--

subtle--largely unconscious until that moment. There was more mystery in this place than a huge theft. There was the mystery of death; the mystery of the man from the West. And he, Aggie, had by sheerest coincidence the very sort of experience and training which fitted him to pursue an investigation of such things. His skill in the outdoors surpassed that of anybody in the region. His scientific career had been made up of deducing seemingly irrelevant facts from time-rotted fragments.

He came out of the woods, walking easily. There was no sound, no stirring in the pergola. Grasshoppers rattled in the long shade of it. Ants had made hills on its floor. The door of the closet in which they had kept their games was rotted entirely and from it had spilled the dolls Danielle had mentioned. Faded, moldy half-familiar dolls. A chipped checkerboard. A decayed archery butt. Some matting. A forgotten sewing basket.

Modeling c1ay--or the box for it--and tiddly-winks. Hank Bogarty had not been there and Danielle had only peered in--disturbing nothing--leaving the water-blanched remnants of many childhoods in a heap.

Aggie sat down on the valley-facing side, under a high stone arch. He remembered an apple tree that was gone, and another from which the top had broken away leaving only a punk-filled trunk that supported an empty, giant knot, like a doughnut on a vertical fork, or a lorgnette with one rim and no lens at all. Across from it, still dauntless, was the old "climbing tree"--gnarled and buckled but full of small, hard, green fruits. He looked into its branches, trying to remember the route to the topmost, and his own size-scale, by discovering it. His eye held. One limb, some ten feet above the ground, was hacked, chipped, scarred and sliced. He saw it because he had always looked for the unnatural in nature. He dwelt upon it, because there was no easy explanation for it.

Someone, he first thought, walking over and looking up, had shinnied the thick limb and hacked at the tree with an ax--an act without meaning. Then he saw that the bark had been marked and incised by a narrower tool than an ax--a tool not much more than an inch in width--a tool like a chisel, or a knife. He turned around and looked back.

Opposite the battered spot, and somewhat higher from the ground, was the trunk that supported the knot-rim. He studied the marks again. They were deep, and beginning to heal over. They had been made before sap had flowed into the apple that year.

Aggie went slowly back to the pergola. He sat again. He would have given a good deal for his pipe. The empty knothole--the hard rim--was a foot across, and it stared down upon the incised bark of the opposite tree like any eye socket. The knothole and the old tree were perhaps twenty feet apart, and the stump supporting the knot was a dozen feet high.

Ten minutes passed. Aggie unfolded his legs as if they were stiff, and walked slowly back across the field. If what he had seen was a coincidence, it was nonetheless revealing. And the probability of coincidence was small. He increased his pace as he re-entered the woods.

Beth was still paddling lackadaisically offshore. She pushed into the warm shallows. He took her place and she sat against the backrest.

Beth eventually broke his extended silence. "There is pollen on your bathing trunks. By that I deduce you've been walking in a field. There is only one field near by--

the one around the gazebo. Did you find out anything that will be of sinister import to the prime minister?"

Aggie smiled. "Maybe."

"But you're not telling?"

He shook his head.

"I think," she said, in a different tone, "I won't take up Sarah's invitation to be house guest and house manager. You're quite right, Aggie. I'm not your type. You're not mine. A girl gets beglamoured easily. But--really--I'm the comfortable sort--home-Ioving--a girl for club porches--beaches--cocktail parties. It's funny. You don't look romantic--and you are, horribly. I look like a foreign spy--and actually I'm a home girl."

She sighed. "You tell Sarah, will you?"

Aggie was jolted from his abstraction. "What?"

She smiled. "Never mind. I will." She added, later, "Ralph is the very right sort--

after all--I suppose."

She was surprised when he looked up. "Ralph? I want to ask about Ralph. I mean-

-what he does--what he's like?"

"He owns an accounting firm. Very prosaic. His whole life is an open ledger."

"He took care of the accounting end of your father's business."

"Some of it," Beth replied. ''The honest part."

"He knows about the other part. Remember the crack he made the night Wes cross-examined the whole club? What was it? About 'Some people report their incomes and others bury them.' Do you think he knew about--the gold up here?"

Beth looked thoughtfully into Aggie's eyes. "I never even wondered! No doubt he knew Father had other accounts and other funds. Ralph doesn't tell me much about his business. Not anything, really. Typical American man of affairs. 'Don't bother your pretty little head.' And he's right, Aggie. It would bore me. Still--"

"Still--what?"

"He's enormously ambitious. He likes money. I know--right now--he's worried about my estate. I mean--about claims and entails that may be tacked on it which he's never heard of. It's odd! I'd thought of that interest as--just typical--of any businessman.

The practical point of view. Looked at--from the angle you're looking--it seems different.

Ralph's ambition might turn to cupidity, his cupidity to crime. Still--it's hard to picture him--standing over a victim--with a dripping blunt instrument--isn't it?"

Aggie thought that she was a fairly detached person, on her own account, inasmuch as the picture connoted her own father in the role of victim. He said, "If it were easy to imagine a killer doing the deed, it would be a cinch to catch them all. If I asked you, 'What does a murderer look like?' you'd be hard put to make a successful answer."

"That's right. A murderer--might look like me."

Aggie grinned. "Let's hope not. So--you don't know whether or not Ralph was aware of the stacked gold?"

"Not the foggiest."

"Was he ever up here in the winter?"

"Would you mind if I didn't get the connections?"

"Nope. Was he? Were you?"

Beth shrugged, smiling. "Lemme see. Of course--we all have been--at one time or another. House parties. We'd open a cottage for Christmas, sometimes, when we were younger. He's been here."

"Last winter, by any chance?"

"I don't think--I'm not sure--but I don't believe any of the crowd did anything here last winter. Why don't you ask Sarah? She's the timetable, geography, almanac and codebook of Indian Stones."

"I will," Aggie said.

The sun had set when he returned to Rainbow Lodge. Sarah was taking a nap.

Chillie announced that dinner would be delayed until eight, owing to the fact that they had received the grocery order tardily. Aggie thought of going to his room to read, but another activity--one he had practiced regularly for several days with waning enthusiasm-

-presently enlisted him.

He swung away from Rainbow Lodge on foot. In the patch of fairly heavy woods between it and the club, he pushed through the trees and underbrush until he reached a tiny, open place that was covered with leaves. Between the leaves could be seen the jaws of a steel trap. The trap was set--and baited.

Aggie strolled at an easy but distance-devouring stride up along the edge of the golf course. He had made four sets at suitable spots in the woods there--but they yielded nothing. So far, he had caught only one red vixen, in bad condition--and rather ashamedly buried her carcass. He followed the lumber road toward Garnet Knob for some distance.

There was a trap under a log, one at the edge of the brook, one in an old run, and another beside a spring. Nothing. He came back, visiting other locations, and made the mental note that it would be a good idea to take up the trap line soon. His sets along Lower Lake were empty and he almost abandoned the idea of visiting the traps on the other pond. He went to them, however, and in the next to the last, he discovered unexpected success.

The ground around that trap had been torn up. A silver-tipped black brush stood above a large stone beyond the bare earth. The fox came up standing--snarling and fierce-

-his leg held firmly. Aggie looked about for a suitable club.

The dead animal was a large one. Its coat was rusty with summer and it seemed thin. Domesticated, he thought. Not used to foraging for itself. Which was why he had caught it, no doubt--and precisely why he had hoped to catch it. A wild silver fox would have been far more cautious than this one. But the fox itself interested Aggie less than the collar it was wearing. A silver-studded, black leather collar. On it was a plate with the familiar initials, "H.H.B." in the familiar script.

Aggie picked up the carcass and then--because he had compunctions about such things--he went back over his whole trap line--a distance of more than three miles--and sprang every trap. It made him very late for dinner.

CHAPTER 15

He left the carcass on the front porch--not without remembering that the monogrammed knife had been stolen from the railing right above the spot. He ignored Sarah's voice, cajoling from the dining room, until he had telephoned State Police Headquarters and left word that he would like to see Wes. He also left some instructions.

Then he went in, tousled Sarah's hair when she started to lecture him about being late, and ate hungrily. While he ate, he thought. Sarah, after a couple of sturdy efforts, sniffed to herself and let him think.

When he was ready for the ice cream, she tried talking again. "Fine sort of husband you'd make! You'd come home to a poor, dear wife who had spent a hard day in the beauty salon and the department stores--and behave exactly as if she were wallpaper!"

"That reminds me. Beth nixed your invitation to stay here."

Sarah studied him. "Well? Is that information! Come clean!"

His face was bland. "Incompatibility. I'm too wild for her. Something."

"I heard," said Sarah, "that you were out canoeing with her. Did she propose?

Notice carefully that I didn't say, 'Did you propose?'"

"She had a stab at it. Told me I was glamorous--in spite of certain aesthetic hazards. Talked herself out of it."

"A fine girl, Aggie. Warm, sensitive, intelligent, brave--"

"Mmmm. Beautiful. Good figure. Finest dark hair in the county. Well-educated.

Magnificent carriage. Spirit. Dash. Good golfer, a good tennis player, terrific at table tennis, good swimmer--everything a man like me would need if he had an extra life to give to his country clubs."

Sarah chortled. "At least--Beth's one female in your class that you haven't run away from! That's some progress--for me."

Aggie looked at her with eyes that were singularly penetrating. "I know your game, Miss Plum," he said.

Sarah set down her coffee cup. "Honestly, I believe you do!"

"I do."

"Hunh!"

"You have no sense at all! You're mad!"

Sarah squinted at him, wrinkling her nose. "Am I? How about you?"

"I'm mad too. It's familial. I'm cautious, though, about other people. You're not."

"Was Beth very disappointed?"

"Search me. She started talking about Ralph. They were thick when I arrived here.

They might thicken up again." That was all he said until they had left the dining room. He took a leather chair near the center table and picked up the evening paper. His aunt cast in his direction several glances that were surprised-and very affectionate. Finally he said,

"You know, Sarah, the most interesting phenomenon in nature is the one which is conscious of nature itself."

"Meaning--?"

' The brain. what else? The human mind. There are two parts to man--the mind and the body. All the physical world belongs to the body. All the world of ideas--to the mind. Both parts must be served. If you think too. much about things--their arrangement and acquisition and enjoyment--you'll stultify your mind. If you project your mind on ideas too completely, they'll absorb you and exhaust you and you'll lose your health.

Everybody tries to strike a balance--to have enough things to be comfortable--and enough ideas to be sensible. Right?"

"Wonderful--if obvious."

"But few people succeed. Some go over to gross materialism. Some--a smaller number--to complete introversion. Either state is--substantially--insane. Take the deaths of Calder and Dr. Davis."

Sarah sat forward in her chair.

Aggie went on. "We have considered things in relation to those deaths. Things--

and not ideas. Not--motives. Not really. We have dozens of what might be called clues--"

he heard Wes Wickman's step on the porch--"and I think we'll have another, before much longer! But it's not enough. We haven't let our minds--our imaginations--do sufficient work. We've tried to consider everything by the logic of things." He leaned around his chair. "Hello, West Come in! Bring that fox, out by the steps--will you?"

The trooper came in, carrying the fox by the tail. He was perspiring, for the night was hot, but he wore a spick-and-span uniform. He held the fox toward Sarah. "Your nephew's a smart trapper, Sarah. I'd have given him fifty to one he wouldn't have nailed this beast."

"Bad bet," Aggie said. "Wonder it didn't walk into somebody's house and give itself up! This fox was accustomed to people. I see you brought the photographs."

Aggie cleared a space on the table. He spread out the evening paper. Wes put the fox on it, and opened a Manila envelope. Sarah moved close. The photographs were glossy prints of a man's hand--with teeth marks on it. "We didn't blow any up to life size," Wes said. "No need. No fox. I did take an impression of the bite of the chefs pooch-but it wasn't at all similar."

"I'll get some calipers," Aggie said. He ran up the stairs.

The trooper looked at Sarah. "What's he got--besides this? It's sticking out all over him!"

"I don't know."

"I hope it's something good!" Wes walked to the cold hearth and back. "I've run down leads on Bogarty till I hate the name. The guy vanished. Thin air. I've uncovered two missing persons that didn't want to be uncovered---one in Albany and one in Goversville--just looking for Bogarty. And there's no trace of the gold. Either Calder or Davis cleaned it out before they died--as we've suspected---or else whoever took it has planted it somewhere. But not in a bank and not in a deposit box, I'll guarantee! I went nuts on this case so long ago that I'm almost back to sanity again!"

Sarah smiled. "Aggie will figure it out."

The trooper was indignant. "Holy hat!"

"He's just been resting for the last two weeks. Vegetating.

Letting his mind lie fallow. I've known all the time that, when he was ready, he'd call you up and tell you the answers."

"What answers?" Aggie said, coming back. "I know a couple more. That's all. I sent for Wes for help. I'm hot at uncovering old cities and unsuspected racial strains--but anything contemporary is out of my line."

He had, in addition to calipers, the paraffin top of a jelly glass. He thrust the paraffin between the jaws of the dead fox, pushed them together, and set the impression thus made beside the photograph. "Crude," he said as he worked, "but adequate." He bent over. "They look identical. We'll take a half dozen measurements and compare their ratios. If the ratios match--that ought to be good enough. Dogs and foxes are related. Not the same thing. A dog might make a bite that would look like a foxbite--anomalies and accidents considered--but it would be mighty funny if there were by chance a dog around here--or even another fox--that happened to have a set of teeth corresponding exactly to the teeth of this guy." He stroked the fur.

They went to work on the measurements. Aggie took them--first from the paraffin and then from the photograph. Sarah wrote them down. Wes set them up as ratios. After fifteen minutes he said, "That ought to do," and calculated. "Checks!" he soon reported.

"A few very trifling differences--Aggie's bad measurement--or camera angle--the curve on the hand. But I'd buy the idea that this fox bit Calder before he died--and after he walked out of this room. Proving that Calder saw Bogarty. So what?"

"Proving nothing of the sort," Aggie answered. "Proving--merely--that Calder saw Bogarty's fox. Or maybe--vice versa, only. A point I was trying to elucidate, philosophically--to Sarah just now. We have piled up a mountain of information and we have done only a pint of thinking."

"You haven't been watching me lie awake nights!" Wes said.

"I mean--real thinking. Speculation. Pushing out in the blue. For example, have you ever thought that Hank Bogarty may never have reached Indian Stones?"

"That's impossible!"

Aggie grinned. "Is it? Prove it! We know that his car got as far as Upper Lake--

and went in it. We know that his fox got loose--and we now have the fox. We know his fox bit Calder--and since foxes--even reasonably tame ones--don't just rush up and bite men, we can assume this fox, at the time of the biting, was on a leash, or in a car, or something of that sort. But does that demonstrate Hank Bogarty was on the other end of the leash or at the wheel of the car? Not positively. We know that Hank Bogarty's knife pinned Hank Bogarty's calling card to Sarah's door--or--at least . . . I think it was the same knife. We know Hank Hogarty's knife was found in George Davis's heart--because you sent the knife out to Seattle and the man who made it identified it, as the press duly reported. We know the calling card was Hank's--because you sent that out. We know Hank was in Albany--because the clerk at the telegraph office identified him from a photograph made for 'Aid Britain' propaganda in Seattle. The newspapers, again. We--"

"Good Lord," said Wes.

Aggie chuckled. "We know all that--but not any of it proves Hank was here. Let us say, purely for argument, that somebody knew Hank was coming and caught up with him in Albany. Let us say this person killed Hank, set him in a barrel of cement and threw him in the Hudson--or otherwise effectively disposed of the body. This person then drove to Indian Stones with the car, the fox, the knife, the calling cards--and anything else that may yet turn up. The car--"

Wes slapped his knee. "Sure! The car is driven into the lake! A cinch! The card is stuck to Sarah's door--for her to find. But Aggie puts the knife on the rail, Calder picks it up, the murderer is around with the fox on a leash--Calder runs into them--the murderer bangs Calder one on the head--because being seen with that fox would give him away!

He gets back Hank's knife from Calder's person! The murderer lets the fox go--or it escapes--he doesn't care. That's wonderful! From there on--the murderer only has to go on making it look as if Bogarty was round to keep me, and the newspapers, and everybody, looking for Hank--instead of somebody else!" The trooper's excitement faded.

"Except for one thing."

"Exactly," said Aggie.

Sarah looked blank. "Exactly what?"

Wes glanced at Aggie. "How does this murderer pass through a locked and bolted door--or a window the size of a book--and put that knife in Davis? Or--did Davis kill himself--after all? Had he stolen the money in the cellar--and did he come across Hank's knife somehow--and use it?"

"No," Sarah said, "George never did!"

"Then I wish," Wes grunted, "you could explain what did happen in that darkroom!"

"I can," Aggie answered. "It was very simple. Finding out--was what put me onto the theory of blue-sky thinking." Nobody interrupted him as he described, meticulously, the two trees he had seen at the summerhouse--the tree with the scars and the tree with the knothole. "In other words," he said, "if you think of the knothole as the little window-and the big tree as Davis--you get the picture. Somebody threw that knife into Davis."

Sarah gasped. "I thought of that long ago. But I didn't believe you could throw a knife hard enough--and, besides--George had the thing in his hand."

"Somebody," Aggie answered, "was out there at the summerhouse--throwing a knife through that knothole and into the tree beyond it--hard enough to dig the point into the wood well up on the blade! The slits were an inch wide! Anyway-Sarah's wrong. That was a heavy knife. You could throw it as hard as a baseball. You could throw it clear through a man, I daresay, except that it had a guard on it."

"But--George was holding it--" she protested.

Aggie nodded. "Yeah. Being struck--in the heart--like that--might produce instantaneous collapse in most people. Shock. But not in George Davis. Not in a surgeon.

Look at the scene. George Davis, locked in his darkroom, working on those prints he'd made of the deadfall. Up in the tree sits the man we don't know. Woman--even. Why not?"

' Tree?' she asked.

"There's a big maple outside the barn. The murderer is in it--looking at George.

Maybe he is going to kill him because he is afraid of what those films may show.

Something of the sort passed through my mind when I broke in. I thought that maybe the murderer might have intended to come back for something in that darkroom. Pictures.

And that maybe Danielle and I had beaten him to it." Aggie looked patronizingly at the trooper's nod of commendation. "I can, and do, think--sometimes. Only--you didn't find a thing that was useful in any of the negatives--did you, Wes?"

"Nothing directly useful. Or very useful. No."

Aggie hesitated--and went on. "Okay. The murderer makes a deliberate noise.

George turns and peers at the window. The knife is thrown. George clasps it and tries to withdraw it--for one, fearful instant. Then he topples."

"I guess," Wes said, "you've got it."

"Guess! Do you need corroboration? If you do--think of this. The maple tree is at an angle from the barn. The phone wires run through it--low down in the branches--to the first pole.-I daresay, if you look, you'll find the limb from which the murderer threw.

Maybe even some old scratches. And you'll find that he had to lean, probably, in order to throw. You'll find, maybe,that even if he used the best possible limb, after a throw, a person might lose his balance-"

Wes finished for him. "And break down the phone wires! By golly, Aggie, that's brilliant! Why didn't I think an accident might have brought those wires down!"

"Because," Aggie answered, "when telephone wires are severed, you habitually think it was done to cut off telephones--and hence, on purpose. The very point I was making."

"So," Wes went on, "if we'd had the sense in the next few days to strip everybody at Indian Stones and look for two parallel bruises--or welts, at least--those wires should have made beauties--we'd have found whoever threw the knife!"

"Unless, of course," Aggie said calmly, "the person who threw it does not belong to Indian Stones."

Wes's expression was both humorous and irritated. "First I like you--and then I hate you. Sure. Could have been an outsider. Somebody who never had a thing to do with the people here--and was unknown here. Unknown--" he broke off and brightened-

"except for the fact that he practiced that shot out by the summerhouse! So--likely--not unknown. I'll have a look at those marks in the morning--get an expert on such things--!"

"I'm something of a dendrochronologist, myself," Aggie said, touching his beard.

"Every good archaeologist is, these days. That means, literally, telling dates by tree rings.

But we can stretch it to include telling seasons by bark growth over knife stabs. The marks were made last winter."

' Winter?'

"Yes: I didn't deduce that--exactly--by the regrowth--though if it had been winter before last, the bark would be pretty much healed. I'm telling it by the height from the ground of the tree with the big knot and the height of the marks--both of which heights I gave you. As you can see, nobody could have stood on the ground and thrown a knife through a knothole twelve feet off the earth in a slightly downward direction to a tree twenty feet away."

"Snow!" said Sarah. "Drifts!"

"Exactly. Snow. Somebody on snowshoes, probably. Not practicing to throw through a window at a noted surgeon. Just--ambling around--coming on the two trees--

realizing the setup was a test of skill--and making a lot of tries. I should say, not tries--but superb shots. Know anybody who can throw a knife like that, Wes?"

The trooper looked rather guiltily at Aggie. "I--well--I think I could myself. I was a crack at it when I was a kid."

"Nobody's here in the winter, though, except Jack," Sarah said.

"What about Jack?" Aggie asked.

The trooper shrugged. "Search me. He's an athlete. I've seen a lot of him--winters.

Gets lonely here--and you like to talk to a person with an education. He's pretty darned swell company. Smart."

"It's silly, anyhow," Sarah said. "He's such a--"

"--lamb." Aggie supplied her word. "I know. Well, he was here, anyhow. Does he ever go away from here--in the winter?"

"Certainly," Sarah replied. "He gets a whole month off--for one thing. His vacation has to be in the winter--because he works all summer. He comes down to New York for short trips to buy things for the club during the winter. Various people from Parkawan substitute for him. On rare occasions, the club has been closed altogether--

though the insurance rates go up, I believe. It was closed last year--for several weeks--in January or February. Jack had the flu. He was in Parkawan hospital."

"I see." Aggie nodded in agreement with himself. "In other words, anybody could have been throwing knives in trees here last winter! Most of the people have been here in the winter, at one time or another. If we assume that the murders had to do with the missing gold--if they were murders, of course--and if we assume that the person who tossed a knife in that tree last winter was the murderer--we can probably assume--just assume--that he was up here last winter on some errand connected with the whole business."

"Trying to locate the cache," Wes said.

"Well, probably. And--if so--that person undoubtedly took great pains to make it appear that he--or she--was anywhere but in Indian Stones at the time. Probably 'left for a vacation in Florida'--or what not. That means--we'd have to check every alibi for everybody in the place for the best part of the winter. We'd have to check Hank Bogarty for the whole winter--out in Seattle--"

Wes groaned. "We're back to him again!"

"--and we'd also have the possibility of a person--or persons--unknown to us--

which we could not check."

"Look," said the trooper. "I'm grateful for the explanation of what happened to Davis. And for the capture of the fox. If you've got any more beauties like that, trot 'em out. If not--don't sit there making me drive myself nuts all over again! I like tangible stuff."

Aggie nodded, without annoyance. "All right. Okay. You like things. Realities.

Stuff. What have you got? List 'em in your mind. You've got a knife, a calling card, a fox, an automobile, some veal bones that were in it. Incidentally--the veal bone I spotted on the cellar floor! What about it?"

"Just veal," said Wes. "No teeth marks. No gnawing. No fox signs."

Aggie chuckled. "I'd all but forgotten that. All right. You've got the deadfall and the bread and the honey and so on. You've got a wine cellar, a bottle of hock, an open cellar window, a secret door, a secret safe that contains straw and some chips from boxes.

You've got broken telephone wires, a missing million in gold and platinum that is real though absent. You've got a pair of shoe pacs that Dr. Davis dropped in Lower Lake.

That is, if you're the man I think you are, you've got 'em."

Wes nodded. "There was blood on them--a little trace in the leather. Same type as Calder's--the expert says."

"Good. Then--you've got two bodies--one with a bitten hand--all extremely concrete and tangible things. A slew of realities. And yet--you're no nearer to finding the murderer of Calder and Davis than the man in the moon! You can't even prove absolutely that either one was murdered! What does that suggest to you?"

' That I'm a dunce."

Aggie shook his head. "Again--the thought-direct. It suggests to me, captain, that the murderer--I think there was one--was a person of enormous invention. A resourceful person. One who could improvise rapidly. It suggests, in other words, the realm of ideas.

It may suggest that you're a dunce. But I, myself, refuse to admit that I am a dunce, or anything like one. Therefore, it suggests that the person responsible for what you once called 'this rumpus'--is bright. Have you ever examined the people connected directly with this whole matter, in the light of that?"

"I've considered 'em, sure. In the light of that--and of opportunity. Who could have had a chance--besides those 'persons unknown' you talked about?"

Aggie started to tick off names on his fingers. "First--Bogarty. Sarah vouchsafes he was an intellectual bearcat. He knew the gold was around here. He's missing. He's the number one possibility. Next--Davis was a likely suspect for killing Calder. Davis may have discovered that Calder robbed the mutual till. And someone else may have killed the doctor. Always a chance of that. Besides, Davis had the best motive on earth for doing in Calder. Calder ran off with his wife. Davis had no decent alibi for the night Calder died."

Wes said, "He had one. So did Waite. I promised old man Waite I wouldn't bring it out unless I had to--but I'll tell you two--on the same pledge. Waite married a chorus girl in the early nineteen-tens--"

Sarah drew a prodigious breath. "He did! And I never knew it! Why! That's--that's practically treason!"

The policeman grinned. "He was ashamed of the woman. They had a daughter.

The mother died--Waite had paid all her bills and taken care of her. Took care of the kid--

afterward. Saw her once in a while--although he never let her know he was her father. He brought her to Parkawan several years ago--about ten, as I recall. She went to school there--and married there. The night Calder was killed--she was taken fearfully sick. Her husband was away. She called Waite--as an old friend. He called Davis. Waite told Davis who the girl was--and Davis went to her house. Took an X ray of her. Some sort of kidney stones. I found the plate in the darkroom. Checked it. Anyway--Davis got Waite's daughter fixed up and comfortable--and Waite was mighty relieved about it. The girl--no need of your knowing her name--didn't know who Davis was, either. I've talked to her.

And that's what Davis was doing between the time he left Danielle--and the time he came back with the X-ray plate!"

"How long was he at the girl's home?"

Wes shrugged. "An hour. Waite was there longer--came in the afternoon, in fact--

but he left around two in the morning. A neighbor came in; the girl was asleep. I know what you're going to say, Aggie. An hour's not enough. Two o'clock still left time. Each man had his own car. Each might possibly have run into Calder here, after, say, two o'clock--and killed him--and carried him up on Garnet Knob. That deadfall might even have been made after daylight. I never could decide. It's possible that Waite or Davis, coming back from that emergency, might have stopped at Calder's house because there was a light on--and killed him--and hidden him in the woods--and thought out and rigged up the bear-trap dodge later in the day. Possible. But you'd hardly think--after a night such as they'd put in--!"

"On the contrary. You might think with equal logic that, having established such superb alibis--which could be weaseled out of them in a crisis--either man might feel in the exact right mood to carry out a scheme against Calder."

Wes looked at Sarah. "I leave it to you."

"I vote with Aggie," Sarah said. "That gives us three possible people--people with opportunity--people who had motives--or who could have had motives. Go on. Danielle-had both. Hated Jim. Alone in her house. No check on her that night at all. Ralph Patton was alone in his house too. I asked him. His motive could be fear of Calder--or a desire to have Beth inherit and a plan to marry Beth--or, Ralph could have taken the gold and Calder could have found out. Davis could have also found out--later. He might have taken a squint in our safe and discovered it empty. He might even have found a clue to the person who emptied it."

"Easily," said Aggie.

"Beth," Sarah went on. "Beth was asleep in bed, I imagine. Bill too, and Martha.

Bill and Beth hated their father. I don't know that either of them hated George Davis.

But--again--if George had found out that they'd committed patricide--"

"Asleep in bed!" Wes muttered. "Try and disprove that one!"

"Jack Browne," Sarah continued. "Calder had done plenty to that boy. Caused his father to kill himself--which is supposed to have brought about his mother's death.

Deprived him of his inheritance. Jack-of course! He was up at the club all night. Asleep?"

She looked at Wes.

"Asleep," said Wes, with a sigh. "So he says."

"And old John," she went on. "Calder even robbed old John! And where old John was, from the time I went to bed that night--till I woke Aggie at four, only old John knows. And there are a good many other people here who--!"

"This," Wes said abruptly, "is getting us nowhere!"

Sarah checked herself and agreed. "A mountain of evidence--and a roomful of candidates--but not one ounce of certainty even about what happened. Aggie, you've disappointed me."

There was the sound of a car in the drive. It stopped under the porte-cochère. Beth walked to the screen door and leaned into the living room. "Bill and Martha and I are going swimming," she said. "It's hot as a baked brick! We'll turn on the boathouse floodlights--and probably collect a crowd. Want to come?"

"Maybe later," Aggie said.

Beth smiled at Wes. "How about you?"

"Thanks. I'm leaving. I've still got a lot of foraging to do tonight."

Beth said, "You be sure to come, Aggie. Do you good to dunk your beard. Bring Danielle, if you like. There's a light in her living room and her coupes in the drive."

Aggie flushed.

Wes stared at him with incredulity. "You aren't toying with that blonde heartbreaker, Aggie, are you?"

"Certainly not!"

Sarah snorted.

Wes went to the door. "Well, I'm going. I've got to look up some men in a tavern about twenty miles down the line. They think they saw a guy like Bogarty buying gas, on the night in question. While I'm at it, I may push on to catch a black-jack dealer in Saratoga who believes Bogarty put up at his aunt's tourist home in western New York. It's been like that--for a long time." He grinned. "Thanks at lot, Aggie, for all the help. Don't think I don't appreciate it."

The professor waved his hand. "Incidentally," he said, "just to keep the record straight: where were you the night Calder--and so forth?"

The trooper stared with an irritability that became amusement. "To tell the truth, I was about three miles on the other side of Garnet Knob, watching some yokels open up a night-running still. So I haven't any alibi either, Aggie. Good night!"

After he had gone there was a long silence. Sarah finally said, "I feel out of it, you know. Neither of you put the finger on me!" When Aggie did not answer, she turned to look at him. He literally had not heard. He was lying on the inglenook seat, with his feet hanging over the end, banging his forehead with his fist as if it were a door. Sarah smirked. "Don't beat your brains out, Aggie. They may be a nuisance now, but perhaps you can use 'em later for something."

He sat bolt upright. "Listen, Sarah! Don't jump and don't scream! I think your old friend Hank is alive--and I think I know where he is!"

CHAPTER 16

Sarah Plum looked at her talented nephew for a full minute with an expression of electrified anticipation. In that time he had risen from the inglenook seat, made a complete circuit of the room, lighted his pipe, set it on the center table beside the silver fox, forgotten it, and started to hunt for it. Sarah pointed at the pipe. "Well?"

"We've been making more sense than we thought," he replied. "But what to do next is the question."

"If you'd care to enlighten a poor old woman who is about to explode with excitement--"

He gazed at her. "Enlighten you? First, I've got to enlighten myself. Then I'll discuss things with you." He started toward the front door and stopped as he reached it.

"Be back in a few minutes. Fifteen. Look. Remember--some time ago--you told me that you'd once found an old plan of the original hotel? The--Sachem House? The one that burned?"

"Certainly. I found the drawings in the club library. That's how I learned about the old cellar with the strong room in it."

"You got 'em?"

"The plans? Of course not! As soon as we'd decided to dig out that strong room on the quiet--I burned them."

"Big help," he said. "While I'm gone--draw 'em--from memory."

"Draw plans I destroyed thirty-some years ago? Are you batty?"

"You said I was." He grinned and went out, slamming the screen. He came right back. "Flashlight," he said. "Where is it?"

"Aggie, don't be in such a dither! The light's on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, where it always is!"

He crossed the room and picked it up. "You might try to catch Wes by telephone--

though the prospects aren't hot. Tell him I have another idea. And as for being in a dither-

-when Jim Calder and George Davis were dead--that was one thing. An--academic thing.

But I don't think Hank is dead--and that's entirely non-academic--in view of the fact that he might be killed any minute, hour, or day!"

In spite of the heat of the night, he ran to the road and turned in the direction of Upper Lake. The hypotheses he had propounded to Wes Wickman had been mental exercises rather than deliberate explorations of possibilities. But one of them--the theory that somebody might have been using Hank Bogarty's possessions to simulate his presence--so neatly fitted the circumstances that it had hung suspended in Aggie's brain.

It brought him, first, to the old consideration of where Hank's body might be if Hank was dead; second, to the new notion that Hank could, conceivably, be alive and confined somewhere. Aggie realized the difficulties in keeping any man--and especially a man such as Hank was supposed to be--under lock and key. Moreover, he'd have to be fed, probably, to be still alive-and he'd have to get water, surely.

But, as Aggie allowed that notion to percolate through his mind, Beth had arrived to invite him to go swimming. Aggie had spent the whole evening in a discussion of every oddity and abnormality connected with Indian Stones since his arrival, so the mention of swimming, coming as it did, while he was wondering where and how a man like Bogarty could possibly be held, recalled the statement made by Mrs. Drayman about algae in the water of Upper Lake. That statement pulled together a host of seemingly irrelevant ideas. Their integration represented a wild guess. But Aggie had confidence in it. A quick trip to Upper Lake was imperative.

The "beach" on that lake--where Mrs. Drayman preferred to swim, owing to its proximity to her house--was a short, narrow strip of natural sand. No attempt had been made to extend it by trucking in more sand, as at Lower Lake. A small brook had carried in the sand, year by year, and the waves had arranged it.

Aggie trotted up to the beach and swirled on his light. The water was disappointingly clear. Clear--but stained, perhaps. It certainly looked more brownish than the water of Lower Lake. He scooped up a handful and tasted it. No peculiar flavor. He hurried along the strip of sand to the mouth of the brook, wishing it was daylight so that he could define colors more accurately. The stream gurgled into the lake from a tier of pools shored up by mossy ledges. It was distinctly brownish. Since it was presumably spring-fed, the stream should have been crystal clear. Aggie thought that Mrs. Drayman would readily assume that a sudden darkening of the water on the beach was due to

"algae" and that it was "unhealthy"--two notions that had nothing, essentially, to do with fact. Mrs. Drayman's opinions were forceful--and her interest in fact was always swayed by convenience.

Aggie plunged into the woods and followed the stream up the hill. Now and again he examined it to make sure he was also following the brownness in it. The brook threaded its way between trees and glacial boulders for an eighth of a mile and came to an end in a gravelly bowl. This emergence represented the spring that fed the brook. It was, in reality, the spot where the stream ceased to run underground. The water in the bowl was even darker than the water farther down. On the bottom were myriad small squares of torn-up paper. He dipped into the basin and examined some of the fragments.

Paper from a notebook and from what had probably been a tin-can label. Aggie shone his light at the surrounding rocks and studied them. He estimated the location of the spring.

The clubhouse lay above him, several hundred yards to the southwest.

He ran back to the lake shore and started for the road. On his way he passed a small pier at which two or three rowboats were moored. A voice spoke from one of them.

"Hello, Aggie."

He spun around. "Danielle! I heard you were back!"

"What the deuce are you doing--whizzing around in the woods?"

"What are you doing--sitting in a boat alone?"

"Thinking. Just--thinking. I was going to come over to see you and Sarah, by and by. How is she?"

"Much better. Well, I've got to push on."

"You're in a terrible hurry!"

"Yes," he said. "I am."

"Won't you talk to me awhile?"

He was already moving away. "Can't. Busy. See you tomorrow." He ran again.

When he came back to the living room at Rainbow Lodge, he found Sarah bent over a large piece of brown paper, with a pencil and a ruler. "I take it," she said, "you believe somebody's hidden Hank under the club?"

"Yeah. I'm sure of it, now." He looked over her shoulder. "Yeah. That's the way it goes. The plan of the wine cellar is perfect. I think the passage to the strong room goes more north and less east. But it'll do." He watched her erase and make the change. "Yeah.

Like that. Do you remember any other cellar space? Anything they might have covered up? Anything the fire itself might have covered up?"

"I honestly don't, Aggie. I think there was some. But maybe that's just a wish. I have a vague recollection it would be around in back--say, where the sun parlor is now.

Part of the Sachem Hotel was built up on bare rock-carved and blasted out. It might have been that. I know that the foundations were so strong, everywhere, that the architect used all he could and built new ones only where he was compelled to. There was a note about it in those plans--and the old foundations were all in dotted lines. The Sachem House, though, was perfectly rectangular--"

Aggie slapped his hands together. "That's something! If we could find two opposite corners--hunh?"

"And it was smaller than the club. Much narrower." Aggie thought. "Which means--if there's still some unexplored cellar--the old entrance might have been in a place now outdoors. Here's the thing. If I were Hank, and if I were being kept underground--

and if--mind you--if--I had a spring on a rivulet or even a sink-hole in my prison--one that ran in and out--as it would have to do in order not to fill my prison full--well, I'd muck up the spring in the hope somebody would notice the muck. But--suppose the place was rock? Old oak beams overhead, say, and perhaps a mess of roots coming through cracks in the stone? There's a lot of sumac around the club. Suppose I had a pot or a pan or a kettle. Well, I'd boil up the wood and the roots, if I could. Make a brown stew and pour that in the spring. I'd tear up all the paper I could--and add it too. The rocks round here are ferrous. I might put some of them in, if it was possible to stew anything. Then--if the tannin in the roots would act at all on the iron in the rocks, I'd get something really good. Tannic acid and iron salts are the basis of the earliest inks. I'd keep staining that water, knowing that I wasn't far from the lake and that the spring must flow into it. And I'd keep praying that somebody would notice that the lake, at some point, was becoming an unprecedented, color, and that whoever noticed would investigate. Since I was being held by force, and since I'd sent word that I was coming, I'd expect people to be looking for me. The police. And I'd expect the police to investigate the change in the water. Not--

expect, maybe. But I'd hope!"

Sarah had just listened--with her mouth open and her gray eyes very alive. When her nephew stopped talking, she said, "Aggie, that's the first thing a soul has said about what Hank might or might not do that sounds like him! What put you on the track of a stain in Upper Lake?"

He sat down and covered his face with his hands. "Mrs. Drayman. She wouldn't swim in it."

Sarah frowned. "Lots of excavations hit springs. As far as stewing up a mess of roots and rocks--wouldn't it smother him to make a fire?"

Aggie shrugged. "We don't know." "He was an engineer--of course--"

"Exactly. So he'd know about the rocks. About the iron in 'em. And he raised silver foxes--so he knows about fur and tanning--and tanning involves using tannic acid--

that's what the word comes from."

"I wish I could remember," she said, "some spot on those old drawings that was marked 'Hit water here'--but I can't."

Aggie grinned at her and returned to her side. He stared at her sketch. "This is my department--now--isn't it? That's what I'm brooding about. An archaeologist ought to be able to dope it. I've helped open tombs. I've directed the digging up of a whole city--a city more than three thousand years old. This joint isn't a century old. How much narrower than the club was the old hotel?"

"Maybe a third."

Aggie began to draw. "The front veranda--is on new foundations--I think.

Cemented fieldstone. So the old ones begin with the club. They must have gone back--out over the spot--where the rear drive is now. Where they trundle out the garbage cans. In the days of the hotel--that was probably part of the basement. Now--widthways--if we take off a third--that just about does come to the solarium. The water table level in those rocks slopes from southwest to northeast--roughly--and the spring--is over about here where the fox's tail is. A line would run pretty close to the solarium--if not under it. That's alongside the first tee on the golf course--and the sun porch is about half a story above it.

Of course, water can flow cockeyed underground, just as it does above-ground. But--

taking one thing with another--I think I'll try to burrow under that porch tonight."

"I wish I could go along with you."

"I won't have time," Aggie said solemnly, "to dig a hole big enough for you."

"Suppose somebody sees you burrowing under that porch?"

"Nobody will. I'll start under the sumacs. It won't take me long. The club's full of people this time of night. Bright inside and dark outside. I've had plenty of experience--

digging. The solarium's on stone piers--with a heavy sill and clapboards between. Of course, if I knew where the other guy went in--" He shrugged. "Maybe he didn't. Maybe Hank's nowhere. That brook could have cut into some sort of minerals--or deadwood--

underground--and stained itself. Somebody could have tossed in the paper." He started toward the kitchen. "I'll get a couple of tools--"

"Aggie! If you find him--what will you do?"

"Get him out--quick. And ask him who put him there."

"Don't you know?"

He stared at his aunt. "Why, no. Do you?"

She shook her head. "I thought you did. You tell me the things you do think in such a spotty way--!"

"Hank ought to know--if, as, and when," he said. "Sarah, didn't you say there used to be a hidden exit to the old hotel? A place the gay glades used for a quick getaway when their irate spouses caught them weekending?"

"Great grief! There was!" Sarah sighed. "But that wasn't on the old plans either, Aggie. It was just--a story. A legend. Your father's father told me. Maybe his father used it. I wouldn't have put it beyond old Hilary Plum--to judge from the family records!"

CHAPTER 17

Aggie lay on his belly and dug like a beaver. Over his head was a canopy of sumac leaves. Filtering through was light from the club solarium. He could hear the thump-thump of the feet of table-tennis players, occasional strident voices, and the tap of the ball. Somewhere in the building above, a radio was playing. It began to utter news and the players stopped to listen. It went on broadcasting music, and the people resumed their game. The sill was partly buried, and dry-rotted. The ground outside it was hard.

But Aggie inched steadily into his hole and presently his feet pulled out of sight.

It was pitch-dark under the porch. The thumping of the players was louder. Aggie switched on his light.

Such a place, even if inaccessible to man, can be reached by fungi, molds, and insects. Such a place contains rubble, old boards, nails, wire, rope, shingles--the oddments dropped and abandoned by masons and carpenters at the time of construction.

Aggie could not quite stand up. The enclosed area was fifty or sixty feet long and some twenty feet in width. He walked through it, inspecting the ground. It consisted, mostly of time-compressed ashes, overlaid with dirt, rotted sod, and the debris. The foundation under the club proper--the inside wall of the place--was blackened. Evidence of the burning of the Sachem House.

There were, however, two squares of unblackened brick on that wall--where windows that had once given on the outdoors had been blocked up because the club plans had called for a porch over them. Aggie noted them and thought about them. But he searched the place for a full half hour--with every iota of his trained skill--before he turned to them. Finding nothing that an archaeologist would consider suggestive of an old door or a hidden passage, Aggie finally went up to one of the two bricked-up rectangles.

According to his knowledge of the cellar and Sarah's plan--the area behind those windows was terra incognita. No doubt it would prove to be a mere black hole under the lounge. Aggie reluctantly picked at the mortar around the least firm-looking brick.

When he got it out--in two halves--he removed another. Then, fixing his eye and his light on the hole, he peered in. After that, he set himself to the demolition of the bricks--expertly--and as quietly as he could, although the noise overhead was considerable.

Behind those bricks was a room--lower than the outside ground level, with a venerable coat of whitewash on its walls. The floor looked like a long-entombed bit of field. But in its middle was a huge pile of ashes and at one side of the pile were steps going down to a door.

Aggie scrambled through the bricked-up window. The room was empty. There was no visible sign of any method of ingress save the one he had made. He knew there must be one--but he did not take time to look. He went down the stairway to the door. It was also blackened, and upon it was a new bolt.

It had taken no more than a glance to reconstruct the raison-d'être of the stairs and the door. Into this place, as the old Sachem House burned, had poured much of the water that had doubtless been carried to the fire by a bucket brigade. Into it, too, had fallen a sludge of ashes, covering the door and filling the stair well. Afterward, the charred foundations had lain naked in the wind and the rain for years--until the site had been purchased for the club. During that period, every trace of the staircase had been erased by drifting earth, by leaves, by growing things--if, indeed, the ashes had left a visible trace.

Somebody had located the stairway, either by search, or--as in Sarah's case--from an old document, and dug it out.

Aggie shot the bolt. He pushed the door open. Ahead, was a long, downsloping passage. He followed it for a hundred yards. Its walls became rock. Cut in the wall, at that point, was a door; and on the door, another new bolt, as well as a heavy beam. He lifted the beam and slid the bolt. This door opened out.

Behind it was a chamber. The walls were rock. The ends of freshly broken roots spiked the ceiling. From somewhere inside came an incessant gurgling of water. Aggie's torch, moving across the floor, touched a heap of opened tin cans and an old chair--and held for a moment on the opposite corner, where a pool of water flowed slowly out of sight in a cavern no more than a foot high. The air in the place was tinged with a chemical smell, but it was not foul. He had the impression that it was replenished from the little cave where the brook ran out.

Aggie spoke. "Mr. Bogarty!"

There was no answer. He stepped into the room and moved his light. Then he held it very still. Stretched out on the floor--raggedly bearded and in filthy clothes--lay a man.

At his side was a pail set on two stones and under it was an empty solidified-alcohol can.

The man did not look very much like the Hank Bogarty of the photographs Aggie had seen--but it was Hank. Aggie thought for a moment that he was dead. Looking closer, he saw that he was breathing--lightly, rapidly.

Aggie knelt and took the man's wrist. His pulse was racing and feeble. He had been there, Aggie thought, for more than two weeks--supplied with food by his captor--

and with canned heat, for cooking it. Light too--Aggie saw--for there was a mound of candle grease on the ground near by. Aggie thought, for a moment, that exhaustion--fear-

-fury--shock--had prostrated Hank. Then he saw the true reason.

Hank's head lolled. On the side of it, toward the back, was a savage wound that had not healed. The wound was infected. Reddish streaks ran into Hank's scalp and down his neck. He had needed medical attention for the injury that had knocked him out--and made it possible for someone to take him there.

Aggie considered the two courses open to him. Hank was a heavy man--and unconscious. To take him out would be a tremendous task--and a rough journey for the sick man. To leave him might mean that his captor would check up on the prisoner-and see the hole in the bricked window. Aggie knew much about Hank's captor. He shuddered. Then, taking a deep breath, he rolled Hank on his face, wormed underneath him, wrapped his right arm around a thigh and seized a wrist with his right hand. He picked up his light with his left hand and lifted mightily.

He went back up the passage at a running walk. He climbed the steps swiftly. He was panting. To lift Hank up and into the old window seemed at first impossible. Then Aggie saw he could do it by removing more bricks. He worked with frenzy. The radio overhead was still going--the feet were still thumping--but it seemed far away and Aggie did not feel safe in that place.

When his task was ended and he was ready to try lifting Hank again, he stopped to breathe. Overhead he heard a slight creak--a sound disoriented from the others.

Instantly, he switched off his light. He peered up in the darkness. He saw--some distance away, between two of the floor joists that made the ceiling--a long thin wedge of dim light that disappeared as he looked at it.

Grimly, he lifted Hank again and thrust his head into the hole. Fiercely, he levered the big man up to it and pushed him through. He plunged after Hank even before Hank had fallen limply on the other side.

There was some sort of trap door that opened into the clubhouse. Under a rug, probably. And whoever had put Hank down there had opened the trap a little--and seen Aggie's light--and closed it. Aggie thought of yelling. But it might take the people upstairs many minutes to find him. In the meanwhile--the man who had opened the trap door would have come out, and around the club. Then what? Aggie didn't know.

The thing to do was to drag Hank to the hole under the sill, leave him there for a moment's reconnoitering, and come back. The tunnel would have to be enlarged for Hank. Aggie squirmed out. He stood in the sumacs, panting, sopping wet with sweat. He heard nothing. He waited, hiding against the side of the building. Still nothing. He ventured to crawl back and shine his light at Hank--and the space under the solarium.

Nobody. Hank lay still, breathing rapidly. Aggie began to widen the hole--and listen--and work again. Ten minutes later he dragged Hank through it.

He paused once more to consider.

Suppose he picked up Hank again--walked boldly into the light--carried him around to the veranda--took him into the club? Was someone waiting for him--out on the shadowy golf course--with a rifle? Would there be a couple of shots--and somebody running away in the night? It was possible. But--suppose he slipped along the side of the club with Hank, and into the lilacs, and through them to where the sumacs met, and from there, down into the woods? Aggie caught his breath and struggled to lift the man. Then--

a shadow among the black shadows--he began to move.

Half an hour later, at the edge of the road in front of Sarah's cottage, Aggie waited for a car to pass and went across--palsied, gasping, almost demented by physical strain and sustained fear. He kicked at the screen door and Sarah opened it. He was too winded to speak. He staggered through the living room and into the butler's pantry, where he stretched Hank on the floor and lay flat beside the man, struggling for breath.

Aggie's appearance--dirty, sweat-covered, bramble-torn--and his behavior--were a test of Sarah's nerve. But she understood, at least partly. To have possession of Hank Bogarty, now, was to be in as grave danger as Calder had once been--and George Davis.

She pulled the blind on the one window ill the pantry. She made a cursory examination of Bogarty. She said, "No word yet from Wes! I've sent out as urgent a message as I could--

to get them trailing him."

Aggie nodded. "How long--how long--for an ambulance to come?"

"Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty."

"Call one."

When she came back from the phone, Aggie was breathing with less violence. He knelt over Bogarty. "Blood poisoning. From that sock on the back of his head.

Ambulance coming?"

"I told 'em," said Sarah, "that if they weren't here in ten minutes, I'd shoot the driver."

"Somebody saw me taking him out," he went on. "Opened a trap door a slit. He was--just where we--figured--he would be. So they know--whoever it is--that I've got him out. And they know--"

"--that the minute Hank can speak--it'll be all over for them."

"That old exit from the hotel," he said, nodding, "has a room off it. The passage goes on--doubtless is blocked up. The room was probably for that safe--originally--but they hit water. Didn't use it for anything, I guess. Afraid it might be flooded. The brook runs in and out through a cave. Air comes up it. But I don't imagine sound travels down very far. It's probably crooked--like a muffler or a gun silencer. Hank was in there. He would have died--!"

Sarah tried to calm the expression of horror in his eyes. "Don't think about it now, Aggie. We'll take Hank to the hospital--"

"You," he answered. He stood up. His muscles were trembling so that his whole body seemed to shiver. "You get in that ambulance and go with Hank! Take Chillie too!

I'll send old John away with Windle!"

"You can't stay here! Your life isn't safe for a second!"

"I'm staying! I hate--whoever did this! Somebody's going to pay for the last hour I went through! I believe I know who it is--but I'm not sure, and I don't care! You get out of here--and I mean it, Sarah! It's not a question--any longer--of being ingenious or of using my head! When I saw this poor devil dying in that hole--I lost my head! Do you understand?"

Sarah stared at her nephew for a full ten seconds. "Yes, Aggie. I do. Be careful!"

He left the pantry quickly. He was in his room, changing his clothes, when the ambulance came. Its siren murmured and its motor thrashed. The feet of men carrying a stretcher pounded in the cottage. Then the murmuring siren faded away on the dirt road.

Indian Stones was silent again. It took Aggie a considerable time to change. But, when he had finished, he hurried downstairs and went to Sarah's teapot. The station wagon keys were gone. Windle and old John had used it for their departure. Aggie ran to the barn, started the vintage limousine, and drove up to the club.

He entered the main lounge calmly enough and walked through the rooms. It was a quarter past eleven. The usual crowd had thinned. But the late-stayers were still on hand. Byron Waite, reading a newspaper, Ralph and Beth at their interminable game of table tennis, Mrs. Drayman shepherding her daughter and, in the exercise of that function, scolding Bill. Danielle wasn't there. Neither was Jack Browne. A more complete showing than Aggie had expected.

He asked old Mr. Waite where Jack was and got the usual, irritable response:

"How should I know! I don't keep track of him! He's supposed to keep track of me. Not that he does! In his room, I guess."

"Where's that?"

"The front room--on the floor above."

Aggie took the staircase in agile, noiseless bounds. The floor above was carpeted.

There was a transom over the door of the end room, painted black, as if to keep out the hall light. In the hall, on a small, round mahogany table, stood a vase of artificial flowers.

Aggie removed the vase and carried the table to Jack's door. He stood up on it gingerly; his face came level with the painted transom. He moved his head until he found a crack in the paint and he pressed his eye close. The resultant partial view of Jack's room was adequate. It was in feverish disorder. Two bulging suitcases stood on the windowsill and another, nearly full, lay on the bed. A revolver lay on the bureau.

Aggie restored the table to its place and knocked on Jack's door. It sprang open.

Jack stood there in a shirt and tie and gray slacks, with a fedora cocked on the back of his head. When he saw that it was Aggie, his face flickered and relaxed. He even smiled.

"Something I can do--?"

Aggie stepped toward him. "Take your hat off, Jack. You're not going anywhere."

Jack backed into his room. "Yes, I am! Downtown! An errand." His voice rose.

"Don't come in here!" His muscles twitched as he yielded ground--twitched with the restrained will to grapple with Aggie. But he did not. Aggie kept coming in, and Jack kept backing until he bumped against his bedstead. Then he tried to turn.

Aggie, who had one hand in the pocket of his jacket, said, "I wouldn't go for that revolver if I were you, Jack. You'd never make it."

Jack sat down on the bed. His face became shiny and his chest rose and fell jerkily. His eyes had a look of frantic speculation which subsided as Aggie did nothing more sinister than to push back some magazines on a desk and sit down.

Jack said, "Why are you coming in here--like this? Suppose I am getting out? I can't stand this job any more! I hate the people! The orders! And this summer has been too much--already! My nerves are shot to pieces!"

Aggie continued to stare at him. He was now a little closer to the bureau than Jack. "The trap door," he said, "is in your office. At least--I imagine so. You cut it yourself, I presume. And dug out the steps. Did you find out about the place from an old blueprint? Or did you find the opening outdoors--somewhere? I didn't dare look for that--

tonight--"

Jack said, "Are you utterly nuts? What trap door? What passage? My office? I've hardly been in it all evening."

Aggie's face was like the face of a judge listening to some excruciating and unwitting testimony whereby a prisoner was hanging himself. "Why? Do you think that it is important for you to have been out of your office a good deal--tonight?"

Jack blustered. "I don't know what you mean! You get out of here! I want to leave!" Aggie kept his hand in his jacket pocket. "You know I've got Hank."

Jack said, "Hank who?" But he was slow in saying it.

Aggie went on, talking almost as if to himself. "Of course--Hank's unconscious.

Can't talk--probably won't be able to, for days. Still--" He shrugged and swung his foot.

"Everything pointed to you--"

Jack seemed to make some sense of the discussion. "Oh. This--Bogarty! You came here to accuse me of that! Aggie, old man! You've known me for years--since I was a kid! You know that I--" He smiled with considerable assurance. "Just because I took this moment to decide to beat it! You ought to know me better. If you've got something that'll scare the truth from somebody who is guilty of all the horrible things around here--

I'll--I'll do anything I can! Stay here, even. But you're barking up the wrong tree."

Aggie sat still on the desk--save for his foot--which went on swinging. He smiled a little, also. "Speaking of trees--they had a lot to do with it. Two good-sized ones--

chopped down to make that deadfall to put Calder's body in. Two others that showed me how George Davis had been killed. A tree that the broken phone wire dangled from.

Some high-up scars in the apple tree, convincing me the murderer--had been here last winter. You were here in the winter. And it had to be somebody who was in the club a lot.

Somebody who could know about the old Sachem House foundations. Being here every winter--you could explore them."

"Anybody could!" Jack was paying irregular attention because of what was going on in his mind.

"Yes. That bottle of hock. Somebody--following me the night I was down in the wine cellar and trying to leave ahead of me in a hurry--could have knocked it out of a bin.

It could have landed standing up. You weren't down there that night? You didn't hear me going through the lobby--and follow me--and rush back and change into pajamas?"

"Of course not! Beth saw me when I came downstairs that night--"

"You didn't do it, then?"

"No kidding--Aggie--!"

"Funny. I thought you did. I thought Bogarty came in here with that fox in a cage.

I thought he told you he'd left his calling card pinned on Sarah's door by his knife--and I thought he got talking about the old days and probably about his plans to get some more money for the British cause out of his old gang. I thought he realized you were close to everybody here and let out something about the fact that his old friends had a lot of gold he had mined for them. Had it hidden. I thought you'd dug out the old secret exit during the winter--just to relieve your boredom. I didn't know how you'd found it. And I thought that you were half crazed by the start of another season. A season of being ordered around and patronized by a community of people who were still rich--while you were poor, and your father was a suicide, and your mother was dead."

"You're wrong!"

"I thought--hearing there was a cash deposit around here--a big one--you went nuts, slugged Bogarty--and hid him down below with the idea of making him disgorge the dope about where the gold was. I thought, when you got back up, you saw Calder playing with that fox in its cage. I thought he'd just ambled in here after leaving Sarah's house to get a highball--or something--"

"I tell you, Aggie, if somebody did all this--!"

Aggie waved his hand. "It was my impression that Bogarty told you he hadn't yet seen anybody. But there was Calder, fooling with the fox--so Calder could report that Bogarty had reached the club. I supposed that Calder opened the cage to pet the fox and it bit him and he let it out. A dog 'the size of a fox'--you said once. That was smart!

Disarming. I thought you hit Calder with something, too. Then--as I figured it--you turned out all the club lights and put Calder in Hank's car and carried him up on the lumber road. You had all night to build that deadfall and run that car into Upper Lake.

But you found out Bogarty didn't know where the gold was! And you couldn't turn him loose! I thought--you watched the excitement about Calder's death and Bogarty's absence grow, hoping one of the people who owned the gold would make a move to check it.

Calder was dead and Sarah had mumps--so I presumed you'd kept close tabs on Davis and Waite. And I'd imagined Davis went down to his wine supply one day, maybe letting you know it--and you followed him. That led you to the gold--you probably watched him work the safe combination. Only--Davis has no wine down there any more. You realized that he could spot you as the thief, if you moved whatever was in that safe. He knew you'd seen him go down to the cellar and he might reason that you, alone, could know he'd gone there when he had no wine to look at. Maybe there was some other item--but you knew Davis could spot you somehow, and you knew you had to kill him. You knew he was already trying to work out who killed Calder--because you'd no doubt followed him enough to see that he was taking pictures of everything--the deadfall especially--and developing them in that darkroom. You had a knife like this one--"

Aggie's hand came out of his pocket. Jack flinched. A hunting knife landed lightly on the bed at his side. Jack picked it up. Aggie went on talking. "I was pretty sure it was you. There was that veal bone on the cellar floor. I think it slipped out of the fox cage when you carried the cage to the furnace to burn it. I don't know. That's my knife, but it's the same type as Hank's. Of course--all I've said is guessing. Still--it's a mass of stuff--

and who else fits it so well? When Bogarty is able to talk--we'll know, of course."

Jack was staring. "You can't prove it! Not a word of it!"

"No," said Aggie, "but you better come along with me and let Wes Wickman talk to you."

They were perhaps ten feet apart--Aggie's eyes boring into Jack's and Jack's eyes widening, hardening, as his lips stretched. He threw the knife with a whiplike motion of his arm. It struck Aggie in the chest; his hand went up to the place with the swiftness of a reflex. Jack was on his feet, leaning forward. But the knife did not penetrate Aggie's heart. It made a hard sound and Aggie caught it as it bounced away. In doing so, he cut his fingers. Jack froze.

"I don't need any more proof now, do I?" Aggie said. "I didn't think you'd try to leave the club tonight, till the people had gone. Why didn't you get me, when I carried Hank out?"

Jack was straightening up, slowly. "Mrs. Drayman cornered me," he said huskily.

"Talked and talked and talked. And I hadn't put the rug back--so I had to stand there."

"I thought of blocking the Indian Stones road with Sarah's jalopy--in case anybody came through in a hurry. I dropped into the club to check up--though. On you.

I've got on a sort of waistcoat. A rajah gave it to me. Water buffalo hide. It's supposed to be bullet-proof. And it's turned spears in its day. Will you come now, Jack?"

For another second, Jack leaned toward Aggie--his face as white as plaster and as rigid. Then he spun around and started for the gun on the bureau. The knife caught him between the tendons at the back of his knee and drove deep into the joint. He staggered and screamed horribly. Aggie was on him, from behind.

CHAPTER 18

Windle drove the magnificent relic, which Sarah used for transportation, from the cement highway to Indian Stones, and stopped at the side of Rainbow Lodge. The springs genuflected to deposit her. She admired her ferns and the blue sky showing through the trees above them. When she entered her living room, where her nephew was whistling a popular air, her maternal smile faded to a look of consternation.

Aggie, in trunks and sandals, was staring into a mirror which, lay flat on the center table. Beside the mirror was a round tin of brown shoe polish. He dabbed his left thumb into the tin and applied the polish to his chin, which was shaved bare. Then he wrinkled his nose. "Smell," he said. "No good. But it'll look like Sam Hill till it's sunburned."

Aggie's chin--the Plum chin--was pronounced. Not massive, but sharp and belligerent. It was also a pale color in comparison to the rest of his face. Sarah repressed a desire to have hysterics as he solemnly wiped away the shoe polish.

"John's idea," he said. "I didn't have much confidence in it, anyhow."

"John told you to shave off your beard!"

"No. Oh, no. John told me to use shoe polish till I got a sun tan. How's Hank?"

Sarah settled in a chair--carefully--so as not to burst into laughter. "He's fine. He made a statement for Wes today. Jack--that fiend--!"

"'Lamb' was always your word for him."

"I'll never have faith in my judgment of human nature again!"

"You were saying?"

"Jack put Hank in that--that dungeon--and then tried to worm out of him where the gold was hidden. When he was satisfied Hank really didn't know--he just--stopped seeing him. Left him with the tinned food and a few candles and some solidified alcohol.

He'd have gone away and let Hank starve to death--or die of infection--"

"He isn't a nice fellow," Aggie said, rising. "Bright--but in the wrong way. Has Wes found where Jack put the gold, yet?"

Sarah was some time in replying. "There isn't any gold. Calder stole it all. Ralph's checking his records--and they show it--indirectly. Nothing but my platinum. Jack buried it on the green at the ninth hole--where they'd just done some resodding. It's a strange thing that Jim Calder would rob Byron and George--but not me."

"Human nature," Aggie said, "is strange. Well--" He gestured a sort of salute with his right hand, which was bandaged.

Sarah shuddered slightly at the sight of the bandages, "Every time I think of you going after Jack-barehanded, that way--"

"I was in a hurry and I was mad," he answered. "Besides, I knew that I wasn't safe that night, and you weren't. I was morally sure that it was Jack--and equally sure I couldn't prove it sufficiently or fast enough to convince anyone else. If he'd had a gun in his pocket--and used it--I might have been able to close in. That buffalo shirt has several layers. Tough as metal. But I figured that if I supplied him with a little less penetrating weapon--he'd use it. And the hide is ideal for knives. My fingers are okay." He grinned.

"I thought you didn't want to hear any more, ever, about my prowess at analysis and deduction."

"I don't," said Sarah. "Where are you going?"

"Swimming. You ought to be able to dope that out. Trunks--and sandals. And--

speaking of deduction--about Beth."

Sarah started with such force that the chair creaked. "Beth? What about Beth?"

"She isn't engaged, is she?"

The effect of that question was remarkable. Sarah's color waned and she opened her mouth twice before she spoke.

"Do you think, Agamemnon, that a girl like Beth--handsome--but rather prosaic--

?"

"I think she'll make Ralph a swell wife! He told me last night he was going to propose." Aggie walked innocently toward the door.

His aunt stared at him with hostility. "You beast!"

"Am I so naïve--so contrary, stubborn and dense--that it is necessary for you to force one woman into my cognizance in order to draw attention to another?"

Her stare began to melt. "Just exactly what--?"

"When we first rode up here," Aggie went on, "you vouchsafed you had a bride picked out for me. Now, you have always known that I shy from females. You've threshed out the subject with me in the past. You are too adroit--much too adroit--in all these matters--to do anything so obvious as to name a woman and expect me to rush after her like the fire on a skyrocket. So--I said to myself--as we rode along and you lay snoring in a most astonishing way--"

"I do not snore!"

"--I said, 'Aggie, what's her game?' And I answered myself, 'There must be a nigger in the woodpile. Or a blonde.''

"Rubbish! You were very interested in Beth."

"Well, I will admit--when I saw her--I wondered if you were being subtle enough to try the direct method. Beth has something. That ebony hair and ivory skin combination--with the turquoise eye. Stirring. But I was never really baffled. You see--

that first night--when you sent me for Dr. Davis--you did not tell me to phone. You told me to get the keys and take the car. At that time, the Davis phone was working perfectly and the Davis car was running like a top. I subsequently thought of that. I decided that your agitation that evening was real--but that you had also decided that if I happened to rouse my quondam childhood playmate--and if she appeared in something sleazy and becoming--it would make a nice, running start for one of those summer flirtations that lead to so many new homes in suburbs."

"You're a rat," said Sarah, "and you're wrong."

"Knowing me," he continued, unmoved, "you might judge that I would pursue this maiden as a sort of irritant to you and your selection. Needless to say, I did no such thing."

"You slapped her," said Sarah. "You bawled her out and ordered her around. Love often takes preposterous forms like that." She looked at his face a moment and sighed.

"All right! I give up! I've always thought that of all the girls Indian Stones ever produced, Danielle Davis was the best suited to carry on and abet the Plum line. Brains, nerve, courage, refusal to abide by the conventions--good looks--everything a woman can have and needs--except a boss--"

Aggie's brows lifted thoughtfully and with sympathy.

"Danielle's very much impressed," he said, "with my executive capacity in human affairs. Not to say my resolution and general verve. She has a good education in biology.

She'd be a help keeping--my anthropological notes. I said I hadn't chased the woman. But the reverse is true. She came back from New York the other night entirely on my account."

Sarah's eyes were suspicious. "Don't kid me! Danielle orders her men around. She doesn't chase." Her mouth popped open again. "Aggie! Is that why you shaved off your beard? Did Danielle tell you to?"

He flushed. "Well, she hinted at it." He saw merriment welling up in her. He spoke severely. "Only, Sarah--and mark this well-- only after I had got her promise to marry me, bearded!"

Her mirth was being replaced by a new expression--an expression of amazement and joy--and Gargantuan sentiment.

Aggie fled.

When he reached the boathouse, he saw Danielle in a beach chair on the grass at some distance from the others and out of their line of view. She was lying back in the chair, relaxed, with her eyes closed. The sun molded her, in the relief of black shadows, and glittered on her red-gold hair, which had poured itself smoothly over the back of the chair. It began, at once, to pinken the tender skin where Aggie's beard had been. He put his hand to the spot and realized that the austere adornment would give him comfort and authority no longer. He frowned. Danielle opened her eyes and said lazily, "Come over here, idiot!"

Agamemnon Telemachus Plum surrendered unconditionally.

THE END

Document Outline

- CHAPTER 1

- CHAPTER 2

- CHAPTER 3

- CHAPTER 4

- CHAPTER 5

- CHAPTER 6

- CHAPTER 7

- CHAPTER 8

- CHAPTER 9

- CHAPTER 10

- CHAPTER 11

- CHAPTER 12

- CHAPTER 13

- CHAPTER 14

- CHAPTER 15

- CHAPTER 16

- CHAPTER 17

- CHAPTER 18