A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Your Own Funeral

The demure little lady stepped into the grocery store, rested her large parcel on the counter, and stood by to be waited on. Outside a man just passing glanced incuriously in through the glass front of the shop as he went by. Just a brief turn of his head, one quick glance, no more. The only unusual feature about it being that male passersby will glance at haberdasheries, cigar stores, even barber shops, but seldom at groceries as a rule.

She was a pretty little thing, and she gave her order in a low, pleasant, half-shy voice, keeping her eyes on the list in her hand. She looked absurdly like a child, gravely reciting a lesson. But there was a wedding ring on her ungloved hand. So she must have been at least eighteen.

“Want me to send it over for you?” he offered. “Kind of heavy—”

“No, thanks, I’ll carry it myself,” she murmured. “No trouble at all.”

She emerged, her arms pretty full, and continued on her way. She wore a short sealskin jacket that swung as she walked; her clothes were plain and inexpensive looking.

The man who had passed the grocery as she’d gone in hadn’t progressed very far. He had stopped at the newsstand at the next corner to buy a paper, then he retreated, his back to the line of buildings, to glance through it quickly before taking it home with him. The hands that held the paper wore stained pigskin gloves.

The little lady with the bundles passed him a moment later. Neither of them glanced at the other; there was no reason for them to. He was lost in the baseball scores boxed at the top of the page, she was eying a light diagonally opposite to make sure she could cross on red. Halfway down the next block she stopped in at another store, a bakery.

A moment after, by one of those coincidences that so often happen, Pigskin Gloves passed in front of the bakery. He was carrying the paper in his pocket now. Once more his eyes strayed indifferently to the inside of the store, then out again. But the average man on the street isn’t particularly interested in the interiors of bakeries either. This one may have been thinking of the supper he was going home to — so leisurely.

She accepted her change from the counterman, put it in her purse, and came out more bebundled than ever. Pigskin Gloves, who was obviously in no great hurry to get home, had stopped at last at the proper kind of showcase — that of a men’s furnishing store a few doors down — and was gazing in at a luscious display of trick shirts. The window had been recently washed, unlike most of its neighbors; except that it lacked a little quicksilver backing, it was every bit as good as a mirror.

The busy little housewife marched by with her packages, and her watery reflection followed across the glass store front. But just as she came abreast of Pigskin Gloves who was standing there with his back to her, the pupils of her eyes flicked briefly sideward toward him, then looked away again. It was as instantaneous, as hard to catch, as the click of a camera shutter.

She went a few steps farther. But there was a change coming over her eyes now. Or rather over the skin around them. It was hardening, tensing a little. Instantly, as though she realized it herself, she relaxed them, and they became as smooth as ever. But she seemed to remember a purchase she had forgotten to make. She stopped, turned abruptly, and began doubling back the way she had just conic.

Pigskin Gloves was still idly looking at shirts and ties as she passed behind him a second time. But this time her eyes were blankly unaware of him; there was no flick toward him; and his oblivious back expressed equal unawareness of her.

At the corner that had the traffic light, she didn’t cross a second time but turned up the side street and passed from sight, remaining just a demure little figure carrying bundles.

Instantly, from nowhere at all a second man had materialized beside Pigskin Gloves. Pigskin Gloves gave him a quick almost unnoticeable prod in the side, as though urging him forward, and then they separated. No one could have seen it, it was no more than a gesture of recognition between two passing acquaintances. The second man, who was dressed in a gray ulster, a gray soft hat, reached the corner and turned it, taking the same direction as the little housewife. The first one, Pigskin Gloves, was hurrying onward to the corner above, but going much faster now. He took the second side street, parallel to this one.

On the one the little housewife had taken, Gray Hat also was going along briskly. A discarded bag full of groceries caught his eye, just outside an area way entrance. An untouched loaf of bread in wax paper had rolled out. He didn’t stop to examine it; on the contrary his brisk pace changed to a jog trot. Further along was a second bag of groceries. This one had rolled toward the street and spilled out over the curb. The jog trot became a headlong run, the unfastened gray coat ballooning out behind him like a parachute. The street ahead was empty.

To be accurate, not strictly empty, but there was no little housewife on it. And that was all that Gray Hat was interested in. Down at the corner, crashed open against a fire hydrant, was the third and last brown paper bag. A pair of bright tin cans had rolled out of it; two boys were bearing down on it from across the way, frantically urged on by a plump maternal figure in an open upper story window.

As Gray Hat, by one of those coincidences that were now becoming a little overworked, reached the corner, Pigskin Gloves was coming at a full run toward him, having rounded the block from the other side. They both turned and followed a single direction.

They went one more block east, then one south. It was incredible how the girl had managed to get so far so quickly. Just beyond the next corner the demure little housewife, packageless now, and hatless, was careening along at a frantic, lurching speed, hugging her arms to her body as most women do when they run. That she could get anywhere at all on such spindly heels, much less as far and as fast as she had showed to what limits the human mechanism can force itself.

Halfway down, a doorway seemed suddenly to engulf her, and she was gone. The white and violet crepe ribbons fastened there fluttered with her passing. Long after she was gone, the glass street door was still slowly jolting back into place on reluctant hinges.

Just too late to catch sight of her, Pigskin Gloves and Gray Hat turned into the block, raced to the next corner. But they didn’t turn it. An elderly man, standing there, approached at their command and said something to them. He made an abortive gesture with his arm, as though to point, and one of them slapped it down. Once again, as they had before, they separated. Gray Hat stayed where he was, pulling his hat brim further down over his eyes. Pigskin Gloves hurried off toward a very little thing, an almost inconspicuous little thing that he had spotted a second before. A blue and white enamel disk affixed to the baseboard of a store window that said Public Telephone.

Twilight was deepening into night; the street lights suddenly came on in long serried rows as far as the eye could reach...

On the second floor of the hallway the demure-faced girl was leaning breathlessly against a door, limp as a rag doll, not making any sound, her face pressed flat against the wood to still the gasping of her breath. Her hands roamed up and down it on each side of her, not knocking but pushing against it, incoherently seeking admittance. She turned just once to look fearfully at the stairs, then pressed despairingly flat against the door again. It opened without a sound; she vanished like a shadow; the door closed again.

On the other side of it, in the orange dimness of a single bulb from far down the long hall, she spoke. A steamy whisper, with no larynx sound at all. “Feds, Champ! Whiskers’ boys, Champ! Right on top of me, almost, before I knew it!” She passed the flat of her hand across her brow, staggered a little from so much running.

The man in the blue shirt finished putting away the blue-black automatic and interlacing the door-seam with chains, as though he hadn’t heard her. Then they moved down the long hallway together, away from the door. In the room at the end he flexed his arm just once, and she was down suddenly on one supporting arm.

“And you came back here! Right straight back, like in a paper chase!” He reached up and turned the bulb out, went over to the blank wall opposite, and from there diagonally up to the windows. Spider-webby net curtains criss-crossed the silvery arc-light glow coming in from the street. He didn’t touch them, didn’t even let his breath disturb them, as he pushed his face close up against them. Champ Lane, in the dim light, looked a good deal like a kid. His hard, cunning face was obscured; his body in silhouette was small, almost stunted; its movements wiry and tense.

“I made it, Champ, I lost them.” Her voice sounded muffled somewhere in the darkened room behind him. “I had to get in out of the open, I had to pull a hole over my head, and I didn’t know which way to turn. If I’d stayed out I’d have been picked up sure as—”

“Why didn’t you pull the river over you, then?” he said bitterly, eyes glinting through two intersections in the closely webbed net.

She picked herself up, swung open a closet door, stepped behind it — outside the closet but away from the windows. Sandpaper hissed once, there was a momentary match-glow, then darkness again. She came out from behind the door with her hand turned down and under over a winking red spark. “I lost all the grub too. I don’t know what we’re going to do, I can’t show my face in those same stores again. My seal coat’s hot, too, and it’s the only thing I’ve got to go out in—”

The red spark moved restlessly back and forth in the velvety darkness of the room. In the silence as she stopped whispering, a muffled wail, an eerie piping sound, came thinly through the ceiling over them.

She shivered. “They still got that stiff up there with them?” she said querulously, tilting her head back. “Why don’t they take it out? It drives you wacky listening to them.”

The man at the window, Champion Lane, wanted by almost the whole nation these last few weeks, hadn’t stirred, hadn’t taken his eyes from the two net pinholes that served each pupil as a frame. He hadn’t seemed to breathe all this time. He spoke again at last.

“You lost ’em!” was all he said, in a clipped, choked voice.

Instantly, without a sound, she was at his shoulder, peering over it down into the street. The red spark in the hollow of her hand was hidden from the window by her palm. He didn’t hit her any more, just dug abruptly back with his elbow. She went away, came back again without the glowing cigarette.

Three men were gathered into a tight little knot on the opposite side of the street; they weren’t looking over this way at all. They melted apart, each went up a different brown-stone stoop. One wore a cravenette waterproof coat. One carried a violin case tucked high up under the pit of his arm. No doors opened to admit them at the tops of those stoops, they just ebbed into the shadows. There were some uniformed policemen, too.

“Warm weather on its way,” Champ said grimly.

She pulled at his sleeve. “Let’s get out. Maybe we still can make it. This is an awful set-up to be caught in — a dead end without any turns!”

“It’s too late, you fool, it’s too late. We’ve got the whole District of Columbia on our hands.”

A fellow and his girl were coming up the street arm in arm from the lower corner. A man suddenly accosted them from an areaway, dropped back again. The couple turned, went hastily back the way they had come, turning their heads repeatedly to look over their shoulders.

“Roping us off, eh?”

“The back yard, Champ. We can get out that way.”

“If they’re on this street, they’re on the next one over.” He turned briefly away, shrugged into a suit coat. Instantly the ghostly blue of his shirt darkened to invisible black. He took the gun out again from under it. “They’re not getting me alive,” he said quietly.

The futile bleating coming down through the ceiling sounded weirder than ever in the tense prickling stillness; it was like the monotonous fluting tune an Indian snake charmer plays, or the whistle of a peanut stand on a lonely street corner.

Champ Lane had always had a sense of humor; perverted, perhaps, but it was there. His eyes flicked upward.

“Move over, whoever you are,” he chuckled, “there’s two more coming up!”

The girl in the room with him winced, drew in her breath sharply, as though something sharp had cut her.

Out in the street a taxi halted, was reversing with difficulty. A directing figure jumped off the running board as it started back the wrong way on a one-way street. Lights were going out by the roomful in the houses opposite. They became strangely blank, inscrutable. A woman came hurrying out of one of them guided by a policeman, a birdcage in her hand. He gave her a parting shove at the elbow and she went waddling down the street to safety.

“Any minute now,” said Champ Lane, showing his teeth in what might have been a grin.

Suddenly the mourners’ lament above broke off short, razor-clean. The waspish buzzing of a door-bell battery, clearly audible through the paper-thin floor, took its place. Z’Z’Z-Z. Footsteps hurried to and fro across the planking up there, scuffled briefly as though someone were being forced to leave against his will.

Then, incredibly, it sounded right there in the same flat with them — louder, as angry as a stirred-up hornet’s nest at the other end of the long hall.

“What do they expect me to do?” he said, “Walk down to the door with my hands up? Take it,” he instructed her briefly, “or else they’ll know for sure which flat—”

She moved down the hall on soundless feet. “Yes?” she breathed into the perforated disk on the wall.

“Everybody out! Everybody down to the street! That’s a Department of Justice order!”

She came back. “They’re clearing the house.”

“Gas, that means,” he said.

“Champ,” she pleaded hoarsely, “don’t just stay in here with your back to the wall and die! Don’t count on your arsenal in the kitchen, you’ve got a whole Government against you! The minutes are going, once they’ve emptied the other flats it’ll be too late—”

An incessant throbbing of feet was sounding from the galvanized iron framework of the staircase outside — all going one way — all going down. It was vibration rather than sound. The warning buzz kept sounding distantly as doors opened. Below, above, somewhere on the same floor. The thin, keening sound suddenly burst into full volume again, but it wasn’t overhead any more, it was going down and around the stairwell, ebbing to the street below.

Champ surged forward swiftly.

He was at the window again. A bowed figure in widow’s weeds, face veiled, was being hurried on reluctant feet across to the other side of the street, a policeman on one side of her, the building superintendent on the other, holding her up.

She, Champ’s wife, must have been at the door without his knowing it; he would probably have shot her down if he had. She came running back. “The roof, Champ, the roof!”

Whaddya think they are — hicks?” was all he said, not turning his head.

“Then do your dying out in the open hall at least, not sealed up in this sardine can! The stairs’re still clear from this floor up. Let’s give it a try, at least. We can always beat it down in again, if it’s no go—” She was pulling at his left arm with both of hers.

“All right,” he said suddenly, “get started, up there. I’m going to begin it from here. It’s coming anyway — and I never yet fired second in my life. Here goes your friend with the raincoat.”

She could just about make out the figure, across his shoulder and through the curtains and the window glass, up on top of a stoop there on the other side, signaling to someone unseen on this side.

He didn’t touch the curtain or the pane. “Watch your eyes.” She squinted them protectingly. It went off like a cannon, the flash lighting up both their faces, and bits of glass spattered all over them like raindrops. The curtain quivered violently; a singed hole was in it now. The figure on the stoop took a nose, dive down the whole twenty brownstone steps, rolled all the way across the sidewalk into the gutter.

Instantly a whole unguessed insect world came to life. Swarms of yellow butterflies fluttered from every areaway, from every stoop, all up and down the street. Whole hivefuls of angry bees seemed to loose themselves against both windows, and hop around inside the room like Mexican jumping-beans. In an instant there wasn’t a shred of glass left in either frame. Champ jerked back, cursing, and threw himself flat on his belly pulling her down with him. The curtains were doing a buck-and-wing. Wisps of smoke came from the roof line across the way and floated off into the nigh t sky. A searchlight beam suddenly shot down from somewhere, found the range of the windows, and bleached the room inside talcum-white.

They were both flat on their stomachs, wriggling snake-like for the safety of the hall, the girl in the lead. Champ swung bodily around his gun, like a rudder steering a floundering boat, ducked his chin to the carpet, and shot up the beam to a cornice across the street. Glass fluted plaintively, the white-hot whorl that centered the beam went yellow, then red, then out. The beam itself snuffed out, like an erased white line. They couldn’t see anything themselves for a minute, much less the others over there around it.

He felt his way after her, hand on her uprighted heel; then they both reared behind the hall wall. “C’mon,” he said, “we’re good for ten minutes yet, after that. They probably think Frankie or somebody else is in here with me.”

A window in the hallway looking out on a shaft that led to the back shivered to pieces just after they’d gone by, their flitting forms must have silhouetted against the light-toned wall behind them.

“Tomcats out on the back fence too,” he gritted. He pitched his gun into the kitchen, grabbed up an unspiked one from a china cabinet where they were hanging from hooks like cups. The place was a regular munitions depot. At the door he took the lead, slithered out to the turn of the stairs, peered down to the floor below. She took the branch leading up.

“Champ, don’t!” she breathed. “Isn’t the rap tough enough as it is?” His gun blasted just once, malevolently, and thick door-glass jumped apart somewhere below. A swarm of bees winged up to the second floor with a noise like a coffee grinder, and the smooth wall broke out with blackheads. But he was already on his way up to the third at her heels. “Tommy gun,” he said. “All they need is tin hats and a flag!”

They shot out around the third landing, past a door with a wreath, and on up to the fourth. The house was all theirs. Below it sounded like a very enthusiastic Fourth of July. On the fourth floor somebody had lost a supper-table napkin in his hurry to get out, probably from under his chin. An overlooked radio was still jabbering away:

“And then little Peter Rabbit said to the Big Bad Wolf—”

Above the fourth the stairs shed their fake marble trim, took on a sharper incline. A roof door sealed them. “Get that hall light!” he ordered, hand on the latch. She high jumped, and couldn’t reach it.

“All right, skip it.” He sighted on it almost casually and it popped into nothingness like a little balloon.

He motioned her down behind him, took off the latch, and began to ease the roof door out with shoulder pressure. Instantly, as though it were high noon out instead of well into the night, the gap was fuming with radiance like a seidlitz powder from some waiting beam, and the usual bees were singing all over the outside of the metal door. One of them, getting in, ricocheted directly across the girl’s feet on one of the lower steps, like some kind of a warm little bug. She shook it off with a kick.

“Musta mobilized the militia,” he said with a flash of sardonic humor. They started down again, on the bias, hugging the inside wall away from the stair rail. Out in the street somewhere a futile bombardment — at nothing — was in full blast. They got down to the third again unopposed. Champ’s wife had picked up the discarded napkin, perhaps with some unspoken wish that he’d surrender alive, and was holding it balled in her hand without his seeing it. They re-passed the door with the crepe, hurriedly left on an inch-wide gap by its routed tenants.

He stopped, wavering by the stairs. Her hand pressed against his arm. “Oh.” It was a small sound — a little, throaty gasp. “Oh — you’re hurt — bleeding—”

“It’s nothing,” he said shortly. “It was that first blast — here, gimme that napkin.” He grabbed it from her, wrapped it around his upper arm just below the biceps, held the ends for her to tie.

“I won’t leave you, Champ. I won’t. You’re hurt.”

“You’ll do like I tell you. I’m all right. Stop snivelin’ over me. It’s just a little blood.” He pushed her away from him, mounted the first steps, then stopped short. “You know what I’m going to do, don’t you?” he said.

She looked frightened — in a new way. “I–I guess so, Champ,” she said, and shivered.

His eyes were hard, commanding.

“Then here’s what it’s up to you to do—” He told her rapidly, in short, sharp phrases. “Don’t worry,” he said, finishing. “And as soon as you get a chance get in touch with Eddie. I’ll leave a message, see? So just sit tight. Now go ahead—” He pushed her from him.

She crept fearfully down a flight further, to the second — alone. Upstairs in the depths of the building somewhere Champ was firing his gun again — into wood, at close range, it sounded like. It was drowned out in the repeated thud and boom of gas grenades coming in now through the windows of the second floor flat.

She came wavering down to the vestibule through the haze of the gas, her hand pressed to her stinging eyes. They led her out to the street, and the barrage against the windows died down shamefacedly. Up at either end were roped-off black masses that were spectators, here in the middle a big bald patch of empty sidewalk and roadway, like a setting for a stage play.

She came out into the middle of this with a knot of men around her — so very fragile and girlish, she looked, to be the cause of so much racket and commotion. She mayn’t have been crying, but the gas made it seem as if she was. “Where is he?” she was asked.

“He got out right at the start,” she said simply. “He must have slipped right through your fingers along with the others. I couldn’t do it, because you’d already seen me this afternoon—” And she gave them a rueful little smile.

They rushed the flat — and got a kitchenful of assorted weapons for their trouble.

“Rigged himself up and put one over on us, huh?” someone in command said wrathfully. “I told you to check those tenants carefully when you cleared the house!”

“We did, but the extras all accounted for themselves as guests from a party they were having on the top floor, and mourners from a wake on the third—”

“Sure! But you didn’t check them with each other, you let them come out in any old order, and didn’t keep any of them in custody after they did. This ain’t the last you’re going to hear about this, McDowell!”

The building was searched from top to bottom, but the girl seemed to have told the truth. Once again as so many times before, Champ Lane had eluded capture by a hair’s breadth. They had the net to set all over again. At least this time they had his wife, whatever good that did them.

The other tenants were allowed to return to their homes, and she was taken to the local headquarters of the Bureau of Investigation for questioning. A questioning that continued relentlessly all the rest of the night and well into the morning of the next day. Without any other brutality, however, than its length.

The girl was able to satisfy them that she had not known who Champ was, or at least that he was a wanted criminal, when she had married him less than three weeks before. The similarity of names between her husband and the outlaw she had ascribed at the time to mere coincidence; Lane was not the most uncommon name there was, after all. Even the nickname Champ itself she had mistakenly thought had been given him in joking reference to the wanted man and not because he himself was the original. He had not, and they knew that as well as she, committed any overt act during those past three weeks, had been hiding out.

“But then if you didn’t know, how is it you ran for your life from a couple of our agents this afternoon?”

She did know by then, she admitted; she had found out meantime — from the collection of weapons in the kitchen; his resemblance to pictures of the real Lane she had seen. She had intended leaving him at the first opportunity, but he had watched her too closely until now. She had wanted to avoid capture this afternoon, however, for fear she would be forced to reveal his hiding place. He might think she had intentionally betrayed him, and then she would be in danger of her life night and day; he was the kind would have tracked her down remorselessly and paid her back.

It all sounded convincing as she told it. She was calm, and in her answers was the composure of one who has a clear conscience. She wasn’t defiant or intractable, but submissive, resigned. Just a little lady who had let her heart lead her head into trouble, that was all; one who was no criminal herself. If they were aware of the one glaring discrepancy between her story and the facts — namely, the two shots, one from the window and one from the stairs, that had been fired after the building was emptied — they gave no sign. It was not to her interest to remind them of that. Even though the man in the waterproof coat had not been killed, she knew the penalty for taking up arms against a government agent. And if Champ had made good his escape, as she claimed, then it must have been she who had fired those shots.

But as the night wore out into wan daylight, and that in turn brightened into full morning, a change began to come over her. It may have been that the strain of the protracted questioning was beginning to tell on her. At any rate, her composure began to slip away from her little by little. At six-thirty she was fidgety, at seven-thirty noticeably nervous and strained, by eight-thirty harried, distracted. They even sent out for a cup of coffee for her, to see if that would brace her up a little, restore her some — but it seemed to have no effect.

As the city outside stirred, awoke to the new day, and went about its business, she began to verge almost on collapse. As butchers, barbers, bakers, elevator operators, bus conductors, street cleaners, bootblacks, newspaper vendors — and pallbearers — took up their daily tasks she commenced to beg them:

“Oh, please let me go! I can’t stand any more of this! Please let me go! I haven’t done anything! I tell you I don’t know where he went!” Her distress became almost unendurable; she couldn’t even sit still on her chair any longer; her fidgeting hands plucked her handkerchief into threads. It was obvious that unless they dismissed her soon they were going to have a first-class case of hysteria on their hands.

After holding what seemed to her like an endless conference in an adjoining room, they sent out word that she would be released on her own recognizance. She was, of course, to hold herself at their disposal for further questioning at any time. If she tried to leave town, she would be arrested.

It was now ten minutes past nine. She fled downstairs to the street like one possessed. She must have sensed that their object in suddenly letting her go was in the hope that she would eventually lead them to Champ Lane.

So she was careful — very careful — even in her frantic haste. She dodged, apparently aimlessly, through the stream of pedestrians, darted into a large department store, dashed down into the basement and left the store by a side-street entrance. Then she plunged across the street and entered a small and grimy but quite respectable hotel.

She had to call Eddie — right away. If she used the pay booth in the lobby, someone might overhear her. She wasn’t sure that she’d actually lost whoever might be trailing her. So she went into the ladies’ washroom and used the telephone there.

In a minute, Eddie’s low-pitched voice came to her over the wire. She identified herself. “What about — him, Eddie? Is he all right? Where is he?”

“Hold it, sister. I haven’t heard a thing.”

“But he said — Eddie, he said he’d call you.” Her voice rose as panic stirred through her; her fingers squeezed around the mouthpiece of the phone until they ached.

“Look. Don’t come over here. Call me later. I’ll let you know if I hear anything...”

“But, Eddie, something must have—” The phone clicked in her ear, and to no one in particular she said, loudly, shrilly, “His arm — the bleeding — dear God, no!”

When she was on the street again, she was a woman gone mad. Her face was all pulled apart — the mouth wrenched open, eyes wide and staring. She forgot that someone might be following her, she forgot to be careful, she forgot everything but Champ — and his arm — and the blood — and where he was, lying unconscious, maybe dead, in that awful place...

She waved to a taxi, jumped in with a swift, sprawling movement, and gave the driver the address of the house she’d left the night before.

The crepe was still affixed to the front door, and but for the two yawning second-floor windows, and some strips of tape holding the glass in place in the street door, there was nothing to witness last night’s battle. The superintendent was sweeping up glass shards from the side-walk as she got out of the cab and accosted him with a white, strained face.

“I came back to get my things,” she said, staring at him with a peculiar fixed tensity.

He glowered at her over his shoulder. “The quicker the better!” He spat, virtuously if inaccurately. “Go on up, help yourself. Fine people to have living in a respectable house!” She couldn’t seem to tear herself away, though. She kept looking from him to the crepe and from the crepe to him. Her eyes strayed up the bullet-pitted facade of the building — stopped a little higher than the second floor, where the blinds were drawn down full length.

“What time,” she asked as casually as she could, “are they having their funeral?”

“Yah, you should ask!” he growled resentfully. “Fine funeral you and that loafer husband of yours give ’em!” And then as she hovered there in the middle of all his glass-sweepings, he went on, “It’s all over with long ago. Eight o’clock sharp they come by and screw down the lid. Eight-thirty already they left the house! He’s under the ground at Evergreen Cemetery by now, poor man, and may his soul rest in peace—”

Something that sounded like the twang of a snapping violin string fell on his ears, and when he looked, his carefully collected glass-sweepings were scattered all over the sidewalk again.

She got the door of the taxi open and fell in. She didn’t climb in, she fell in on her face. The driver heard a choked sound that he translated as “Evergreen Cemetery,” and acted upon it. Her legs were still sticking out through the open door as the cab veered off.

Down at the lower corner, by one of those coincidences that were happening again, there was another cab drawn up at the curb with three men in it. She had managed to get up on her knees by the time her machine flashed by. She screamed out at them through the open window, “For God’s sake, follow me — if you’re Feds!”

Which was a strange invitation to come from Champ Lane’s wife. Her outthrust arm, beckoning them on wind mill fashion, continued to wave frantically out the window for blocks down.

“Quit it, lady!” warned the driver at one point, when she had caught him by the shoulders with both hands to help him get some speed up. “Or I’ll turn you over to a cop!”

One cop did overtake them shortly, on a motorcycle, but instead of stopping them, he shot ahead, holding the crosswise traffic in the side streets until they had gone by.

No vehicle had ever yet arrived outside a burial ground with such indecent haste as this one, squealing to a skidding stop and filling the peaceful air with a smell of burned-out bearings. But she was already tumbling through the dignified ornamental gateway, into the tranquil setting of well-groomed shrubbery, neat white markers, and winding, sanded paths.

She drew up abruptly, cupped both hands despairingly to the sides of her head, as though not knowing which way to turn. A distant muffled explosion, like a percussion cap buried in the ground, solved her dilemma for her. She sped in that direction like an arrow out of a bow.

Halfway she met a crowd of people running toward her — in fact scattering in all directions from a single focal point. Frightened people, squalling, gibbering people, one or two of them even stumbling over the turf in their frantic, heedless haste to reach the gates. She battled her way through them until she reached the spot where the stampede had started. An equally frightened but more courageous sexton stood at bay on a little mound of freshly upturned earth, a prayer book extended exorcisingly toward a coffin that was precariously balanced on the very lip of the grave. It was pounding as though it contained a dynamo. And as it pounded it rocked, almost seesawed, with a violent inner agitation. The sexton’s white lips moved in hurried exhortation, but no sound passed them.

The widow stood, wavering, by him.

Just as she got there a second gun shot echoed hollowly inside the monstrous thing, and wisps of smoke filtered out of bullet holes that the coffin must have received the night before. Champ Lane’s wife dropped down beside it, threw her arms over it in maddened, forestalling embrace, to keep it from going over. She was aware of three men running up after her from the direction of the entrance gates. She recognized one of the men who had questioned her.

“Help me,” she sobbed. “You followed me because you wanted Champ Lane — he’s in there — help me get him out—”

The man’s face went hard and incredulous. “In there — how?”

“He was going to hide in there — until the raid was over. In — with the dead man. He was so small he could do it all right. He was going to get out as soon as you’d gone — but his arm — it must have bled— Champ must have passed out and now they... Oh, don’t stand there — help me get him out. A crowbar, a chisel — anything—”

A distorted mask of gray-faced terror that bore a remote resemblance to the widely publicized features of gunman Champ Lane, gazed up into their faces a few minutes later with mute, dog-like gratitude. His sworn enemies, at that moment, must have seemed like angels to him. Angels with handcuffs.

He handed them the gun that he had emptied, in his mad terror, when he came alive and found himself lying, weak and dazed from loss of blood, in the coffin with the dead man’s cold body. The way he gave up the gun was almost like a gesture of devotion.

“They didn’t hear my first shot — or maybe they thought it was the hearse backfiring.” He shivered. A hoarse rattle shook in his throat as he looked down at the disarranged corpse. “I was — under that — for hours — all night...”

As they held him upright between them and as one of them reached out a hand with the open jaws of the manacles reaching for his wrists, the small, tough man who had been the terror of forty-eight states suddenly dropped to his knees. The detective jerked the handcuffs back before Champ Lane could press his mouth against them.

“Bring on Atlanta, Leavenworth — even Alcatraz,” he whimpered. “Lead me to ’em. They’re all right with me!”

The headline in the papers that evening was, in a way, Champ line’s epitaph.