Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.69, No. 5, August 13, 1932

Lying in the road with bullets whining over him, Bradley swore he’d follow his assailants to hell itself to get them.

Chapter I Sinister Cargo

There were three men in the low-slung red roadster with the New York license plates, grim-mouthed men who took the state trooper’s measure with hard eyes as his motorcycle came coughing into Sam Witherspoon’s filling station below Barlows with hardly a gill of gas left in the tank.

Old Sam had been afraid of them. That showed in his face when the light over the pump fell upon the gray uniform behind him. Relief was in his voice, too. He called over his shoulder:

“ ’Lo, Bradley. Be with you in a minute.”

Trooper Bradley, one foot on the ground, the other long putteed leg dangling over the saddle, was returning the stares from the roadster with interest. From his angle of vision, the light wasn’t so good. It didn’t give him as clear a look at the faces of the three in the New York car as he could have wished.

Even then he had a queer conviction that would probably be faces worth remembering; but the roadster stood well beyond the pump and the passengers were outside the shine of the single bulb burning above it. When they had tossed a crumpled bill to Sam Witherspoon and pulled away, they left with Bradley only an impression of hard-bitten mouths, rocky jaws and alert, metallic eyes glinting out of the shadows of low-drawn hat brims.

He shook his head after them. They had looked like thugs on quick appraisal, and probably were. The roads were full of their kind nowadays, particularly up in these border counties where so many gangsters from the big towns had bought up great tracts of wild acreage and established camps. Crooks, racketeers, city scum, rolling around in high-priced cars that not one honest man in a thousand could afford to buy or run, lording it with their pockets stuffed with blood-stained money — and nothing for a policeman to do but turn his head the other way when they passed. The law was a finicky thing, a shield to the criminal unless you caught him in the very act of crime.

Up by the pump, Witherspoon was chuckling.

“Diggety-dog! Well, if them’s hijackers, I could sure stand more of their kind o’ trade.” He came to Bradley smoothing and patting a grimy green bill. “Five simoleons for eleven gallons of the regular is what they left — and dodburn me if I wasn’t scared that they aimed to stick me up.”

Five dollars was more than twice the price of eleven gallons of gas. Bradley, wondering whether the tip would have been so lavish if the hard-boiled New Yorkers hadn’t found a sudden cause for haste in his appearance, put the question into words.

“Dunno about that,” Witherspoon said, still a little green around the gills. “But I’ll tell you the truth, trooper, they had my hair standing straight on end until you buzzed along. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying it after they treated me so good, but… well, they’re totin’ a piece of freight that’s fit to give any peaceable citizen the jim-jams.”

Bradley, bent over the cap of his gas tank, looked up quickly. “Yes? What was it, Sam?”

Witherspoon shifted his cud, cocked an apprehensive eye toward the diminishing red dot that was the roadster’s tail light, and started a shrug that ended in a shudder.

“Now, that’s something, trooper,” he said, “that I wouldn’t want to answer straight out. Matter o’ fact, I couldn’t, not bein’ familiar with that kind of hardware. But it wasn’t no sewing machine and it wasn’t no shotgun, either.”

Bradley had straightened. “You mean — a machine gun?”

“Just on guesswork, yes,” Witherspoon nodded. “It was on the floor in back of the car, covered with a robe. In the rumble. The fellow sittin’ there happened to kick the robe just while I was leading the gas-hose back to the tank and I couldn’t help but see that mean-looking snout poking out from under it. The fellow in the rumble seat give me just about the dirtiest look I ever had out of human eyes. One of the men in the front turned around and cussed him hot and heavy, and then yelled at me to mind my own damn business and fill that tank fast.”

Bradley looked eastward up the road, caught a last glimpse of the tail light as it whipped around a curve and judged that the roadster must be traveling now with the throttle wide open.

“Mine’s the same order, Sam,” he snapped. “Fill her fast!” A moment after that, tank brimming and capped and engine roaring, he shot a glance at his wrist-watch. “Exactly quarter to nine, Sam,” he said and held the dial to the light for verification. “Be sure to remember; maybe I’ll have to call you as a witness.”

That was over Sam Witherspoon’s head, a mystery that he still was considering open-mouthed when Bradley had melted noisily and rapidly into the night, bound east.

On roads as good as this one, seventy miles an hour was what Trooper Bradley considered just about a good cruising speed. Now, with a moving objective ahead of him as fleet as that big-engined roadster, he bore on the gas until the needle of his speedometer was flickering past “eighty.”

Five miles east of Sam Witherspoon’s filling station, siren shrieking a demand for right of way, he crossed Canada Pike at a dizzy speed that turned the broad ribbon of cement into a mere chalk mark beneath his streaming eyes. Beyond the Pike, he had ripped through seven more miles of crisp October night before his spotlight, whitening a New York license plate ahead, vindicated his judgment in keeping on the straightaway.

He was well up into the hill country then, in the most desolate part of his wide-flung and sparsely settled bailiwick. The nearest town, Holtsville, was more than twenty miles away. Within a range of half a dozen miles there wasn’t even so much as an occupied dwelling, nothing but deserted farmhouses, forlorn and falling into decay.

The single spotlight on their trail evidently had told its story to the men in the roadster. It had been their strategy not to make a race of it, but to slacken speed. Bradley himself slowed down and a grin came to his lips when he had “clocked” them for a quarter mile. They were jogging along at thirty-five miles an hour now, law-abiding citizens so far as speed regulations were concerned.

That was all right as far as it went, but Bradley had a trump to play — an ace that, if not up his sleeve, was at least in plain sight on his wrist.

He eased his holster forward, loosened the heavy service pistol in it and sped to overtake the suspected car.

Chapter II Machine-Gunned

Nothing was left of Bradley’s smile when he had swung alongside the roadster. His shouted, “Pull over!” was strictly and briskly official.

Armaments and odds regardless, the New Yorkers were not hunting trouble just then. The driver obediently stepped on his brake and threw out his clutch. As he looked inquiringly at the trooper, the glimmer of the dashlight showed an expression of exaggeratedly innocent surprise on his face.

“What’s wrong, officer?” he wanted to know.

“Thirty-five an hour is legal up here, ain’t it?” asked the flat-nosed man beside him, his voice dulcet.

“That’s as high as we’ve been hittin’ it, trooper,” chimed in the passenger in the rumble seat. “Thirty-five. Never an inch more. We don’t know these roads so good, anyway — see?”

They hadn’t recognized Bradley in the darkness; that was plain enough to him.

“Then my speedometer must be wrong,” he said mildly. “Closer to sixty-five is how I clock it. Come on, Barney Oldfield. Let’s see the license!”

That was routine, as familiar to the men in the roadster as to Bradley. He thought it brought an easing of the tension which he had sensed beneath their outward show of docility. So much the better. If he could persuade them to follow him along to Holtsville without fireworks by letting them believe they were in for nothing worse than a brief delay and a fine for speeding, well and good.

With Law on the short end of a three to one bet, a lonely spot like that was certainly no place to start searching for the machine-gun which old Sam Witherspoon might or might not have seen. Bradley, for more reasons than one willing to let well enough alone, put an iron clamp on his impulse to reach into the rumble and jerk out the robe. He reached instead, and reached casually, for the license card extended over the wheel.

The driver had fished out a New York motor vehicle registration form along with the card. Bradley held them in the beam of the near headlight and made a show of comparing names and registration numbers. He wasn’t looking for information; registration and driving license blanks were easily come by, and any one could fill them in. It was only in further effort to lull suspicion that he questioned a discrepancy.

“You don’t own the car?” he asked the man at the wheel.

“No. It belongs to my cousin. He gave me the loan of it for a little vacation trip to Canada. And listen — he’s particular as hell, because it ain’t hardly broke in yet. I wouldn’t drive it faster than thirty-five on a bet.”

Bradley shook his head. “You’re on the wrong road for Canada,” he said. “Should have turned right, miles back. I don’t wonder you missed Canada Pike, passing it at better than sixty.”

The driver showed a flash of dental gold and a mirthless and confident grin. “Sure it was sixty, trooper?”

“Sure enough to stop you.”

“That’s a joke. You wasn’t behind us then — not near enough to clock us. Suppose we had been stepping on it; wouldn’t we of been watching for a motorcycle light?”

“Probably.” Bradley admitted. “But I’m making this particular speeding case on a point of elapsed time. You stopped for gas a while ago, didn’t you? Well, it was exactly seventeen minutes to nine by my watch when you pulled away from the filling station. That’s allowing you two minutes before I left. When I came up with you the watch said three minutes to nine — and right on this spot where you’re standing, you’re fourteen and six-tenths miles from the pump. Get it? I’ll lend you a pencil if you can’t figure it out in your head.”

The driver leaned over the side of the car, peering. “Hell’s bells!” he grunted. “You’re the cop we seen up the line!”

“Same one,” Bradley corroborated. “Just your hard luck, that’s all, that I happened to be coming this way, coming fast. It’s been a dull day. You’re my first collar. Holtsville is right ahead on this road, so we’ll go along together and tell it to the judge.”

In the roadster there had been a swift exchange of glances. The man in the rumble seat started to stoop, and straightened again when he saw the trooper’s hand at his holster and a pair of speculative steady eyes fixed upon him. The passenger beside the driver had caught the movement, and automatically had ducked forward. Bradley didn’t miss that, either. He was playing with dynamite that might be exploding in his face any instant.

The byplay had been lost on the driver. He grinned again and shrugged.

“Oh, what t’hell!” he exclaimed. “Maybe I did let her out on a couple of wide-open stretches. But have a heart, trooper. We’re past our turn already; you just said so. Why can’t we hold court right here, friendly, and—”

“Nothing doing, brother!” Bradley cut in curtly. “I’m not the kind of cop who tries his own cases on the road.”

“I know. Sure. I can see you’re on the level, officer.” The driver’s voice was soothing as he fished out a wallet. “But you can tell just about what the fine would be. We’ll leave it with you, hey? Here’s a ten spot. That cover it?”

“No go,” said Bradley. “It could cost me my job. How do I know who you people are? You might be working under cover for the state, yourselves. I’m playing safe. Holtsville it is.”

He had made up his mind then that Holtsville was as far as the roadster would get that night. It was the biggest town of his territory, a county seat with a modern jail — half a dozen armed sheriff’s deputies there to lend a hand if it came to a gunplay when he started to search that rumble.

Direct action here and now would have suited him better, personally. He still itched to drag out the robe and bring the real issue into the open. But lately there had been state-wide agitation in the press, hard criticism by editors blind to conditions, because troopers had been allegedly too quick on the trigger. In the pocket of his tunic at that moment was a bulletin from State Police Headquarters cautioning all troopers to use their pistols only as a last resort.

The flat-nosed man had reached an arm behind the driver’s shoulder and a yellowish ball fell from his fingers to the running board. It rolled off and landed at Bradley’s feet.

“I think you dropped something, trooper,” the New Yorker said, pointing. “Looks like a hundred dollar bill from here. You ought to be careful of money like that.”

The roadster, in gear, had edged forward a foot or two. The yellow ball lay where it caught enough of the beam of the motorcycle headlight to show Bradley what it was — a wadded bill, with a dazzling “100” in the corner.

“Not mine,” he said, surer than ever that he had made a prize catch. “What’s more, I don’t want any part of it.” He looked hard at the flat-nosed man. “You dropped it, didn’t you?” That method of offering backsheesh was a standard trick among rum-runners; it had been tried on Bradley before.

A crooked smile answered his frown. “Me? Oh, well — maybe I did. Anyway, if you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

Bradley bent over to pick up and throw back the scorned bribe and kept on bending when his fingers had touched it. A consultation of eyes, this one unnoticed by him, had preceded the dropping of the hundred dollar note. The man in the rumble seat, directly over him as he stooped, had whipped a gun out of a shoulder belt under his coat and brought it crashing down on his head.

The roadster took wing as Bradley pitched forward, his right hand automatically closing on the grip of his pistol and then going limp there. Over the retreating rear end came sputtering flashes of red that lengthened out into a yard-long finger of flame. A staccato rattle sounded raucously over the smooth thrum of the motor; sparks sprang from the cement where the trooper lay.

A hundred yards up the road the red car came to a squealing, skidding halt.

“What the hell are you stopping for?” demanded the man with the flat nose. “Don’t be a damn fool, Mac. Tony got him all right.”

“Got him plenty,” confirmed the machine gunner in the rumble seat, looking back. “Look at him!”

The motorcycle had gone one way as Bradley went the other. It lay on its side, its headlights still going and shining full on a sprawled and motionless gray figure by the ditch.

“We ain’t going to leave him there, are we?” growled the driver. “We ought to chuck him in the brush, Scudder. That motorcycle, too.”

“Yeah?” snarled the flat-nosed Scudder. “And get ourselves all smeared up? That’s out, Mac. He’ll lay there for hours, most likely, before any other car comes along. This ain’t Forty-second and Broadway. Use your foot, fella. We’re overdue, now. Let’s get along to Dutch’s, fast!”

Scudder was the boss. That wasn’t a suggestion, but a command. The driver shrugged and depressed the clutch. Gears softly meshing, the red roadster fled guiltily upward into the dark hills.

Chapter III The Death House “Kite”

A husky wind out of the northeast had been clubbing at the cloud rack, whipping it to lace, hustling it off in ragged streamers over the hills. Spangles of gold glinted from dancing water while the rout was on; then a yellow moon looked clear at itself in a little lake and gilded the roof of a bungalow on the shore.

The bungalow, log-walled, pressed to the grassy bank by the forest, belonged precisely to its setting. An artist, finding that lake and surveying its shore, would have chosen no other spot for it. But “Dutch” Gompert, owner of the bungalow and lord of the lake was no artist. Sport-shirted, heavy-shouldered, hairy-armed, he stood at the end of the broad veranda toward the water and turned a scowl upward to the sky.

“Damn the moon!” he exploded. “This ain’t going to help things any!”

In the doorway behind him, nicotine-stained fingers cupped themselves like yellow claws around a match that flared brightly between inhalations on a vulture face. The match, snapped out, described a glowing arc.

“Nature’s grand,” said the spindly man, squinting at the bright sky and then staring back along the road that curled down the hillside to the lake. “What the hell do you suppose has happened to them birds, anyway?”

Dutch Gompert directed a last glare at the unwelcome moon and turned his back on it.

“They’ll get here, all right,” he said. “It’s a case of got to. They know it, Crow.”

Corroboration, neatly timed, appeared at the hilltop above them. The headlights of an automobile climbing the far side of the rise whitened the sky.

“That’s service!” grinned the man called “Crow.” “Glad I didn’t have a bet up. Here they come now.”

“Maybe,” Gompert said, “it ain’t them yet. Maybe it’s Gwen. I told her to get here at ten o’clock, but she could be ahead of time for once in her life.”

The approaching car had shot over the hump and was coasting to them — a long, low roadster, top down. A door was opening as it stopped in front of the bungalow, and one of the three passengers jumped out.

“Okay, Lafayette!” he cried. “Here we are!”

Gompert withheld congratulation. His voice was sour. “Not any too soon,” he said “Duncan’s folding his tent tomorrow. Going back to town. If the trick ain’t turned tonight, we’re outta luck. What slowed you, Scudder? Lose your way?”

“Wait till you hear,” the flat-nosed traveler grunted. “We just got a traffic pinch, Dutch. In the dark of the moon, on the open road, miles from nowhere — up pops a cop, and we’re grabbed for speeding!”

“Jeez!” breathed Gompert. He stared, open-mouthed. “And you guys with a tommy-gun in the car!”

Scudder nodded. “Sure, with a tommy-gun in the car. And do you s’pose that we were standing for the collar?”

The Crow moved forward across the veranda, craning his scrawny neck, his beads of eyes incredulous.

“Cut the kidding,” he advised. “It ain’t funny.”

Scudder’s close-set eyes smouldered on him. “This’d be a swell time to kid, wouldn’t it? I’m telling you, a cop got on our tail and we had to blow him off of it.”

“That’s what happened,” confirmed the machine gunner in the rumble seat. “It was just a few miles down that cement crossroad. If you’d been outdoors, you could almost have heard the typewriter going when I sprayed him.”

The Crow had to believe it then. He whistled. “You left him there?” he demanded.

“Left him flat on the cement. Scudder said to.”

Dutch Gompert moistened his lips. “What kind of cop?”

“One of them fancy birds,” Scudder said. “State trooper.”

The Crow’s eyes glittered as they swung to Gompert. “Trooper!” he cawed. “Get that baby, did you? Then you can have the best in the house. Ask Dutch!”

The newcomers looked toward Gompert, waited for him to speak while he stared over the lake, brows drawn, abstractedly jingling coins in his pocket.

“If you birds croaked a state trooper,” he told them after a space, “you just saved me that much trouble. There’s only been one trooper in this district since I came up. Fella named Bradley — poison. Sooner or later it would have been a case of bump him off or get out. But — this certainly wasn’t a good night for it.” He shook his head. “Well, it’s done, anyhow. Just what happened, Scudder?”

In swift sentences, a verbal shorthand filled in by eager contributions from the roadster’s other passengers, the flat-nosed man described the chase.

“That old guy at the filling station has got me worried,” he said. “Him and your pal, the cop, might have got their heads together.”

“It’s pretty near a cinch they did,” nodded Dutch Gompert. “There would be the tip-off. Looks to me like you fellas better use my car on the Duncan trip and say good-bye to this one.”

“What do you mean, good-bye?” came sharply from the driver of the roadster.

“Good-bye — forever!”

“Yeah? Ditch four grand?”

“Drown it!” Gompert’s gaze traveled again to the water. “That lake’s better than five hundred feet deep in places — and I know some of the places. That ain’t all. I’ve sunk jobs as new and shiny as this out there. Hot ones, o’ course. Borrowed buggies that wise-aleck trooper thought he had a line on.”

Scudder reinforced him. “Dutch is right, Mac,” he said, looking regretfully at the roadster and then resignedly at the lake. “It ain’t the car you ought to be thinking about as much as the jam it might get us into. There ain’t a machine on the road — or in the showroom, either — that I’d take a chance on the hot seat for.”

With Gompert, the incident closed. “Down she goes, and that’s that,” he said. “My sedan will be better for the job at Duncan’s, anyway. Come in and I’ll give you the program.”

Inside the bungalow a four-foot log was blazing in a huge stone fireplace. Rubbing chilled hands over it, Scudder said savagely:

“Fat lot of good Veronalli’s going to do for himself, forcing this job on us. Suppose we do manage to spring him out of the death house — how long does he think we’ll let him walk the streets before he gets his?”

Gompert spat at the log. “That’ll come in its turn,” he growled. “Right now, it’s Joe Veronalli that has us on the spot. That dirty little rat ain’t running any bluff, Scudder. He’s all set to squeal on the mob if we don’t put the finger on Duncan for him. And he’s getting impatient. There was another kite from him in the mail this morning. The way he manages to swing out correspondence, you’d think he was in the Biltmore instead of in the pen. Here’s the latest, Scud. Read it yourself.”

Gompert picked a sheet of soiled paper from the long plank table in the center of the room and Scudder, after a quick glance, nodded. “It’s Veronalli’s fist, all right,” he conceded. Then he held the scrawl close to a hissing gasoline lantern suspended from a rough-hewn beam and read aloud:

Scudder returned the “kite” to the table, weighted it with a whiskey glass and stood staring at it.

“Well, he sure doped out a fast one,” he admitted with a grudging admiration. “If Duncan is anywhere near human, it ought to work just the way Joe figures it — and that’s all we’ve got to worry about right now. Everything’s set at your end, Dutch?”

“All set,” Gompert said. He cleared a space on the table and spread out a road map. “The first thing is to get the lay of the land fixed in your mind.” A thick thumb hovered over the map and descended. “This is where you are now, Scudder — the puddle outside is what they call Little Moose Lake. This road here is the one where you left Bradley; hope he rots there. Gwen’s shack is about ten miles up this other pike, but you don’t need to bother your head about that; just bring the package back here, see? Gwen’s coming over and she’ll take care of it. That hide-away of hers is perfect.”

“And what’s the blue cross-mark there?” Scudder asked, looking over Gompert’s shoulder. “Duncan’s place?”

“That’s the mansion. It sits back a good half mile from the road. They say there’s more than six thousand acres to the whole estate — miles of it. But you’ll find the maim house easy enough. You keep going around the lake on this same road you came over. Then you turn left on the next cement and that leads you straight to it. I metered off the distance today, and it’s just a shade over sixteen miles to Duncan’s gate. You’ll know the place when you come to it. After that, it’s a crash-in.”

“Crash-in is right,” assented Scudder. “My idea, Duncan’s got to know what it’s all about before we leave. That’s the only way to play it — cards on the table with Duncan himself. No foolishness with notes later on, but cold turkey at the jump. He’ll keep his trap shut then — and like it.”

“Yeah! And he’ll manage to keep his people quiet. If you only make it strong enough, there’ll never be a squawk to the cops — never a line in the papers. That’s up to you.”

Scudder took a last glance at the map and walked to the door.

“I feel sorry for you, Mac,” he said. “Come on, say good-bye to four grand’s worth of roadster. Maybe the bus won’t be here when we get back.”

“It won’t — not where you can see it,” promised Gompert. “Better switch that typewriter over to the sedan. Tony — just in case!”

The sedan, as rangy and powerful as the roadster, stood in the open beside the bungalow, its bright metal work sparkling in the moonlight. The moon struck a duller gleam from the barrel of the machine gun as the swarthy artilleryman transferred it from the rumble of the red car.

“Looks like an even swap at that,” grinned the New York party’s chauffeur, settling himself behind the wheel of the sedan. He listened appreciatively to the purr of the motor, instantly alive as his foot touched the starter. “This’ll do fine.”

A moment later the sedan slid away. It skirted the lake, struck off through the hills on the continuation of the dirt road which the roadster had followed to Dutch Gompert’s poetic retreat and, after a few minutes, was on smooth concrete.

Far to the west, where tall stone posts rose beside the highway and closed gates of iron barred the entrance to a private road, the sleek machine halted. Close behind the posts stood a vine draped cottage, obviously a gate-keeper’s lodge.

The man with the flat nose, again sitting with the driver, reached across the wheel. “Let’s start it in style,” he said, and under the light pressure of his hand the sedan’s horn sounded a muted trumpet call. Almost immediately a stoop-shouldered old man appeared from the lodge in answer to the summons and swung open the gates.

Scudder had slipped from the car after sounding the horn. He was behind the nearer pillar, ready for a spring, as the gate-keeper stood blinking in a blaze of headlights that hid everything behind them.

“Are you folks expected?” the old man called out, shambling forward.

Masked now, Scudder leaped at him. A blackjack rose and fell. The gatekeeper’s knees sagged. He dropped in a heap.

“Expected?” the flat-nosed man rasped, driving a toe into the ribs of his crumpled victim. “Was that?”

Chapter IV Bradley Hits the Road Again

Down, but not out. Almost, not quite. Flat on his face, cheek to the icy cement, Bradley snapped out of his daze as the escaping gunmen’s car darted ahead.

What a chump! The trio in the roadster had been TNT on wheels, and he’d known it. Letting down his guard, giving them that chance at him, had been just about the equivalent of suicide. Except that the stiff brim of his campaign hat had broken the blow, a fractured skull would certainly have been the reward of his lapse.

He started to get up, then went flat again. Fire suddenly was spouting from the back of the roadster to the accompaniment of a throaty rattle. The flame and the roar vindicated old Sam Witherspoon’s eyesight. They did have a machine gun in the New York car and they were using it. A bee-swarm of slugs from it passed over him with a strident buzzing.

The angle of fire had been depressed when another burst came; bouncing bullets struck fire from the concrete all about him. One bit of lead scored a hit on the motorcycle out there in the middle of the road. He heard the hard ping and saw the front wheel spinning.

When the firing ceased he saw that the roadster was at a standstill. By rising then he would have courted another burst from the machine gun, so he lay quiet and made no further movement after he had cleared his automatic of the holster.

He didn’t open fire. That would have been one more sucker play. At a hundred yards — the distance between him and the roadster must have been all of that — his pistol wouldn’t be much good. They could rip him up with the machine gun before he got fairly into action with it.

He thought they’d be coming back, one or two of them at least, to make sure that the tommy-gun had done its work. That would be the time to use the pistol; to shoot fast and straight, drop whoever came and make a sprint for the car before the rapid-fire gun opened up again. But none of them came. He heard their voices, hot in argument, and then the tail light was receding.

In a few seconds it was at the crest of the next rise; up, over — gone!

Bradley was up as the tail light vanished, weaving to the motorcycle. The lump on his head seemed to be the size of his fist. He was giddy now, but that would pass after the breeze had been slapping his face for a while. With their machine gun those murderous New Yorkers might keep him out of pistol range; nothing on earth, he grimly promised himself, would keep him off their trail. And he was going to get them! No matter where they went, he’d get them even though he had to follow them to the gates of hell itself.

He had to amend that vow no sooner than it had been made. The miracle that had saved him when the bullets were flying thick had not spared the motorcycle. A bullet had passed through the front tire and that left him with a tricky repair job to do before he went anywhere.

It took time to get the wheel off, more time to patch the two holes in the tube, and a long ten minutes beyond all that to inflate the tire with the small hand pump after the blow-out patch was in.

Haste hadn’t made for speed, and when the motorcycle was ready to go he could no longer hope to overtake the gunmen, even had there been any way of telling which branch of the road they had taken at the fork a few miles beyond. It would have to be a case, now, of getting to a telephone and spreading an alarm; at least he knew the license number and could describe the car and its passengers, and there was a reasonable chance that they would be picked up.

The nearest telephone? Was there one nearer than Sam Witherspoon’s? Offhand, he couldn’t think of one. He made a quick calculation and decided that he could get to the little crossroads inn where he was billeted, on ahead, in no more time than a return to the starting point of the chase would require.

So deciding, he made the inn at a trifling speed of sixty miles an hour, a mere jog for him, sparing the sketchily repaired tire in momentary expectation of a blowout.

Expecting it, he didn’t get the blowout. The tire took him home, and in precisely three-quarters of an hour after he had seen the last of the New York roadster his description of it was flashing to trooper barracks and billets and country and city police stations through not only his own, but all neighboring states.

While he was setting that machinery in motion, one of the three faces was vivid to Bradley — reminiscently vivid. The man with the flat nose was some one he had seen before; that had been his impression, and an instant impression, when he had overtaken and halted the roadster; an impression that had strengthened as he raced for the telephone. Now he was sure of it.

He desperately raked his memory. Where had he seen Flat Nose, and when?

A sudden hunch came. Upstairs, where he had methodically filed away every police bulletin received in that territory since he had been assigned there, he played it straight across the files.

There were hundreds of the bulletins, from detective bureaus all over the country and with every government department of criminal investigation represented as well — and it turned out, finally, that it was in one of the Federal broadsides he had previously seen the unforgettable face of the flat-nosed New Yorker. The particular bulletin which bore the likeness was more than a year old, but there was no mistaking that the man pictured and the man who had sat beside the driver in the roadster were one and the same.

Halfway through the files when he at last came to the photograph, Bradley snatched it out with a whoop of exultation. Thomas Scudder, alias Stevens, alias MacManus, once or still a fugitive under an indictment charging conspiracy to withdraw liquor illegally from a bonded warehouse — that was his man!

At the moment of discovery Bradley had eyes only for the one face, although the bulletin called for the apprehension of two fugitives and carried also a stiffly posed front-and-side camera study of Thomas Scudder’s companion in crime. He wasn’t interested in the second man just then, but when he presently gave a casual glance to the Rogues’ Gallery photograph to the left of the scowling Scudder, the glance froze into a petrified stare.

Another acquaintance! And more than an acquaintance, the bullet-headed and bull-necked party of the second part was now a neighbor!

“Dutch Gompert!” breathed Bradley. “What a break!”

Ten-point type under the Rogues’ Gallery picture spelled out confirmation. “Fritz (Dutch) Gompert” it was, according to the caption — and Bradley, who had intended to put a dressing on his head wound and turn in, swiftly changed his plans. He slipped out of his crimson stained tunic and into another just dry-cleaned; and then, back in the garage, he made quick work of shedding the bullet-broken tire and replacing it with a sound one.

As he felt now, he was good for all night, wide awake, ready to dash out again on the chase he had been forced to abandon as hopeless an hour ago. Rest was out of the question for him, at least until he had gone to Dutch Gompert’s place on Little Moose Lake and investigated the possibility that Dutch was entertaining company from New York.

It was a good bet that Dutch did have guests. If Gompert and Scudder had been team-mates in crookedness a year or two ago, why not now? In that case it would most likely have been for Little Moose Lake that the roadster was heading, and the fact that the trio in the car had left a presumably dead state policeman on a lonely road behind them would hardly have caused them to alter their objective. On the contrary, Dutch Gompert would harbor and advise them — click in with an alibi in case of need.

It was eighteen miles to Little Moose by the shortest route, and the black clouds were piling up again as the motorcycle, wide open, zoomed through the hills. The wind was up to almost half a gale; crashing through the brown woods, wrenching the crisp leaves from their dying grip on the branches, it swallowed the thunder of Bradley’s dash through the night. It covered the motorcycle’s roar so utterly that he had approached to within a quarter mile of Dutch Gompert’s place before he thought it better to leave the machine behind.

Where he dismounted the crest of the last sharp hill gave him what amounted to a bird’s eye view of Little Moose Lake and the bungalow nestling on its shore. Under the stormy sky the lake was a blob of ink, a blob that would have been invisible except for light from the bungalow that reflected on the sable waters.

Down in the lighted house there might be two enemies or there might be five. Dutch Gompert might be alone, as he usually was, with the Man Friday he called “Crow,” that scrawny bravo whose wasted body and dead eyes showed him far gone in drug addiction. Would he find just those two — or would Scudder and his machine gun crew be with them? At the showdown, would he face two or would he face five?

Bradley, boiling, nursed a hot hope that the answer would be five. Some day, sooner or later, he would either be throwing Dutch Gompert into a cell or running him out of the country. But he could wait to deal with Dutch. What he badly wanted tonight was just to come up with Thomas Scudder and his two fellow tourists.

Five to one wouldn’t really be bad odds, not when surprise went with the attack. If there were five men in the bungalow now, they wouldn’t be sitting around with guns on their knees. More likely they’d have glasses in their hands, and it would require no more than the kicking in of a window and a finger on the trigger of a formidable police positive to master them.

So Bradley, proceeding down hill afoot, carried with him full confidence of his ability to make a clean job of it single-handed whether the bungalow held two or held more. Had reinforcements been available, he could have wished them for only one reason — to guard his back while, after disarming them, he laced into Scudder and his big town pals with his fists.

The wind still was rising. No need, with all that racket, to pussyfoot. Even when he had reached the bungalow and was on the veranda, Bradley knew he could have brought his heels down hard without betraying his presence. There was not only noise from straining, brittle branches and scurrying leaves now; the wind, sweeping down the four-mile length of Little Moose, was crashing in a surf that drummed heavily along the shingle.

Listening at the door, Bradley could catch no sound within. The window nearer the door was curtained, and he went to another at the lakeside end of the long veranda. His view of the interior was unobstructed there. A huge log was flaming in a fireplace beyond a big table with a top of rough planks, but the chairs drawn to the hearth were empty. There weren’t five men in the bungalow, and there weren’t two. Lighted, warm, doubly inviting on so raw a night, the single big room with the curtained bunks built into its wall was deserted.

That was strange, but stranger still was the sight which met Bradley’s eyes as he turned from the window. Little Moose Lake, as he very well knew’, had a stretch of a shade more than four miles from head to foot, and was nowhere less than half a mile in width. And now, suddenly, an automobile was coming straight at him across the water, brilliant headlights boring close down across the lathered surface.

Bradley rubbed his eyes. There had never been a bridge across Little Moose, and never would be. What was he seeing — or did he just think he saw’ it? Had that crack on the head knocked something loose in his brain, perhaps, and made him a victim of delusions?

He still saw the headlights, though, after the eye-rubbing and the question. The only difference was that they had changed direction. They no longer came toward him but were casting their beam down the lake. The white shaft kept on turning until it was lighting the woods across Little Moose and another light was facing him, a light not nearly so bright; a red light, this one.

Straining his eyes, Bradley could just make out two letters on the metal plate on which the red light shone. The letters were “N Y,” and that was enough for him. He was sane, and the water-voyaging automobile out there wasn’t even an optical illusion. It was an explainable fact. As he congratulated himself on that heartening assurance, the headlights were snuffed out.

Bradley drew a deep breath. Thanks to his brief glimpse of the license plate, he knew now what was doing.

He went back along the veranda and tried the door. It was unlocked. A swift glance around the big room revealed half a dozen likely hiding places; the best of all would be one of those curtained alcoves into which the bunks were built.

His strategy would be different now, bagging his men a lot easier. He’d have no window-sill to negotiate after he’d revealed himself, but could have his quarry under observation-from the instant of their entrance and pick his moment for making his presence known.

The hard gasp of a struggling motorboat engine reached him above the clatter of the gathering storm when he had made his survey and his decision. He peered out a window that looked on the lake, cautiously parting the dark curtains that would show no shadow on the far side. A launch was slowly fighting its way to the little dock below the bungalow, towing what looked like a big bathing raft.

Bradley saw the launch tie up at the dock, saw then that there were only two men in it. They set the raft adrift, for a space watched it until it had been carried close onto the shingle, and then started up toward the bungalow.

When they opened the door, Bradley was out of sight in his alcove. Dutch Gompert and the Crow — nobody else.

He gave them time to throw off their mackinaws; time beyond that to pour and down a drink from the whiskey bottle on the long table. Then the little metal rings tinkled along the suspending wire as he swept back the curtain. Gompert and the Crow wheeled at the sound. They stood rooted, silent, Dutch frozen with amazement, his bony satellite livid with terror.

“Oh, my God!” screamed the Crow. “Look, Dutch, look! Do you see it?”

Bradley hadn’t drawn his pistol. Against men paralyzed, as these men were, he didn’t have to.

“Hello, Dutch!” he greeted calmly. “What’s happened to your friends from New York?”

Chapter V The Kite’s Tail

A wheezy gasp of relief came from the dope-soaked Crow when Bradley’s voice had revealed him to be a living man and not an avenging spirit. Beside him, Dutch Gompert mopped a face suddenly moist and plumped his weight down at the edge of the home-built table. Neither spoke.

“This must be quite a surprise,” Bradley suggested. “You hear, one minute, that I’ve got a lily in my hand. Next minute, here I am!”

Gompert’s bewilderment was evolving into rage. His face reddened.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he snarled. “You’ve got your nerve, breaking into a place like this!”

“Didn’t break in — I walked in,” Bradley countered, placid. “Walked in to get a little information. You had some visitors here a short time ago, Gompert. I want to find out where they are.”

“Visitors? Here?” Gompert swiveled. “Hear that, Crow? Remember seeing any visitors?”

“That’s a laugh,” said the Crow. “There ain’t been nobody here but us.”

“I mean,” Bradley said, “the people who came up in that red roadster.”

“What red roadster?”

“The one you just got rid of.”

That brought guilty eyes furtively together.

“You’re talking Choctaw,” Dutch Gompert complained.

“I’ve been here quite a while — and I’ve got eyes,” Bradley told him. “I saw you take an automobile out on the lake, on a raft. You towed back the raft, but not the automobile. Now I’ve got an idea where a few other cars went just when I was ready to grab them — and you.”

Gompert burst out with a too loud laugh. “Say, grayback, you didn’t see as much as you think you did! What car do you suppose that was? I dumped one, sure. I’m not denying that. There ain’t any reason why I should. It was a piece of old junk that’s been standing around here until I got tired of looking at it.”

Bradley grinned. “Yes? Well, the car you took out in the lake and didn’t bring back had this year’s license plates on it — New York license plates. Isn’t that a fact?”

“You’re telling me,” Gompert came back after a pause.

“You bet I am,” agreed Bradley. “And I’ll tell you something else, Gompert. That car was the same red roadster that Scudder came here in!”

The cigarette which the Crow had just lighted dropped from his fingers to the floor.

“Scudder!” he cried.

The side glance that Gompert darted at him was freighted with a promise of future reprisal for that slip. He did what he could to cover it.

“Who’s Scudder?” he demanded.

“Tom Scudder,” Bradley said. This was the time to put it on thick and he proceeded to. “Scudder, alias Stevens, alias a few other things. The Scudder who was indicted with you in New York in that whiskey withdrawal game. The Scudder who came in the red roadster a while ago and told you he and his friends had just shot up a state trooper with that machine gun they carried in the rumble. That’s the Scudder I’m looking for — and when I get my hands on him, you can lay your bottom dollar, Gompert, that he’s going to be a resident of this commonwealth for a good long stretch. Now, where is he?”

Dutch’s eves blazed. “You go to hell, Bradley!” he grated. “Even if I could tell you anything, do you think I would? Be your age!”

“You will,” Bradley promised. He jerked out the police positive. “Get your hands up, both of you! First I’m going to frisk you and then I’m going to work on you.”

Even up there, Dutch and the Crow were wearing the familiar harness of the city gunman. Each had a shoulder belt under his coat, and a moment later the side pockets of Bradley’s gray tunic were weighted with the snub-nosed pistols he had taken from them.

“The investigating committee is just about to sit, Gompert — and sit hard!” he announced grimly. “Are you going to tell me where Scudder went with those two other mugs, or am I going to bruise the information out of you? Take your choice.”

Dutch Gompert delayed answer. While Bradley was disarming him, his eye had fallen on that tell-tale scrap of paper that might give the whole game away if Bradley got hold of it — Joe Veronalli’s “kite.” Now he had begun inching toward it along the edge of the table. The Crow saw what he was up to and attempted to cover the maneuver by diverting attention to himself.

“Mind if I take a drink, Bradley?” he asked.

He was reaching for the uncorked bottle as he spoke, and with calculated clumsiness tipped it over when his shaking hand touched it.

That by-play had a reverse effect on Bradley from the one intended. It warned him that something was afoot.

“Set ’em up in the other alley,” he jeered at the Crow, but out of the corner of his eyes he was watching Gompert.

Dutch, all innocence, had started to talk. “All right, Bradley; you win,” he said, changing his tone. “Scudder was here. That’s the truth. But he didn’t say nothing about any gun play and he went away in the same car he came in. You’re wrong about the machine I dumped, see? It was just an old heap, like I told you. As for where’s Scudder’s going, all I can tell you is what he told me. He’s on a little pleasure trip to Canada, get me? If I was looking for him, I’d hit for Montreal.”

Very slowly, Gompert had continued his progress along the table. Bradley, seeming not to notice that, pounced upon him when he had pushed over a soiled whiskey glass and was crumpling in a big palm a sheet of paper that had lain beneath it. His left hand closed like a steel trap on the gangster’s wrist.

“Something interesting, is it?” he snapped. “Well, I’ll take a look at it, Gompert, just so long as you’ve been good enough to call my attention to it. Drop it, now, or I’ll have to cripple your arm for you.”

With that grip he could have broken the captive arm, and when he had given Dutch a painful demonstration of his ability the clenched hand relaxed and the crumpled paper fell to the floor.

Bradley wasn’t repeating his earlier mistake. He didn’t stoop to pick up the paper then, but kicked it across the room. Nor did he turn his back on Gompert and the Crow when he went after it. After a dozen steps to the rear had brought him to the ball of paper, he got it by crouching rather than by stooping, his eyes on the glaring pair during every instant of the recovery and his pistol menacing them.

But here he had the upper hand firmly. Dutch and the Crow were momentarily cowed beyond any thought of rushing him and risking the deadly police positive. While he held them at a distance he could safely see what it was that Gompert had been so anxious to get out of sight. He backed into a corner, where he also could watch the door, and smoothed out the paper.

In the corner, the light was not so good. He found the pencilled message hard to decipher and made slow work of it. Only when he came to the name of Duncan — “Big Boss” Duncan — did he get anything from the scrawl.

The name gave him a hot lead. Duncan was a big name up in this country, a big name all through the state. Yes, in these last ten years the biggest name of all.

Thorne Duncan, as famous for his philanthropies as for his wealth, was a legendary figure. Equally a power in industry and in politics, Duncan divided his time between his magnificent city home and an estate in these up-country hills that took in thousands of acres.

By all odds, Thorne Duncan must be the Duncan mentioned in the letter, and almost certainly Dutch Gompert’s effort to destroy the scrawl meant that it was a prospective raid on the Duncan estate that had brought the three machine gunners up from New York. Probably they were on their way there now — on their way, or already arrived!

“Thanks, Dutch,” said Bradley. “You’re a great help, old-timer. So Scudder is visiting Thorne Duncan, is he? Snap it, now! How long ago did he leave?”

“He went to Canada,” Gompert insisted stonily.

“Maybe. But by way of Duncan’s, I’ll gamble. Got a telephone here, Gompert?”

“No.”

That was a lie, Bradley thought. He stood by the unshaded window and when he had glanced out he was sure of it. He could see a line of poles along the roadside; not light poles, certainly, or else Gompert wouldn’t be using that gasoline lantern.

Bradley swept the big room with exploring eyes and spotted a telephone in a far corner, standing on the floor and half hidden by a chair.

“What’s that?” he snapped. “No phone, Gompert? I’m surprised at you!”

“Same thing. It’s been shut off.”

“Sure? I’ll just check on that, if you don’t mind.”

Gompert shot a meaning glance at the Crow as Bradley crossed the room — and the Crow, sidling away, kicked a little switch set close above the floorboards in the wall by the fireplace.

Bradley had the receiver off the hook then. There was a promising jingle, but that first sign of life was also the last one on the wire. He swore and hung up.

Tough luck! With miles of dirt road to negotiate before he got onto the concrete, it would take him at least twenty minutes to reach High Acres, the Thorne Duncan estate, and time was precious. If the Scudder party really had started for High Acres he could not hope to get there ahead of them, couldn’t hope now even to put Duncan on his guard.

“All right, Gompert,” he said. “That’s once you’ve told the truth, anyhow. Maybe I’d better take a run over to Duncan’s and see what’s doing. What do you think?”

Gompert followed his retreat to the door with baleful eyes.

“You can take a jump in the lake,” he declared.

“Thanks,” said Bradley. “Next July I will. In the meantime — don’t forget I’ll be seeing you!”

The door slammed and he was gone.

Gompert turned a cold grin on the Crow. “Well, if that guy Bradley ain’t a hard clock to stop!” he blurted.

“Jeez! What a mess!” The Crow shuddered. “He’ll gum the deal, sure. Have all the cops in the state dashing in here.”

Dutch Gompert shook his big head. “No he won’t. There’s a good chance he’ll run into the sedan — and Tony won’t miss him again.”

“Suppose he don’t?”

“It’ll be hush-hush for him at Duncan’s, that’s what. Scudder will see to that.”

The Crow was unconvinced, shaky. “Just the same,” he insisted, “we’re going to have that bird Bradley on our neck. I feel it in my bones.”

“Yeah?” Gompert mocked him. “Not if I know my vegetables, Crow. Say, I was figuring out a fast one on Bradley even before he finished reading Joe’s kite. That guy ain’t indestructible, you know. Maybe he’s proof against machine gun bullets, but he can be got other ways. Listen while I make a call and you’ll find out what one of ’em is. Boot that switch, will you?”

The switch on the wall was a cutoff. Closed again, it restored communication between Little Moose Lake and the outside world. When Gompert had lifted the receiver a prompt “Number, please,” came over the wire from a rural switchboard many miles away.

“Four — one — three,” Gompert spoke into the transmitter.

“Gwen?” said the Crow. “Has she had time to get back there?”

“She’s a driving fool, ain’t she?” asked Gompert. He whistled softly between his teeth while he waited for an answer; then, the answer being slow, he threw an aside to the Crow: “Maybe it works, maybe it don’t. It’s worth a shot, anyway — and if it does work, Mister State Trooper Bradley is going to wake up tomorrow mornin’ sitting under five hundred foot of fresh water in Mac’s four-grand roadster!”

Chapter VI Crashed In!

Two men, gray-haired, dinner-coated, host and guest, sat together before a hospitable fire in the oak-panelled library of the manor house at High Acres, fragrant smoke curling lazily from their cigars.

They were old friends. That could have been taken from their very silence as they stared into the glowing embers. More tangible evidence than that of their long friendship was there behind them — a photograph of the guest, framed in gold, on the desk of the host.

The guest had been yawning; thirty-six holes of golf was more than he was used to these days. He caught himself nodding in the wing chair, not for the first time, and arose.

“I’m tuckered, Thorne,” he said. “If I don’t turn in now under my own power, I’ll have to be packed to bed. Good night.”

Thorne Duncan walked with him to the hall door.

“Too early for me; I’ll read for an hour or two,” he said. “Good night, Morton.”

A plump man in dark livery, also graying, opened the library door a few minutes after Duncan had returned to his chair and switched on the reading light beside it.

“Anything more, sir?”

“Nothing, thank you.” The master of High Acres shook his head. “You may call it a day, Ludlow — and a night.”

He opened the book he had selected after seeing his guest up the stairway, adjusted his glasses, and lost himself in the text. For half an hour the novel held him and then he closed it. Again he looked into the fire and dreamed — and out of the dreaming arose an impulse that presently lifted him to his feet. He went out into the broad, dim hall and softly climbed the staircase that had been brought to him overseas, entire, from an Old World palace.

In the upper hall he opened a door and tip-toed into a room where a night light burned. It was a very large room and in it, head to a wall along which painted sprites spread their wings and painted clowns cavorted, was a very small bed.

Thorne Duncan leaned over the sleeping figure in the bed — a little girl, brown curls all helter-skelter on the pillow, hugging close to her a battered, cherished doll with one eye gone and only half a nose remaining.

For Thorne Duncan, this was no rare expedition. In the two years since High Acres had been left without a mistress, the nightly pilgrimage to the nursery had become fixed habit with him. The small bed held everything that made his life worth living now.

He had made no sound since entering, but the child stirred. Her eyes opened and blinked sleepily. She released the doll, and the soft little arms that had held it reached up to Duncan. A pet name she had for him, her own nursery invention, shaped drowsily on her lips. He bent lower and kissed them, closed her eyes with gentle fingertips and stole away.

When he had returned to the library he found himself after a time in the grip of an unaccountable restlessness. Ordinarily, he would sit for hours by the fire; tonight it irked him to sit for minutes. He was wakeful and at the same time strangely uneasy, found himself regretting that his guest had not remained below with him.

He poked the log vigorously, trying to arouse a more cheerful blaze. Failing, he rid the lofty room of shadows by switching on the lights in the wall-brackets. When he had done that, he stopped on the way back to his chair and his book to listen.

Queer hour for visitors, but a car was coming up the main drive. Near now, it continued past the dark main door of the mansion and stopped beside the terrace outside the lighted library. In another moment some one was rapping at the library door which opened from the terrace. Thorne Duncan hesitated, then opened it.

A masked man who held a pistol confronted him.

“Don’t yelp!” he advised.

Duncan’s jaw tightened. He had lost color, but his voice was steady.

“I suppose,” he said, “you wish me to ask you in?”

“We’re coming,” the masked man confirmed briefly.

Two others, also masked, had climbed upon the terrace. Thorne Duncan could see behind them the car from which they had come — a big sedan. Unarmed and with the bell cord out of reach, he bowed to force. He stood aside as the intruders shouldered in. One of them crossed the room, opened the hall door and looked out. He turned to ask:

“Anybody else up, Duncan?”

“No one.”

“All right, then. Sit down,” said the masked leader. “You and me will have a little talk while my friends do their stuff.”

“Thanks for the invitation,” Thorne Duncan said dryly, “but I’m quite comfortable standing.” He nodded toward a square bulk covered with a tapestry. “There’s my safe — open. I hope you won’t find the contents disappointing.”

At a nod from the spokesman, the two shorter and slenderer men had started toward the hall door. Duncan called after them sharply:

“Where are you going?”

They kept on, ignoring the question.

“They’re going after what we came for. It’s nothing in your safe, Duncan. You’ve got something in this house that’s worth more to you than that safe chock full of thousand-dollar notes would be. I mean — that kid of yours!”

Duncan caught his breath. “No, no!” he cried. “You’ll have to kill me before you take her!”

He would have sprung for the gun then, but the masked man took a swift step backward.

“Don’t try anything like that, Duncan,” he cautioned. “It wouldn’t get you anywheres. I’d give you the flat of the gun alongside your ear — which’d be plenty without any shooting.”

Duncan’s legs suddenly were weak under him. He dropped into a chair. “You can’t do this!” he groaned. “Can’t do it!” He steadied himself with a heroic effort. “For God’s sake, don’t go through with it. You don’t have to. Whatever the ransom you mean to demand, you can have it now. I’ll write you my check for the money — pledge you my word of honor that I won’t stop payment and won’t ever make a move against you.”

The masked leader shook his head. “We don’t want your check, Duncan. Don’t want a cent of your money.”

“What, then?”

“Your power. Your influence. You’ve got plenty of it, and to spare. We want it swung a certain way.”

Thorne Duncan pulled himself up straight in the wing chair and stared. “I don’t understand you.”

“You will. Listen here. You’re the big finger in politics in this state, ain’t you, Duncan? You put the Governor where he is — ain’t it so? And you and him are pals, besides. If I’m wrong, stop me.”

Duncan moistened his lips. “Part of what you say is true. What then?”

“It’s up to you to pull some wires — and we keep your kid until they’re pulled, see? There don’t need to be any rumpus raised. The girl will be all right with us — unless you get a brainstorm and put the cops after us. In that case, we’ll just call everything off and get rid of the kid. You’ll never see her again. But if you keep quiet about this, use your noodle, use your influence the way we want you to use it, the kid comes back to you safe and sound. And nobody’ll try to squeeze any dough out of you, understand?”

“As far as you’ve gone, I understand. You want me to get something from the Governor. What?”

“A pardon for a friend of ours. A full pardon for Joe Veronalli. Get that name set in your mind, Duncan, because if you forget it — if you don’t make good for us — your kid’s a goner. Joseph Veronalli. He’s in the death-house at the state pen now, poor Joe is, and you’re the one who’s going to spring him. Savvy?”

Thorne Duncan sat in thought, his chin on his chest. “What,” he asked after a space, “if my influence with the Governor is not as great as you believe it to be?”

“Then it’s just too bad. But don’t be that way, Duncan. The Governor will do anything you say. That’s what we’re banking on.”

Joe Veronalli’s masked champion evidently had intended to say more, but he broke off with the speech unfinished. Some sound outdoors had caught his ear and as he listened for it to repeat Thorne Duncan listened with him.

When the sound came again the chief of the kidnaper band leaped to his feet.

“Motorcycle!” he blared. “Damn you, Duncan, have you got some secret button around here that calls cops? Remember, one word about this to the police or the papers and it’s — good-bye, kid! We’ll kill her, sure, if you squawk!”

He sprang for the hall door. Duncan followed him to see the other masked men racing down the stairs. A sob of protest escaped him. They had found the nursery. One of them was carrying a blanketed armful.

“Motorcycle!” he called over the stair-rail.

“Just in time to be too late!” the leader said. “Quick! Out the same way we came in!”

It had to be quick. Already the great knocker at the front of the house was thundering a heavy-fisted demand for entrance.

Chapter VII Hands Off!

On the run from Little Moose Lake to High Acres, Bradley beat the twenty minutes he had allowed himself by two minutes and a fraction. At this time of year there was little or no night traffic on local roads and once he had hit the concrete he had it to himself. When he arrived at the High Acres lodge he had covered the sixteen-mile stretch of it without passing or meeting a single car.

The estate gate stood open, a circumstance which he marked at once as unusual. He had passed the High Acres entrance times without number, and the gate had always been closed except when automobiles were entering the estate or leaving it.

Turning in, he slapped on his brakes, jerked the motorcycle back on its stand and ran up on the porch of the lodge to find out just what visitors might have come to High Acres within the last hour or so. Scudder and his tommy-gun artists were of course no longer traveling in the red roadster. His guess was that Dutch Gompert, who always had two or three suspiciously fancy automobiles around, had lent them a replacement car. On that car, assuming that they had come to High Acres and already had gone on their way, he wanted to get a line.

His first knock at the lodge door brought no response. He knocked again and harder, and that evoked a sound within that sent a chill through him — a heavy groan. The door yielded when he tried it and in the dark hall he played his pocket flash along the walls until he had located the light switch. The groan was repeated as the hall lamp came on, and he traced it to a room at the rear of the cottage.

Mylan, the gate-keeper, lay on the floor there, his head a welter of blood, his wrists and his ankles bound with wire and a handkerchief stuffed into his mouth as a gag.

Swiftly on his knees beside him, Bradley relieved him of the gag.

“What happened? Quick!” he asked as he went to work on the wire.

Mylan’s eyes were open and had showed a flicker of recognition.

“Big sedan,” he whispered. “Something — something hit me.”

Bradley knew that questioning would bring nothing more. Also, there was nothing much he could do for the old man after freeing him, and there was a possibility that he still might be in time to walk in on something at the manor house.

“You’ll be all right, Mylan,” he said, “so I’m going to push on. Lock that front door and keep it locked until I get back. That ought to be soon.”

He raced out, made his saddle with a flying jump and went scooting up the broad poplar-lined road. One minute later he was staring at the dark façade of the mansion. All seemed to be peaceful within. If there had been a burglary, the household evidently had slept right through it and by now the burglars had gone with their loot — gone out through that open gate.

He had no indecision, though, concerning his present course. Without question, there had been a robbery, and Thorne Duncan had better learn about it at once. Making the stone loggia at a jump, Bradley snatched at the bronze knocker and began a lusty thumping.

He had only a short wait. A lock clicked and the door opened. Thorne Duncan himself stood there, his face as white as his starched shirt front. Somewhere remotely behind him a door- slammed. Pistol instantly out, Bradley started forward.

Duncan blocked him with outspread arms.

“Don’t — go back there! I beg you not to!”

And that presented to Trooper Bradley both the weirdest mystery of his experience and the knottiest problem of conduct. As he hesitated over the problem, the answer to the mystery was taking wing. Outside the house an automobile that he had failed to see was thundering away with the cut-out open. He started back to the door to give chase — and Thorne Duncan, springing ahead of him, shot a bolt.

“You can’t pass!” he panted. “I… I forbid it!”

Bradley squared his shoulders and his teeth clicked together hard. “Do you think you can, Mr. Duncan?” he asked. “I’m a police officer with a duty to perform — don’t forget that.”

Duncan still stood with his back to the door.

“You have no duty here,” he said. “Not here.”

“Wherever there has been crime, I have,” said Bradley; “and to my certain knowledge a crime has been committed at High Acres tonight. You are interfering, Mr. Duncan, though I don’t know why — interfering when the people going away in that car are the criminals, to my best present knowledge and belief.”

“You’re wrong, trooper,” Thorne Duncan said. “There has been no crime at High Acres — no crime so far as you’re concerned. You may consider anything that has happened here my own personal and private affair.”

Bradley shook his head. “Afraid I can’t. You’ve made it impossible, now, Mr. Duncan, for me to overhaul men who were already due for arrest and certain conviction to a long imprisonment before they came here. That puts you in a mighty bad position, if you will look at it squarely. And when you say there has been no crime tonight on this estate — well, I know different. Or wouldn’t you call felonious assault a crime?”

Duncan stared. “What’s this?”

“I’m talking about Mylan, down at your lodge. He was slugged — might have been killed. I found him tied up, just coming to his senses.”

“Great God! Mylan’s been hurt?”

“Go take a look at him, Mr. Duncan, and then tell me what you think of the men you’re protecting.”

The millionaire’s eyes were desperate, his voice strained. “God, if I could only tell you! If I could—” He broke off, wheeling.

A startling, blood chilling-interruption had come from above. Somewhere upstairs a woman suddenly was screaming. Then bare feet, or slippered feet, were racing along the upper hall, and the voice that had screamed was calling shrilly down the stairway.

“Mr. Duncan! Mr. Duncan! Lord have mercy on the baby — they’ve taken her away!”

Thorne Duncan caught Bradley by an arm. “Now you know, trooper,” he whispered. “Your men were kidnapers. I couldn’t let you go after them — start shooting — when they had my daughter with them. Does it all come clear to you?”

The shrill voice rose again.

“Do you hear me, Mr. Duncan? The baby’s been stolen! The men tied me up and I just got free.”

“Letty’s nurse,” the father said. “She sleeps in a room off the nursery.” He raised his voice. “Go back, Anna!” he commanded sharply. “I know. I know everything that’s necessary to know right now.”

Bradley, looking about for a telephone, had discovered one on a hall table and was moving toward it. Thorne Duncan, still a persistent obstacle, snatched it from his hand as he was raising the receiver.

“What are you trying to do?” he demanded, in panic.

“What’s most necessary to do right now,” Bradley told him. “Shoot out an alarm.”

“You mustn’t!”

Bradley stared. “Do you really mean that, Mr. Duncan? Why not?”

“I’ve told you that this is my private affair. I must be left free to handle it in my own way. I don’t want any police action taken — nor even a police report made. You must forget everything you have heard here.”

Bradley straightened. Rich and powerful as he was, Thorne Duncan was still a civilian. Whole-heartedly sympathizing with him was one thing; taking orders from him to suppress a criminal report quite another. That would have gone against the grain of any seasoned trooper with a decent respect for his service.

“On the question of hushing up the crime that I’ve learned about in the course of duty,” he said stiffly, “I’ll have to refer you to my superior.”

Thorne Duncan’s eventual nod of agreement surprised him, and so did the new, cool note in Duncan’s voice.

“Let me assure you, trooper,” he said, “that I appreciate both your position and your readiness to take on heavy odds, here tonight. You’ve no objection to an appeal to a superior?”

“None at all. I’m not exactly thick-headed, Mr. Duncan. You’ve certainly some mighty good reason for wanting to suppress the report. But, frankly, I doubt if Lieutenant Howard—”

“Who is Lieutenant Howard?”

“My immediate boss. The officer I report directly to. His headquarters are a couple of counties down state. In the barracks at Princetown.”

Thorne Duncan looked long at Bradley, a peculiar light in his eyes.

“Suppose you had orders from the commander-in-chief of the state police to erase all this from your memory? Would that be sufficient?” he asked quietly.

“From Major Anderson? Naturally.”

As Duncan slowly shook his head, Bradley was aware that others awakened by the nurse’s scream were hurrying down the broad stairway. A plump man in a flapping bathrobe was in the lead. Bradley, taking hasty stock of him, placed him as an upper servant. Then Thorne Duncan reclaimed his attention.

“No, I didn’t have Major Anderson in mind,” he was saying in the same quiet voice. “Is there no one above him? How about the Governor, trooper?”

Bradley wore the faintest of smiles as he nodded. “The Governor, of course,” he said. “He’s boss of everything in the state — all departments.”

The plump man in the oversized bathrobe had joined them then, eyes popping at sight of Bradley’s uniform. Behind him was a taller and slimmer man in a padded dressing-gown, gray-haired, shrewd-eyed, erect of carriage. His was another face that Bradley thought he had seen somewhere before.

“Of course, the Governor,” repeated Thorne Duncan. “Tonight, trooper, it happens that I have the honor of having him under my roof.” His eyes went to the straight, gray man in the dressing-gown and Bradley’s eyes followed. “You are looking at him now,” said the master of High Acres — “Governor Morton Wendover!”

Chapter VIII The Lady Who Phoned

The terrifically flustered plump man was Ludlow, the Duncan butler. Bradley, under personal orders from the Governor to stand by, was left with him to parry frantic questions while Thorne Duncan and Morton Wendover went into conference in the library.

A quarter hour had passed when a call from them rescued Bradley from the inquisition in the front hall.

“We have come to the conclusion,” Duncan said, “to take you fully into our confidence, trooper. To begin with, you will understand that nothing you now know of what has happened here tonight and nothing you will hear shall be repeated. Not only is the case not to be reported, it is not to be whispered.”

“Orders,” nodded the Governor. “Observe them strictly, please.”

Briefly, then, pacing the priceless rug as he talked, Thorne Duncan described the kidnaper’s raid and informed Bradley of their demands.

“I tell you all this,” he concluded, “so that you may keep silent with a clear conscience. So you will realize that police activity and newspaper notoriety could work only harm in this particular case.”

“The orders of the Governor,” Bradley said, “would have been enough. What’s all right with his conscience will always be all right with mine.”

His eyes, ever since Duncan had stated the kidnaper’s price, had been fixed upon Morton Wendover. Joe Veronalli’s name he had known; mention of it had caused him a start. It was a name familiar to every law enforcement officer in half a dozen states. Racketeer, hi-jacker, wanton killer, Veronalli was awaiting execution of the death sentence for a singularly atrocious gang murder in the metropolis of the commonwealth — a murder which he had been imported from New York to do.

If ever a man deserved the chair, Joe Veronalli did. No voice save that of his high-priced counsel had ever been lifted in his defense. Even the women’s clubs, solid against capital punishment, had neglected to make their usual protest when he was convicted and sentenced to death. The newspapers, the public, for once the pulpit, too, had agreed that here no lesser avengement by organized society would fit the crime and the criminal. It would be, certainly, the equivalent of political suicide for Morton Wendover to pardon Veronalli.

The Governor, it seemed, could read eyes. At least, he saw the question in Bradley’s, and calmly he proceeded to answer it when Duncan had finished.

“There are bigger things in life, trooper,” he said, looking steadily back at Bradley now, “than even the highest public office. One is friendship and another is heart. Poor Duncan’s child — his world — is in the hands of desperate men. There is no question but that they will execute their threat against her if there is no surrender by us. Quoting at random, but quoting from a wisdom profound — ‘it is better that a hundred who are guilty shall walk free than that one who is innocent shall suffer.’ Yes, I shall sign a pardon for Joseph Veronalli tomorrow, a full and free pardon, and so keep peace with my conscience. And you two, God help me, are the only mortals who will ever know from me why the pardon was granted!”

A great man, Bradley told himself, as presently he went trundling back to his billet at a low-pressured and moody sixty-five. A greater man, this Morton Wendover, than the state had ever suspected; the sort of man who really should be down in Washington. As a New England favorite son he had been heading in that direction. Now, because he was what he was, he was through. There weren’t any two ways about it. Thumbs would be down on him from the moment he signed the Veronalli pardon.

In general the last man to become a hero-worshiper, Trooper Bradley was bowing at a worthy idol’s feet tonight. Homeward bound, pledged to silence but to nothing else, he swore an everlasting blood feud against the ghoulish crew who would own the responsibility for bringing that idol down. Some day, somewhere, Thomas Scudder and his tommy-gun twins would cross his path again. When that day came, there would be no quarter, none asked by State Trooper Bradley and none given. Meanwhile, as he had solemnly promised at Little Moose Lake, he’d be seeing Dutch Gompert and that bird of ill-omen called the Crow.

It was well after midnight when Bradley got back to his quarters, to discover there that the turn of twelve hadn’t meant the end of one day’s work for him, but just the starting of another. A few minutes before his arrival there had been a hurry call for him. A woman who said she was alone in her home — a Mrs. Liggett, who lived, according to the memorandum on Bradley’s slate above the telephone, far out on that same road where he had been the target of the New York tommy-gun — wanted help, and wanted it quick.

Bradley, dog-tired and suffering a reaction from the blow of the pistol butt, got the Liggett number from the information operator and immediately called back? Devoutly he hoped that the emergency, whatever it had been, was a thing of the past; but apparently it was not. The woman’s voice that answered was tight with terror.

“Please come up — please come! — and come as fast as you possibly can,” she begged him. “I’m miles from my nearest neighbor and a rough-looking man is lurking in the woods across the road. My husband’s in Boston tonight and I’m absolutely defenseless. Right this minute I’m half crazy.”

It was a must. Bradley, who had traveled further at later hours on smaller cause, tarried just long enough to replenish his fuel tank before hitting the road again.

The trip was a twenty-miler, over concrete — sixteen minutes and some odd seconds from gas pump to the rescue. Starting, Bradley had known exactly where he was going. He knew the house well. It was the homestead on the old Ketchum place, a farm long deserted and recently rented to people who were new to the hill counties.

The homestead, built close to the road in a day when farm dwellers looked to passing couriers for news of the world beyond their narrow horizon, was blazing with light. That was symptomatic in itself of panic within, and when Bradley had stepped onto the veranda a frightened voice challenged him from the far side of a closed door.

“If… if you try to get in, I’ll shoot! I’ve got a rifle here!”

“Then please put it away,” Bradley urged. “This is the state trooper you talked to on the telephone.”

A bolt creaked and the door opened then — opened on a vision of blond beauty for which Bradley had been totally unprepared. Femininity in these hills didn’t come generally in pink and fluffy packages like this; in the main, it ran to angles, the coiffure perennially in vogue was a tight combination of topknot and comb, and the favored material for negligees was gingham.

Blond and svelte, Mrs. Liggett could have been recognized as “city folks” at any distance under a mile. Her hair was bobbed and wavy, she wore a soft and shimmering something of silk, and she smelled of sweeter things than good yellow soap. On Bradley she had something like the effect of the pistol butt wielded from that rumble seat. She stunned him.

There were red glints in her hair, red glints in the shimmer of her wrap — and more than a trace of Little Red Riding Hood in her speech.

“I… I can’t believe that you’re here so soon!” she gasped in a voice not quite grown-up, it seemed to Bradley. “Didn’t you say you had twenty miles to come?”

“Motorcycles move,” he rather unnecessarily assured her. Then he snapped to business. “Been annoyed any more since you phoned?”

“N-no!” she said. “But I’ve been scared out of my wits. I… I’m afraid I won’t want to live here any more after tonight.” Her perfect lips, cherry red, trembled to a sigh. “Oh, and I’ve loved it so!”

Bradley, not wholly at ease, was fishing for his flashlight. “I’ll take a look around,” he said.

“Please don’t!” she cried. The cherry lips parted in swift alarm. “He may have a gun.”

Bradley grinned cheerfully. “Well, so have I,” he said and hopped down from the veranda. “Where did you see him last? Across the road, wasn’t it?”

He jumped one ditch and then another and with the flashlight boring a hole in the night ahead of him went beating through the brush. A few minutes of that was enough. The prowler, if he hadn’t already gone on his way, was a needle in a hay-stack. Bradley went back to the refurbished farm house and made a report to that effect.

“This probably will never happen again as long as you’re here,” he reassured his dazzling client. “But you really ought to keep a gun in the house, Mrs. Liggett — just for your own peace of mind, I mean.”

Her reply to that was a timid confession. “Guns frighten me. I am really a terrible little coward.” She looked appealingly at Bradley. “You… you don’t have to leave me right away? Couldn’t you stay until Mr. Liggett gets here? He should be home almost any minute now, you see.”

That, somehow, didn’t quite click.

“I thought you said,” Bradley told her, “that he was staying in Boston tonight?”

She smiled. “Did it sound like that? What I was trying to say was that he’s on his way home from Boston — but I might have said anything, being in such a state of nerves. Won’t you stay?”

In mind’s eye Bradley could see a hobo hitting the grit after one glimpse of the gray uniform, a hurrying hobo, a mile away by now and wishing he were further. But it would be impossible, he knew, to convince a lone and badly frightened woman that the picture was authentic. He didn’t even try.

“I’ll sit out here,” he promised, resigned, “until your husband comes or until—”

“Out here?” She seemed to see something humorous in the proposal. “Don’t be foolish! Whatever kind of husband do you think I’ve got? He’ll laugh when I tell him. No, no; you come right on in and wait until he’s here to thank you. I’ve got hot water on for tea. It was going to be a case of tea for nerves; now — please? — can’t it be tea for two?”

Bradley just at that moment was looking down at the garage — seeing something that suddenly interested him.

“I don’t know,” he demurred. “Don’t you think it might be better for you to leave a note and drive over to Holtsville and stay at a hotel?”

“But how can I? Mr. Liggett has the car.”

Her eyes had widened; Bradley’s for an instant narrowed. Here was something else that didn’t quite click. Light from a nearby window had showed him a closed padlock on the garage door, and no one-car family of his acquaintance ever had made a practice of locking the garage when the car was out.

He rubbed the back of his head, sore as a boil and getting sorer. And that hurt, and what it brought back had something to do with his irresolution. As he stood debating, she held the door open and continued to urge him in. Hers wasn’t the only voice urging.

“Go ahead; see what happens!” a reckless inner voice insisted.

He looked her in the eye and smiled.

“Why not?” he said.

Chapter IX A Trap Springs

She left him in a living room that seemed to him a little garish, a room no more suggesting a farm parlor than she suggested a farm wife. While she was in the kitchen he was thinking fast. There was something queer about this invitation, something in her eagerness to get him into the house that held him on his guard. Something offside about the whole business, phone call and all. What? And why? Well, at least he had put himself now on the road to find out.

She came back first with an ornate cream and sugar service, teaspoons and a sliced lemon. Next she brought a steaming earthenware pot, and finally two cups she had filled in the kitchen.

“Cream or lemon?” she wanted to know, slim and beautifully kept hands hovering after she had seated herself across from Bradley at the cozy table. “And for Heaven’s sakes, take off that belt and hang it up somewhere. You do look so awfully uncomfortable.”

“I’m used to the belt — just as comfortable as I can be,” he said, and as he spoke he shifted his chair a trifle so that both doors at the rear of the room would be in his range of vision.

She had baby-blue eyes — but they were not, under the light, baby soft.

She repeated, “Cream or lemon?”

“Neither. I take mine straight.” How could he get her out of the room again? Simple! “I… I hate to bother you,” he said, “but a sandwich would go fine. I missed dinner.”

He thought that her eyes clouded, but she was quickly on her feet. “Oh, you poor famished thing! Of course!”

When he heard her rattling in the refrigerator, Bradley lifted his teacup — not to his lips, but to his nose. It smelled like tea, and also it smelled like something else. He said to himself, lifting the cup again: “Here goes, anyway!” The cup was empty when a cold roast and bread and butter came on another tray, and it brought a stare and an exclamation.

“You’ve drunk your tea! How… how did you like it?”

“Can’t begin to tell you,” Bradley said.

Truth again. He honestly could not begin to. He hadn’t drunk, hadn’t even tasted, what had been in the cup. Instead, he had spattered it along the rug under the table, not enough in any one spot to make the smallest puddle, and he was ardently wishing the dry fiber would hurry and absorb it.

That had been the beginning of an experiment; an experiment, Bradley had to admit to himself, that he might be feeling more than a little foolish about later on. But over-confidence in company not formally introduced had just missed netting him a headstone once that night, and he couldn’t help seeing something just a bit bizarre in people who carefully locked their garage when the car was touring.

A drumfire of gay chatter came at him across the table, but despite it his eyelids began to droop a little after a time. That was a continuation of the experiment, and a notable success. It wasn’t hard for him to look sleepy, because he was sleepy. When the roast had come his attack on it was feeble.

“You’re dog-tired,” he stood accused through that failure. “Too tired to eat.”

Bradley indignantly denied it, eyes half closed but not yet losing sight of those doors at the rear. A sixth sense told him that his danger, if there really was danger for him here and he wasn’t the victim of an addled imagination, lay behind one of them.

In the face of raillery, his eyelids drooped lower and his head sank. He answered with a mumble to another invitation to remove his gun-belt. Then he slumped sleepily in his chair.

She apparently had been expecting that. Her chatter ceased. Silence spun out long. He heard chair legs scrape and then a hand was at his belt and a whisper at his ear.

“You’re not comfortable. Do you hear me? Do let me get that belt off — there’s a dear.”

But the hand on the belt was not at the buckle; it was moving to the holster. Bradley was breathing heavily and the blond woman’s own breath was coming fast now.

“Can’t you hear, honey? I’m trying to help you,” she softly insisted.

Bradley had the holster safely pinned under the chair arm, his whole weight anchoring it, when her hand reached it. In another instant, tugging, she had disclosed the true source of her solicitude — and it exactly confirmed the suspicion on which Bradley had undertaken the test. He couldn’t want any better proof than this that the tea he had sprinkled on the rug instead of drinking had actually been doped. His imagination hadn’t gone haywire, but had simply proved itself in good working order. Her whole aim had been to get him separated from his pistol. How, without help, did she think she was going to accomplish the separation now?

While she pulled at the holster, less careful when she was sure he was too far gone to know what was happening, Bradley’s mind was busy.

If he had been brought out here to drink drugged tea and to be disarmed, that certainly clinched it that the telephone call had been bait in a trap for him. But whose trap? Why all this elaborate stage setting when he was traveling daily through the hills alone and a stray bullet through the back would finish him any old time?

While he was in this position the blond Lorelei couldn’t get the gun and she couldn’t budge him. She soon found that out.

Through slitted eyes he saw her cross the room and open that second door at the rear — the door which until then had stood closed. Beyond it, she whispered to somebody hidden there in a big closet. A man’s whisper replied.

In a moment the man had appeared. Bradley had thought a lot of things out by then and was less surprised than exultant. The man was Dutch Gompert!

“And that,” said Gompert, looking toward the table, “is the dumbbell that’s had these hick hill-counties buffaloed! The wise guy! Couldn’t he be grabbed off easy, though? Wasn’t I right?”

“He’s got the gun wedged there, somehow,” the woman complained in the querulous voice of Red Riding Hood.

“Hell of a lot of good the gun is to him!” scoffed Gompert. He stood scratching his chin. “Just about ready to roll up and sink,” he added with a flat laugh. “It’s a lot neater this way, Gwen. When the water’s deep enough, it’s a swell way to get rid of a guy you don’t like around. No blood, no dirt — just, plop! — and he’s gone for good.”

The woman moved closer to Bradley.

“I don’t like the idea of him having that gun on him,” she murmured. “You get it, why don’t you? If he comes out of it—”

“He won’t,” Dutch said. “Not a chance. The Crow know’s more about dope than half the doctors. This boy friend’ll be in the drink before he’s due to rise and chirp.” He walked to the wall phone. “The first thing to do is call Little Moose and take a load off Scudder’s mind.”

Directly after that the wall phone tinkled. Gompert called for a number and got it.

“Scudder?” he asked. “Everything’s jake at Gwen’s, Scud. Yeah, he came and he fell. I mean it. He’s here, dead to the world. I’ll be bringing him over.”

Gompert hung up and turned from the phone.

“Now I’ll unharness your prize bull,” he said.

He took one step toward Bradley and stopped short with a strangled oath. The blond screamed. The gray figure was no longer slumping, but erect in the chair and the police positive was out of its holster leveled at the end of a steady gray arm.

“Be careful how you take hold of the pistol, Gompert,” recommended Bradley, eyes wide open. “The end aimed your way is hot!”

Chapter X Road Closed!

Somewhere or other, Dutch Gompert had got another gun to replace the one Bradley had taken from him at the lakeside bungalow. It was in his shoulder holster now — but it was Bradley who drew it, his own pistol jabbing hard into Gompert’s ribs.

Then his handcuffs flashed out. A moment later he shoved Dutch back into the closet, the blond woman safely manacled to him and passionately accusing him of responsibility for the upset. He turned a key on their vitriolic quarrel and pocketed it. The door was a heavy one. They’d stay put.

Now what? Ahead of him lay the chance of a single-handed capture out at Little Moose Lake, a spectacular grab, the walloping thrill of a big job done without help. Scudder being there meant that Thorne Duncan’s little girl was there. Capture, rescue and the salvaging of Morton Wendover’s career in politics — a one-man accomplishment!

But he couldn’t chance it. He didn’t have the right to. They’d certainly put up a fight against one lone trooper, might get him before he got them. Against a big posse, though, they’d see they didn’t have a show. What was he to consider — glory for himself or safety for the kid?

No argument there. To hell with glory!

When he called High Acres on Gwen’s telephone and exploded his bombshell of news, he was throwing glory out the window. Duncan, wildly excited, called the Governor into consultation while Bradley held the wire. Then Wendover was on the line, his voice crisp.

“Good work, Bradley! Damned good work! I’ve got a road map in front of me, and if the kidnapers are at Little Moose lake we can bottle ’em up. One posse going in from Holtsville and another coming west from Fairchild will do it. I’m phoning both places at once. You pick up the Holtsville posse at the crossroad and take charge. Duncan and I will be with the other one.”

Bradley didn’t have to go to the crossroad to pick up the Holtsville posse. They had to come by the Ketchum homestead, and when they did he sent his two handcuffed prisoners back to the Holtsville jail in one of the half dozen cars.

The storm had broken then and a driving sleet stung his face as he led his score of armed special deputies over the hill road. At half past one he was looking down for the second time that night at Little Moose Lake and a lighted bungalow. Now a big sedan stood outside the house.

He had halted the posse behind the brow of the last hill. The people from Fairchild, who were to come in around the lake from the west, weren’t in sight yet.

He waited until he saw the first pair of headlights on the shore road before he signaled his drivers and kicked the motorcycle into action.

Down in the bungalow the approaching headlights caused a sudden flurry. Speeding down the hill, Bradley saw dark figures piling into the sedan. That didn’t worry him then; the sedan wasn’t going anywhere.

But it did go somewhere. Blocked from both directions as he started his engine, the driver had made a wild sweep and plunged wildly into a narrow wood-road that came in near the bungalow. That was a road too obscure to be marked on the map, so little used that even Bradley had forgotten its existence.

Desperate, he swung into it after the fleeing machine, his posse stringing out behind him. The sedan had a lead of a couple of hundred yards and held it. That road had never been built for a motorcycle speedway. The best Bradley could do was hang on.

A mile north of the lake the machine gun opened on him. He gave himself up as the branches began to snap about him, but the gun went silent after the first burst. Jammed, he hoped. If it wasn’t, he’d be riding to his finish. He was on that sedan’s tail to stay until the bitter end.

That narrow, winding road had to go somewhere, and eventually, just as the machine gun started spouting lead again, it got there — got there so suddenly that the sedan went crazily sliding on the sleety cement of the highway into which it poured itself.

Bradley thought for a horrified instant that the big car was going to turn over with Duncan’s baby in it. He had a flash of her white face and scared eyes as he whizzed past the rocking car.

At that speed and on such pavement he couldn’t stop, once he had shot into the highway.

The sedan, righting itself, had made a complete turn. It was behind him as he braked down — behind him, and coming. Back of it the lights of the first of the fleet of pursuit cars racing through the wood-road shone bright on the wet concrete.

Bradley opened his throttle, warned to get going by the renewed rattle of the machine gun. It had been cleared somewhere along the wood-road and now he was being peppered from the rear.

When he dared look back, he had put a quarter mile between him and the sedan. Another quarter mile back he could see first one car and then another of the pursuing fleet skid into the highway and straighten out to the chase.

He knew this road, knew exactly where he was on it. It was a straightaway cut, just opened this year, between Barlows and the village of Lansdowne in the next county. Bar-lows lay twenty-odd miles ahead, and there was nothing else ahead short of Barlows but a railroad crossing and an invisible county line.

Bradley did some lightning calculating while he was pulling out of machine-gun range. There was an all-night garage at Barlows, a favorite stop with truckmen. If there were several trucks there tonight, could he possibly get to Barlows far enough ahead of the kidnapers so there’d be time for him to swing out the trucks across their path and block them at the edge of town?

Holding them for just a couple of minutes would be enough to cook their goose, for some of the pursuit cars were almost as speedy as the sedan. They weren’t being left behind fast now, and they’d certainly keep plugging along.

His motorcycle, hands down, was faster than anything on four wheels not built for the race-track. He could cover five miles to the sedan’s four. How much time would that give him in Barlows to organize his blockade? Enough? And would enough trucks be there?

They’d have to be, he grimly told himself. Beyond Barlows lay the big woods — safety for the kidnapers, and either death for the child or political ruin for the Governor. Once the sedan had plunged into that maze of forest extending deep into Canada, police alarms would mean nothing. And short of the big woods the posse would be hopelessly outdistanced and he himself out of gas and out of the chase.

It was a slim chance, but the best chance — the only chance he could see then. A few minutes after he had let out his final notch of speed, though, he was debating another chance that flashed to his mind as the hoot of a distant whistle came to him over the hills. That was the night train, Canada-bound, whistling at the Canada Pike crossing five miles east. In just five minutes that long string of Pullmans would be reaching this road.

The crossing was still several miles ahead, he didn’t know exactly how many. But if he could get there in time, could in any way manage to flag the flyer — what a barricade!

He threw another glance over his shoulder from the top of the long hill. The sedan was far behind him now, and the pursuit still gamely coming along in the remoter distance.

A long chance, but worth a try! It was a time for long chances and for desperate ones. Splashing, mud-covered, sleet-beaten, Bradley made for the crossing. Squarely in the middle of it, he stopped the motorcycle and kicked it up on its stand, back to the panting locomotive just letting go another blast at the whistle post for this crossing. The train was a quarter mile away. Exactly a quarter mile. That was always the distance from whistle post to crossing.

Yes — or no? Would the flyer stop, or wouldn’t it? That tail light of his, thought of at the last moment, wasn’t a very bright light. But it was a red light — and didn’t red mean, “Stop?”

It did. Or else the engineer had seen the motorcycle, apparently stalled on the tracks, at the same time he saw the tail light on rounding the curve. Behind Bradley as the great spotlight hit him, powerful air-brakes were screeching.

But the Limited kept coming. He stayed where he was, engine racing, until it was no more than a hundred yards away, still plowing on. Then it was time to move. He did move, but he didn’t get off the track. Suddenly he had realized what would probably happen if he did. The engineer would curse him out of the cab window and pick up speed, and the flyer would go on.

He didn’t mean to let it go on. Not now. Not when another grip of the brakes would halt it.

Not when that big sedan racing down at the crossing was this close to being stopped!

Jaw set, motorcycle crazily bouncing, Bradley went up the track over the ties. Ten yards. Twenty yards. Thirty. And the Limited, brakes again grinding, was blowing its hot breath down his neck, traveling faster than he could.

He knew it would stop then. His job was done. Desperately he jerked his handlebar at the precise instant when he felt his rear wheel lifting on that triangle of death jutting out from the locomotive’s prow, and he and the motorcycle went plunging down the embankment together.

Half way down it, something hard hit his head and the world went black.

He was chewing a mouthful of cinders when he opened his eyes a few minutes later. Duncan and the Governor were on their knees beside him, and many others were crowding behind them.

“We got them, trooper, thanks to you!” Wendover said. “Got all three of them — and the baby — without firing a shot.”

Bradley sat up. His head hurt like sin, but nothing seemed to be broken. Duncan seized his hand, tried to say something and couldn’t. A man in overalls then bent over him.

“I’m the engineer, trooper,” he said. “I wanted to tell yuh that when I see that red light, first off, I—”

Bradley spat out some cinders.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “it’s a green light now!”