Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

The Gutting of Couffignal by Dashiell Hammett

The only contemporary detective novel in the Modern Library series is Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON. From the standpoints of historical importance, vigor of style, and creative originality, no worthier American standard-bearer could have been selected.

For the Modem Library edition, Mr. Hammett wrote a special introduction in which he mentioned an earlier story called “The Gutting of Couffignal.” He confessed that in this earlier tale he had failed to bring off a “promising dénouement” but thought that he “might have better luck” if he incorporated the same climax in THE MALTESE FALCON, combined with another failure of the past.

Obviously, it was your Editor’s duty to unearth “The Gutting of Couffignal” and find out what Mr. Hammett was talking about. Disguised as a literary detective, your Editor followed up an ingenious clue and nailed “The Gutting” in its hideout. On reading the story, the mystery was solved. Mr. Hammett’s allusion refers to the climactic scene between The Continental Op and Princess Zhukovski which in conception bears a strong resemblance to the climactic scene between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy at the end of THE MALTESE FALCON. Otherwise the two stories are completely different.

Aside from this interesting historical point, “The Gutting” is an excellent example of Hammett’s startling powers — a tremendously effective thriller in which The Continental Op operates at the top of his form. It is a privilege to reprint this “forgotten” Hammett, now destined to become an anthological favorite.

Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. Its western shore is a high, straight cliff that jumps abruptly up out of San Pablo Bay. From the top of this cliff the island slopes eastward, down to a smooth pebble beach that runs into the water again, where there are piers and a clubhouse and moored pleasure boats.

Couffignal’s main street, paralleling the beach, has the usual bank, hotel, moving-picture theater, and stores. But it differs from most main streets of its size in that it is more carefully arranged and preserved. There are trees and hedges and strips of lawn on it, and no glaring signs. The buildings seem to belong beside one another, as if they had been designed by the same architect, and in the stores you will find goods of a quality to match the best city stores.

The intersecting streets — running between rows of neat cottages near the foot of the slope — become winding hedged roads as they climb toward the cliff. The higher these roads get, the farther apart and larger are the houses they lead to. The occupants of these higher houses are the owners and rulers of the island. Most of them are well-fed old gentlemen who, the profits they took from the world with both hands in their younger days now stowed away at safe percentages, have bought into the island colony so they may spend what is left of their lives nursing their livers and improving their golf among their kind. They admit to the island only as many storekeepers, working-people, and similar riffraff as are needed to keep them comfortably served.

That is Couffignal.

It was some time after midnight. I was sitting in a second-story room in Couffignal’s largest house, surrounded by wedding presents whose value would add up to something between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.

Of all the work that comes to a private detective (except divorce work, which the Continental Detective Agency doesn’t handle) I like weddings as little as any. Usually I manage to avoid them, but this time I hadn’t been able to. Dick Foley, who had been slated for the job, had been handed a black eye by an unfriendly pickpocket the day before. That let Dick out and me in. I had come up to Couffignal — a two-hour ride from San Francisco by ferry and auto stage — that morning, and would return the next.

This had been neither better nor worse than the usual wedding detail. The ceremony had been performed in a little stone church down the hill. Then the house had begun to fill with reception guests. They had kept it filled to overflowing until some time after the bride and groom had sneaked off to their eastern train.

The world had been well represented. There had been an admiral and an earl or two from England; an ex-president of a South American country; a Danish baron; a tall young Russian princess surrounded by lesser titles, including a fat, bald, jovial and black-bearded Russian general who had talked to me for a solid hour about prize fights, in which he had a lot of interest, but not so much knowledge as was possible; an ambassador from one of the Central European countries; a justice of the Supreme Court; and a mob of people whose prominence and near-prominence didn’t carry labels.

In theory, a detective guarding wedding presents is supposed to make himself indistinguishable from the other guests. In practice, it never works out that way. He has to spend most of his time within sight of the booty, so he’s easily spotted. Besides that, eight or ten people I recognized among the guests were clients or former clients of the Agency, and so knew me. However, being known doesn’t make so much difference as you might think, and everything had gone off smoothly.

Shortly after dark a wind smelling of rain began to pile storm clouds up over the bay. Those guests who lived at a distance, especially those who had water to cross, hurried off for their homes. Those who lived on the island stayed until the first raindrops began to patter down. Then they left.

The Hendrixson house quieted down. Musicians and extra servants left. The weary house servants began to disappear in the direction of their bedrooms. I found some sandwiches, a couple of books and a comfortable armchair, and took them up to the room where the presents were now hidden under grey-white sheeting.

Keith Hendrixson, the bride’s grandfather — she was an orphan — put his head in at the door.

“Have you everything you need for your comfort?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

He said good night and went off to bed — a tall old man, slim as a boy.

The wind and the rain were hard at it when I went downstairs to give the lower windows and doors the up-and-down. Everything on the first floor was tight and secure, everything in the cellar. I went upstairs again.

Pulling my chair over by a floor lamp, I put sandwiches, books, ashtray, gun and flashlight on a small table beside it. Then I switched off the other lights, set fire to a Fatima, sat down, wriggled my spine comfortably into the chair’s padding, picked up one of the books, and prepared to make a night of it.

The book was called The Lord of the Sea, and had to do with a strong, tough and violent fellow named Hogarth, whose modest plan was to hold the world in one hand. There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats and floating forts larger than Couffignal. It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.

Hogarth was still going strong when the lights went out.

In the dark, I got rid of the glowing end of my cigarette by grinding it in one of the sandwiches. Putting the book down, I picked up gun and flashlight, and moved away from the chair.

Listening for noises was no good. The storm was making hundreds of them. What I needed to know was why the lights had gone off.

I waited. My job was to watch the presents. Nobody had touched them yet. There was nothing to get excited about.

Minutes went by, perhaps ten of them.

The floor swayed under my feet. The windows rattled with a violence beyond the strength of the storm. The dull boom of a heavy explosion blotted out the sounds of wind and falling water. The blast was not close at hand, but not far enough away to be off the island.

Crossing to the window, peering through the wet glass, I could see nothing. I should have seen a few misty lights far down the hill. Not being able to see them settled one point. The lights had gone out all over Couffignal, not only in the Hendrixson house.

That was better. The storm could have put the lighting system out of whack, could have been responsible for the explosion — maybe.

Staring through the black window, I had an impression of great excitement down the hill, of movement in the night. But all was too far away for me to have seen or heard even had there been lights, and all too vague to say what was moving. The impression was strong but worthless. It didn’t lead anywhere. I told myself I was getting feeble-minded, and turned away from the window.

Another blast spun me back to it. This explosion sounded nearer than the first, maybe because it was stronger. Peering through the glass again, I still saw nothing. And still had the impression of things that were big moving down there.

Bare feet pattered in the hall. A voice was anxiously calling my name. Turning from the window again, I pocketed my gun and snapped on the flashlight. Keith Hendrixson, in pajamas and bathrobe, looking thinner and older than anybody could be, came into the room.

“Is it—”

“I don’t think it’s an earthquake,” I said, since that is the first calamity your Californian thinks of. “The lights went off a little while ago. There have been a couple of explosions down the hill since the—”

I stopped. Three shots, close together, had sounded. Rifle-shots, but of the sort that only the heaviest of rifles could make. Then, sharp and small in the storm, came the report of a far-away pistol.

“What is it?” Hendrixson demanded.

“Shooting.”

More feet were pattering in the halls, some bare, some shod. Excited voices whispered questions and exclamations. The butler, a solemn, solid block of a man, partly dressed, and carrying a lighted five-pronged candlestick, came in.

“Very good, Brophy,” Hendrixson said as the butler put the candlestick on the table. “Will you try to learn what is the matter?”

“I have tried, sir. The telephone seems to be out of order, sir. Shall I send Oliver down to the village?”

“No-o. I don’t suppose it’s that serious. Do you think it is anything serious?” he asked me.

I said I didn’t think so, but I was paying more attention to the outside than to him. I had heard a thin screaming that could have come from a distant woman, and a volley of small-arms shots. The racket of the storm muffled these shots, but when the heavier firing we had heard before broke out again, it was clear enough.

To have opened the window would have been to let in gallons of water without helping us to hear much clearer. I stood with an ear tilted to the pane, trying to arrive at some idea of what was happening outside.

Another sound took my attention from the window — the ringing of the doorbell. It rang loudly and persistently.

Hendrixson looked at me. I nodded.

“See who it is, Brophy,” he said.

The butler went solemnly away, and came back even more solemnly.

“Princess Zhukovski,” he announced.

She came running into the room — the tall Russian girl I had seen at the reception. Her eyes were wide and dark with excitement. Her face was very white and wet. Water ran in streams down her blue waterproof cape, the hood of which covered her dark hair.

“Oh, Mr. Hendrixson!” She had caught one of his hands in both of hers. Her voice, with nothing foreign in its accents, was the voice of one who is excited over a delightful surprise. “The bank is being robbed, and the — what do you call him? — marshal of police has been killed!”

“What’s that?” the old man exclaimed, jumping awkwardly, because water from her cape had dripped down on one of his bare feet. “Weegan killed? And the bank robbed?”

“Yes! Isn’t it terrible?” She said it as if she were saying wonderful. “When the first explosion woke us, the general sent Ignati down to find out what was the matter, and he got down there just in time to see the bank blown up. Listen!”

We listened, and heard a wild outbreak of mixed gun-fire.

“That will be the general arriving!” she said. “He’ll enjoy himself most wonderfully. As soon as Ignati returned with the news, the general armed every male in the household from Aleksandr Sergyeevich to Ivan the cook, and led them out happier than he’s been since he took his division to East Prussia in 1914.”

“And the duchess?” Hendrixson asked.

“He left her at home with me, of course, and I furtively crept out and away from her while she was trying for the first time in her life to put water in a samovar. This is not the night for one to stay at home!”

“H-m-m,” Hendrixson said, his mind obviously not on her words. “And the bank!”

He looked at me. I said nothing. The racket of another volley came to us.

“Could you do anything down there?” he asked.

“Maybe, but—” I nodded at the presents under their covers.

“Oh, those!” the old man said. “I’m as much interested in the bank as in them; and, besides, we will be here.”

“All right!” I was willing enough to carry my curiosity down the hill. “I’ll go down. You’d better have the butler stay in here, and plant the chauffeur inside the front door. Better give them guns if you have any. Is there a raincoat I can borrow? I brought only a light overcoat.”

Brophy found a yellow slicker that fitted me. I put it on, stowed gun and flashlight conveniently under it, and found my hat while Brophy was getting and loading an automatic pistol for himself and a rifle for Oliver, the mulatto chauffeur.

Hendrixson and the princess followed me downstairs. At the door I found she wasn’t exactly following me — she was going with me.

“But, Sonya!” the old man protested.

“I’m not going to be foolish, though I’d like to,” she promised him. “But I’m going back to my Irinia Androvana, who will perhaps have the samovar watered by now.”

“That’s a sensible girl!” Hendrixson said, and let us out into the rain and the wind.

It wasn’t weather to talk in. In silence we turned downhill between two rows of hedging, with the storm driving at our backs. At the first break in the hedge I stopped, nodding toward the black blot a house made.

“That is your—”

Her laugh cut me short. She caught my arm and began to urge me down the road again.

“I only told Mr. Hendrixson that so he would not worry,” she explained. “You do not think I am not going down to see the sights.”

She was tall. I am short and thick. I had to look up to see her face — to see as much of it as the rain-grey night would let me see.

“You’ll be soaked to the hide, running around in this rain,” I objected.

“What of that? I am dressed for it.”

She raised a foot to show me a heavy waterproof boot and a woolen-stockinged leg.

“There’s no telling what we’ll run into down there, and I’ve got work to do,” I insisted. “I can’t be looking out for you.”

“I can look out for myself.”

She pushed her cape aside to show me a square automatic pistol in one hand.

“You’ll be in my way.”

“I will not,” she retorted. “You’ll probably find I can help you. I’m as strong as you, and quicker, and I can shoot.”

The reports of scattered shooting had punctuated our argument, but now the sound of heavier firing silenced the dozen objections to her company that I could still think of. After all, I could slip away from her in the dark if she became too much of a nuisance.

“Have it your own way,” I growled, “but don’t expect anything from me.”

“You’re so kind,” she murmured as we got under way again, hurrying now, with the wind at our backs speeding us along.

Occasionally dark figures moved on the road ahead of us, but too far away to be recognizable. Presently a man passed us, running uphill — a tall man whose nightshirt hung out of his trousers, down below his coat, identifying him as a resident.

“They’ve finished the bank and are at Medcraft’s!” he yelled as he went by.

“Medcraft is the jeweler,” the girl informed me.

The sloping under our feet grew less sharp. The houses — dark but with faces vaguely visible here and there at windows — came closer together. Below, the flash of a gun could be seen now and then.

Our road put us into the lower end of the main street just as a staccato rat-ta-tat broke out.

I pushed the girl into the nearest doorway, and jumped in after her.

Bullets ripped through walls with the sound of hail tapping on leaves.

That was the thing I had taken for an exceptionally heavy rifle — a machine gun.

The girl had fallen back in a corner, all tangled up with something. I helped her up. The something was a boy of seventeen or so, with one leg and a crutch.

“It’s the boy who delivers papers,” Princess Zhukovski said, “and you’ve hurt him with your clumsiness.”

The boy shook his head, grinning as he got up.

“No’m, I ain’t hurt none, but you kind of scared me, jumping on me.”

She had to stop and explain that she hadn’t jumped on him, that she had been pushed into him by me, and that she was sorry and so was I.

“What’s happening?” I asked the newsboy when I could get a word in.

“Everything,” he boasted, as if some of the credit were his. “There must be a hundred of them, and they’ve blowed the bank wide open, and now some of ’em is in Medcraft’s, and I guess they’ll blow that up, too. And they killed Tom Weegan. They got a machine gun on a car in the middle of the street.”

“Where’s everybody — all the merry villagers?”

“Most of ’em are up behind the Hall. They can’t do nothing, though, because the machine gun won’t let ’em get near enough to see what they’re shooting at, and that smart Bill Vincent told me to clear out, ’cause I’ve only got one leg, as if I couldn’t shoot as good as the next one, if I only had something to shoot with!”

“That wasn’t right of them,” I sympathized. “But you can do something for me. You can stick here and keep your eye on this end of the street, so I’ll know if they leave in this direction.”

“You’re not just saying that so I’ll stay here out of the way, are you?”

“No,” I lied. “I need somebody to watch. I was going to leave the princess here, but you’ll do better.”

“Yes,” she backed me up, catching the idea. “This gentleman is a detective, and if you do what he asks you’ll be helping more than if you were up with the others.”

The machine gun was still firing, but not in our direction now.

“I’m going across the street,” I told the girl. “If you—”

“Aren’t you going to join the others?”

“No. If I can get around behind the bandits while they’re busy with the others, maybe I can turn a trick.”

“Watch sharp now!” I ordered the boy, and the princess and I made a dash for the opposite sidewalk.

We reached it without drawing lead, sidled along a building for a few yards, and turned into an alley. From the alley’s other end came the smell and wash and the dull blackness of the bay.

While we moved down this alley I composed a scheme by which I hoped to get rid of my companion, sending her off on a safe wild-goose chase. But I didn’t get a chance to try it out.

The big figure of a man loomed ahead of us.

Stepping in front of the girl, I went on toward him. Under my slicker I held my gun on the middle of him.

He stood still. He was larger than he had looked at first. A big, slope-shouldered, barrel-bodied husky. His hands were empty. I spotted the flashlight on his face for a split second. A flat-cheeked, thick-featured face, with high cheek-bones.

“Ignati!” the girl exclaimed over my shoulder.

He began to talk what I suppose was Russian to the girl. She laughed and replied. He shook his big head stubbornly, insisting on something. She stamped her foot and spoke sharply. He shook his head again and addressed me.

“General Pleshskev, he tell me bring Princess Sonya to home.”

His English was almost as hard to understand as his Russian. His tone puzzled me. It was as if he was explaining some absolutely necessary thing that he didn’t want to be blamed for, but that nevertheless he was going to do.

While the girl was speaking to him again, I guessed the answer. This big Ignati had been sent out by the general to bring the girl home, and he was going to obey his orders if he had to carry her. He was trying to avoid trouble with me by explaining the situation.

“Take her,” I said, stepping aside.

The girl scowled at me, laughed.

“Very well, Ignati,” she said in English, “I shall go home,” and she turned on her heel and went back up the alley, the big man close behind her.

Glad to be alone, I wasted no time in moving in the opposite direction until the pebbles of the beach were under my feet. The pebbles ground harshly under my heels. I moved back to more silent ground and began to work my way as swiftly as I could up the shore toward the center of action. The machine gun barked on. Smaller guns snapped. Three concussions, close together — bombs, hand grenades, my ears and my memory told me.

The stormy sky glared pink over a roof ahead of me and to the left. The boom of the blast beat my ear-drums. Fragments I couldn’t see fell around me. That, I thought, would be the jeweler’s safe blowing apart.

I crept on up the shore line. The machine gun went silent. Lighter guns snapped, snapped, snapped. Another grenade went off. A man’s voice shrieked pure terror.

Risking the crunch of pebbles, I turned down to the water’s edge again. I had seen no dark shape on the water that could have been a boat. There had been boats moored along this beach in the afternoon. With my feet in the water of the bay I still saw no boat. The storm could have scattered them, but I didn’t think it had. The island’s western height shielded this shore. The wind was strong here, but not violent.

My feet sometimes on the edge of the pebbles, sometimes in the water, I went on up the shore line. Now I saw a boat. A gently bobbing black shape ahead. No light was on it. Nothing I could see moved on it. It was the only boat on that shore. That made it important.

Foot by foot, I approached.

A shadow moved between me and the dark rear of a building. I froze. The shadow, man-size, moved again, in the direction from which I was coming.

Waiting, I didn’t know how nearly invisible, or how plain, I might be against my background. I couldn’t risk giving myself away by trying to improve my position.

Twenty feet from me the shadow suddenly stopped.

I was seen. My gun was on the shadow.

“Come on,” I called softly. “Keep coming. Let’s see who you are.”

The shadow hesitated, left the shelter of the building, drew nearer. I couldn’t risk the flashlight. I made out dimly a handsome face, boyishly reckless, one cheek dark-stained.

“Oh, how d’you do?” the face’s owner said in a musical baritone voice. “You were at the reception this afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen Princess Zhukovski? You know her?”

“She went home with Ignati ten minutes or so ago.”

“Excellent!” He wiped his stained cheek with a stained handkerchief, and turned to look at the boat. “That’s Hendrixson’s boat,” he whispered. “They’ve got it and they’ve cast the others off.”

“That would mean they are going to leave by water.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “unless — Shall we have a try at it?”

“You mean jump it?”

“Why not?” he asked. “There can’t be very many aboard. God knows there are enough of them ashore. You’re armed. I’ve a pistol.”

“We’ll size it up first,” I decided, “so we’ll know what we’re jumping.”

“That is wisdom,” he said, and led the way back to the shelter of the buildings.

Hugging the rear walls of the buildings, we stole toward the boat.

The boat grew clearer in the night. A craft perhaps forty-five feet long, its stem to the shore, rising and falling beside a small pier. Across the stern something protruded. Something I couldn’t quite make out. Leather soles scuffled now and then on the wooden deck. Presently a dark head and shoulders showed over the puzzling thing in the stern.

The Russian lad’s eyes were better than mine.

“Masked,” he breathed in my ear. “Something like a stocking over his head and face.”

The masked man was motionless where he stood. We were motionless where we stood.

“Could you hit him from here?” the lad asked.

“Maybe, but night and rain aren’t a good combination for sharpshooting. Our best bet is to sneak as close as we can, and start shooting when he spots us.”

“That is wisdom,” he agreed.

Discovery came with our first step forward. The man in the boat grunted. The lad at my side jumped forward. I recognized the thing in the boat’s stern just in time to throw out a leg and trip the young Russian. He tumbled down, all sprawled out on the pebbles. I dropped behind him.

The machine gun in the boat’s stern poured metal over our heads.

“No good rushing that!” I said. “Roll out of it!”

I set the example by revolving toward the back of the building we had just left.

The man at the gun sprinkled the beach, but sprinkled it at random, his eyes no doubt spoiled for night-seeing by the flash of his gun.

Around the corner of the building, we sat up.

“You saved my life by tripping me,” the lad said coolly.

“Yes. I wonder if they’ve moved the machine gun from the street, or if—”

The answer to that came immediately. The machine gun in the street mingled its vicious voice with the drumming of the one in the boat.

“A pair of them!” I complained. “Know anything about the layout?”

“I don’t think there are more than ten or twelve of them,” he said, “although it is not easy to count in the dark. The few I have seen are completely masked — like the man in the boat. They seem to have disconnected the telephone and light lines first and then to have destroyed the bridge. We attacked them while they were looting the bank, but in front they had a machine gun mounted in an automobile, and we were not equipped to combat on equal terms.”

“Where are the islanders now?”

“Scattered, and most of them in hiding, I fancy, unless General Pleshskev has succeeded in rallying them again.”

“I frowned and beat my brains together. You can’t fight machine guns and hand grenades with peaceful villagers and retired capitalists. No matter how well led and armed they are, you can’t do anything with them. For that matter, how could anybody do much against that tough a game?”

“Suppose you stick here and keep your eye on the boat,” I suggested. “I’ll scout around and see what’s doing farther up, and if I can get a few good men together, I’ll try to jump the boat again, probably from the other side. But we can’t count on that. The get-away will be by boat. We can count on that, and try to block it. If you lie down you can watch the boat around the corner of the building without making much of a target of yourself. I wouldn’t do anything to attract attention until the break for the boat comes. Then you can do all the shooting you want.”

“Excellent!” he said. “You’ll probably find most of the islanders up behind the church. You can get to it by going straight up the hill until you come to an iron fence, and then follow that to the right.”

“Right.”

I moved off in the direction he had indicated.

At the main street I stopped to look around before venturing across. Everything was quiet there. The only man I could see was spread out facedown on the sidewalk near me.

On hands and knees I crawled to his side. He was dead. I didn’t stop to examine him further, but sprang up and streaked for the other side of the street.

Nothing tried to stop me. In a doorway, flat against a wall, I peeped out. The wind had stopped. The rain was no longer a driving deluge, but a steady down-pouring of small drops. Couffignal’s main street, to my senses, was a deserted street.

I wondered if the retreat to the boat had already started. On the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the bank, I heard the answer to that guess.

High up on the slope, almost up to the edge of the cliff, by the sound, a machine gun began to hurl out its stream of bullets.

Mixed with the racket of the machine gun were the sounds of smaller arms, and a grenade or two.

At the first crossing, I left the main street and began to run up the hill. Men were running toward me. Two of them passed, paying no attention to my shouted, “What’s up now?”

The third man stopped because I grabbed him — a fat man whose breath bubbled, and whose face was fish-belly white.

“They’ve moved the car with the machine gun on it up behind us,” he gasped when I had shouted my question into his ear again.

“What are you doing without a gun?” I asked.

“I... I dropped it.”

“Where’s General Pleshskev?”

“Back there somewhere. He’s trying to capture the car, but he’ll never do it. It’s suicide!”

Other men had passed us, running downhill, as we talked. I let the white-faced man go, and stopped four men who weren’t running so fast as the others.

“What’s happening now?” I questioned them.

“They’s going through the houses up the hill,” a sharp-featured man with a small mustache and a rifle said.

“Has anybody got word off the island yet?” I asked.

“Can’t,” another informed me. “They blew up the bridge first thing.”

“Can’t anybody swim?”

“Not in that wind. Young Catlan tried it and was lucky to get out again with a couple of broken ribs.”

“The wind’s gone down,” I pointed out.

The sharp-featured man gave his rifle to one of the others and took off his coat.

“I’ll try it,” he promised.

“Good! Wake up the whole country, and get word through to the San Francisco police boat and to the Mare Island Navy Yard. They’ll lend a hand if you tell ’em the bandits have machine guns. Tell ’em the bandits have an armed boat waiting to leave in. It’s Hendrixson’s.”

The volunteer swimmer left.

“A boat?” two of the men asked together.

“Yes. With a machine gun on it. If we’re going to do anything, it’ll have to be now, while we’re between them and their get-away. Get every man and every gun you can find down there. Tackle the boat from the roofs if you can. When the bandits’ car comes down there, pour it into it. You’ll do better from the buildings than from the street.”

The three men went on downhill. I went uphill, toward the crackling of firearms ahead. The machine gun was working irregularly. It would pour out its rat-tat-tat for a second or so, and then stop for a couple of seconds. The answering fire was thin, ragged.

I met more men, learned from them that the general, with less than a dozen men, was still fighting the car. I repeated the advice I had given the other men. My informants went down to join them. I went on up.

A hundred yards farther along, what was left of the general’s dozen broke out of the night, around and past me, flying downhill, with bullets hailing after them.

The road was no place for mortal man. I stumbled over two bodies, scratched myself in a dozen places getting over a hedge. On soft, wet sod I continued my uphill journey.

The machine gun on the hill stopped its clattering. The one in the boat was still at work.

The one ahead opened again, firing too high for anything near at hand to be its target. It was helping its fellow below, spraying the main street.

Before I could get closer it had stopped. I heard the car’s motor racing. The car moved toward me.

Rolling into the hedge, I lay there, straining my eyes through the spaces between the stems. I had six bullets in a gun that hadn’t yet been fired.

When I saw wheels on the lighter face of the road, I emptied my gun, holding it low.

The car went on.

I sprang out of my hiding-place.

The car was suddenly gone from the empty road.

There was a grinding sound. A crash. The noise of metal folding on itself. The tinkle of glass.

I raced toward those sounds.

Out of a black pile where an engine sputtered, a black figure leaped — to dash off across the soggy lawn. I cut after it, hoping that the others in the wreck were down for keeps.

I was less than fifteen feet behind the fleeing man when he cleared a hedge. I’m no sprinter, but neither was he. The wet grass made slippery going.

He stumbled while I was vaulting the hedge. When we straightened out again I was not more than ten feet behind him.

Once I clicked my gun at him, forgetting I had emptied it. Six cartridges were wrapped in a piece of paper in my vest pocket, but this was no time for loading.

A building loomed ahead. My fugitive bore off to the right, to clear the corner.

To the left a heavy shotgun went off.

The running man disappeared around the house-corner.

“Sweet God!” General Pleshskev’s mellow voice complained. “That with a shotgun I should miss all of a man at the distance!”

“Go round the other way!” I yelled, plunging around the corner.

His feet thudded ahead. I could not see him. The general puffed around from the other side of the house.

“You have him?”

“No.”

In front of us was a stone-faced bank, on top of which ran a path. On either side of us was a high and solid hedge.

“But, my friend,” the general protested. “How could he have—?”

A pale triangle showed on the path above — a triangle that could have been a bit of shirt showing above the opening of a vest.

“Stay here and talk!” I whispered to the general, and crept forward.

“It must be that he has gone the other way,” the general carried out my instructions, rambling on as if I were standing beside him, “because if he had come my way I should have seen him, and if he had raised himself over either of the hedges or the embankment, one of us would surely have seen him against...”

He talked on and on while I gained the shelter of the bank on which the path sat, while I found places for my toes in the rough stone facing.

The man on the road, trying to make himself small with his back in a bush, was looking at the talking general. He saw me when I had my feet on the path.

He jumped, and one hand went up.

I jumped, with both hands out.

A stone, turning under my foot, threw me sidewise, twisting my ankle, but saving my head from the bullet he sent at it.

My outflung left arm caught his legs as I spilled down. He came over on top of me. I kicked him once, caught his gun-arm, and had just decided to bite it when the general puffed up over the edge of the path and prodded the man off me with his shotgun.

When it came my turn to stand up, I found it not so good. My twisted ankle didn’t like to support its share of my hundred-and-eighty-some pounds. Putting most of my weight on the other leg, I turned my flashlight on the prisoner.

“Hello, Flippo!” I exclaimed.

“Hello!” he said without joy in the recognition.

He was a roly-poly Italian youth of twenty-three or — four. I had helped send him to San Quentin four years ago for his part in a payroll stick-up. He had been out on parole for several months now.

“The prison board isn’t going to like this,” I told him.

“You got me wrong,” he pleaded. “I ain’t been doing a thing. I was up here to see some friends. And when this thing busted loose I had to hide, because I got a record, and if I’m picked up I’ll be railroaded for it. And now you got me, and you think I’m in on it!”

“You’re a mind reader,” I assured him, and asked the general: “Where can we pack this bird away for a while, under lock and key?”

“In my house there is a lumber-room with a strong door and not a window.”

“That’ll do it. March, Flippo!”

General Pleshskev collared the youth, while I limped along behind them, examining Flippo’s gun, which was loaded except for the one shot he had fired at me, and reloading my own.

We had caught our prisoner on the Russian’s grounds, so we didn’t have far to go.

The general knocked on the door and called out something in his language. Bolts clicked and grated, and the door was swung open by a heavily mustached Russian servant. Behind him the princess and a stalwart older woman stood.

We went in while the general was telling his household about the capture, and took the captive up to the lumber-room. I frisked him for his pocketknife and matches — he had nothing else that could help him get out — locked him in and braced the door solidly with a length of board. Then we went downstairs again.

“You are injured!” the princess, seeing me limp across the floor, cried.

“Only a twisted ankle,” I said. “But it does bother me some. Is there any adhesive tape around?”

“Yes,” and she spoke to the mustached servant, who went out of the room and presently returned, carrying rolls of gauze and tape and a basin of steaming water.

“If you’ll sit down,” the princess said, taking these things from the servant.

But I shook my head and reached for the adhesive tape.

“I want cold water, because I’ve got to go out in the wet again. If you’ll show me the bathroom, I can fix myself up in no time.”

We had to argue about that, but I finally got to the bathroom, where I ran cold water on my foot and ankle, and strapped it with adhesive tape, as tight as I could without stopping the circulation altogether. Getting my wet shoe on again was a job, but when I was through I had two firm legs under me, even if one of them did hurt some.

When I rejoined the others I noticed that the sound of firing no longer came up the hill, and that the patter of rain was lighter, and a grey streak of coming daylight showed under a drawn blind.

I was buttoning my slicker when the knocker rang on the front door. Russian words came through, and the young Russian I had met on the beach came in.

“Aleksandr, you’re—” the stalwart older woman screamed, when she saw the blood on his cheek, and fainted.

He paid no attention to her at all, as if he was used to having her faint.

“They’ve gone in the boat,” he told me while the girl and two men servants gathered up the woman and laid her on an ottoman.

“How many?” I asked.

“I counted ten, and I don’t think I missed more than one or two, if any.”

“The men I sent down there couldn’t stop them?”

He shrugged.

“What would you? It takes a strong stomach to face a machine gun. Your men had been cleared out of the buildings almost before they arrived.”

The woman who had fainted had revived by now and was pouring anxious questions in Russian at the lad. The princess was getting into her blue cape. The woman stopped questioning the lad and asked her something.

“It’s all over,” the princess said. “I am going to view the ruins.”

That suggestion appealed to everybody. Five minutes later all of us, including the servants, were on our way downhill. Behind us, around us, in front of us, were other people going downhill, hurrying along in the drizzle that was very gentle now, their faces tired and excited in the bleak morning light.

Halfway down, a woman ran out of a cross-path and began to tell me something. I recognized her as one of Hendrixson’s maids.

I caught some of her words.

“Presents gone... Mr. Brophy murdered... Oliver...”

“I’ll be down later,” I told the others, and set out after the maid.

She was running back to the Hendrixson house. I couldn’t run, couldn’t even walk fast. She and Hendrixson and more of his servants were standing on the front porch when I arrived.

“They killed Oliver and Brophy,” the old man said.

“How?”

“We were in the back of the house, the rear second story, watching the flashes of the shooting down in the village. Oliver was down here, just inside the front door, and Brophy in the room with the presents. We heard a shot in there, and immediately a man appeared in the doorway of our room, threatening us with two pistols, making us stay there for perhaps ten minutes. Then he shut and locked the door and went away. We broke the door down — and found Brophy and Oliver dead.”

“Let’s look at them.”

The chauffeur was just inside the front door. He lay on his back, with his brown throat cut straight across the front, almost back to the vertebrae. His rifle was under him. I pulled it out and examined it. It had not been fired.

Upstairs, the butler Brophy was huddled against a leg of one of the tables on which the presents had been spread. His gun was gone. I turned him over, straightened him out, and found a bullet-hole in his chest. Around the hole his coat was charred in a large area.

Most of the presents were still here. But the most valuable pieces were gone. The others were in disorder, lying around any which way, their covers pulled off.

“What did the one you saw look like?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him very well,” Hendrixson said. “There was no light in our room. He was simply a dark figure against the candle burning in the hall. A large man in a black rubber raincoat, with some sort of black mask that covered his whole head and face.”

As we went downstairs again I gave Hendrixson a brief account of what I had seen and heard and done since I had left him. There wasn’t enough of it to make a long tale.

“Do you think you can get information about the others from the one you caught?” he asked, as I prepared to go out.

“No. But I expect to bag them just the same.”

Couffignal’s main street was jammed with people when I limped into it again. A detachment of Marines from Mare Island was there, and men from a San Francisco police boat. Excited citizens in all degrees of partial nakedness boiled around them, A hundred voices were talking at once, recounting their personal adventures and braveries and losses and what they had seen. Such words as machine gun, bomb, bandit, car, shot, dynamite, and killed sounded again and again, in every variety of voice and tone.

The bank had been completely wrecked by the charge that had blown the vault. The jewelry store was another ruin. A grocer’s across the street was serving as a field hospital. Two doctors were toiling there, patching up damaged villagers.

I recognized a familiar face under a uniform cap — Sergeant Roche of the harbor police — and pushed through the crowd to him.

“Just get here?” he asked as we shook hands. “Or were you in on it?”

“In on it.”

“What do you know?”

“Everything.”

“Who ever heard of a private detective that didn’t,” he joshed as I led him out of the mob.

“Did you people run into an empty boat out in the bay?” I asked when we were away from audiences.

“Empty boats have been floating around the bay all night,” he said.

I hadn’t thought of that.

“Where’s your boat now?” I asked.

“Out trying to pick up the bandits. I stayed with a couple of men to lend a hand here.”

“You’re in luck,” I told him. “Now sneak a look across the street. See the stout old boy with the black whiskers? Standing in front of the druggist’s.”

General Pleshskev stood there, with the woman who had fainted, the young Russian whose bloody cheek had made her faint, and a pale, plump man of forty-something who had been with them at the reception. A little to one side stood big Ignati, the two men-servants I had seen at the house, and another who was obviously one of them. They were chatting together and watching the excited antics of a red-faced property-owner who was telling a curt lieutenant of Marines that it was his own personal private automobile that the bandits had stolen to mount their machine gun on.

“Yes,” said Roche, “I see your fellow with the whiskers.”

“Well, he’s your meat. The woman and two men with him are also your meat. And those four Russians standing to the left are some more of it. There’s another missing, but I’ll take care of that one. Pass the word to the lieutenant, and you can round up those babies without giving them a chance to fight back. They think they’re safe as angels.”

“Sure, are you?” the sergeant asked.

“Don’t be silly!” I growled, as if I had never made a mistake in my life.

I had been standing on my one good prop. When I put my weight on the other to turn away from the sergeant, it stung me all the way to the hip. I pushed my back teeth together and began to work painfully through the crowd to the other side of the street.

The princess didn’t seem to be among those present. My idea was that, next to the general, she was the most important member of the push. If she was at their house, and not yet suspicious, I figured I could get close enough to yank her in without a riot.

Walking was hell. My temperature rose. Sweat rolled out on me.

“Mister, they didn’t none of ’em come down that way.”

The one-legged newsboy was standing at my elbow. I greeted him as if he were my pay-check.

“Come on with me,” I said, taking his arm. “You did fine down there, and now I want you to do something else for me.”

Half a block from the main street I led him up on the porch of a small yellow cottage. The front door stood open, left that way when the occupants ran down to welcome police and Marines, no doubt. Just inside the door, beside a hall rack, was a wicker porch chair. I committed unlawful entry to the extent of dragging that chair out on the porch.

“Sit down, son,” I urged the boy.

He sat, looking up at me with puzzled freckled face. I took a firm grip on his crutch and pulled it out of his hand.

“Here’s five bucks for rental,” I said, “and if I lose it I’ll buy you one of ivory and gold.”

And I put the crutch under my arm and began to propel myself up the hill.

It was my first experience with a crutch. I didn’t break any records. But it was a lot better than tottering along on an unassisted bum ankle.

The hill was longer and steeper than some mountains I’ve seen, but the gravel walk to the Russians’ house was finally under my feet.

I was still some dozen feet from the porch when Princess Zhukovski opened the door.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, and then, recovering from her surprise, “your ankle is worse!”

She ran down the steps to help me climb them. As she came I noticed that something heavy was sagging and swinging in the right-hand pocket of her grey flannel jacket.

With one hand under my elbow, the other arm across my back, she helped me up the steps and across the porch. That assured me she didn’t think I had tumbled to the game. If she had, she wouldn’t have trusted herself within reach of my hands. Why, I wondered, had she come back to the house after starting downhill with the others?

While I was wondering we went into the house, where she planted me in a large and soft leather chair.

“You must certainly be starving after your strenuous night,” she said. “I will see if—”

“No, sit down.” I nodded at a chair facing mine. “I want to talk to you.”

She sat down, clasping her slender white hands in her lap. In neither face nor pose was there any sign of nervousness, not even of curiosity. And that was overdoing it,

“Where have you cached the plunder?” I asked.

The whiteness of her face was nothing to go by. It had been white as marble since I had first seen her. The darkness of her eyes was as natural. Nothing happened to her other features. Her voice was smoothly cool.

“I am sorry,” she said. “The question doesn’t convey anything to me.”

“Here’s the point,” I explained. “I’m charging you with complicity in the gutting of Couffignal, and in the murders that went with it. And I’m asking you where the loot has been hidden.”

Slowly she stood up, raised her chin, and looked at least a mile down at me.

“How dare you? How dare you speak so to me, a Zhukovski!”

“I don’t care if you’re one of the Smith Brothers!” Leaning forward, I had pushed my twisted ankle against a leg of the chair, and the resulting agony didn’t improve my disposition. “For the purpose of this talk you are a thief and a murderer.”

Her strong slender body became the body of a lean crouching animal. Her white face became the face of an enraged animal. One hand — claw now — swept to the heavy pocket of her jacket.

Then, before I could have batted an eye — though my life seemed to depend on my not batting it — the wild animal had vanished. Out of it — and now I know where the writers of the old fairy stories got their ideas — rose the princess again, cool and straight and tall.

She sat down, crossed her ankles, put an elbow on an arm of her chair, propped her chin on the back of that hand, and looked curiously into my face.

“However,” she murmured, “did you chance to arrive at so strange and fanciful a theory?”

“It wasn’t chance, and it’s neither strange nor fanciful,” I said. “Maybe it’ll save time and trouble if I show you part of the score against you. Then you’ll know how you stand and won’t waste your brains pleading innocence.”

“I should be grateful,” she smiled, “very!”

I tucked my crutch in between one knee and the arm of my chair, so my hands would be free to check off my points on my fingers.

“First — whoever planned the job knew the island — not fairly well, but every inch of it. There’s no need to argue about that. Second — the car on which the machine gun was mounted was local property, stolen from the owner here. So was the boat in which the bandits were supposed to have escaped. Bandits from the outside would have needed a car or a boat to bring their machine guns, explosives, and grenades here and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t have used that car or boat instead of stealing a fresh one. Third — there wasn’t the least hint of the professional bandit touch on this job. If you ask me, it was a military job from beginning to end. And the worst safe-burglar in the world could have got into both the bank vault and the jeweler’s safe without wrecking the buildings. Fourth — bandits from the outside wouldn’t have destroyed the bridge. They might have blocked it, but they wouldn’t have destroyed it. They’d have saved it in case they had to make their get-away in that direction. Fifth — bandits figuring on a get-away by boat would have cut the job short, wouldn’t have spread it over the whole night. Enough racket was made here to wake up California all the way from Sacramento to Los Angeles. What you people did was to send one man out in the boat, shooting, and he didn’t go far. As soon as he was at a safe distance, he went overboard, and swam back to the island. Big Ignati could have done it without turning a hair.”

That exhausted my right hand. I switched over, counting on my left.

“Sixth — I met one of your party, the lad, down on the beach, and he was coming from the boat. He suggested that we jump it. We were shot at, but the man behind the gun was playing with us. He could have wiped us out in a second if he had been in earnest, but he shot over our heads. Seventh that same lad is the only man on the island, so far as I know, who saw the departing bandits. Eighth — all of your people that I ran into were especially nice to me, the general even spending an hour talking to me at the reception this afternoon. That’s a distinctive amateur crook trait. Ninth — after the machine gun car had been wrecked I chased its occupant. I lost him around this house. The Italian boy I picked up wasn’t him. He couldn’t have climbed up on the path without my seeing him. But he could have run around to the general’s side of the house and vanished indoors there. The general liked him, and would have helped him. I know that, because the general performed a downright miracle by missing him at some six feet with a shotgun. Tenth — you called at Hendrixson’s house for no other purpose than to get me away from there.”

That finished the left hand. I went back to the right.

“Eleventh — Hendrixson’s two servants were killed by someone they knew and trusted. Both were killed at close quarters and without firing a shot. I’d say you got Oliver to let you into the house, and were talking to him when one of your men cut his throat from behind. Then you went upstairs and probably shot the unsuspecting Brophy yourself. He wouldn’t have been on his guard against you. Twelfth — but that ought to be enough, and I’m getting a sore throat from listing them.”

She took her chin off her hand, took a fat white cigarette out of a thin black case, and held it in her mouth while I put a match to the end of it. She took a long pull at it — a draw that accounted for a third of its length — and blew the smoke down at her knees.

“That would be enough,” she said when all these things had been done, “if it were not that you yourself know it was impossible for us to have been so engaged. Did you not see us — did not everyone see us — time and time again?”

“That’s easy!” I argued. “With a couple of machine guns, a trunkful of grenades, knowing the island from top to bottom, in the darkness and in a storm, against bewildered civilians — it was duck soup. There are nine of you that I know of, including two women. Any five of you could have carried on the work, once it was started, while the others took turns appearing here and there, establishing alibis. And that is what you did. You took turns slipping out to alibi yourselves. Everywhere I went I ran into one of you. And the general! That whiskered old joker running around leading the simple citizens to battle! I’ll bet he led ’em plenty! They’re lucky there are any of ’em alive this morning!”

She finished her cigarette with another inhalation, dropped the stub on the rug, ground out the light with one foot, sighed wearily, and asked:

“And now what?”

“Now I want to know where you have stowed the plunder.”

The readiness of her answer surprised me.

“Under the garage, in a cellar we dug secretly there some months ago.”

I didn’t believe that, of course, but it turned out to be the truth.

I didn’t have anything else to say. When I fumbled with my borrowed crutch, preparing to get up, she raised a hand and spoke gently:

“Wait a moment, please. I have something to suggest.”

Half standing, I leaned toward her, stretching out one hand until it was close to her side.

“I want the gun,” I said.

She nodded, and sat still while I plucked it from her pocket, put it in one of my own, and sat down again.

“You said a little while ago that you didn’t care who I was,” she began immediately. “But I want you to know. There are so many of us Russians who once were somebodies and who now are nobodies that I won’t bore you with the repetition of a tale the world has grown tired of hearing. But you must remember that this weary tale is real to us who are its subjects. However, we fled from Russia with what we could carry of our property, which fortunately was enough to keep us in bearable comfort for a few years.

“In London we opened a Russian restaurant, but London was suddenly full of Russian restaurants, and ours became, instead of a means of livelihood, a source of loss. We tried teaching music and languages, and so on. In short, we hit on all the means of earning our living that other Russian exiles hit upon, and so always found ourselves in overcrowded, and thus unprofitable, fields. But what else did we know — could we do?

“I promised not to bore you. Well, always our capital shrank, and always the day approached on which we should be shabby and hungry, the day when we should become familiar to readers of your Sunday papers — charwomen who had been princesses, dukes who now were butlers. There was no place for us in the world. Outcasts easily become outlaws. Why not? Could it be said that we owed the world any fealty? Had not the world sat idly by and seen us despoiled of place and property and country?

“We planned it before we had heard of Couffignal. We could find a small settlement of the wealthy, sufficiently isolated, and, after establishing ourselves there, we would plunder it. Couffignal, when we found it, seemed to be the ideal place. We leased this house for six months, having just enough capital remaining to do that and to live properly here while our plans matured. Here we spent four months establishing ourselves, collecting our arms and our explosives, mapping our offensive, waiting for a favorable night. Last night seemed to be that night, and we had provided, we thought, against every eventuality. But we had not, of course, provided against your presence and your genius. They were simply others of the unforeseen misfortunes to which we seem eternally condemned.”

She stopped, and fell to studying me with mournful large eyes that made me feel like fidgeting.

“It’s no good calling me a genius,” I objected. “The truth is you people botched your job from beginning to end. Your general would get a big laugh out of a man without military training who tried to lead an army. But here are you people with absolutely no criminal experience trying to swing a trick that needed the highest sort of criminal skill. Look at how you all played around with me! Amateur stuff! A professional crook with any intelligence would have either let me alone or knocked me off. No wonder you flopped! As for the rest of it — your troubles — I can’t do anything about them.”

“Why?” very softly. “Why can’t you?”

“Why should I?” I made it blunt.

“No one else knows what you know.” She bent forward to put a white hand on my knee. “There is wealth in that cellar beneath the garage. You may have whatever you ask.”

I shook my head.

“You aren’t a fool!” she protested. “You know—”

“Let me straighten this out for you,” I interrupted. “We’ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we’ll throw them out. Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays me a fair salary, but I could find other jobs that would pay more. Even a hundred dollars more a month would be twelve hundred a year. Say twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in the years between now and my sixtieth birthday.

“Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weigh that against any sum of money. Money is good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I’ve been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and tackling puzzles, my satisfaction out of catching crooks and solving riddles. It’s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I’m not going to blow that up!”

She shook her head slowly, lowering it, so that now her dark eyes looked up at me under the thin arcs of her brows.

“You speak only of money,” she said. “I said you may have whatever you ask.”

That was out. I don’t know where these women get their ideas.

“You’re still all twisted up,” I said brusquely, standing now and adjusting my borrowed crutch. “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it. You might just as well expect a hound to play tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught. We’re wasting time anyway. I’ve been thinking the police or Marines might come up here and save me a walk. You’ve been waiting for your mob to come back and grab me. I could have told you they were being arrested when I left them.”

That shook her. She had stood up. Now she fell back a step, putting a hand behind her for steadiness, on her chair. An exclamation I didn’t understand popped out of her mouth. Russian, I thought, but the next moment I knew it had been Italian.

“Put your hands up.”

It was Flippo’s husky voice. Flippo stood in the doorway, holding an automatic.

I raised my hands as high as I could without dropping my supporting crutch, meanwhile cursing myself for having been too careless, or too vain, to keep a gun in my hand while I talked to the girl.

So this was why she had come back to the house. If she freed the Italian, she had thought, we would have no reason for suspecting that he hadn’t been in on the robbery, and so we would look for the bandits among his friends. A prisoner, of course, he might have persuaded us of his innocence. She had given him the gun so he could either shoot his way clear, or, what would help her as much, get himself killed trying.

While I was arranging these thoughts in my head, Flippo had come up behind me. His empty hand passed over my body, taking away my own gun, his, and the one I had taken from the girl.

“A bargain, Flippo,” I said when he had moved away from me, a little to one side, where he made one corner of a triangle whose other corners were the girl and I. “You’re out on parole, with some years still to be served. I picked you up with a gun on you. That’s plenty to send you back to the big house. I know you weren’t in on this job. My idea is that you were up here on a smaller one of your own, but I can’t prove that and don’t want to. Walk out of here, alone and neutral, and I’ll forget I saw you.”

Little thoughtful lines grooved the boy’s round, dark face.

The princess took a step toward him.

“You heard the offer I just now made him?” she asked. “Well, I make that offer to you, if you will kill him.”

The thoughtful lines in the boy’s face deepened.

“There’s your choice, Flippo,” I summed up for him. “All I can give you is freedom from San Quentin. The princess can give you a fat cut of the profits in a busted caper, with a good chance to get yourself hanged.”

The girl, remembering her advantage over me, went at him hot and heavy in Italian, a language in which I know only four words. Two of them are profane and the other two obscene. I said all four.

The boy was weakening. If he had been ten years older, he’d have taken my offer and thanked me for it. But he was young and she — now that I thought of it — was beautiful. The answer wasn’t hard to guess.

“But not to bump him off,” he said to her, in English, for my benefit. “We’ll lock him up in there where I was at.”

I suspected Flippo hadn’t any great prejudice against murder. It was just that he thought this one unnecessary, unless he was kidding me to make the killing easier.

The girl wasn’t satisfied with his suggestion. She poured more hot Italian at him. Her game looked surefire, but it had a flaw. She couldn’t persuade him that his chances of getting any of the loot away were good. She had to depend on her charms to swing him. And that meant she had to hold his eye.

He wasn’t far from me.

She came close to him. She was singing, chanting, crooning Italian syllables into his round face.

She had him.

He shrugged. His whole face said yes. He turned—

I knocked him on the noodle with my borrowed crutch.

The crutch splintered apart. Flippo’s knees bent. He stretched up to his full height. He fell on his face on the floor. He lay there, dead-still, except for a thin worm of blood that crawled out of his hair to the rug.

A step, a tumble, a foot or so of hand-and-knee scrambling put me within reach of Flippo’s gun.

The girl, jumping out of my path, was half-way to the door when I sat up with the gun in my hand.

“Stop!” I ordered.

“I shan’t,” she said, but she did, for the time at least. “I am going out.”

“You are going out when I take you.”

She laughed, a pleasant laugh, low and confident.

“I’m going out before that,” she insisted good-naturedly.

I shook my head.

“How do you purpose stopping me?” she asked.

“I don’t think I’ll have to,” I told her. “You’ve got too much sense to try to run while I’m holding a gun on you.”

She laughed again, an amused ripple.

“I’ve got too much sense to stay,” she corrected me. “Your crutch is broken, and you’re lame. You can’t catch me by running after me, then. You pretend you’ll shoot me, but I don’t believe you. You’d shoot me if I attacked you, of course, but I shan’t do that. I shall simply walk out, and you know you won’t shoot me for that. You’ll wish you could, but you won’t. You’ll see.”

Her face turned over her shoulder, her dark eyes twinkling at me, she took a step toward the door.

“Better not count on that!” I threatened.

For answer to that she gave me a cooing laugh. And took another step.

“Stop, you idiot!” I bawled at her.

Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of grey flannel shaping itself to the calf of each grey wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped forward.

Sweat greased the gun in my hand.

When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat.

“Adieu!” she said softly.

And I put a bullet in the calf of her left leg.

She sat down — plump! Utter surprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain.

I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.

“You ought to have known I’d do it!” My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger’s in my ears. “Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?”