Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Ernest Savage Count Me Out

You get up to Bucky Hagen’s place on a footpath that follows the ridge tor a quarter mile and then angles through the trees to his cabin. You can’t drive there, except on a motorcycle. He parks his Chevy pickup in a little open space alongside the ridge where the rutted road ends. And then he walks up, unless he brings that old Harley-Davidson of his, in which case he rides. It’s a better walk than it is a ride, but Bucky, since his wife died and he’s gone to hell, mostly rides. Bucky’s sixty-two, quite a bit older than I am, so maybe I shouldn’t criticize.

His Chevy was parked in the open space and I figured he was there, so I went on up. Walking. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon of a cool spring day. Tomorrow morning at dawn the fishing season would open up here in the mountains and for the past ten years Bucky and I have faced that auspicious moment together. We don’t do anything else together — he lives in Stockton, I in San Francisco — but we do that, and it’s a seasoned tradition we both like and it has the strength of tradition.

Bucky’s cabin is situated on a slight rise of otherwise level land in a grove of giant pines almost parklike in their spacing. Before his wife Betsy died, she spent patient loving years clearing the undergrowth from between the trees, and Bucky’s place is about as pretty as you’re going to find. Or was, anyway, before she went. Now it’s lapsing back to seed, just as he is. Last year he was drunk most of the three days we spent together fishing the Upper Eagle, and you just don’t get drunk in places like that.

The Upper Eagle is a series of deep swirling pools strung like jewels between stretches of white water that falls sometimes one foot or two and sometimes twenty feet in a straight drop. It pounds down out of the High Sierra in a gorge of rocks and boulders and shelves of stone worn smooth and bleached white by eons of wind, water, and sun. It’s a beautiful river, but it takes all a man’s strength and cunning to stay alive on. It has fish in it that have been there forever and will never get caught and will never die. I know some of them and I’ve given them names which I call out when I fish their special pools. It’s the kind of river that will do that sort of thing to a grown man. And it has gold in it too.

Last year on our last afternoon together, Bucky fell in the river and almost drowned and I lost a good rod and reel pulling him out. I told him then I’d never fish with him again when he was drunk and I was coming up now to remind him of that.

The Harley-Davidson was in the woodshed to the left of the cabin. Smoke was coiling lazily out of the stone chimney to the right. I stopped about forty feet from the place and felt the warmth of anger build behind my eyes. I tried to stop it, to calm myself. I come up here for two weeks every spring to get away from all that — the angering things, human cussedness, sloth, indifference, evil. The thick mat of pine needles on his cabin roof is what turned the heat on behind my eyes — that, and the busted spark arrester on his chimney top.

Normally at this time of year there’s still a good snow pack on the ground and rooftops, but this year there wasn’t, and that combination of dry pine needles and unscreened chimney stack was dynamite. Fire warnings were posted all over the mountains and Bucky should have known better. I walked up to his door and knocked.

A woman opened it — a girl, about twenty-looking. She surprised me.

“Where’s Bucky?” I said.

“Him and Milt went over to the river,” she said. She stood hipshot against the doorframe, dark sullen eyes on mine.

“Who’s Milt?” I said.

“Who’re you?”

I took a deep breath. “My name’s Sam Train,” I said evenly. “I’m a friend of Bucky’s. My cabin’s down slope a bit. When’s he due back?”

“He di’n’t say.” She wore a loose red halter and short denim pants over solid hips and thighs. Her feet were bare and dirty and she smelled. She couldn’t have gotten into the tackiest beer joint in California, but she could get into Bucky’s and I thought, sadly, hell, he’s slipped another notch since last year, maybe all the way this time. She was the kind of female I want no part of.

“Well, look,” I said civilly, “when he gets back tell him to clean off his roof and fix that spark arrester on his chimney stack.” She looked blank, so I said, “Come on out and I’ll show you.”

“Up yours,” she said tonelessly.

I almost reached through the door to grab her and drag her out, but didn’t. The heat flared and died behind my eyes. I didn’t need this and I didn’t need Bucky anymore. But this year the fire hazard was too critical to be careless with. “Tell him,” I said. “Or the Forestry Service will.”

I’d left San Francisco before nine that morning and arrived at my cabin around noon. I turn in off the ridge road a little before Bucky’s parking area and can drive the Dart almost to my cabin before the tall trees block me off. The first thing I do each year is check the place for damage and then rake the roof clean, unless it’s under snow. So far I’ve never found damage, but it’s a thing you keep your fingers crossed against. This is high country and hard country, but they’re getting closer every year — the migrant vandals, the destroyers, the random killers who will burn your home or shoot you or smash your face on sheer impulse.

After I got back from Bucky’s I made a list of what I’d need for the two weeks I planned to stay and went down to Mountain City to get it. That chore usually pleases me, but this year it didn’t. I kept thinking of Bucky’s roof and spark arrester and of Bucky himself. We’d fished and panned for gold through a long stretch of years, nearly a quarter of my life, and it was over now. Bucky hadn’t come back from the grievous blow of Betsy’s death, and never would.

Last year, after he’d cost me a rod and reel, he’d quit fishing and taken up his perennial hunt for gold partly if not mostly in the taverns of Mountain City where stories of strikes and lost mines and abandoned claims are as rife as they ever were. Down through the years I’ve panned about $1500 worth of dust and flakes (at today’s prices) from the Upper Eagle and its headwaters, and so has Bucky. And somewhere up there are the veins from which it comes, the mother lode, and men will go on searching for it until it’s found or the world ends. But it will not be found by a drunk, I thought, whose secret search is for the soothing grave.

I felt sorry for Bucky, but I did not want him, in the carelessness of his decline, to set fire to my mountain, so on the way back I stopped at the Division of Forestry office. I told the ranger on duty that he should send a man up to Hagen’s place and make him shape up, and he said he would first thing in the morning. I could have gone back and talked to Bucky myself and the ranger’s eyes told me that — but it was their job, not mine. I’m on vacation. For nineteen years I was a cop on the S.F. Force and for the three years since I’ve been a P.I.

The next morning I got up at four o’clock and drove down through Mountain City and cross country from there to the north fork of the Feather River. I’d decided Bucky and his friends could have the Upper Eagle for a day or two. Besides, I was fond of the Feather. It’s more leisurely and less violent and dangerous than the Eagle and it’s a good place to get your legs in shape after the winter’s layoff. You fish all Sierra streams from rock to rock and halfway through that first day, sometimes, you wish you were home in bed.

I had good luck there as I usually do. By noon I’d caught my limit and after I ate my sandwich and drank the rest of my coffee I headed home. On the way back I heard over the car radio that a fire was underway north of the Upper Eagle and it gave me the same dark thrill that report always does. I hurried. I went through Mountain City at 3:15 and twenty minutes later was jouncing up the ridge road near the cabin. Just above my turnoff a dark-green Forestry pickup was parked, heading down.

I pulled over, got out, and walked up the road to Bucky’s parking area where two more Forestry trucks, a Mountain County Sheriff’s car, and a County ambulance were parked. One of the Forestry trucks, a flatbed, had a winch rig on the rear and a cable had been fed down over the lip of the ridge to something out of sight below. A half dozen uniformed men were standing there looking down. Standing by themselves at the point where Bucky’s trail leads up slope were the girl I’d talked to yesterday and a big man.

The girl had on a sweater over the same red halter she’d worn yesterday and a pair of dirty sneakers on her feet. She looked at me without apparent recognition from twenty feet away, then whispered something to the man, and he looked at me with quick interest. He was heavily bearded and long-haired and powerful-looking. I returned his stare for a few seconds before walking over to the Deputy Sheriff I recognized and asking him what happened.

“Train!” he said and stuck out his hand. “Hagen’s down there,” he said, “and a ranger named Miller. They went over the edge in the ranger’s truck sometime this morning. The man down below says they’re both dead. When’d you get up?”

“Yesterday. I heard there was a fire, Arkins.”

“Yeah, there was, but it’s out now. North of the Eagle, a small one. One of the helicopters spotted the ranger’s truck in the ravine on the way back from there.”

“How’d it happen, d’you know? I mean Bucky.”

“We got an idea. Miller came out this morning to get Hagen to clean his roof and fix his chimney and evidently they got in a fuss about it. Those people over there” — he gestured toward the girl and the bearded man — “say Miller arrested Hagen and started to take him to town. They said Hagen was drunk. Then, evidently, they had a fight in the truck and Hagen got shot and the truck went over the edge. We’ll know more when they get the bodies up, but that could’ve been the way it went. Miller was a known hothead and you know Hagen, he hasn’t been sober for two years.”

“Who says Hagen got shot?”

“The man down below there. Miller’s the only one at the local station who routinely carries a sidearm. He’s quick, like I say, and we’ve had some trouble with him. Saturday nights he gets drunk too. I see you been fishing, Sam. Any luck?”

“Yeah, my limit. Over on the Feather.”

“They tell me Teel Lake is loaded with steelhcad.”

“I’m not much of a lake man. Arkins. Did you get statements from those two over there?”

“Not yet. We’ll take ’em down to town when we get the bodies up.”

“Who are they?”

“Friends of Bucky’s, they said. They said they met him a couple of weeks ago in Stockton and he invited ’em up for the summer.”

“The whole summer?”

“That’s what they said.”

I looked over my shoulder at the girl and our eyes locked instantly, hers sullen and baleful now; maybe she smelled the cop in me. The man was looking at the winch truck, his hands in his hip pockets, flat white belly and hair-matted chest showing through the gap in one of those buttonless wool-lined vests that macho types sometimes wear. It was a bravura touch in the chilly afternoon air.

A radio crackled and the cable, snaking down the steep slope of the ravine, jumped and tightened. You could see the path the truck had smashed through the underbrush, but you couldn’t see the truck. It was below a jutting shelf of rock a hundred feet down and it would be hard to get it back up past that shelf. Maybe they’d just bring up the bodies.

Arkins lit a cigarette and the Hare of his match reminded me of a lot of things, chiefly that I had opened the curtain on this lethal show. But I said, “What started the fire, Arkins, do they know yet?”

“Probably one of these things,” Arkins said, shaking out the match. “Probably some city dude cooking his breakfast this morning. Roughing it. No offense, Sam.” He grinned at me amiably.

Last fall Arkins and I had had a brief encounter in the way of business and he had emerged from it with more egg on his face than I. But he was an easy-going, self-forgiving man, like most mountain men, and I liked him. “Somebody,” I said, “has still got to clean off Bucky’s roof and fix his chimney.”

“Yeah,” Arkins said.

“Maybe you can get Grizzly Barlow over there to do it,” I said. “He’s living there, I guess.”

“Yeah, whyn’t you ask him, Sam?”

”I asked somebody already,” I said. “And besides I’m on vacation.” I turned, walked back down to the Dart, and went home.

I usually sleep like a contented child in the cabin and that night was no exception, but when I wakened in the morning I felt for the first time the impact of Bucky’s death and the first real lash of guilt.

It was nonsense. Bucky had wanted to die. For three years Bucky had been Death looking for a place to happen, so why should it trouble me? It was nonsense.

I went outside and breathed the cold clean air. Where I go on the Upper Eagle is a long hard uphill hike and you don’t take that first step without thinking about it. My legs still hurt from the workout yesterday on the Feather and I knew they would for a couple days yet. They needed more time before tackling the Eagle — more of the Feather maybe, or one of the little tributaries up above where I’ve found some gold. I was waffling. It had been a bad start for what has always been the most prized two weeks of my year, and there I was just standing there.

I ate breakfast and then got in the Dart and drove the four winding miles down to Mountain City. I’d lost two rooster-tail lures on the Feather yesterday and I wanted to replace them and get a fresh spool of eight-ounce line. Besides, there was a new Daiwa reel I’d heard about and I figured Mickey Johnson would have it in his store down there if anyone did. More waffling—

I was still in Johnson’s at ten o’clock and had about forty bucks worth of stuff lined up to buy when Arkins found me there.

“Saw your car outside, Sam,” he said, “and figured you was here.”

“So?” I had a particularly fancy new lure in my hand and didn’t put it down.

“So how about coming over and identifying Bucky’s body?”

“Why me, Arkins? Half the people up here knew him, including you.”

“You know I can’t do it, Sam. Besides, you knew him better than anyone else. Come on.”

I didn’t want to go. An hour in Johnson’s store had reacquainted me with why I was here. “Count me out,” I said doggedly. “Get somebody up from Stockton to do it.”

“He had no family, Train, you know that.”

“Then a neighbor, a friend. How about those hippie guests of his?”

“They’re not there this morning. I just got back from there.”

“Why didn’t you get ’em to do it last night?” I said obstinately.

“We didn’t get the bodies up until after dark and they’d gone by then. Come on, Sam, it’ll take you ten minutes.”

I dropped the lure back in its box and followed him out.

The shot had gone clean through Bucky’s heart. Doc Zerbo, who handled autopsies for Mountain County, said death had been instantaneous. Bucky’s body was laid out on an embalming table in the back room of Madison’s Funeral Parlor on Main Street, down the block from Johnson’s. Mountain City is about a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide and ninety percent of the permanent population of the county live there. They can’t afford a lot of sophisticated forensic equipment and personnel. Dr. Edward Zerbo does their autopsies in Madison’s back room, but he makes his living setting bones during the skiing season and curing snake bite the rest of the year. I’d met him once before and liked him. He said he’d rather be poor here than rich anywhere else, and I understand that.

“Well, it’s Bucky,” I said, and Arkins duly noted that down.

“The bullet I took out of him looks like a .38,” Zerbo said, “and Miller’s gun is a .38 and there’s probably no doubt he shot him, but we’ll have to send them down to Sacramento for a ballistics check.”

“Sounds good,” I said, and turned to go, but then turned back. Bucky’s body was badly battered from the long fall down the slope of the ravine, but there was a motley pattern of marks on his legs that weren’t bruises. Little red bumps.

“What’re those?” I said to Zerbo, pointing, and he said probably ant bites made while he and Miller were dead in the ravine.

“Does Miller have any?” I said and Zerbo shrugged and pulled the sheet back from Miller’s body on the next table. It was as badly battered as Bucky’s, but there were no little red marks on his legs.

“What killed him?” I said.

“The fall,” Zerbo said. “I haven’t done him yet, but it looks like his neck’s broken.”

“The ants didn’t like him, I guess.” I’d seen something else on Bucky’s body, but didn’t mention it. There were marks around his shoulders that looked as if he’d worn a heavy backpack for a long time, and I knew Bucky didn’t even own a backpack. It bothered me as it would have bothered me if I were working; but I wasn’t working; I was on vacation now and I put it out of my mind.

“Good seeing you again, Doc,” I said and left.

I drove up to Teel Lake that afternoon and rented a boat at the marina and caught three good-looking steelhead, but since they were only lip-hooked I threw them back. I don’t like lake fishing. Everybody and his Aunt Maude from down below goes lake fishing, especially early in the season, and the surface of the lake that afternoon was as crowded as a supermarket parking lot on dollar day.

The automotive age has produced a law in America as irrevocable as the table of tides: If you can’t get to it on wheels, don’t go to it. In ten years on the Upper Eagle I’ve seen no more than a half dozen men, counting Bucky, and that s what I like about it — that and its raw thundering beauty, and its danger. This was no vacation, it was a shopping trip on water. I was back at the cabin by six o’clock.

There’s no power cable to the cabin and therefore no radio, TV, or electric lights. There’s nothing much in it save a butane-powered cook top and refrigerator, a table, a few chairs, three bunks, and a half dozen books. But there is yourself, there’s always yourself and what you’ve made of yourself in forty-five quick years.

Why, I asked myself, did the bugs bite Bucky, but not bite Miller? I put aside the book I’d been trying to read under the cold light of a hissing mantle lantern, and let the question all the way in. It was a cop question, and once a cop, always a cop. Bucky had gotten himself bitten someplace other than down in the ravine. So where, and why?

I got up, went outside, and listened to the world spin for a while. You can hear it up here and it’s a good sound; the sound of Time.

The ground underfoot was springy with mulch, the massed and layered detritus of 10,000 years. This noble forest, these tall trees die as we die and are chewed to dust as we are chewed to dust by the million mandibled jaws of the small world. It’s their work.

Tie a man to one of these trees, I thought, leave him there for a while and the big black ants will think he’s just another job to do. Strap a man by his shoulders somehow— But why?

Dammit! I wanted no part of this. I turned and went back in the cabin and by midnight I finally got to sleep. Bucky was better off where he was anyway, I told myself.

There are two things you have in mind when you fish the Upper Eagle; the first is to stay alive, the second to catch a fish, assuming you’ve achieved the first. There’s a point up there beyond which I’ve never gone and never will. It’s where, for me, the river starts. It pours down between two giant boulders into a boiling pool twenty feet below, breaks there into several streams that gush through and over a ridge of rocks to a larger pool three or four feet lower down. The water is freshly melted snow and viciously cold and the thunder of it is awesome. I drop a line in that lower pool every year, but it’s a gesture, a ritual. I don’t think any fish could live in it, even if he were fool enough to want to.

Usually in spring the snow is still piled deep along the banks of the Eagle, but this year the pack had been light and there wasn’t much there, just grainy patches in the shaded spots, still firm and dry at ten in the morning; but by noon, under the lash of the mountain sun, their substance too would join this cataract, this thundering rush of virgin water, this primitive force. It never seems possible to me that I am just hours away from my apartment on Van Ness in San Francisco, and always that first day I know both joy and fear, but mostly fear.

It is no place to be alone. With every step you’re at risk and if you break a leg you stay forever. I wear work shoes up here with thick, cleated, composition soles. Uncleated soles, even of rubber or crepe, are no good. The water bounces and sprays up the sides of the sleek rocks and sometimes wets their tops and they can become like greased slides if you don’t have the right kind of shoes on.

I wear heavy cord pants, a heavy wool shirt, and a brimmed hat that otherwise hangs on a peg in the cabin. I carry a canvas creel slung on a strap over my shoulder that lies flat against my side until I put something in it. I carry six lures in a flat plastic box in one button-down shin pocket, a candy bar in the other, and a single rod and reel. You’ve got to have one hand free to help you from rock to rock and the fewer things you have dangling from your frame, the fewer chances there are to snag on something.

Moving around up there, I missed Bucky. We always had eye contact with each other and that’s almost like having an extra hand.

I worked carefully down to the next lower pool and began some serious fishing. Pierre lived in that pool. Pierre is a trout and, as I said, he always has lived there and always will. I hooked him once two years ago and if I’d had a net I could have landed him. But I never carry a net because it’s just one more thing that could get you in trouble; and besides, I didn’t want to catch Pierre. He’s King here, and I just visit.

I use a green and gold rooster tail as lure, one-eighth ounce in weight if the wind’s up, one-sixteenth if the air is still. I drop the lure in the white water in the center of the stream and draw it across his domain, about a foot down and flashing all the way in the clear green pool. He always comes out and sniffs at it — at least once — and two years ago the hook snagged him on the underside of the lower lip and drew him to the edge where he wiggled free and swam away.

It must have embarrassed Pierre, for he didn’t show up again all that season. He’s about two feet long and there’s a pattern of black dots on his mottled brown back that looks like a P. Downstream a way in another pool there’s a similar trout with a pattern of dots on his back forming an H and his name is Harry. Up here you talk to the fish if you talk at all, even if a friend’s in sight. Your voice carries about a yard through the fractured air and teaches you finally that most of what you say you needn’t have.

Back home in San Francisco, sometimes, awake in bed, listening to the rumble and squeal of traffic, the beagle-bawl of ships in the Bay, the screams of muggers’ victims, and other not entirely imaginary sounds, I wish I could capture the special thunder of the Eagle, as the roar of the sea is caught in a shell, and lay it on the pillow next to my head. It’s a tiring man’s whimsy; but I’d sleep better.

Pierre came out that morning and sniffed my lure three times before I bid him goodbye and moved on down to my next station, where Harry lives. I’ve never hooked Harry, but I usually take one or two of his smaller mates for eating. Their flesh is so hard and firm that it flakes like a cracker when cooked, and there’s nothing quite so good. But I didn’t take anything that day from Harry’s pool, or from anywhere else. Not a fish, anyway.

My legs had been aching all morning and when the sun was straight overhead I sat down in one of my favorite spots and ate my candy bar. I was tired and I missed Bucky. I’d slipped a while back and gotten my right leg wet to the knee and knew suddenly just how alone I was. Bucky would have come a-running, drunk or sober.

A little above and to the right of where I sat on a ledge, thirty feet over the roiling stream below, a nameless creek came tumbling in through the trees and joined its waters with the Eagle. Bucky and I had taken gold higher up on that creek, and a little last year from the curling gravel bar it formed at its junction with the Eagle.

It was a spectacular vantage point, if a little scary. The natural ledge on which I sat tapered away to nothing on my left and was no more than two feet wide at any point as it curved back around the rock on my right to solid ground. Bucky wouldn’t come out there and called me a damn fool when I did. But it was always worth it. If I were a bird I’d live on that ledge.

After I finished my candy bar and talked to my legs for a few moments, I stood up carefully and stretched — and saw them from the corner of my eye, Bucky’s friends. Somehow I’d half expected to all morning.

And they saw me.

They were forty feet below me on the south bank of the river, 150 feet away in a straight line. We looked at each other for a long time and then the girl said something to the man and the man reached into a canvas sack at his feet, pulled out a pistol and very deliberately, holding it in both hands, fired at me.

I didn’t hear the shot in the roar of the river, but I saw the muzzle flash. He moved a little uphill and fired again, just as I flattened myself on the rock at my back. I heard the zip-hiss of that shot only inches away.

I looked again and he was running up the slope behind me. He had me trapped. If he knew where the ledge I was standing on started, he could walk out on it and shoot me at his pleasure. But he didn’t know that. I took another quick peek and saw him clambering up a big domed rock to the right of mine. From its top he’d be twenty-five feet away and from there he could cover the point at which I’d have to emerge if I retreated around the ledge. But he didn’t know that either.

I took another quick look and saw him now nearly on top of the domed rock, but unsure of his feet yet and he wasted a shot that I didn’t even hear. I had seconds to do something before he reached the top of the dome and only one thing to do it with — my rod and reel. It was leaning against the rock behind me and it was still armed with the eighth-ounce rooster tail I’d been using in Harry’s pool. It was going to have to be a very good cast—

I took another peek to estimate distance. The domed rock was steeper near the top than it looked and the man had on the wrong kind of shoes. His left leg was extended down the side of the rock, his right bent under him holding his weight. He aimed at me onehanded, but didn’t fire. He was about twenty-five feet from me now on a slight uphill line. I wanted him standing.

I took the rod in my right hand and twisted on the ledge, fifteen inches wide where I was, so that my face was now pressed against the stone. I took another quick look and saw another muzzle flash and heard the sharp slap of the bullet striking the rock just above my head.

I was ready to go. I could hit him easily with the rooster tail, but that isn’t what I wanted. I wanted to drop it over his shoulder or his head and have it go past him by no more than a foot, because a foot was about all I could pull it back without losing my footing on the ledge. I wanted him to fall into that murderous water below, not me.

I had to invite one more shot because I wanted him slightly off-balance from the recoil. I held the rod down, ready to whip it up and cast, then I stuck my head far enough around for him to see, raised the rod, and cast in one fluid move. I don’t know where his shot went, but the rooster tail snagged in the long hair at the back of his head and when I pulled it back as far as I could before letting it go, he came part way with it. He whirled, his arms flying, his left shoe slipping again, and arced over backward. He tried to twist in mid-air, but didn’t have the room and caught a rock full in the chest before bouncing in the water thirty feet below and out of sight.

I shut my eyes for a moment and pressed my cheek against the stone, warm in the afternoon sun. My knees felt as though they could bend either way and I didn’t want to try them yet. When I opened my eyes again, the girl was jumping from the shore to a rock about a yard out in the water. There was a cluster of rocks there that in low water could take a sure-footed man halfway across the stream, but not now. The water there was all white and angry; but she didn’t seem to see that, she saw her man slipping past, slipping away, his hairy face rolling up for an instant, then an arm, a leg; a broken man out there, dead or dying and lost forever.

She balanced for a moment on the first rock and then jumped for the next and I heard myself mouthing the words, “Go back, go back!” She slipped, seemed to sit in the air for a moment, then half stood again, turning and falling.

I could see nothing at first but her long black hair, then I could see her face, her mouth wide, her teeth flashing, her eyes on mine. She was clinging to a rock, both arms wrapped around it, her body trailing behind in the fierce grip of the boiling stream. Her dark eyes were riveted on mine and her mouth now was forming the words over and over, “Help me, help me!”

I sidled shakily around the ledge to solid ground and then down to where she’d started her short fruitless trip. She was fifteen feet away, but her pleading eyes seemed closer than that.

I was unmoved. Somehow she and her man had harnessed Bucky to something outdoors, a tree probably, and left him there long enough for the ants to chew him up pretty good before, again somehow, killing him. And if that were so, it was a good bet they’d also killed the ranger.

“Please — oh, God, help me, please!” I could almost hear her words in the thundering air.

I wanted to walk away right now and be done with it. She couldn’t last another ten minutes in the grip of that frigid powerful stream. They’d killed Bucky and the ranger and then they’d tried to kill me because they thought I knew that; or — it occurred to me just then — because I saw them here, just here. Not somewhere else, but here.

I could walk away from her right now and sleep well tonight. And tomorrow night, and the next. But there is a difference in some of us, and some night—

The flickering spark we call soul is a sacred thing. If hers isn’t, then mine is. She could walk away from me laughing; I knew that. But I’m not her. Not yet.

I didn’t try to jump out on the rocks as she had. I stepped into the water just upstream of them and felt the breath snap shut in my throat. I moved toward her, belly deep, handing myself from rock to rock, my feet searching out the high spots on the stony bed of the stream. Her eyes were on me all the way until I caught her hands, and then they closed.

I pulled her over the rock she’d been clinging to, got her arms over my shoulders, and hauled her to shore and up the bank a few yards to where the sun burned warm. We were both exhausted and lay there for minutes before I got up and took off my shirt and spread it out to dry. I didn’t touch her. She had on a shirt and sweater and those same denim shorts she’d worn before. The skin of her legs was still bluish-white from cold and they were both badly scratched from the rocks.

Her right leg was broken at mid-shin. It didn’t go straight down, but bent there in a way that could make you sick if you let it. It didn’t bother me at all.

A little later, when the cold wore off, it would begin to hurt again. It had probably hurt sharply when it happened, but then the cold had taken over. It meant that my option was still open; she would die here, too, if I left her, and the temptation was still strong. She opened her eyes and pulled hair away from her face the way women do, lightly, with the tips of the fingers. In any other woman it would have been a charming gesture.

I crouched down by her head on the springy brown earth. “You’re gonna tell me how and why you killed Bucky,” I said, “or I’m gonna leave you here for the ants. Do you understand me?”

She frowned groggily. “Bucky—?” It took her a while to pick up the thread — Bucky had been several fatal events back. “We have this rig,” she said finally. “We hooked it on him and tied him to a tree.”

“What rig?”

“This rig we’ve got. It’s like a strait jacket, sort of.”

“You’ve used it before?”

“Well, yes — once or twice.”

“Why on Bucky?”

“He had this gold — He wouldn’t tell us where it was at first.”

My God! I thought; Bucky and his gold, his big strike somewhere. “Gold — where?” I said.

“Right here.” She raised her head a little. “Around here somewhere.”

“If he told you that — why did you kill him?”

“He fought with Milt. He tried to kill Milt. Milt knocked him out. And just then—”

“What?” The pain in her leg was building now.

“This guy in the monkey suit showed up and — Milt hit him on the head.”

Her eyes winced and closed and I picked it up from there. “So Milt took the ranger’s gun and put it in the ranger’s hand and shot Bucky with it, didn’t he? Then the two of you carried them down to the ranger’s truck, set them up in it, and ran it over the edge. Right?”

“We had to,” she said.

She opened her eyes wide and tried to sell it to me. “We couldn’t do anything else, don’t you see?”

I saw.

I stood up and gazed down at her with something too close to hate to live with for long. How many times had I heard that plea: “The guy wouldn’t give me his money, so I had to kill him. Right?” And we’re buying it, a little more each day.

I couldn’t think about that.

“Where’d you meet Bucky?” I said.

“In this bar in Stockton. He had this little glass thing full of gold— He was bragging about it, Mr. Train.”

Well, he probably was, I thought; there was so little left for him to brag about. I sighed for him just one time. I doubted that he’d fought with Milt. I think that Milt just beat him up for the joy of it, cheered on by this girl. And then the ranger came — the one I’d sent.

“If I take you back, will you tell them all that — the cops?”

“Oh, yes, yes! Just don’t leave me here!”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Mr. Train.”

I didn’t quite grin. She was a pretty girl, good bones in the face and a big bounteous body. Fixed up she’d catch a man’s eye quick and dull his good sense. And she would lie; she was born to lie. She’d deny that she and Milt had anything to do with Bucky and the ranger, and that lie might stick. She’d say that I lusted for her and killed Milt to get her — and that would make sense to half of them down there. Otherwise, why would I bring her back? Why not just leave her?

It would be trouble, a tangled, tricky kind of trouble, and in the end some would still believe her. Maybe all of them would. It would take work to clear myself, lots of it, and I didn’t come here to work. I came here to get away to fish the Upper Eagle — and not for the like of this.

I looked down at her and said, “I’m gonna leave you here. I can’t afford to take the risk.”

She knew what I was talking about: her eyes were a mix of pain and guile. She closed them. “I will tell the truth,” she said softly. “I’ll tell it the way it happened.”

“Sure you will,” I said. But the decision had been made and there was no going back on it. I went over and put on my half-dry shirt and then I picked her up and draped her over my shoulder. It was about three o’clock, I figured, and it would take me three hours, at least, to get her to town.

I turned her over to the Sheriff at the Mountain City Hospital at 6:30 that evening, and then the trouble started. Just as I knew it would. She told them I d killed Milt and tried to rape her and she’d broken her leg running away.

It was a week before I cleared myself enough to get back to San Francisco, and the first thing I did was sit down wearily and plan a vacation. Hawaii, maybe.

Next time, count me out.

But they’re everywhere you go.