Great American Detective Stories

No Crime in the Mountains by Raymond Chandler

There’s a growing school of thought that Raymond Chandler is a capital-W Writer, of significance and importance. I hope, selfishly, that nothing comes of this. Things happen (naming no names) to mystery novelists who are adjudged Writers; for one thing, they stop writing mystery novels, and a cessation of the PHILIP MARLOWE stories is an unbearable thought. But the ugly fact remains that Chandler can write like nobody else in the business, and is one of the great exponents to date of the poetry of violence and justice. You may never have heard of JOHN EVANS; but call him MARLOWE and you won’t know the difference. “No crime in the mountains” is authentic Chandler — a full meaty novelet never before printed in book form.

The letter came just before noon, special delivery, a dime-store envelope with the return address F. S. Lacey, Puma Point, California. Inside was a check for a hundred dollars, made out to cash and signed Frederick S. Lacey, and a sheet of plain white bond paper typed with a number of strikeovers. It said:

There hadn’t been any business in a week, but this made it a nice day. The bank on which the check was drawn was about six blocks away. I went over and cashed it, ate lunch, and got the car out and started off.

It was hot in the valley, hotter still in San Bernardino, and it was still hot at five thousand feet, fifteen miles up the high-gear road to Puma Lake. I had done forty of the fifty miles of curving, twisting highway before it started to cool off, but it didn’t get really cool until I reached the dam and started along the south shore of the lake past the piled-up granite boulders and the sprawled camps in the flats beyond. It was early evening when I reached Puma Point and I was as empty as a gutted fish.

The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner, opposite a dance hall. I registered, carried my suitcase upstairs and dropped it in a bleak, hard-looking room with an oval rug on the floor, a double bed in the corner, and nothing on the bare pine wall but a hardware-store calendar all curled up from the dry mountain summer. I washed my face and hands and went downstairs to eat.

The dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby was full to overflowing with males in sport clothes and liquor breaths and females in slacks and shorts with blood-red fingernails and dirty knuckles. A fellow with eyebrows like John L. Lewis was prowling around with a cigar screwed info his face. A lean, pale-eyed cashier in shirt sleeves was fighting to get the race results from Hollywood Park on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potato was full of water. In the deep, black corner of the room a hillbilly symphony of five defeatists in white coats and purple shirts was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar.

I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on it, and went out onto the main stem. It was still broad daylight, but the neon lights were turned on and the evening was full of the noise of auto horns, shrill voices, the rattle of bowls, the snap of .22s at the shooting gallery, juke-box music, and behind all this the hoarse, hard mutter of speedboats on the lake. At a corner opposite the post office a blue-and-white arrow said telephone. I went down a dusty side road that suddenly became quiet and cool and piny. A tame doe deer with a leather collar on its neck wandered across the road in front of me. The phone office was a log cabin, and there was a booth in the corner with a coin-in-the-slot telephone. I shut myself inside and dropped my nickel and dialed 2306. A woman’s voice answered.

I said: “Is Mr. Fred Lacey there?”

“Who is calling, please?”

“Evans is the name.”

“Mr. Lacey is not here right now, Mr. Evans. Is he expecting you?”

That gave her two questions to my one. I didn’t like it. I said: “Are you Mrs. Lacey?”

“Yes. I am Mrs. Lacey.” I thought her voice was taut and overstrung, but some voices are like that all the time.

“It’s a business matter,” I said. “When will he be back?”

“I don’t know exactly. Sometime this evening, I suppose. What did you—”

“Where is your cabin, Mrs. Lacey?”

“It’s... it’s on Ball Sage Point, about two miles west of the village. Are you calling from the village? Did you—”

“I’ll call back in an hour, Mrs. Lacey,” I said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth. In the other corner of the room a dark girl in slacks was writing in some kind of account book at a little desk. She looked up and smiled and said: “How do you like the mountains?”

I said: “Fine.”

“It’s very quiet up here,” she said. “Very restful.”

“Yeah. Do you know anybody named Fred Lacey?”

“Lacey? Oh, yes, they just had a phone put in. They bought the Baldwin cabin. It was vacant for two years, and they just bought it. It’s out at the end of Ball Sage Point, a big cabin on high ground, looking out over the lake. It has a marvelous view. Do you know Mr. Lacey?”

“No,” I said, and went out of there.

The tame doe was in the gap of the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way. She wouldn’t move, so I stepped over the fence and walked back to the Indian Head and got into my car.

There was a gas station at the east end of the village. I pulled up for some gas and asked the leathery man who poured it where Ball Sage Point was.

“Well,” he said. “That’s easy. That ain’t hard at all. You won’t have no trouble finding Ball Sage Point. You go down here about a mile and a half past the Catholic church and Kincaid’s Camp, and at the bakery you turn right and then you keep on the road to Willerton Boys’ Camp, and it’s the first road to the left after you pass on by. It’s a dirt road, kind of rough. They don’t sweep the snow off in winter, but it ain’t winter now. You know somebody out there?”

“No.” I gave him money. He went for the change and came back.

“It’s quiet out there,” he said. “Restful. What was the name?”

“Murphy,” I said.

“Glad to know you, Mr. Murphy,” he said, and reached for my hand. “Drop in any time. Glad to have the pleasure of serving you. Now, for Ball Sage Point you just keep straight on down this road—”

“Yeah,” I said, and left his mouth flapping.

I figured I knew how to find Ball Sage Point now, so I turned around and drove the other way. It was just possible Fred Lacey would not want me to go to his cabin.

Half a block beyond the hotel the paved road turned down toward a boat landing, then east again along the shore of the lake. The water was low. Cattle were grazing in the sour-looking grass that had been under water in the spring. A few patient visitors were fishing for bass or bluegill from boats with outboard motors. About a mile or so beyond the meadows a dirt road wound out toward a long point covered with junipers. Close inshore there was a lighted dance pavilion. The music was going already, although it still looked like late afternoon at that altitude. The band sounded as if it was in my pocket. I could hear a girl with a throaty voice singing “The Woodpecker’s Song.” I drove on past and the music faded and the road got rough and stony. A cabin on the shore slid past me, and there was nothing beyond it but pines and junipers and the shine of the water. I stopped the car out near the tip of the point and walked over to a huge tree fallen with its roots twelve feet in the air. I sat down against it on the bone-dry ground and lit a pipe. It was peaceful and quiet and far from everything. On the far side of the lake a couple of speedboats played tag, but on my side there was nothing but silent water, very slowly getting dark in the mountain dusk. I wondered who the hell Fred Lacey was and what he wanted and why he didn’t stay home or leave a message if his business was so urgent. I didn’t wonder about it very long. The evening was too peaceful. I smoked and looked at the lake and the sky, and at a robin waiting on the bare spike at the top of a tall pine for it to get dark enough so he could sing his good-night song.

At the end of half an hour I got up and dug a hole in the soft ground with my heel and knocked my pipe out and stamped down the dirt over the ashes. For no reason at all, I walked a few steps toward the lake, and that brought me to the end of the tree. So I saw the foot.

It was in a white duck shoe, about size nine. I walked around the roots of the tree.

There was another foot in another white duck shoe. There were pin-stripped white pants with legs in them, and there was a torso in a pale-green sport shirt of the kind that hangs outside and has pockets like a sweater. It had a buttonless V neck and chest hair showed through the V. The man was middle-aged, half bald, had a good coat of tan and a line mustache shaved up from the lip. His lips were thick, and his mouth, a little open as they usually are, showed big strong teeth. He had the kind of face that goes with plenty of food and not too much worry. His eyes were looking at the sky. I couldn’t seem to meet them.

The left side of the green sport shirt was sodden with blood in a patch as big as a dinner plate. In the middle of the patch there might have been a scorched hole. I couldn’t be sure. The light was getting a little tricky.

I bent down and felt matches and cigarettes in the pockets of the shirt, a couple of rough lumps like keys and silver in his pants pockets at the sides. I rolled him a little to get at his hip. He was still limp and only a little cooled off. A wallet of rough leather made a tight fit in his right hip pocket. I dragged it out, bracing my knee against his back.

There was twelve dollars in the wallet and some cards, but what interested me was the name on his photostat driver’s license. I lit a match to make sure I read it right in the fading daylight.

The name on the license was Frederick Shield Lacey.

I put the wallet back and stood up and made a full circle, staring hard. Nobody was in sight, on land or on the water. In that light, nobody could have seen what I was doing unless he was close.

I walked a few steps and looked down to see if I was making tracks. No. The ground was half pine needles of many years past, and the other half pulverized rotten wood.

The gun was about four feet away, almost under the fallen tree. I didn’t touch it. I bent down and looked at it. It was a .22 automatic, a Colt with a bone grip. It was half buried in a small pile of the powdery, brown, rotted wood. There were large black ants on the pile, and one of them was crawling along the barrel of the gun.

I straightened up and took another quick look around. A boat idled off shore out of sight around the point. I could hear an uneven stutter from the throttled-down motor, but I couldn’t see it. I started back toward the car. I was almost up to it. A small figure rose silently behind a heavy manzanita bush. The light winked on glasses and on something else, lower down in a hand.

A voice said hissingly: “Placing the hands up, please.”

It was a nice spot for a very fast draw. I didn’t think mine would be fast enough. I placed the hands up.

The small figure came around the manzanita bush. The shining thing below the glasses was a gun. The gun was large enough. It came toward me.

A gold tooth winked out of a small mouth below a black mustache.

“Turning around, please,” the nice little voice said soothingly. “You seeing man lie on ground?”

“Look,” I said, “I’m a stranger here. I—”

“Turning around very soon,” the man said coldly.

I turned around.

The end of the gun made a nest against my spine. A light, deft hand prodded me here and there, rested on the gun under my arm. The voice cooed. The hand went to my hip. The pressure of my wallet went away. A very neat pickpocket. I could hardly feel him touch me.

“I look at wallet now. You very still,” the voice said. The gun went away.

A good man had a chance now. He would fall quickly to the ground, do a back flip from a kneeling position, and come up with his gun blazing in his hand. It would happen very fast. The good man would take the little man with glasses the way a dowager takes her teeth out, in one smooth motion. I somehow didn’t think I was that good.

The wallet went back on my hip, the gun barrel back into my back.

“So,” the voice said softly. “You coming here you making mistake.”

“Brother, you said it,” I told him.

“Not matter,” the voice said. “Go away now, go home. Five hundred dollars. Nothing being said five hundred dollars arriving one week from today.”

“Fine,” I said. “You having my address?”

“Very funny,” the voice cooed. “Ha, ha.”

Something hit the back of my right knee, and the leg folded suddenly the way it will when hit at that point. My head began to ache from where it was going to get a crack from the gun, but he fooled me. It was the old rabbit punch, and it was a honey of its type. Done with the heel of a very hard little hand. My head came off and went halfway across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.

There was an interval of midnight in a small room with the windows shut and no air. My chest labored against the ground. They put a ton of coal on my back. One of the hard lumps pressed into the middle of my back. I made some noises, but they must have been unimportant. Nobody bothered about them. I heard the sound of a boat motor get louder, and a soft thud of feet walking on the pine needles, making a dry, slithering sound. Then a couple of heavy grunts and steps going away. Then steps coming back and a burry voice, with a sort of accent.

“What did you get there, Charlie?”

“Oh, nothing,” Charlie said cooingly. “Smoking pipe, not doing anything. Summer visitor, ha, ha.”

“Did he see the stiff?”

“Not seeing,” Charlie said. I wondered why.

“O.K., let’s go.”

“Ah, too bad,” Charlie said. “Too bad.” The weight got off my back and the lumps of hard coal went away from my spine. “Too bad,” Charlie said again. “But must do.”

He didn’t fool this time. He hit me with the gun. Come around and I’ll let you feel the lump under my scalp. I’ve got several of them.

Time passed and I was up on my knees, whining. I put a foot on the ground and hoisted myself on it and wiped my face off with the back of my hand and put the other foot on the ground and climbed out of the hole it felt like I was in.

The shine of water, dark now from the sun but silvered by the moon, was directly in front of me. To the right was the big fallen tree. That brought it back. I moved cautiously toward it, rubbing my head with careful fingertips. It was swollen and soft, but not bleeding. I stopped and looked back for my hat, and then remembered I had left it in the car.

I went around the tree. The moon was bright as it can only be in the mountains or on the desert. You could almost have read the paper by its light. It was very easy to see that there was no body on the ground now and no gun lying against the tree with ants crawling on it. The ground had a sort of moothed-out, raked look.

I stood there and listened, and all I heard was the blood pounding in my head, and all I felt was my head aching. Then my hand jumped for the gun and the gun was there. And the hand jumped again for my wallet and the wallet was there. I hauled it out and looked at my money. That seemed to be there, too.

I turned around and plowed back to the car. I wanted to go back to the hotel and get a couple of drinks and lie down. I wanted to meet Charlie after a while, but not right away. First I wanted to lie down for a while. I was a growing boy and I needed rest.

I got into the car and started it and tooled it around on the soft ground and back onto the dirt road and back along that to the highway. I didn’t meet any cars. The music was still going well in the dancing pavilion off to the side, and the throaty-voiced singer was giving out “I’ll Never Smile Again.”

When I reached the highway I put the lights on and drove back to the village. The local law hung out in a one-room pine-board shack halfway up the block from the boat landing, across the street from the firehouse. There was a naked light burning inside, behind a glass-paneled door.

I stopped the car on the other side of the street and sat there for a minute looking into the shack. There was a man inside, sitting bareheaded in a swivel chair at an old roll-top desk. I opened the car door and moved to get out, then stopped and shut the door again and started the motor and drove on.

I had a hundred dollars to earn, after all.

I drove two miles past the village and came to the bakery and turned on a newly oiled road toward the lake. I passed a couple of camps and then saw the brownish tents of the boys’ camp with lights strung between them and a clatter coming from a big tent where they were washing dishes. A little beyond that the road curved around an inlet and a dirt road branched off. It was deeply rutted and full of stones half embedded in the dirt, and the trees barely gave it room to pass. I went by a couple of lighted cabins, old ones built of pine with the bark left on. Then the road climbed and the place got emptier, and after a while a big cabin hung over the edge of the bluff looking down on the lake at its feet. The cabin had two chimneys and a rustic fence, and a double garage outside the fence. There was a long porch on the lake side, and steps going down to the water. Light came from the windows. My headlamps tilted up enough to catch the name Baldwin painted on a wooden board nailed to a tree. This was the cabin, all right.

The garage was open and a sedan was parked in it. I stopped a little beyond and went far enough into the garage to feel the exhaust pipe of the car. It was cold. I went through a rustic gate up a path outlined in stones to the porch. The door opened as I got there. A tall woman stood there, framed against the light. A little silky dog rushed out past her, tumbled down the steps and hit me in the stomach with two front paws, then dropped to the ground and ran in circles, making noises of approval.

“Down, Shiny!” the woman called. “Down! Isn’t she a funny little dog? Funny itty doggie. She’s half coyote.”

The dog ran back into the house. I said: “Are you Mrs. Lacey? I’m Evans. I called you up about an hour ago.”

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Lacey,” she said. “My husband hasn’t come in yet. I... well, come in, won’t you?” Her voice had a remote sound, like a voice in the mist.

She closed the door behind me after I went in and stood there looking at me, then shrugged a little and sat down in a wicker chair. I sat down in another just like it. The dog appeared from nowhere, jumped in my lap, swiped a neat tongue across the end of my nose and jumped down again. It was a small grayish dog with a sharp nose and a long, feathery tail.

It was a long room with a lot of windows and not very fresh curtains at them. There was a big fireplace, Indian rugs, two davenports with faded cretonne slips over them, more wicker furniture, not too comfortable. There were some antlers on the wall, one pair with six points.

“Fred isn’t home yet,” Mrs. Lacey said again. “I don’t know what’s keeping him.”

I nodded. She had a pale face, rather taut, dark hair that was a little wild. She was wearing a double-breasted scarlet coat with brass buttons, gray flannel slacks, pigskin clog sandals, and no stockings. There was a necklace of cloudy amber around her throat and a bandeau of old-rose material in her hair. She was in her middle thirties, so it was too late for her to learn how to dress herself.

“You wanted to see my husband on business?”

“Yes. He wrote me to come up and stay at the Indian Head and phone him.”

“Oh — at the Indian Head,” she said, as if that meant something. She crossed her legs, didn’t like them that way, and uncrossed them again. She leaned forward and cupped a long chin in her hand. “What kind of business are you in, Mr. Evans?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“It’s... it’s about the money?” she asked quickly.

I nodded. That seemed safe. It was usually about money. It was about a hundred dollars that I had in my pocket, anyhow.

“Of course,” she said. “Naturally. Would you care for a drink?”

“Very much.”

She went over to a little wooden bar and came back with two glasses. We drank. We looked at each other over the rims of our glasses.

“The Indian Head,” she said. “We stayed there two nights when we came up. While the cabin was being cleaned up. It had been empty for two years before we bought it. They get so dirty.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“You say my husband wrote to you?” She was looking down into her glass now. “I suppose he told you the story.”

I offered her a cigarette. She started to reach, then shook her head and put her hand on her kneecap and twisted it. She gave me the careful up-from-under look.

“He was a little vague,” I said. “In spots.”

She looked at me steadily and I looked at her steadily. I breathed gently into my glass until it misted.

“Well, I don’t think we need be mysterious about it,” she said. “Although as a matter of fact I know more about it than Fred thinks I do. He doesn’t know, for example, that I saw that letter.”

“The letter he sent me?”

“No. The letter he got from Los Angeles with the report on the ten-dollar bill.”

“How did you get to see it?” I asked.

She laughed without much amusement. “Fred’s too secretive. It’s a mistake to be too secretive with a woman. I sneaked a look at it while he was in the bathroom. I got it out of his pocket.”

I nodded and drank some more of my drink. I said: “Uh-huh.” That didn’t commit me very far, which was a good idea as long as I didn’t know what we were talking about. “But how did you know it was in his pocket?” I asked.

“He’d just got it at the post office. I was with him.” She laughed, with a little more amusement this time. “I saw that there was a bill in it and that came from Los Angeles. I knew he had sent one of the bills to a friend there who is an expert on such things. So of course I knew this letter was a report. It was.”

“Seems like Fred doesn’t cover up very well,” I said. “What did the letter say?”

She flushed slightly. “I don’t know that I should tell you. I don’t really know that you are a detective or that your name is Evans.”

“Well, that’s something that can be settled without violence,” I said. I got up and showed her enough to prove it. When I sat down again the little dog came over and sniffed at the cuffs on my trousers. I bent down to pat her head and got a handful of spit.

“It said that the bill was beautiful work. The paper, in particular, was just about perfect. But under a comparison microscope there were very small differences of registration. What does that mean?”

“It means that the bill he sent hadn’t been made from a government plate. Anything else wrong?”

“Yes. Under black light — whatever that is — there appeared to be slight differences in the composition of the inks. But the letter added that to the naked eye the counterfeit was practically perfect. It would fool any bank teller.”

I nodded. This was something I hadn’t expected. “Who wrote the letter, Mrs. Lacey?”

“He signed himself Bill. It was on a plain sheet of paper. I don’t know who wrote it. Oh, there was something else. Bill said that Fred ought to turn it in to the Federal people right away, because the money was good enough to make a lot of trouble if much of it got into circulation. But, of course, Fred wouldn’t want to do that if he could help it. That would be why he sent for you.”

“Well, no, of course not,” I said. This was a shot in the dark, but it wasn’t likely to hit anything. Not with the amount of dark I had to shoot into.

She nodded, as if I had said something.

“What is Fred doing now, mostly?” I asked.

“Bridge and poker, like he’s done for years. He plays bridge almost every afternoon at the athletic club and poker at night a good deal. You can see that he couldn’t afford to be connected with counterfeit money, even in the most innocent way. There would always be someone who wouldn’t believe it was innocent. He plays the races, too, but that’s just fun. That’s how he got the five hundred dollars he put in my shoe for a present for me. At the Indian Head.”

I wanted to go out in the yard and do a little yelling and breast beating, just to let off steam. But all I could do was sit there and look wise and guzzle my drink. I guzzled it empty and made a lonely noise with the ice cubes and she went and got me another one. I took a slug of that and breathed deeply and said:

“If the bill was so good, how did he know it was bad, if you get what I mean?”

Her eyes widened a little. “Oh — I see. He didn’t, of course. Not that one. But there were fifty of them, all ten-dollar bills, all new. And the money hadn’t been that way when he put it in the shoe.”

I wondered if tearing my hair would do me any good. I didn’t think — my head was too sore. Charlie. Good old Charlie! O.K., Charlie, after a while I’ll be around with my gang.

“Look,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Lacey. He didn’t tell me about the shoe. Does he always keep his money in a shoe, or was this something special on account of he won it at the races and horses wear shoes?”

“I told you it was a surprise present for me. When I put the shoe on I would find it, of course.”

“Oh.” I gnawed about half an inch off my upper lip. “But you didn’t find it?”

“How could I when I sent the maid to take the shoes to the shoemaker in the village to have lifts put on them? I didn’t look inside. I didn’t know Fred had put anything in the shoe.”

A little light was coming. It was very far off and coming very slowly. It was a very little light, about half a firefly’s worth.

I said: “And Fred didn’t know that. And this maid took the shoes to the shoemaker. What then?”

“Well, Gertrude — that’s the maid’s name — said she hadn’t noticed the money, either. So when Fred found out about it and had asked her, he went over to the shoemaker’s place, and he hadn’t worked on the shoes and the roll of money was still stuffed down into the toe of the shoe. So Fred laughed and took the money out and put it in his pocket and gave the shoemaker five dollars because he was lucky.”

I finished my second drink and leaned back. “I get it now. Then Fred took the roll out and looked it over and he saw it wasn’t the same money. It was all new ten-dollar bills, and before it had probably been various sizes of bills and not new or not all new.”

She looked surprised that I had to reason it out. I wondered how long a letter she thought Fred had written me. I said: “Then Fred would have to assume that there was some reason for changing the money. He thought of one and sent a bill to a friend of his to be tested. And the report came back that it was very good counterfeit, but still counterfeit. Who did he ask about it at the hotel?”

“Nobody except Gertrude, I guess. He didn’t want to start anything. I guess he just sent for you.”

I snubbed my cigarette out and looked out of the open front windows at the moonlit lake. A speedboat with a hard white headlight slid muttering along in the water, far off over the water, and disappeared behind a wooded point.

I looked back at Mrs. Lacey. She was still sitting with her chin propped in a thin hand. Her eyes seemed far away.

“I wish Fred would come home,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He went out with a man named Frank Luders, who is staying at the Woodland Club, down at the far end of the lake. Fred said he owned an interest in it. But I called Mr. Luders up a while ago and he said Fred had just ridden uptown with him and got off at the post office. I’ve been expecting Fred to phone and ask me to pick him up somewhere. He left hours ago.”

“They probably have some card games down at the Woodland Club. Maybe he went there.”

She nodded. “He usually calls me, though.”

I stared at the floor for a while and tried not to feel like a heel. Then I stood up. “I guess I’ll go on back to the hotel. I’ll be there if you want to phone me. I think I’ve met Mr. Lacey somewhere. Isn’t he a thickset man about forty-five, going a little bald, with a small mustache?”

She went to the door with me. “Yes,” she said. “That’s Fred, all right.”

She had shut the dog in the house and was standing outside herself as I turned the car and drove away. God, she looked lonely.

I was lying on my back on the bed, wobbling a cigarette around and trying to make up my mind just why I had to play cute with this affair, when the knock came at the door. I called out. A girl in a working uniform came in with some towels. She had dark, reddish hair and a pert, nicely made-up face and long legs. She excused herself and hung some towels on the rack and started back to the door and gave me a sidelong look with a good deal of fluttering eyelash in it.

I said, “Hello, Gertrude,” just for the hell of it.

She stopped, and the dark-red head came around and the mouth was ready to smile.

“How’d you know my name?”

“I didn’t. But one of the maids is Gertrude. I wanted to talk to her.”

She leaned against the door frame, towels over her arm. Her eyes were lazy. “Yeah?”

“Live up here, or just up here for the summer?” I asked.

Her lip curled. “I should say I don’t live up here. With these mountain screwballs? I should say not.”

“You doing all right?”

She nodded. “And I don’t need any company, mister.” She sounded as if she could be talked out of that.

I looked at her for a minute and said: “Tell me about that money somebody hid in a shoe.”

“Who are you?” she asked coolly.

“The name is Evans. I’m a Los Angeles detective.” I grinned at her, very wise.

Her face stiffened a little. The hand holding the towels clutched and her nails made a scratching sound on the cloth. She moved back from the door and sat down in a straight chair against the wall. Trouble dwelt in her eyes.

“A dick,” she breathed. “What goes on?”

“Don’t you know?”

“All I heard was Mrs. Lacey left some money in a shoe she wanted a lift put on the heel, and I took it over to the shoemaker and he didn’t steal the money. And I didn’t, either. She got the money back, didn’t she?”

“Don’t like cops, do you? Seems to me I know your face,” I said.

The face hardened. “Look, copper, I got a job and I work at it. I don’t need any help from any copper. I don’t owe anybody a nickel.”

“Sure,” I said. “When you took those shoes from the room did you go right over to the shoemaker with them?”

She nodded shortly.

“Didn’t stop on the way at all?”

“Why would I?”

“I wasn’t around then. I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, I didn’t. Except to tell Weber I was going out for a guest.”

“Who’s Mr. Weber?”

“He’s the assistant manager. He’s down in the dining room a lot.”

“Tall, pale guy that writes down all the race results?”

She nodded. “That would be him.”

“I see,” I said. I struck a match and lit my cigarette. I stared at her through smoke. “Thanks very much,” I said.

She stood up and opened the door. “I don’t think I remember you,” she said, looking back at me.

“There must be a few of us you didn’t meet,” I said.

She flushed and stood there glaring at me.

“They always change the towels this late in your hotel?” I asked her, just to be saying something.

“Smart guy, ain’t you?”

“Well, I try to give that impression,” I said with a modest smirk.

“You don’t put it over,” she said, with a sudden trace of thick accent.

“Anybody handle those shoes except you — after you took them?”

“No. I told you I just stopped to tell Mr. Weber—” She stopped dead and thought a minute. “I went to get him a cup of coffee,” she said. “I left them on his desk by the cash register. How the hell would I know if anybody handled them? And what difference does it make if they got their dough back all right?”

“Well, I see you’re anxious to make me feel good about it. Tell me about this guy, Weber. He been here long?”

“Too long,” she said nastily. “A girl don’t want to walk too close to him, if you get what I mean. What am I talking about?”

“About Mr. Weber.”

“Well, to hell with Mr. Weber — if you get what I mean.”

“You been having any trouble getting it across?”

She flushed again. “And strictly off the record,” she said, “to hell with you.”

“If I get what you mean,” I said.

She opened the door and gave me a quick, half-angry smile and went out.

Her steps made a tapping sound going along the hall. I didn’t hear her stop at any other doors. I looked at my watch. It was after half past nine.

Somebody came along the hall with heavy feet, went into the room next to me and banged the door. The man started hawking and throwing shoes around. A weight flopped on the bed springs and started bounding around. Five minutes of this and he got up again. Two big, unshod feet thudded on the floor, a bottle tinkled against a glass. The man had himself a drink, lay down on the bed again, and began to snore almost at once.

Except for that and the confused racket from downstairs in the dining room and the bar there was the nearest thing you get to silence in a mountain resort. Speedboats stuttered out on the lake, dance music murmured here and there, cars went by blowing horns, the .22s snapped in the shooting gallery, and kids yelled at each other across the main drag.

It was so quiet that I didn’t hear my door open. It was half open before I noticed it. A man came in quietly, half closed the door, moved a couple of steps farther into the room and stood looking at me. He was tall, thin, pale, quiet, and his eyes had a flat look of menace.

“O.K., sport,” he said. “Let’s see it.”

I rolled around and sat up. I yawned. “See what?”

“The buzzer.”

“What buzzer?”

“Shake it up, half-smart. Let’s see the buzzer that gives you the right to ask questions of the help.”

“Oh, that,” I said, smiling weakly. “I don’t have any buzzer, Mr. Weber.”

“Well, that is very lovely,” Mr. Weber said. He came across the room, his long arms swinging. When he was about three feet from me he leaned forward a little and made a very sudden movement. An open palm slapped the side of my face hard. It rocked my head and made the back of it shoot pain in all directions.

“Just for that,” I said, “you don’t go to the movies tonight.”

He twisted his face into a sneer and cocked his right fist. He telegraphed his punch well ahead. I would almost have had time to run out and buy a catcher’s mask. I came up under the fist and stuck a gun in his stomach. He grunted unpleasantly. I said:

“Putting the hands up, please.”

He grunted again and his eyes went out of focus, but he didn’t move his hands. I went around him and backed toward the far side of the room. He turned slowly, eyeing me. I said:

“Just a moment until I close the door. Then we will go into the case of the money in the shoe, otherwise known as the Clue of the Substituted Lettuce.”

“Go to hell,” he said.

“A right snappy comeback,” I said. “And full of originality.”

I reached back for the knob of the door, keeping my eyes on him. A board creaked behind me. I swung around, adding a little power to the large, heavy, hard and businesslike hunk of concrete which landed on the side of my jaw. I spun off into the distance, trailing flashes of lightning, and did a nose dive out into space. A couple of thousand years passed. Then I stopped a planet with my back, opened my eyes fuzzily and looked at a pair of feet.

They were sprawled out at a loose angle, and legs came toward me from them. The legs were splayed out on the floor of the room. A hand hung down limp, and a gun lay just out of its reach. I moved one of the feet and was surprised to find it belonged to me. The lax hand twitched and reached automatically for the gun, missed it, reached again and grabbed the smooth grip. I lifted it. Somebody had tied a fifty-pound weight to it, but I lifted it anyway. There was nothing in the room but silence. I looked across and was staring straight at the closed door. I shifted a little and ached all over. My head ached. My jaw ached. I lifted the gun some more and then put it down again. The hell with it. I should be lifting guns around for what. The room was empty. All visitors departed. The droplight from the ceiling burned with an empty glare. I rolled a little and ached some more and got a leg bent and a knee under me. I came up grunting hard, grabbed the gun again and climbed the rest of the way. There was a taste of ashes in my mouth.

“Ah, too bad,” I said out loud. “Too bad. Must do. O.K., Charlie. I’ll be seeing you.”

I swayed a little, still groggy as a three-day drunk, swiveled slowly and prowled the room with my eyes.

A man was kneeling in prayer against the side of the bed. He wore a gray suit and his hair was a dusty blond color. His legs were spread out, and his body was bent forward on the bed and his arms were flung out. His head rested sideways on his left arm.

He looked quite comfortable. The rough deer-horn grip of the hunting knife under his left shoulder blade didn’t seem to bother him at all.

I went over to bend down and look at his face. It was the face of Mr. Weber. Poor Mr. Weber! From under the handle of the hunting knife, down the back of his jacket, a dark streak extended.

It was not mercurochrome.

I found my hat somewhere and put it on carefully, and put the gun under my arm and waded over to the door. I reversed the key, switched the light off, went out and locked the door after me and dropped the key into my pocket.

I went along the silent hallway and down the stairs to the office. An old wasted-looking night clerk was reading the paper behind the desk. He didn’t even look at me. I glanced through the archway into the dining room. The same noisy crowd was brawling at the bar. The same hillbilly symphony was fighting for life in the corner. The guy with the cigar and the John L. Lewis eyebrows was minding the cash register. Business seemed good. A couple of summer visitors were dancing in the middle of the floor, holding glasses over each other’s shoulders.

I went out of the lobby door and turned left along the street to where my car was parked, but I didn’t go very far before I stopped and turned back into the lobby of the hotel. I leaned on the counter and asked the clerk:

“May I speak to the maid called Gertrude?”

He blinked at me thoughtfully over his glasses.

“She’s off at nine thirty. She’s gone home.”

“Where does she live?”

He stared at me without blinking this time.

“I think maybe you’ve got the wrong idea,” he said.

“If I have, it’s not the idea you have.”

He rubbed the end of his chin and washed my face with his stare. “Something wrong?”

“I’m a detective from L.A. I work very quietly when people let me work quietly.”

“You’d better see Mr. Holmes,” he said. “The manager.”

“Look, pardner, this is a very small place. I wouldn’t have to do more than wander down the row and ask in the bars and eating places for Gertrude. I could think up a reason. I could find out. You would save me a little time and maybe save somebody from getting hurt. Very badly hurt.”

He shrugged. “Let me see your credentials, Mr.—”

“Evans.” I showed him my credentials. He stared at them a long time after he had read them, then handed the wallet back and stared at the ends of his fingers.

“I believe she’s stopping at the Whitewater Cabins,” he said.

“What’s her last name?”

“Smith,” he said, and smiled a faint, old, and very weary smile, the smile of a man who has seen too much of one world. “Or possibly Schmidt.”

I thanked him and went back out on the sidewalk. I walked half a block, then turned into a noisy little bar for a drink. A three-piece orchestra was swinging it on a tiny stage at the back. In front of the stage there was a small dance floor, and a few fuzzy-eyed couples were shagging around flat-footed with their mouths open and their faces full of nothing.

I drank a jigger of rye and asked the barman where the Whitewater Cabins were. He said at the east end of the town, half a block back, on a road that started at the gas station.

I went back for my car and drove through the village and found the road. A pale-blue neon sign with an arrow on it pointed the way. The Whitewater Cabins were a cluster of shacks on the side of the hill with an office down front. I stopped in front of the office. People were sitting out on their tiny front porches with portable radios. The night seemed peaceful and homey. There was a bell in the office.

I rang it and a girl in slacks came in and told me Miss Smith and Miss Hoffman had a cabin kind of off by itself because the girls slept late and wanted quiet. Of course, it was always kind of noisy in the season, but the cabin where they were — it was called Tuck-Me-Inn — was quiet and it was at the back, way off to the left, and I wouldn’t have any trouble finding it. Was I a friend of theirs?

I said I was Miss Smith’s grandfather, thanked her and went out and up the slope between the clustered cabins to the edge of the pines at the back. There was a long woodpile at the back, and at each end of the cleared space there was a small cabin. In front of the one to the left there was a coupe standing with its lights dim. A tall blond girl was putting a suitcase into the boot. Her hair was tied in a blue handkerchief, and she wore a blue sweater and blue pants. Or dark enough to be blue, anyhow. The cabin behind her was lighted, and the little sign hanging from the roof said “Tuck-Me-Inn.”

The blond girl went back into the cabin, leaving the boot of the car open. Dim light oozed out through the open door. I went very softly up on the steps and walked inside.

Gertrude was snapping down the top of a suitcase on a bed. The blond girl was out of sight, but I could hear her out in the kitchen of the little cabin.

I couldn’t have made very much noise. Gertrude snapped down the lid of the suitcase, hefted it and started to carry it out. It was only then that she saw me. Her face went very white, and she stopped dead, holding the suitcase at her side. Her mouth opened, and she spoke quickly back over her shoulder: “Anna — achtung!”

The noise stopped in the kitchen. Gertrude and I stared at each other.

“Leaving?” I asked.

She moistened her lips. “Going to stop me, copper?”

“I don’t guess. What you leaving for?”

“I don’t like it up here. The altitude is bad for my nerves.”

“Made up your mind rather suddenly, didn’t you?”

“Any law against it?”

“I don’t guess. You’re not afraid of Weber, are you?”

She didn’t answer me. She looked past my shoulder. It was an old gag, and I didn’t pay any attention to it. Behind me, the cabin door closed. I turned, then. The blond girl was behind me. She had a gun in her hand. She looked at me thoughtfully, without any expression much. She was a big girl, and looked very strong.

“What is it?” she asked, speaking a little heavily, in a voice almost like a man’s voice.

“A Los Angeles dick,” replied Gertrude.

“So,” Anna said. “What does he want?”

“I don’t know,” Gertrude said. “I don’t think he’s a real dick. He don’t seem to throw his weight enough.”

“So,” Anna said. She moved to the side and away from the door. She kept the gun pointed at me. She held it as if guns didn’t make her nervous — not the least bit nervous. “What do you want?” she asked throatily.

“Practically everything,” I said. “Why are you taking a powder?”

“That has been explained,” the blond girl said calmly. “It is the altitude. It is making Gertrude sick.”

“You both work at the Indian Head?”

The blond girl said: “Of no consequence.”

“What the hell,” Gertrude said. “Yeah, we both worked at the hotel until tonight. Now we’re leaving. Any objection?”

“We waste time,” the blond girl said. “See if he has a gun.”

Gertrude put her suitcase down and felt me over. She found the gun and I let her take it, big-hearted. She stood there looking at it with a pale, worried expression. The blond girl said:

“Put the gun down outside and put the suitcase in the car. Start the engine of the car and wait for me.”

Gertrude picked her suitcase up again and started around me to the door.

“That won’t get you anywhere,” I said. “They’ll telephone ahead and block you on the road. There are only two roads out of here, both easy to block.”

The blond girl raised her fine, tawny eyebrows a little. “Why should anyone wish to stop us?”

“Yeah, why are you holding that gun?”

“I did not know who you were,” the blond girl said. “I do not know even now. Go on, Gertrude.”

Gertrude opened the door, then looked back at me and moved her lips one over the other. “Take a tip, shamus, and beat it out of this place while you’re able,” she said quietly.

“Which of you saw the hunting knife?”

They glanced at each other quickly, then back at me. Gertrude had a fixed stare, but it didn’t look like a guilty kind of stare. “I pass,” she said. “You’re over my head.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I know you didn’t put it where it was. One more question: How long were you getting that cup of coffee for Mr. Weber the morning you took the shoes out?”

“You are wasting time, Gertrude,” the blond girl said impatiently, or as impatiently as she would ever say anything. She didn’t seem an impatient type.

Gertrude didn’t pay any attention to her. Her eyes held a tight speculation. “Long enough to get him a cup of coffee.”

“They have that right in the dining room.”

“It was stale in the dining room. I went out to the kitchen for it. I got him some toast, also.”

“Five minutes?”

She nodded. “About that.”

“Who else was in the dining room besides Weber?”

She stared at me very steadily. “At that time I don’t think anybody. I’m not sure. Maybe someone was having a late breakfast.”

“Thanks very much,” I said. “Put the gun down carefully on the porch and don t drop it. You can empty it if you like. I don’t plan to shoot anyone.”

She smiled a very small smile and opened the door with the hand holding the gun and went out. I heard her go down the steps and then heard the boot of the car slammed shut. I heard the starter, then the motor caught and purred quietly.

The blond girl moved around to the door and took the key from the inside and put it on the outside. “I would not care to shoot anybody,” she said. “But I could do it if I had to. Please do not make me.”

She shut the door and the key turned in the lock. Her steps went down off the porch. The car door slammed and the motor took hold. The tires made a soft whisper going down between the cabins. Then the noise of the portable radios swallowed that sound.

I stood there looking around the cabin, then walked through it. There was nothing in it that didn’t belong there. There was some garbage in a can, coffee cups not washed, a saucepan full of grounds. There were no papers, and nobody had left the story of his life written on a paper match.

The back door was locked, too. This was on the side away from the camp, against the dark wilderness of the trees. I shook the door and bent down to look at the lock. A straight bolt lock. I opened a window. Screen was nailed over it against the wall outside. I went back to the door and gave it the shoulder. It held without any trouble at all. It also started my head blazing again. I felt in my pockets and was disgusted. I didn’t even have a five-cent skeleton key.

I got the can opener out of the kitchen drawer and worked a corner of the screen loose and bent it back. Then I got up on the sink and reached down to the outside knob of the door and groped around. The key was in the lock. I turned it and drew my hand in again and went out of the door. Then I went back and put the lights out. My gun was lying on the front porch behind a post of the little railing. I tucked it under my arm and walked downhill to the place where I had left my car.

There was a wooden counter leading back from beside the door and a potbellied stove in the corner, and a large blueprint map of the district and some curled-up calendars on the wall. On the counter were piles of dusty-looking folders, a rusty pen, a bottle of ink, and somebody’s sweat-darkened Stetson.

Behind the counter there was an old golden-oak roll-top desk, and at the desk sat a man, with a tall corroded brass spittoon leaning against his leg. He was a heavy, calm man, and he sat tilted back in his chair with large, hairless hands clasped on his stomach. He wore scuffed brown army shoes, white socks, brown wash pants held up by faded suspenders, a khaki shirt buttoned to the neck. His hair was mousy brown except at the temples, where it was the color of dirty snow. On his left breast there was a star. He sat a little more on his left hip than on his right, because there was a brown leather hip holster inside his right hip pocket, and about a foot of .45 gun in the holster.

He had large ears and friendly eyes, and he looked about as dangerous as a squirrel, but much less nervous. I leaned on the counter and looked at him, and he nodded at me and loosed a half pint of brown juice into the spittoon. I lit a cigarette and looked around for some place to throw the match.

“Try the floor,” he said. “What can I do for you, son?”

I dropped the match on the floor and pointed with my chin at the map on the wall. “I was looking for a map of the district. Sometimes chambers of commerce have them to give away. But I guess you wouldn’t be the chamber of commerce.”

“We ain’t got no maps,” the man said. “We had a mess of them a couple of years back, but we run out. I was hearing that Sid Young had some down at the camera store by the post office. He’s the justice of the peace here, besides running the camera store, and he gives them out to show them whereat they can smoke and where not. We got a bad fire hazard up here. Got a good map of the district up there on the wall. Be glad to direct you any place you’d care to go. We aim to make the summer visitors to home.”

He took a slow breath and dropped another load of juice.

“What was the name?” he asked.

“Evans. Are you the law around here?”

“Yep. I’m Puma Point constable and San Berdoo deppity sheriff. What law we gotta have, me and Sid Young is it. Barron is the name. I come from L.A. Eighteen years in the fire department. I come up here quite a while back. Nice and quiet up here. You up on business?”

I didn’t think he could do it again so soon, but he did. That spittoon took an awful beating.

“Business?” I asked.

The big man took one hand off his stomach and hooked a finger inside his collar and tried to loosen it. “Business,” he said calmly. “Meaning, you got a permit for that gun, I guess?”

“Hell, does it stick out that much?”

“Depends what a man’s lookin’ for,” he said, and put his feet on the floor. “Maybe you ’n’ me better get straightened out.”

He got to his feet and came over to the counter and I put my wallet on it, opened out so that he could see the photostat of the license behind the celluloid window. I drew out the L.A. sheriff’s gun permit and laid it beside the license.

He looked them over. “I better kind of check the number,” he said.

I pulled the gun out and laid it on the counter beside his hand. He picked it up and compared the numbers. “I see you got three of them. Don’t wear them all to onst, I hope. Nice gun, son. Can’t shoot like mine, though.” He pulled his cannon off his hip and laid it on the counter. A Frontier Colt that would weigh as much as a suitcase. He balanced it, tossed it into the air and caught it spinning, then put it back on his hip. He pushed my .38 back across the counter.

“Up here on business, Mr. Evans?”

“I’m not sure. I got a call, but I haven’t made a contact yet. A confidential matter.”

He nodded. His eyes were thoughtful. They were deeper, colder, darker than they had been.

“I’m stopping at the Indian Head,” I said.

“I don’t aim to pry into your affairs, son,” he said. “We don’t have no crime up here. Onst in a while a fight or a drunk driver in summertime. Or maybe a couple hard-boiled kids on a motorcycle will break into a cabin just to sleep and steal food. No real crime, though. Mighty little inducement to crime in the mountains. Mountain folks are mighty peaceable.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And again, no.”

He leaned forward a little and looked into my eyes.

“Right now,” I said, “you’ve got a murder.”

Nothing much changed in his face. He looked me over feature by feature. He reached for his hat and put it on the back of his head.

“What was that, son?” he asked calmly.

“On the point east of the village out past the dancing pavilion. A man shot, lying behind a big fallen tree. Shot through the heart. I was down there smoking for half an hour before I noticed him.”

“Is that so?” he drawled. “Out Speaker Point, eh? Past Speaker’s Tavern. That the place?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“You taken a longish while to get around to telling me, didn’t you?” The eyes were not friendly.

“I got a shock,” I said. “It took me a while to get myself straightened out.”

He nodded. “You and me will now drive out that way. In your car.”

“That won’t do any good,” I said. “The body has been moved. After I found the body I was going back to my car and a Japanese gunman popped up from behind a bush and knocked me down. A couple of men carried the body away and they went off in a boat. There’s no sign of it there at all now.”

The sheriff went over and spit in his gobboon. Then he made a small spit on the stove and waited as if for it to sizzle, but it was summer and the stove was out. He turned around and cleared his throat and said:

“You’d kind of better go on home and lie down a little while, maybe.” He clenched a fist at his side. “We aim for the summer visitors to enjoy theirselves up here.” He clenched both his hands, then pushed them hard down into the shallow pockets in the front of his pants.

“O.K.,” I said.

“We don’t have no Japanese gunmen up here,” the sheriff said thickly. “We are plumb out of Japanese gunmen.”

“I can see you don’t like that one,” I said. “How about this one? A man named Weber was knifed in the back at the Indian Head a while back. In my room. Somebody I didn’t see knocked me out with a brick, and while I was out this Weber was knifed. He and I had been talking together. Weber worked at the hotel. As cashier.”

“You said this happened in your room?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems like,” Barron said thoughtfully, “you could turn out to be a bad influence in this town.”

“You don’t like that one, either?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t like this one, neither. Unless, of course, you got a body to go with it.”

“I don’t have it with me,” I said, “but I can run over and get it for you.”

He reached and took hold of my arm with some of the hardest fingers I ever felt. “I’d hate for you to be in your right mind, son,” he said. “But I’ll kind of go over with you. It’s a nice night.”

“Sure,” I said, not moving. “The man I came up here to work for is called Fred Lacey. He just bought a cabin out on Ball Sage Point. The Baldwin cabin. The man I found dead on Speaker Point was named Frederick Lacey, according to the driver’s license in his pocket. There’s a lot more to it, but you wouldn’t want to be bothered with the details, would you?”

“You and me,” the sheriff said, “will now run over to the hotel. You got a car?”

I said I had.

“That’s fine,” the sheriff said. “We won’t use it, but give me the keys.”

The man with the heavy, furled eyebrows and the screwed-in cigar leaned against the closed door of the room and didn’t say anything or look as if he wanted to say anything. Sheriff Barron sat straddling a straight chair and watching the doctor, whose name was Menzies, examine the body. I stood in the corner where I belonged. The doctor was an angular, bug-eyed man with a yellow face relieved by bright-red patches on his cheeks. His fingers were brown with nicotine stains, and he didn’t look very clean.

He puffed cigarette smoke into the dead man’s hair and rolled him around on the bed and felt him here and there. He looked as if he was trying to act as if he knew what he was doing. The knife had been pulled out of Weber’s back. It lay on the bed beside him. It was a short, wide-bladed knife of the kind that is worn in a leather scabbard attached to the belt. It had a heavy guard which would seal the wound as the blow was struck and keep blood from getting back on the handle. There was plenty of blood on the blade.

“Sears Sawbuck Hunter’s Special No. 2438,” the sheriff said, looking at it. “There’s a thousand of them around the lake. They ain’t bad and they ain’t good. What you say, doc?”

The doctor straightened up and took a handkerchief out. He coughed hackingly into the handkerchief, looked at it, shook his head sadly and lit another cigarette.

“About what?” he asked.

“Cause and time of death.”

“Dead very recently,” the doctor said. “Not more than two hours. There’s no beginning of rigor yet.”

“Would you say the knife killed him?”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Jim Barron.”

“There’s been cases,” the sheriff said, “where a man would be poisoned or something and they would stick a knife into him to make it look different.”

“That would be very clever,” the doctor said nastily. “You had many like that up here?”

“Only murder I had up here,” the sheriff said peacefully, “was old Dad Meacham over to the other side. Had a shack in Sheedy Canyon. Folks didn’t see him around for a while, but it was kinda cold weather and they figured he was in there with his oil stove resting up. Then when he didn’t show up they knocked and found the cabin was locked up, so they figured he had gone down for the winter. Then come a heavy snow and the roof caved in. We was over there a-trying to prop her up so he wouldn’t lose all his stuff, and by gum, there was Dad in bed with a ax in the back of his head. Had a little gold he’d panned in summer — I guess that was what he was killed for. We never did find out who done it.”

“You want to send him down in my ambulance?” the doctor asked, pointing at the bed with his cigarette.

The sheriff shook his head. “Nope. This is a poor country, doc. I figure he could ride cheaper than that.”

The doctor put his hat on and went to the door. The man with the eyebrows moved out of the way. The doctor opened the door. “Let me know if you want me to pay for the funeral,” he said, and went out.

“That ain’t no way to talk,” the sheriff said.

The man with the eyebrows said: “Let’s get this over with and get him out of here so I can go back to work. I got a movie outfit coming up Monday and I’ll be busy. I got to find me a new cashier, too, and that ain’t so easy.”

“Where did you find Weber?” the sheriff asked. “Did he have any enemies?”

“I’d say he had at least one,” the man with the eyebrows said. “I got him through Frank Luders over at the Woodland Club. All I know about him is he knew his job and he was able to make a ten-thousand-dollar bond without no trouble. That’s all I needed to know.”

“Frank Luders,” the sheriff said. “That would be the man that’s bought in over there. I don’t think I met him. What does he do?”

“Ha, ha,” the man with the eyebrows said.

The sheriff looked at him peacefully. “Well, that ain’t the only place where they run a nice poker game, Mr. Holmes.”

Mr. Holmes looked blank. “Well, I got to go back to work,” he said. “You need any help to move him?”

“Nope. Ain’t going to move him right now. Move him before daylight. But not right now. That will be all for now, Mr. Holmes.”

The man with the eyebrows looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then reached for the doorknob.

I said: “You have a couple of German girls working here, Mr. Holmes. Who hired them?”

The man with the eyebrows dragged his cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, put it back and screwed it firmly in place. He said: “Would that be your business?”

“Their names are Anna Hoffman and Gertrude Smith, or maybe Schmidt,” I said. “They had a cabin together over at the Whitewater Cabins. They packed up and went down the hill tonight. Gertrude is the girl that took Mrs. Lacey’s shoes to the shoemaker.”

The man with the eyebrows looked at me very steadily.

I said: “When Gertrude was taking the shoes, she left them on Weber’s desk for a short time. There was five hundred dollars in one of the shoes. Mr. Lacey had put it in there for a joke, so his wife would find it.”

“First I heard of it,” the man with the eyebrows said. The sheriff didn’t say anything at all.

“The money wasn’t stolen,” I said. “The Laceys found it still in the shoe over at the shoemaker s place.”

The man with the eyebrows said: “I’m certainly glad that got straightened out all right.” He pulled the door open and went out and shut it behind him. The sheriff didn’t say anything to stop him.

He went over into the corner of the room and spit in the wastebasket. Then he got a large khaki-colored handkerchief out and wrapped the blood-stained knife in it and slipped it down inside his belt, at the side. He went over and stood looking down at the dead man on the bed. He straightened his hat and started toward the door. He opened the door and looked back at me. “This is a little tricky,” he said. “But it probably ain’t as tricky as you would like for it to be. Let’s go over to Lacey’s place.”

I went out and he locked the door and put the key in his pocket. We went downstairs and out through the lobby and crossed the street to where a small, dusty, tan-colored sedan was parked against the fireplug. A leathery young man was at the wheel. He looked underfed and a little dirty, like most of the natives. The sheriff and I got in the back of the car. The sheriff said:

“You know the Baldwin place out to the end of Ball Sage, Andy?”

“Yup.”

“We’ll go out there,” the sheriff said. “Stop a little to this side.” He looked up at the sky. “Full moon all night, tonight,” he said. “And it’s sure a dandy.”

The cabin on the point looked the same as when I had seen it last. The same windows were lighted, the same car stood in the open double garage, and the same wild, screaming bark burst on the night.

“What in heck’s that?” the sheriff asked as the car slowed. “Sounds like a coyote.”

“It’s half coyote,” I said.

The leathery lad in front said over his shoulder, “You want to stop in front, Jim?”

“Drive her down a piece. Under them old pines.”

The car stopped softly in black shadow at the roadside. The sheriff and I got out. “You stay here, Andy, and don’t let nobody see you,” the sheriff said. “I got my reasons.”

We went back along the road and through the rustic gate. The barking started again. The front door opened. The sheriff went up on the steps and took his hat off.

“Mrs. Lacey? I’m Jim Barron, constable at Puma Point. This here is Mr. Evans, from Los Angeles. I guess you know him. Could we come in a minute?”

The woman looked at him with a face so completely shadowed that no expression showed on it. She turned her head a little and looked at me. She said, “Yes, come in,” in a lifeless voice.

We went in. The woman shut the door behind us. A big gray-haired man sitting in an easy-chair let go of the dog he was holding on the floor and straightened up. The dog tore across the room, did a flying tackle on the sheriff’s stomach, turned in the air and was already running in circles when she hit the floor.

“Well, that’s a right nice little dog,” the sheriff said, tucking his shirt in.

The gray-haired man was smiling pleasantly. He said: “Good evening.” His white, strong teeth gleamed with friendliness.

Mrs. Lacey was still wearing the scarlet double-breasted coat and the gray slacks. Her face looked older and more drawn. She looked at the floor and said: “This is Mr. Frank Luders from the Woodland Club. Mr. Bannon and” — she stopped and raised her eyes to look at a point over my left shoulder — “I didn’t catch the other gentleman’s name,” she said.

“Evans,” the sheriff said, and didn’t look at me at all. “And mine is Barron, not Bannon.” He nodded at Luders. I nodded at Luders. Luders smiled at both of us. He was big, meaty, powerful-looking, well-kept and cheerful. He didn’t have a care in the world. Big, breezy Frank Luders, everybody’s pal.

He said: “I’ve known Fred Lacey for a long time. I just dropped by to say hello. He’s not home, so I am waiting a little while until a friend comes by in a car to pick me up.”

“Pleased to know you, Mr. Luders,” the sheriff said. “I heard you had bought in at the club. Didn’t have the pleasure of meeting you yet.”

The woman sat down very slowly on the edge of a chair. I sat down. The little dog, Shiny, jumped in my lap, washed my right ear for me, squirmed down again and went under my chair. She lay there breathing out loud and thumping the floor with her feathery tail.

The room was still for a moment. Outside the windows on the lake side there was a very faint throbbing sound. The sheriff heard it. He cocked his head slightly, but nothing changed in his face.

He said: “Mr. Evans here come to me and told me a queer story. I guess it ain’t no harm to mention it here, seeing Mr. Luders is a friend of the family.”

He looked at Mrs. Lacey and waited. She lifted her eyes slowly, but not enough to meet his. She swallowed a couple of times and nodded her head. One of her hands began to slide slowly up and down the arm of her chair, back and forth, back and forth. Luders smiled.

“I’d ’a’ liked to have Mr. Lacey here,” the sheriff said. “You think he’ll be in pretty soon?”

The woman nodded again. “I suppose so,” she said in a drained voice. “He’s been gone since mid-afternoon. I don’t know where he is. I hardly think he would go down the hill without telling me, but he has had time to do that. Something might have come up.”

“Seems like something did,” the sheriff said. “Seems like Mr. Lacey wrote a letter to Mr. Evans, asking him to come up here quickly. Mr. Evans is a detective from L.A.”

The woman moved restlessly. “A detective?” she breathed.

Luders said brightly: “Now why in the world would Fred do that?”

“On account of some money that was hid in a shoe,” the sheriff said.

Luders raised his eyebrows and looked at Mrs. Lacey. Mrs. Lacey moved her lips together and then said very softly: “But we got that back, Mr. Bannon. Fred was having a joke. He won a little money at the races and hid it in one of my shoes. He meant it for a surprise. I sent the shoe out to be repaired with the money still in it, but the money was still in it when we went over to the shoemaker’s place.”

“Barron is the name, not Bannon,” the sheriff said. “So you got your money back all intact, Mrs. Lacey?”

“Why — of course. Of course, we thought at first, it being a hotel and one of the maids having taken the shoe... well, I don’t know just what we thought, but it was a silly place to hide money — but we got it back, every cent of it.”

“And it was the same money?” I said, beginning to get the idea and not liking it.

She didn’t quite look at me. “Why, of course. Why not?”

“That ain’t the way I heard it from Mr. Evans,” the sheriff said peacefully, and folded his hands across his stomach. “They was a slight difference, seems like, in the way you told it to Evans.”

Luders leaned forward suddenly in his chair, but his smile stayed put. It didn’t even get tight. The woman made a vague gesture and her hand kept moving on the chair arm. “I... told it... told what to Mr. Evans?”

The sheriff turned his head very slowly and gave me a straight, hard stare. He turned his head back. One hand patted the other on his stomach.

“I understand Mr. Evans was over here earlier in the evening and you told him about it, Mrs. Lacey. About the money being changed?”

“Changed?” Her voice had a curiously hollow sound. “Mr. Evans told you he was here earlier in the evening? I... I never saw Mr. Evans before in my life.”

I didn’t even bother to look at her. Luders was my man. I looked at Luders. It got me what the nickel gets you from the slot machine. He chuckled and put a fresh match to his cigar.

The sheriff closed his eyes. His face had a sort of sad expression. The dog came out from under my chair and stood in the middle of the room looking at Luders. Then she went over in the corner and slid under the fringe of a daybed cover. A snuffling sound came from her a moment, then silence.

“Hum, hum, dummy,” the sheriff said, talking to himself. “I ain’t really equipped to handle this sort of a deal. I don’t have the experience. We don’t have no fast work like that up here. No crime at all in the mountains. Hardly.” He made a wry face.

He opened his eyes. “How much money was that in the shoe, Mrs. Lacey?”

“Five hundred dollars.” Her voice was hushed.

“Where at is this money, Mrs. Lacey?”

“I suppose Fred has it.”

“I thought he was goin’ to give it to you, Mrs. Lacey.”

“He was,” she said sharply. “He is. But I don’t need it at the moment. Not up here. He’ll probably give me a check later on.”

“Would he have it in his pocket or would it be in the cabin here, Mrs. Lacey?”

She shook her head. “In his pocket, probably. I don’t know. Do you want to search the cabin?”

The sheriff shrugged his fat shoulders. “Why, no, I guess not, Mrs. Lacey. It wouldn’t do me no good if I found it. Especially if it wasn’t changed.”

Luders said: “Just how do you mean changed, Mr. Barron?”

“Changed for counterfeit money,” the sheriff said.

Luders laughed quietly. “That s really amusing, don’t you think? Counterfeit money at Puma Point? There’s no opportunity for that sort of thing up here, is there?”

The sheriff nodded at him sadly. “Don’t sound reasonable, does it?”

Luders leaned forward a little more. “Have you any knowledge Mr. Evans here — who claims to be a detective? A private detective, no doubt?”

“I thought of that,” the sheriff said.

Luders leaned forward a little more. “Have you any knowledge other than Mr. Evans’ statement that Fred Lacey sent for him?”

“He’d have to know something to come up here, wouldn’t he?” the sheriff said in a worried voice. “And he knew about that money in Mrs. Lacey’s slipper.”

“I was just asking a question,” Luders said softly.

The sheriff swung around on me. I was already wearing my frozen smile. Since the incident in the hotel I hadn’t looked for Lacey’s letter. I knew I wouldn’t have to look, now.

“You got a letter from Lacey?” he asked me in a hard voice.

I lifted my hand toward my inside breast pocket. Barron threw his right hand down and up. When it came up it held the Frontier Colt. “I’ll take that gun of yours first,” he said between his teeth. He stood up.

I pulled my coat open and held it open. He leaned down over me and jerked the automatic from the holster. He looked at it sourly a moment and dropped it into his left hip pocket. He sat down again. “Now look,” he said easily.

Luders watched me with bland interest. Mrs. Lacey put her hands together and squeezed them hard and stared at the floor between her shoes.

I took the stuff out of my breast pocket. A couple of letters, some plain cards for casual notes, a packet of pipe cleaners, a spare handkerchief. Neither of the letters was the one. I put the stuff back and got a cigarette out and put it between my lips. I struck the match and held the flame to the tobacco. Nonchalant.

“You win,” I said, smiling. “Both of you.”

There was a slow flush on Barron’s face and his eyes glittered. His lips twitched as he turned away from me.

“Why not,” Luders asked gently, “see also if he really is a detective?”

Barron barely glanced at him. “The small things don’t bother me,” he said. “Right now I’m investigatin’ a murder.”

He didn’t seem to be looking at either Luders or Mrs. Lacey. He seemed to be looking at a corner of the ceiling. Mrs. Lacey shook, and her hands tightened so that the knuckles gleamed hard and shiny and white in the lamplight. Her mouth opened very slowly, and her eyes turned up in her head. A dry sob half died in her throat.

Luders took the cigar out of his mouth and laid it carefully in the brass dip on the smoking stand beside him. He stopped smiling. His mouth was grim. He said nothing.

It was beautifully timed. Barron gave them all they needed for the reaction and not a second for a comeback. He said, in the same almost indifferent voice:

“A man named Weber, cashier in the Indian Head Hotel. He was knifed in Evans’ room. Evans was there, but he was knocked out before it happened, so he is one of them boys we hear so much about and don’t often meet — the boys that get there first.”

“Not me,” I said. “They bring their murders and drop them right at my feet.”

The woman’s head jerked. Then she looked up, and for the first time she looked straight at me. There was a queer light in her eyes, shining far back, remote and miserable.

Barron stood up slowly. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t get it at all. But I guess I ain’t making any mistake in takin’ this feller in.” He turned to me. “Don’t run too fast, not at first, bud. I always give a man forty yards.”

I didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything.

Barron said slowly: “I’ll have to ask you to wait here till I come back, Mr. Luders. If your friend comes for you, you could let him go on. I’d be glad to drive you back to the club later.”

Luders nodded. Barron looked at a clock on the mantel. It was a quarter to twelve. “Kinda late for a old fuddy-duddy like me. You think Mr. Lacey will be home pretty soon, ma’am?”

“I... I hope so,” she said, and made a gesture that meant nothing unless it meant hopelessness.

Barron moved over to open the door. He jerked his chin at me. I went out on the porch. The little dog came halfway out from under the couch and made a whining sound. Barron looked down at her.

“That sure is a nice little dog,” he said. “I heard she was half coyote. What did you say the other half was?”

“We don’t know,” Mrs. Lacey murmured.

“Kind of like this case I’m working on,” Barron said, and came out onto the porch after me.

We walked down the road without speaking and came to the car. Andy was leaning back in the corner, a dead half cigarette between his lips.

We got into the car. “Drive down a piece, about two hundred yards,” Barron said. “Make plenty of noise.”

Andy started the car, raced the motor, clashed the gears, and the car slid down through the moonlight and around a curve of the road and up a moonlit hill sparred with the shadows of tree trunks.

“Turn her at the top and coast back, but not close,” Barron said. “Stay out of sight of that cabin. Turn your lights off before you turn.”

“Yup,” Andy said.

He turned the car just short of the top, going around a tree to do it. He cut the lights off and started back down the little hill, then killed the motor. Just beyond the bottom of the slope there was a heavy clump of manzanita, almost as tall as ironwood. The car stopped there. Andy pulled the brake back very slowly to smooth out the noise of the ratchet.

Barron leaned forward over the back seat. “We’re going across the road and get near the water,” he said. “I don’t want no noise and nobody walkin’ in no moonlight.”

Andy said: “Yup.”

We got out. We walked carefully on the dirt of the road, then on the pine needles. We filtered through the trees, behind fallen logs, until the water was down below where we stood. Barron sat down on the ground and then lay down. Andy and I did the same. Barron put his face close to Andy.

“Hear anything?”

Andy said: “Eight cylinders, kinda rough.”

I listened. I could tell myself I heard it, but I couldn’t be sure. Barron nodded in the dark. “Watch the lights in the cabin,” he whispered.

We watched. Five minutes passed, or enough time to seem like five minutes. The lights in the cabin didn’t change. Then there was a remote, half-imagined sound of a door closing. There were shoes on wooden steps.

“Smart. They left the light on,” Barron said in Andy’s ear.

We waited another short minute. The idling motor burst into a roar of throbbing sound, a stuttering, confused racket, with a sort of hop, skip and jump in it. The sound sank to a heavy purring roar and then quickly began to fade. A dark shape slid out on the moonlit water, curved with a beautiful line of froth and swept past the point out of sight.

Barron got a plug of tobacco out and bit. He chewed comfortably and spat four feet beyond his feet. Then he got up on his feet and dusted off the pine needles. Andy and I got up.

“Man ain’t got good sense chewin’ tobacco these days,” he said. “Things ain’t fixed for him. I near went to sleep back there in the cabin.” He lifted the Colt he was still holding in his left hand, changed hands and packed the gun away on his hip.

“Well?” he said, looking at Andy.

“Ted Rooney’s boat,” Andy said. “She’s got two sticky valves and a big crack in the muffler. You hear it best when you throttle her up, like they did just before they started.”

It was a lot of words for Andy, but the sheriff liked them.

“Couldn’t be wrong, Andy? Lots of boats get sticky valves.”

Andy said: “What the hell you ask me for?” in a nasty voice.

“O.K., Andy, don’t get sore.”

Andy grunted. We crossed the road and got into the car again. Andy started it up, backed and turned and said: “Lights?”

Barron nodded. Andy put the lights on. “Where to now?”

“Ted Rooney’s place,” Barron said peacefully. “And make it fast. We got ten miles to there.”

“Can’t make it in less’n twenty minutes,” Andy said sourly. “Got to go through the Point.”

The car hit the paved lake road and started back past the dark boys’ camp and the other camps, and turned left on the highway. Barron didn’t speak until we were beyond the village and the road out to Speaker Point. The dance band was still going strong in the pavilion.

“I fool you any?” he asked me then.

“Enough.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“The job was perfect,” I said, “but I don’t suppose you fooled Luders.”

“That lady was mighty uncomfortable,” Barron said. “That Luders is a good man. Hard, quiet, full of eyesight. But I fooled him some. He made mistakes.”

“I can think of a couple,” I said. “One was being there at all. Another was telling us a friend was coming to pick him up, to explain why he had no car. It didn’t need explaining. There was a car in the garage, but you didn’t know whose car it was. Another was keeping that boat idling.”

“That wasn’t no mistake,” Andy said from the front seat. “Not if you ever tried to start her up cold.”

Barron said: “You don’t leave your car in the garage when you come callin’ up here. Ain’t no moisture to hurt it. The boat could have been anybody’s boat. A couple of young folks could have been in it getting acquainted. I ain’t got anything on him, anyways, so far as he knows. He just worked too hard tryin’ to head me off.”

He spat out of the car. I heard it smack the rear fender like a wet rag. The car swept through the moonlit night, around curves, up and down hills, through fairly thick pines and along open flats where cattle lay.

I said: “He knew I didn’t have the letter Lacey wrote me. Because he took it away from me himself, up in my room at the hotel. It was Luders that knocked me out and knifed Weber. Luders knows that Lacey is dead, even if he didn’t kill him. That’s what he’s got on Mrs. Lacey. She thinks her husband is alive and that Luders has him.”

“You make this Luders out a pretty bad guy,” Barron said calmly. “Why would Luders knife Weber?”

“Because Weber started all the trouble. This is an organization. Its object is to unload some very good counterfeit ten-dollar bills, a great many of them. You don’t advance the cause by unloading them in five-hundred dollar lots, all brand-new, in circumstances that would make anybody suspicious, would make a much-less-careful man than Fred Lacey suspicious.”

“You’re doing some nice guessin’, son,” the sheriff said, grabbing the door handle as we took a fast turn, “but the neighbors ain’t watchin’ you. I got to be more careful. I’m in my own back yard. Puma Lake don’t strike me as a very good place to go into the counterfeit-money business.”

“O.K.” I said.

“On the other hand, if Luders is the man I want, he might be kind of hard to catch. There’s three roads out of the valley, and there’s half a dozen planes down to the east end of the Woodland Club golf course. Always is in summer.”

“You don’t seem to be doing very much worrying about it,” I said.

“A mountain sheriff don’t have to worry a lot,” Barron said calmly. “Nobody expects him to have any brains. Especially guys like Mr. Luders don’t.”

The boat lay in the water at the end of a short painter, moving as boats move even in the stillest water. A canvas tarpaulin covered most of it and was tied down here and there, but not everywhere it should have been tied. Behind the short, rickety pier a road twisted back through juniper trees to the highway. There was a camp off to one side, with a miniature white lighthouse for its trade-mark. A sound of dance music came from one of the cabins, but most of the camp had gone to bed.

We came down there walking, leaving the car on the shoulder of the highway. Barron had a big flash in his hand and kept throwing it this way and that, snapping it on and off. When we came to the edge of the water and the end of the road down to the pier, he put his flashlight on the road and studied it carefully. There were fresh-looking tire tracks.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“Looks like tire tracks,” I said.

“What do you think, Andy?” Barron said. “This man is cute, but he don’t give me no ideas.”

Andy bent over and studied the tracks. “New tires and big ones,” he said, and walked toward the pier. He stooped down again and pointed. The sheriff threw the light where he pointed. “Yup, turned around here,” Andy said. “So what? The place is full of new cars right now. Come October and they’d mean something. Folks that live up here buy one tire at a time, and cheap ones, at that. These here are heavy-duty all-weather treads.”

“Might see about the boat,” the sheriff said.

“What about it?”

“Might see if it was used recent,” Barron said.

“Hell,” Andy said, “we know it was used recent, don’t we?”

“Always supposin’ you guessed right,” Barron said mildly.

Andy looked at him in silence for a moment. Then he spit on the ground and started back to where we had left the car. When he had gone a dozen feet he said over his shoulder:

“I wasn’t guessin’.” He turned his head again and went on, plowing through the trees.

“Kind of touchy,” Barron said. “But a good man.” He went down on the boat landing and bent over it, passing his hand along the forward part of the side, below the tarpaulin. He came back slowly and nodded. “Andy’s right. Always is, durn him. What kind of tires would you say those marks were, Mr. Evans? They tell you anything?”

“Cadillac V-12,” I said. “A club coupe with red leather seats and two suitcases in the back. The clock on the dash is twelve and one half minutes slow.”

He stood there, thinking about it. Then he nodded his big head. He sighed. “Well, I hope it makes money for you,” he said, and turned away.

We went back to the car. Andy was in the front seat behind the wheel again. He had a cigarette going. He looked straight ahead of him through the dusty windshield.

“Where’s Rooney live now?” Barron asked.

“Where he always lived,” Andy said.

“Why, that’s just a piece up the Bascomb road.”

“I ain’t said different,” Andy growled.

“Let’s go there,” the sheriff said, getting in. I got in beside him.

Andy turned the car and went back half a mile and then started to turn. The sheriff snapped to him: “Hold it a minute.”

He got out and used his flash on the road surface. He got back into the car. “I think we got something. Them tracks down by the pier don’t mean a lot. But the same tracks up here might turn out to mean more. If they go on into Bascomb, they’re goin’ to mean plenty. Them old gold camps over there is made to order for monkey business.”

The car went into the side road and climbed slowly into a gap. Big boulders crowded the road, and the hillside was studded with them. They glistened pure white in the moonlight. The car growled on for half a mile and then Andy stopped again.

“O.K., Hawkshaw, this is the cabin,” he said. Barron got out again and walked around with his flash. There was no light in the cabin. He came back to the car.

“They come by here,” he said. “Bringing Ted home. When they left they turned toward Bascomb. You figure Ted Rooney would be mixed up in something crooked, Andy?”

“Not unless they paid him for it,” Andy said.

I got out of the car and Barron and I went up toward the cabin. It was small, rough, covered with native pine. It had a wooden porch, a tin chimney guyed with wires, and a sagging privy behind the cabin at the edge of the trees. It was dark. We walked up on the porch and Barron hammered on the door. Nothing happened. He tried the knob. The door was locked. We went down off the porch and around the back, looking at the windows. They were all shut. Barron tried the back door, which was level with the ground. That was locked, too. He pounded. The echoes of the sound wandered off through the trees and echoed high up on the rise among the boulders.

“He’s gone with them,” Barron said. “I guess they wouldn’t dast leave him now. Prob’ly stopped here just to let him get his stuff-some of it. Yep.”

I said: “I don’t think so. All they wanted of Rooney was his boat. That boat picked up Fred Lacey’s body out at the end of Speaker Point early this evening. The body was probably weighted and dropped out in the lake. They waited for dark to do that. Rooney was in on it and he got paid. Tonight they wanted the boat again. But they got to thinking they didn’t need Rooney along. And if they’re over in Bascomb Valley in some quiet little place, making or storing counterfeit money, they wouldn’t at all want Rooney to go over there with them.”

“You’re guessing again, son,” the sheriff said kindly. “Anyways, I don’t have no search warrant. But I can look over Rooney’s dollhouse a minute. Wait for me.”

He walked away toward the privy. I took six feet and hit the door of the cabin. It shivered and split diagonally across the upper panel. Behind me, the sheriff called out, “Hey,” weakly, as if he didn’t mean it.

I took another six feet and hit the door again. I went in with it and landed on my hands and knees on a piece of linoleum that smelled like a fish skillet. I got up to my feet and reached up and turned the key switch of a hanging bulb. Barron was right behind me, making clucking noises of disapproval.

There was a kitchen with a wood stove, some dirty wooden shelves with dishes on them. The stove gave out a faint warmth. Unwashed pots sat on top of it and smelled. I went across the kitchen and into the front room. I turned on another hanging bulb. There was a narrow bed to one side, made up roughly, with a slimy quilt on it. There was a wooden table, some wooden chairs, an old cabinet radio, hooks on the wall, an ashtray with four burned pipes in it, a pile of pulp magazines in the corner on the floor.

The ceiling was low to keep the heat in. In the corner there was a trap to get up to the attic. The trap was open and a stepladder stood under the opening. An old water-stained canvas suitcase lay open on a wooden box, and there were odds and ends of clothing in it.

Barron went over and looked at the suitcase. “Looks like Rooney was getting ready to move out or go for a trip. Then these boys come along and picked him up. He ain’t finished his packing, but he got his suit in. A man like Rooney don’t have but one suit and don’t wear that ’less he goes down the hill.”

“He’s not here,” I said. “He ate dinner here, though. The stove is still warm.”

The sheriff cast a speculative eye at the stepladder. He went over and climbed up it and pushed the trap up with his head. He raised his torch and shone it around overhead. He let the trap close and came down the stepladder again.

“Likely he kept the suitcase up there,” he said. “I see there’s a old steamer trunk up there, too. You ready to leave?”

“I didn’t see a car around,” I said. “He must have had a car.”

“Yep. Had a old Plymouth. Douse the light.”

He walked back into the kitchen and looked around that and then we put both the lights out and went out of the house. I shut what was left of the back door. Barron was examining tire tracks in the soft decomposed granite, trailing them back over to a space under a big oak tree where a couple of large darkened areas showed where a car had stood many times and dripped oil.

He came back swinging his flash, then looked toward the privy and said: “You could go on back to Andy. I still gotta look over that dollhouse.”

I didn’t say anything. I watched him go along the path to the privy and unlatch the door, and open it. I saw his flash go inside and the light leaked out of a dozen cracks and from the ramshackle roof. I walked back along the side of the cabin and got into the car. The sheriff was gone a long time. He came back slowly, stopped beside the car and bit off another chew from his plug. He rolled it around in his mouth and then got to work on it.

“Rooney,” he said, “is in the privy. Shot twice in the head.” He got into the car. “Shot with a big gun, and shot very dead. Judgin’ from the circumstances I would say somebody was in a hell of a hurry.”

The road climbed steeply for a while following the meanderings of a dried mountain stream the bed of which was full of boulders. Then it leveled off about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the level of the lake. We crossed a cattle stop of spaced narrow rails that clanked under the car wheels. The road began to go down. A wide undulating flat appeared with a few browsing cattle in it. A lightless farmhouse showed up against the moonlit sky. We reached a wider road that ran at right angles. Andy stopped the car and Barron got out with his big flashlight again and ran the spot slowly over the road surface.

“Turned left,” he said, straightening. “Thanks be there ain’t been another car past since them tracks were made.” He got back into the car.

“Left don’t go to no old mines,” Andy said. “Left goes to Worden’s place and then back down to the lake at the dam.”

Barron sat silent a moment and then got out of the car and used his flash again. He made a surprised sound over to the right of the T intersection. He came back again, snapping the light off.

“Goes right, too,” he said. “But goes left first. They doubled back, but they been somewhere off west of here before they done it. We go like they went”

Andy said: “You sure they went left first and not last? Left would be a way out to the highway.”

“Yep. Right marks overlays left marks,” Barron said.

We turned left. The knolls that dotted the valley were covered with ironwood trees, some of them half dead. Ironwood grows to about eighteen or twenty feet high and then dies. When it dies the limbs strip themselves and get a gray-white color and shine in the moonlight.

We went about a mile and then a narrow road shot off toward the north, a mere track. Andy stopped. Barron got out again and used his flash. He jerked his thumb and Andy swung the car. The sheriff got in.

“Them boys ain’t too careful,” he said. “Nope. I’d say they ain’t careful at all. But they never figured Andy could tell where that boat come from, just by listenin’ to it.”

The road went into a fold of the mountains and the growth got so close to it that the car barely passed without scratching. Then it doubled back at a sharp angle and rose again and went around a spur of hill and a small cabin showed up, pressed back against a slope with trees on all sides of it.

And suddenly, from the house or very close to it, came a long, shrieking yell which ended in a snapping bark. The bark was choked off suddenly.

Barron started to say: “Kill them—” but Andy had already cut the lights and pulled off the road. “Too late, I guess,” he said dryly. “Must’ve seen us, if anybody’s watchin’.”

Barron got out of the car. “That sounded mighty like a coyote, Andy.”

“Yup.”

“Awful close to the house for a coyote, don’t you think, Andy?”

“Nope,” Andy said. “Lights out, a coyote would come right up to the cabin lookin’ for buried garbage.”

“And then again it could be that little dog,” Barron said.

“Or a hen laying a square egg,” I said. “What are we waiting for? And how about giving me back my gun? And are we trying to catch up with anybody, or do we just like to get things all figured out as we go along?”

The sheriff took my gun off his left hip and handed it to me. “I ain’t in no hurry,” he said. “Because Luders ain’t in no hurry. He coulda been long gone, if he was. They was in a hurry to get Rooney, because Rooney knew something about them. But Rooney don’t know nothing about them now because he’s dead and his house locked up and his car driven away. If you hadn’t bust in his back door, he could be there in his privy a couple of weeks before anybody would get curious. Them tire tracks looks kind of obvious, but that’s only because we know where they started. They don’t have any reason to think we could find that out. So where would we start? No, I ain’t in any hurry.”

Andy stooped over and came up with a deer rifle. He opened the left-hand door and got out of the car.

“The little dog’s in there,” Barron said peacefully. “That means Mrs. Lacey is in there, too. And there would be somebody to watch her. Yep, I guess we better go up and look, Andy.”

“I hope you’re scared,” Andy said. “I am.”

We started through the bees. It was about two hundred yards to the cabin. The night was very still. Even at that distance I heard a window open. We walked about fifty feet apart. Andy stayed back long enough to lock the car. Then he started to make a wide circle, far out to the right.

Nothing moved in the cabin as we got close to it, no light showed. The coyote or Shiny, the dog, whichever it was, didn’t bark again.

We got very close to the house, not more than twenty yards. Barron and I were about the same distance apart. It was a small rough cabin, built like Rooney’s place, but larger. There was an open garage at the back, but it was empty. The cabin had a small porch of fieldstone.

Then there was the sound of a short, sharp struggle in the cabin and the beginning of a bark, suddenly choked off. Barron fell down flat on the ground. I did the same. Nothing happened.

Barron stood up slowly and began to move forward a step at a time and a pause between each step. I stayed out. Barron reached the cleared space in front of the house and started to go up the steps to the porch. He stood there, bulky, clearly outlined in the moonlight, the Colt hanging at his side. It looked like a swell way to commit suicide.

Nothing happened. Barron reached the top of the steps, moved over tight against the wall. There was a window to his left, the door to his right. He changed his gun in his hand and reached out to bang on the door with the butt, then swiftly reversed it again, and flattened to the wall.

The dog screamed inside the house. A hand holding a gun came out at the bottom of the opened window and turned.

It was a tough shot at the range. I had to make it. I shot. The bark of the automatic was drowned in the duller boom of a rifle. The hand drooped and the gun dropped to the porch. The hand came out a little farther and the fingers twitched, then began to scratch at the sill. Then they went back in through the window and the dog howled. Barron was at the door, jerking at it. And Andy and I were running hard for the cabin, from different angles.

Barron got the door open and light framed him suddenly as someone inside lit a lamp and turned it up.

I made the porch as Barron went in, Andy close behind me. We went into the living room of the cabin.

Mrs. Fred Lacey stood in the middle of the floor beside a table with a lamp on it, holding the little dog in her arms. A thickset blond-ish man lay on his side under the window, breathing heavily, his hand groping around aimlessly for the gun that had fallen outside the window.

Mrs. Lacey opened her arms and let the dog down. It leaped and hit the sheriff in the stomach with its small, sharp nose and pushed inside his coat at his shirt. Then it dropped to the floor again and ran around in circles, silently, weaving its hind end with delight.

Mrs. Lacey stood frozen, her face as empty as death. The man on the floor groaned a little in the middle of his heavy breathing. His eyes opened and shut rapidly. His lips moved and bubbled pink froth.

“That sure is a nice little dog, Mrs. Lacey,” Barron said, tucking his shirt in. “But it don’t seem a right handy time to have him around — not for some people.”

He looked at the blond man on the floor. The blond man’s eyes opened and became fixed on nothing.

“I lied to you,” Mrs. Lacey said quickly. “I had to. My husband’s life depended on it. Luders has him. He has him somewhere over here. I don’t know where, but it isn’t far off, he said. He went to bring him back to me, but he left this man to guard me. I couldn’t do anything about it, sheriff. I’m... I’m sorry.”

“I knew you lied, Mrs. Lacey,” Barron said quietly. He looked down at his Colt and put it back on his hip. “I knew why. But your husband is dead, Mrs. Lacey. He was dead long ago. Mr. Evans here saw him. It’s hard to take, ma’am, but you better know it now.”

She didn’t move or seem to breathe. Then she went very slowly to a chair and sat down and leaned her face in her hands. She sat there without motion, without sound. The little dog whined and crept under her chair.

The man on the floor started to raise the upper part of his body. He raised it very slowly, stiffly. His eyes were blank. Barron moved over to him and bent down.

“You hit bad, son?”

The man pressed his left hand against his chest. Blood oozed between his fingers. He lifted his right hand slowly, until the arm was rigid and pointing to the corner of the ceiling. His lips quivered, stiffened, spoke.

“Heil Hitler!” he said thickly.

He fell back and lay motionless. His throat rattled a little and then that, too, was still, and everything in the room was still, even the dog.

“This man must be one of them Nazis,” the sheriff said. “You hear what he said?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I turned and walked out of the house, down the steps and down through the trees again to the car. I sat on the running board and lit a cigarette, and sat there smoking and thinking hard.

After a little while they all came down through the trees. Barron was carrying the dog. Andy was carrying his rifle in his left hand. His leathery young face looked shocked.

Mrs. Lacey got into the car and Barron handed the dog in to her. He looked at me and said: “It’s against the law to smoke out here, son, more than fifty feet from a cabin.”

I dropped the cigarette and ground it hard into the powdery gray soil. I got into the car, in front beside Andy.

The car started again and we went back to what they probably called the main road over there. Nobody said anything for a long time, then Mrs. Lacey said in a low voice: “Luders mentioned a name that sounded like Sloat. He said it to the man you shot. They called him Kurt. They spoke German. I understand a little German, but they talked too fast. Sloat didn’t sound like German. Does it mean anything to you?”

“It’s the name of an old gold mine not far from here,” Barron said. “Sloat’s Mine. You know where it is, don’t you, Andy?”

“Yup. I guessed I killed that feller, didn’t I?”

“I guess you did, Andy.”

“I never killed nobody before,” Andy said.

“Maybe I got him,” I said. “I fired at him.”

“Nope,” Andy said. “You wasn’t high enough to get him in the chest. I was.”

Barron said: “How many brought you to that cabin, Mrs. Lacey? I hate to be asking you questions at a time like this, ma’am, but I just got to.”

The dead voice said: “Two. Luders and the man you killed. He ran the boat.”

“Did they stop anywhere — on this side of the lake, ma’am?”

“Yes. They stopped at a small cabin near the lake. Luders was driving. The other man, Kurt, got out, and we drove on. After a while Luders stopped and Kurt came up with us in an old car. He drove the car into a gully behind some willows and then came on with us.”

“That’s all we need,” Barron said. “If we get Luders, the job’s all done. Except I can’t figure what it’s all about.”

I didn’t say anything. We drove on to where the T intersection was and the road went back to the lake. We kept on across this for about four miles.

“Better stop here, Andy. We’ll go the rest of the way on foot. You stay here.”

“Nope. I ain’t going to,” Andy said.

“You stay here,” Barron said in a voice suddenly harsh. “You got a lady to look after and you done your killin’ for tonight. All I ask is you keep that little dog quiet.”

The car stopped. Barron and I got out. The little dog whined and then was still. We went off the road and started across country through a grove of young pines and manzanita and ironwood. We walked silently, without speaking. The noise our shoes made couldn’t have been heard thirty feet away except by an Indian.

We reached the far edge of the thicket in a few minutes. Beyond that the ground was level and open. There was a spidery something against the sky, a few low piles of waste dirt, a set of sluice boxes built one on top of the other like a miniature cooling tower, an endless belt going toward it from a cut. Barron put his mouth against my ear.

“Ain’t been worked for a couple of years,” he said. “Ain’t worth it. Day’s hard work for two men might get you a pennyweight of gold. This country was worked to death sixty years ago. That low hut over yonder’s a old refrigerator car. She’s thick and damn near bulletproof. I don’t see no car, but maybe it’s behind. Or hidden. Most like hidden. You ready to go?”

I nodded. We started across the open space. The moon was almost as bright as daylight. I felt swell, like a clay pipe in a shooting gallery. Barron seemed quite at ease. He held the big Colt down at his side, with his thumb over the hammer.

Suddenly light showed in the side of the refrigerator car and we went down on the ground. The light came from a partly opened door, a yellow panel and a yellow spearhead on the ground. There was a movement in the moonlight and the noise of water striking the ground. We waited a little, then got up again and went on.

There wasn’t much use playing Indian. They would come out of the door or they wouldn’t. If they did, they would see us, walking, crawling or lying. The ground was that bare and the moon was that bright. Our shoes scuffed a little, but this was hard dirt, much walked on and tight packed. We reached a pile of sand and stopped beside it. I listened to myself breathing. I wasn’t panting, and Barron wasn’t panting either. But I took a lot of interest in my breathing. It was something I had taken for granted for a long time, but right now I was interested in it. I hoped it would go on for a long time, but I wasn’t sure.

I wasn’t scared. I was a full-sized man and I had a gun in my hand. But the blond man back in the other cabin had been a full-sized man with a gun in his hand, too. And he had a wall to hide behind. I wasn’t scared though. I was just thoughtful about little things. I thought Barron was breathing too loud, but I thought I would make more noise telling him he was breathing too loud than he was making breathing. That’s the way I was, very thoughtful about the little things.

Then the door opened again. This time there was no light behind it. A small man, very small, came out of the doorway carrying what looked like a heavy suitcase. He carried it along the side of the car, grunting hard. Barron held my arm in a vise. His breath hissed faintly.

The small man with the heavy suitcase, or whatever it was, reached the end of the car and went around the corner. Then I thought that although the pile of sand didn’t look very high it was probably high enough so that we didn’t show above it. And if the small man wasn’t expecting visitors, he might not see us. We waited for him to come back. We waited too long.

A clear voice behind us said: “I am holding a machine gun, Mr. Barron. Put your hands up, please. If you move to do anything else, I fire.”

I put my hands up fast. Barron hesitated a little longer. Then he put his hands up. We tinned slowly. Frank Luders stood about four feet away from us, with a Tommy-gun held waist high. Its muzzle looked as big as the Second Street tunnel in L.A.

Luders said quietly: “I prefer that you face the other way. When Charlie comes back from the car, he will light the lamps inside. Then we shall all go in.”

We faced the long, low car again. Luders whistled sharply. The small man came back around the corner of the car, stopped a moment, then went toward the door Luders called out: “Light the lamps, Charlie. We have visitors.”

The small man went quietly into the car and a match scratched and there was light inside.

“Now, gentlemen, you may walk,” Luders said. “Observing, of course, that death walks close behind you and conducting yourselves accordingly.”

We walked.

“Take their guns and see if they have any more of them, Charlie.”

We stood backed against a wall near a long wooden table. There were wooden benches on either side of the table. On it was a tray with a bottle of whiskey and a couple of glasses, a hurricane lamp and an old-fashioned farmhouse oil lamp of thick glass, both lit, a saucer full of matches and another full of ashes and stubs. In the end of the cabin, away from the table, there was a small stove and two cots, one tumbled, one made up as neat as a pin.

The little Japanese came toward us with the light shining on his glasses.

“Oh having guns,” he purred. “Oh too bad.”

He took the guns and pushed them backward across the table to Luders. His small hands felt us over deftly. Barron winced and his face reddened, but he said nothing. Charlie said:

“No more guns. Pleased to see, gentlemen. Very nice night, I think so. You having picnic in moonlight?”

Barron made an angry sound in his throat. Luders said: “Sit down, please, gentlemen, and tell me what I can do for you.”

We sat down. Luders sat down opposite. The two guns were on the table in front of him and the Tommy-gun rested on it, his left hand holding it steady, his eyes quiet and hard. His was no longer a pleasant face, but it was still an intelligent face. Intelligent as they ever are.

Barron said: “Guess I’ll chew. I think better that way.” He got his plug out and bit into it and put it away. He chewed silently and then spit on the floor.

“Guess I might mess up your floor some,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

The Jap was sitting on the end of the neat bed, his shoes not touching the floor. “Not liking much,” he said hissingly, “very bad smell.”

Barron didn’t look at him. He said quietly: “You aim to shoot us and make your getaway, Mr. Luders?”

Luders shrugged and took his hand off the machine gun and leaned back against the wall.

Barron said: “You left a pretty broad trail here except for one thing. How we would know where to pick it up. You didn’t figure that out because you wouldn’t have acted the way you did. But you was all staked out for us when we got here. I don’t follow that.”

Luders said: “That is because we Germans are fatalists. When things go very easily, as they did tonight — except for that fool, Weber — we become suspicious. I said to myself, ‘I have left no trail, no way they could follow me across the lake quickly enough. They had no boat, and no boat followed me. It would be impossible for them to find me. Quite impossible.’ So I said, ‘They will find me just because to me it appears impossible. Therefore, I shall be waiting for them.’ ”

“While Charlie toted the suitcases full of money out to the car,” I said.

“What money?” Luders asked, and didn’t seem to look at either of us. He seemed to be looking inward, searching.

I said: “Those very fine new ten-dollar bills you have been bringing in from Mexico by plane.”

Luders looked at me then, but indifferently. “My dear friend, you could not possibly be serious?” he suggested.

“Phooey. Easiest thing in the world. The border patrol has no planes now. They had a few coast guard planes awhile back, but nothing came over, so they were taken off. A plane flying high over the border from Mexico lands on the field down by the Woodland Club golf course. It’s Mr. Luders’ plane and Mr. Luders owns an interest in the club and lives there. Why should anybody get curious about that. But Mr. Luders doesn’t want half a million dollars’ worth of queer money in his cabin at the club, so he finds himself an old mine over here and keeps the money in this refrigerator car. It’s almost as strong as a safe and it doesn’t look like a safe.”

“You interest me,” Luders said calmly. “Continue.”

I said: “The money is very good stuff. We’ve had a report on it. That means organization — to get the inks and the right paper and the plates. It means an organization much more complete than any gang of crooks could manage. A government organization. The organization of the Nazi government.”

The little Jap jumped up off the bed and hissed, but Luders didn’t change expression. “I’m still interested,” he said laconically.

“I ain’t,” Barron said. “Sounds to me like you’re tryin’ to talk yourself into a vestful of lead.”

I went on: “A few years ago the Russians tried the same stunt. Planting a lot of queer money over here to raise funds for espionage work and, incidentally, they hoped, to damage our currency. The Nazis are too smart to gamble on that angle. All they want is good American dollars to work with in Central and South America. Nice mixed-up money that’s been used. You can’t go into a bank and deposit a hundred thousand dollars in brand-new ten-dollar bills. What’s bothering the sheriff is why you picked this particular place, a mountain resort full of rather poor people.”

“But that does not bother you with your superior brain, does it?” Luders sneered.

“It don’t bother me a whole lot either,” Barron said. “What bothers me is folks getting killed in my territory. I ain’t used to it.”

I said: “You picked the place primarily because it’s a swell place to bring the money into. It’s probably one of hundreds all over the country, places where there is very little law enforcement to dodge but places where in the summertime a lot of strange people come and go all the time. And places where planes set down and nobody checks them in or out. But that isn’t the only reason. It’s also a swell place to unload some of the money, quite a lot of it, if you’re lucky. But you weren’t lucky. Your man Weber pulled a dumb trick and made you unlucky. Should I tell you just why it’s a good place to spread queer money, if you have enough people working for you?”

“Please do,” Luders said, and patted the side of the machine gun. “Because for three months in the year this district has a floating population of anywhere from twenty to fifty thousand people, depending on the holidays and week-ends. That means a lot of money brought in and a lot of business done. And there’s no bank here. The result of that is that the hotels and bars and merchants have to cash checks all the time. The result of that is that the deposits they send out during the season are almost all checks and the money stays in circulation. Until the end of the season, of course.”

“I think that is very interesting,” Luders said. “But if this operation were under my control, I would not think of passing very much money up here. I would pass a little here and there, but not much. I would test the money out, to see how well it was accepted. And for a reason that you have thought of. Because most of it would change hands rapidly and, if it was discovered to be queer money, as you say, it would be very difficult to trace the source of it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be smarter. You’re nice and frank about it.”

“To you,” Luders said, “it naturally does not matter how frank I am.”

Barron leaned forward suddenly. “Look here, Luders, killin’ us ain’t going to help you any. If you come right down to it, we don’t have a thing on you. Likely you killed this man Weber, but the way things are up here, it’s going to be mighty hard to prove it. If you been spreading bad money, they’ll get you for it, sure, but that ain’t a hangin’ matter. Now I’ve got a couple pair of handcuffs in my belt, so happens, and my proposition is you walk out of here with them on, you and your Japanese pal.”

Charlie the Jap said: “Ha, ha. Very funny man. Some boob I guess yes.”

Luders smiled faintly. “You put all the stuff in the car, Charlie?”

“One more suitcase coming right up,” Charlie said.

“Better take it on out, and start the engine, Charlie.”

“Listen, it won’t work, Luders,” Barron said urgently. “I got a man back in the woods with a deer rifle. It’s bright moonlight. You got a fair weapon there, but you got no more chance against a deer rifle than Evans and me got against you. You’ll never get out of here unless we go with you. He seen us come in here and how we come. He’ll give us twenty minutes. Then he’ll send for some boys to dynamite you out. Them were my orders.”

Luders said quietly: “This work is very difficult. Even we Germans find it difficult. I am tired. I made a bad mistake. I used a man who was a fool, who did a foolish thing, and then he killed a man because he had done it and the man knew he had done it. But it was my mistake also. I shall not be forgiven. My life is no longer of great importance. Take the suitcase to the car, Charlie.”

Charlie moved swiftly toward him. “Not liking, no,” he said sharply. “That damn heavy suitcase. Man with rifle shooting. To hell.”

Luders smiled slowly. “That’s all a lot of nonsense, Charlie. If they had men with them, they would have been here long ago. That is why I let these men talk. To see if they were alone. They are alone. Go, Charlie.”

Charlie said hissingly: “I going, but I still not liking.”

He went over to the corner and hefted the suitcase that stood there. He could hardly carry it. He moved slowly to the door and put the suitcase down and sighed. He opened the door a crack and looked out. “Not see anybody,” he said. “Maybe all lies, too.”

Luders said musingly: “I should have killed the dog and the woman, too. I was weak. The man Kurt, what of him?”

“Never heard of him,” I said. “Where was he?”

Luders stared at me. “Get up on your feet, both of you.”

I got up. An icicle was crawling around on my back. Barron got up. His face was gray. The whitening hair at the side of his head glistened with sweat. There was sweat all over his face, but his jaws went on chewing.

He said softly: “How much you get for this job, son?”

I said thickly: “A hundred bucks, but I spent some of it.”

Barron said in the same soft tone: “I been married forty years. They pay me eighty dollars a month, house and firewood. It ain’t enough. By gum, I ought to get a hundred.” He grinned wryly and spat and looked at Luders. “To hell with you, you Nazi bastard,” he said.

Luders lifted the machine gun slowly and his lips drew back over his teeth. His breath made a hissing noise. Then very slowly he laid the gun down and reached inside his coat. He took out a Luger and moved the safety with his thumb. He shifted the gun to his left hand and stood looking at us quietly. Very slowly his face drained of all expression and became a dead gray mask. He lifted the gun, and at the same time he lifted his right arm stiffly above shoulder height. The arm was as rigid as a rod.

“Heil, Hitler!” he said sharply.

He turned the gun quickly, put the muzzle in his mouth and fired.

The Jap screamed and streaked out of the door. Barron and I lunged hard across the table. We got our guns. Blood fell on the back of my hand and then Luders crumpled slowly against the wall.

Barron was already out of the door. When I got out behind him, I saw that the little Jap was running hard down the hill toward a clump of brush.

Barron steadied himself, brought the Colt up, then lowered it again.

“He ain’t far enough,” he said. “I always give a man forty yards.”

He raised the big Colt again and turned his body a little and, as the gun reached firing position, it moved very slowly and Barron’s head went down a little until his arm and shoulder and right eye were all in a line.

He stayed like that, perfectly rigid for a long moment, then the gun roared and jumped back in his hand and a lean thread of smoke showed faint in the moonlight and disappeared.

The Jap kept on running. Barron lowered his Colt and watched him plunge into a clump of brush.

“Hell,” he said. “I missed him.” He looked at me quickly and looked away again. “But he won’t get nowhere. Ain’t got nothing to get with. Them little legs of his ain’t hardly long enough to jump him over a pine cone.”

“He had a gun,” I said. “Under his left arm.”

Barron shook his head. “Nope. I noticed the holster was empty. I figured Luders got it away from him. I figure Luders meant to shoot him before he left.”

Car lights showed in the distance, coming dustily along the road.

“What made Luders go soft?”

“I figure his pride was hurt,” Barron said thoughtfully. “A big organizer like him gettin’ hisself all balled to hell by a couple of little fellows like us.”

We went around the end of the refrigerator car. A big new coupe was parked there. Barron marched over to it and opened the door. The car on the road was near now. It turned off and its headlights raked the big coupe. Barron stared into the car for a moment, then slammed the door viciously and spat on the ground.

“Caddy V-12,” he said. “Red leather cushions and suitcases in the back.” He reached in again and snapped on the dashlight. “What time is it?”

“Twelve minutes to two,” I said.

“This clock ain’t no twelve and a half minutes slow,” Barron said angrily. “You slipped on that.” He turned and faced me, pushing his hat back on his head. “Hell, you seen it parked in front of the Indian Head,” he said.

“Right.”

“I thought you was just a smart guy.”

“Right,” I said.

“Son, next time I got to get almost shot, could you plan to be around?”

The car that was coming stopped a few yards away and a dog whined. Andy called out: “Anybody hurt?”

Barron and I walked over to the car. The door opened and the little silky dog jumped out and rushed at Barron. She took off about four feet away and sailed through the air and planted her front paws hard against Barron’s stomach, then dropped back to the ground and ran in circles.

Barron said: “Luders shot hisself inside there. There’s a little Jap down in the bushes we got to round up. And there’s three, four suitcases full of counterfeit money we got to take care of.”

He looked off into the distance, a solid, heavy man like a rock. “A night like this,” he said, “and it’s got to be full of death.”