The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, February 1930

I

I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.

A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.

He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:

“Kavalov’s?”

He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.

I followed him to the car.

Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.

The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.

Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.

Rain accumulated in fat drops on the boughs and came down to thump the Stutz’s roof. The dulness of rainy early evening became almost the blackness of night inside these tunnels.

The flat-faced man switched on the lights, and increased our speed.

He sat rigidly erect at the wheel. I sat behind him. Above his military collar, among the hairs that were clipped short on the nape of his neck, globules of moisture made tiny shining points. The moisture could have been rain. It could have been sweat.

We were in the middle of one of the tunnels.

The flat-faced man’s head jerked to the left, and he screamed:

“A-a-a-a-a-a!”

It was a long, quivering, high-pitched bleat, thin with terror.

I jumped up, bending forward to see what was the matter with him.

The car swerved and plunged ahead, throwing me back on the seat again.

Through the side window I caught a one-eyed glimpse of something dark lying in the road.

I twisted around to try the back window, less rain-bleared.

I saw a black man lying on his back in the road, near the left edge. His body was arched, as if its weight rested on his heels and the back of his head. A knife handle that couldn’t have been less than six inches long stood straight up in the air from the left side of his chest.

By the time I had seen this much we had taken a curve and were out of the tunnel.

“Stop,” I called to the flat-faced man.

He pretended he didn’t hear me. The Stutz was a tan streak under us. I put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.

His shoulder squirmed under my hand, and he screamed “A-a-a-a-a!” again as if the dead black man had him.

I reached past him and shut off the engine.

He took his hands from the wheel and clawed up at me. Noises came from his mouth, but they didn’t make any words that I knew.

I got a hand on the wheel. I got my other forearm under his chin. I leaned over the back of his seat so that the weight of my upper body was on his head, mashing it down against the wheel.

Between this and that and the help of God, the Stutz hadn’t left the road when it stopped moving.

I got up off the flat-faced man’s head and asked:

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

He looked at me with white eyes, shivered, and didn’t say anything.

“Turn it around,” I said. “We’ll go back there.”

He shook his head from side to side, desperately, and made some more of the mouth-noises that might have been words if I could have understood them.

“You know who that was?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“You do,” I growled.

He shook his head.

By then I was beginning to suspect that no matter what I said to this fellow I’d get only head-shakes out of him.

I said:

“Get away from the wheel, then. I’m going to drive back there.”

He opened the door and scrambled out.

“Come back here,” I called.

He backed away, shaking his head.

I cursed him, slid in behind the wheel, said, “All right, wait here for me,” and slammed the door.

He retreated backwards slowly, watching me with scared, whitish eyes while I backed and turned the coach.

I had to drive back farther than I had expected, something like a mile.

I didn’t find the black man.

The tunnel was empty.

If I had known the exact spot in which he had been lying, I might have been able to find something to show how he had been removed. But I hadn’t had time to pick out a landmark, and now any one of four or five places looked like the spot.

With the help of the coach’s lamps I went over the left side of the road from one end of the tunnel to the other.

I didn’t find any blood. I didn’t find any footprints. I didn’t find anything to show that anybody had been lying in the road. I didn’t find anything.

It was too dark by now for me to try searching the woods.

I returned to where I had left the flat-faced man.

He was gone.

It looked, I thought, as if Mr. Kavalov might be right in thinking he needed a detective.

II

Half a mile beyond the place where the flat-faced man had deserted me, I stopped the Stutz in front of a grilled steel gate that blocked the road. The gate was padlocked on the inside. From either side of it tall hedging ran off into the woods. The upper part of a brown-roofed small house was visible over the hedge-top to the left.

I worked the Stutz’s horn.

The racket brought a gawky boy of fifteen or sixteen to the other side of the gate. He had on bleached whipcord pants and a wildly striped sweater. He didn’t come out to the middle of the road, but stood at one side, with one arm out of sight as if holding something that was hidden from me by the hedge.

“This Kavalov’s?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said uneasily.

I waited for him to unlock the gate. He didn’t unlock it. He stood there looking uneasily at the car and at me.

“Please, mister,” I said, “can I come in?”

“What — who are you?”

“I’m the guy that Kavalov sent for. If I’m not going to be let in, tell me, so I can catch the six-fifty back to San Francisco.”

The boy chewed his lip, said, “Wait till I see if I can find the key,” and went out of sight behind the hedge.

He was gone long enough to have had a talk with somebody.

When he came back he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and said:

“It’s all right, sir. They’re expecting you.”

When I had driven through the gate I could see lights on a hilltop a mile or so ahead and to the left.

“Is that the house?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. They’re expecting you.”

Close to where the boy had stood while talking to me through the gate, a double-barrel shotgun was propped up against the hedge.

I thanked the boy and drove on. The road wound gently uphill through farm land. Tall, slim trees had been planted at regular intervals on both sides of the road.

The road brought me at last to the front of a building that looked like a cross between a fort and a factory in the dusk. It was built of concrete. Take a flock of squat cones of various sizes, round off the points bluntly, mash them together with the largest one somewhere near the center, the others grouped around it in not too strict accordance with their sizes, adjust the whole collection to agree with the slopes of a hilltop, and you would have a model of the Kavalov house. The windows were steel-sashed. There weren’t very many of them. No two were in line either vertically or horizontally. Some were lighted.

As I got out of the car, the narrow front door of this house opened.

A short, red-faced woman of fifty or so, with faded blonde hair wound around and around her head, came out. She wore a high-necked, tight-sleeved, gray woolen dress. When she smiled her mouth seemed wide as her hips.

She said:

“You’re the gentleman from the city?”

“Yeah. I lost your chauffeur somewhere back on the road.”

“Lord bless you,” she said amiably, “that’s all right.”

A thin man with thin dark hair plastered down above a thin, worried face came past her to take my bags when I had lifted them out of the car. He carried them indoors.

The woman stood aside for me to enter, saying:

“Now I suppose you’ll want to wash up a little bit before you go in to dinner, and they won’t mind waiting for you the few minutes you’ll take if you hurry.”

I said, “Yeah, thanks,” waited for her to get ahead of me again, and followed her up a curving flight of stairs that climbed along the inside of one of the cones that made up the building.

She took me to a second-story bedroom where the thin man was unpacking my bags.

“Martin will get you anything you need,” she assured me from the doorway, “and when you’re ready, just come on downstairs.”

I said I would, and she went away. The thin man had finished unpacking by the time I had got out of coat, vest, collar and shirt. I told him there wasn’t anything else I needed, washed up in the adjoining bathroom, put on a fresh shirt and collar, my vest and coat, and went downstairs.

The wide hall was empty. Voices came through an open doorway to the left.

One voice was a nasal whine. It complained:

“I will not have it. I will not put up with it. I am not a child, and I will not have it.”

This voice’s t’s were a little too thick for t’s, but not thick enough to be d’s.

Another voice was a lively, but slightly harsh, barytone. It said cheerfully:

“What’s the good of saying we won’t put up with it, when we are putting up with it?”

The third voice was feminine, a soft voice, but flat and spiritless. It said:

“But perhaps he did kill him.”

The whining voice said: “I do not care. I will not have it.”

The barytone voice said, cheerfully as before: “Oh, won’t you?”

A doorknob turned farther down the hall. I didn’t want to be caught standing there listening. I advanced to the open doorway.

III

I was in the doorway of a low-ceilinged oval room furnished and decorated in gray, white and silver. Two men and a woman were there.

The older man — he was somewhere in his fifties — got up from a deep gray chair and bowed ceremoniously at me. He was a plump man of medium height, completely bald, dark-skinned and pale-eyed. He wore a wax-pointed gray mustache and a straggly gray imperial.

“Mr. Kavalov?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.” His was the whining voice.

I told him who I was. He shook my hand and then introduced me to the others.

The woman was his daughter. She was probably thirty. She had her father’s narrow, full-lipped mouth, but her eyes were dark, her nose was short and straight, and her skin was almost colorless. Her face had Asia in it. It was pretty, passive, unintelligent.

The man with the barytone voice was her husband. His name was Ringgo. He was six or seven years older than his wife, neither tall nor heavy, but well setup. His left arm was in splints and a sling. The knuckles of his right hand were darkly bruised. He had a lean, bony, quick-witted face, bright dark eyes with plenty of lines around them, and a good-natured hard mouth.

He gave me his bruised hand, wriggled his bandaged arm at me, grinned, and said:

“I’m sorry you missed this, but the future injuries are yours.”

“How did it happen?” I asked.

Kavalov raised a plump hand.

“Time enough it is to go into that when we have eaten,” he said. “Let us have our dinner first.”

We went into a small green and brown dining-room where a small square table was set. I sat facing Ringgo across a silver basket of orchids that stood between tall silver candlesticks in the center of the table. Mrs. Ringgo sat to my right, Kavalov to my left. When Kavalov sat down I saw the shape of an automatic pistol in his hip pocket.

Two men servants waited on us. There was a lot of food and all of it was well turned out. We ate caviar, some sort of consommé, sand dabs, potatoes and cucumber jelly, roast lamb, corn and string beans, asparagus, wild duck and hominy cakes, artichoke-and-tomato salad, and orange ice. We drank white wine, claret, Burgundy, coffee and crème de menthe.

Kavalov ate and drank enormously. None of us skimped.

Kavalov was the first to disregard his own order that nothing be said about his troubles until after we had eaten. When he had finished his soup he put down his spoon and said:

“I am not a child. I will not be frightened.”

He blinked pale, worried eyes defiantly at me, his lips pouting between mustache and imperial.

Ringgo grinned pleasantly at him. Mrs. Ringgo’s face was as serene and inattentive as if nothing had been said.

“What is there to be frightened of?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Kavalov said. “Nothing excepting a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and play-acting.”

“You can call it anything you want to call it,” a voice grumbled over my shoulder, “but I seen what I seen.”

The voice belonged to one of the men who was waiting on the table, a sallow, youngish man with a narrow, slack-lipped face. He spoke with a subdued sort of stubbornness, and without looking up from the dish he was putting before me.

Since nobody else paid any attention to the servant’s clearly audible remark, I turned my face to Kavalov again. He was trimming the edge of a sand dab with the side of his fork.

“What kind of trickery and play-acting?” I asked.

Kavalov put down his fork and rested his wrists on the edge of the table. He rubbed his lips together and leaned over his plate towards me.

“Supposing” — he wrinkled his forehead so that his bald scalp twitched forward — “you have done injury to a man ten years ago.” He turned his wrists quickly, laying his hands palms-up on the white cloth. “You have done this injury in the ordinary business manner — you understand? — for profit. There is not anything personal concerned. You do not hardly know him. And then supposing he came to you after all those ten years and said to you: ‘I have come to watch you die.’” He turned his hands over, palms down. “Well, what would you think?”

“I wouldn’t,” I replied, “think I ought to hurry up my dying on his account.”

The earnestness went out of his face, leaving it blank. He blinked at me for a moment and then began eating his fish. When he had chewed and swallowed the last piece of sand dab he looked up at me again. He shook his head slowly, drawing down the corners of his mouth.

“That was not a good answer,” he said. He shrugged, and spread his fingers. “However, you will have to deal with this Captain Cat-and-mouse. It is for that I engaged you.”

I nodded.

Ringgo smiled and patted his bandaged arm, saying:

“I wish you more luck with him than I had.”

Mrs. Ringgo put out a hand and let the pointed fingertips touch her husband’s wrist for a moment.

I asked Kavalov:

“This injury I was to suppose I had done: how serious was it?”

He pursed his lips, made little wavy motions with the fingers of his right hand, and said:

“Oh — ah — ruin.”

“We can take it for granted, then, that your captain’s really up to something?”

“Good God!” said Ringgo, dropping his fork. “I wouldn’t like to think he’d broken my arm just in fun.”

Behind me the sallow servant spoke to his mate:

“He wants to know if we think the captain’s really up to something.”

“I heard him,” the other said gloomily. “A lot of help he’s going to be to us.”

Kavalov tapped his plate with a fork and made angry faces at the servants.

“Shut up,” he said. “Where is the roast?” He pointed the fork at Mrs. Ringgo. “Her glass is empty.” He looked at the fork. “See what care they take of my silver,” he complained, holding it out to me. “It has not been cleaned decently in a month.”

He put the fork down. He pushed back his plate to make room for his forearms on the table. He leaned over them, hunching his shoulders. He sighed. He frowned. He stared at me with pleading pale eyes.

“Listen,” he whined. “Am I a fool? Would I send to San Francisco for a detective if I did not need a detective? Would I pay you what you are charging me, when I could get plenty good enough detectives for half of that, if I did not require the best detective I could secure? Would I require so expensive a one if I did not know this captain for a completely dangerous fellow?”

I didn’t say anything. I sat still and looked attentive.

“Listen,” he whined. “This is not April-foolery. This captain means to murder me. He came here to murder me. He will certainly murder me if somebody does not stop him from it.”

“Just what has he done so far?” I asked.

“That is not it.” Kavalov shook his bald head impatiently. “I do not ask you to undo anything that he has done. I ask you to keep him from killing me. What has he done so far? Well, he has terrorized my people most completely. He has broken Dolph’s arm. He has done these things so far, if you must know.”

“How long has this been going on? How long has he been here?”

“A week and two days.”

“Did your chauffeur tell you about the black man we saw in the road?”

Kavalov pushed his lips together and nodded slowly.

“He wasn’t there when I went back,” I said.

He blew out his lips with a little puff and cried excitedly:

“I do not care anything about your black men and your roads. I care about not being murdered.”

“Have you said anything to the sheriff’s office?” I asked, trying to pretend I wasn’t getting peevish.

“That I have done. But to what good? Has he threatened me? Well, he has told me he has come to watch me die. From him, the way he said it, that is a threat. But to your sheriff it is not a threat. He has terrorized my people. Have I proof that he has done that? The sheriff says I have not. What absurdity! Do I need proof? Don’t I know? Must he leave fingerprints on the fright he causes? So it comes to this: the sheriff will keep an eye on him. ‘An eye,’ he said, mind you. Here I have twenty people, servants and farm hands, with forty eyes. And he comes and goes as he likes. An eye!”

“How about Ringgo’s arm?” I asked.

Kavalov shook his head impatiently and began to cut up his lamb.

Ringgo said:

“There’s nothing we can do about that. I hit him first.” He looked at his bruised knuckles. “I didn’t think he was that tough. Maybe I’m not as good as I used to be. Anyway, a dozen people saw me punch his jaw before he touched me. We performed at high noon in front of the post office.”

“Who is this captain?”

“It’s not him,” the sallow servant said. “It’s that black devil.”

Ringgo said:

“Sherry’s his name, Hugh Sherry. He was a captain in the British army when we knew him before — quartermasters department in Cairo. That was in 1917, all of twelve years ago. The commodore” — he nodded his head at his father-in-law — “was speculating in military supplies. Sherry should have been a line officer. He had no head for desk work. He wasn’t timid enough. Somebody decided the commodore wouldn’t have made so much money if Sherry hadn’t been so careless. They knew Sherry hadn’t made any money for himself. They cashiered Sherry at the same time they asked the commodore please to go away.”

Kavalov looked up from his plate to explain:

“Business is like that in wartime. They wouldn’t let me go away if I had done anything they could keep me there for.”

“And now, twelve years after you had him kicked out of the army in disgrace,” I said, “he comes here, threatens to kill you, so you believe, and sets out to spread panic among your people. Is that it?”

“That is not it,” Kavalov whined. “That is not it at all. I did not have him kicked out of any armies. I am a man of business. I take my profits where I find them. If somebody lets me take a profit that angers his employers, what is their anger to me? Second, I do not believe he means to kill me. I know that.”

“I’m trying to get it straight in my mind.”

“There is nothing to get straight. A man is going to murder me. I ask you not to let him do it. Is not that simple enough?”

“Simple enough,” I agreed, and stopped trying to talk to him.

Kavalov and Ringgo were smoking cigars, Mrs. Ringgo and I cigarettes over crème de menthe when the red-faced blonde woman in gray wool came in.

She came in hurriedly. Her eyes were wide open and dark. She said:

“Anthony says there’s a fire in the upper field.”

Kavalov crunched his cigar between his teeth and looked pointedly at me.

I stood up, asking:

“How do I get there?”

“I’ll show you the way,” Ringgo said, leaving his chair.

“Dolph,” his wife protested, “your arm.”

He smiled gently at her and said:

“I’m not going to interfere. I’m only going along to see how an expert handles these things.”

IV

I ran up to my room for hat, coat, flashlight and gun.

The Ringgos were standing at the front door when I started downstairs again.

He had put on a dark raincoat, buttoned tight over his injured arm, its left sleeve hanging empty. His right arm was around his wife. Both of her bare arms were around his neck. She was bent far back, he far forward over her. Their mouths were together.

Retreating a little, I made more noise with my feet when I came into sight again. They were standing apart at the door, waiting for me. Ringgo was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. He opened the door.

Mrs. Ringgo addressed me:

“Please don’t let my foolish husband be too reckless.”

I said I wouldn’t, and asked him:

“Worth while taking any of the servants or farm hands along?”

He shook his head.

“Those that aren’t hiding would be as useless as those that are,” he said. “They’ve all had it taken out of them.”

He and I went out, leaving Mrs. Ringgo looking after us from the doorway. The rain had stopped for the time, but a black muddle overhead promised more presently.

Ringgo led me around the side of the house, along a narrow path that went downhill through shrubbery, past a group of small buildings in a shallow valley, and diagonally up another, lower, hill.

The path was soggy. At the top of the hill we left the path, going through a wire gate and across a stubbly field that was both gummy and slimy under our feet. We moved along swiftly. The gumminess of the ground, the sultriness of the night air, and our coats, made the going warm work.

When we had crossed this field we could see the fire, a spot of flickering orange beyond intervening trees. We climbed a low wire fence and wound through the trees.

A violent rustling broke out among the leaves overhead, starting at the left, ending with a solid thud against a tree trunk just to our right. Then something plopped on the soft ground under the tree.

Off to the left a voice laughed, a savage, hooting laugh.

The laughing voice couldn’t have been far away. I went after it.

The fire was too small and too far away to be of much use to me: blackness was nearly perfect among the trees.

I stumbled over roots, bumped into trees, and found nothing. The flashlight would have helped the laugher more than me, so I kept it idle in my hand.

When I got tired of playing peekaboo with myself, I cut through the woods to the field on the other side, and went down to the fire.

The fire had been built in one end of the field, a dozen feet or less from the nearest tree. It had been built of dead twigs and broken branches that the rain had missed, and had nearly burnt itself out by the time I reached it.

Two small forked branches were stuck in the ground on opposite sides of the fire. Their forks held the ends of a length of green sapling. Spitted on the sapling, hanging over the fire, was an eighteen-inch-long carcass, headless, tailless, footless, skinless, and split down the front.

On the ground a few feet away lay an airedale puppy’s head, pelt, feet, tail, insides, and a lot of blood.

There were some dry sticks, broken in convenient lengths, beside the fire. I put them on as Ringgo came out of the woods to join me. He carried a stone the size of a grapefruit in his hand.

“Get a look at him?” he asked.

“No. He laughed and went.”

He held out the stone to me, saying:

“This is what was chucked at us.”

Drawn on the smooth gray stone, in red, were round blank eyes, a triangular nose, and a grinning, toothy mouth — a crude skull.

I scratched one of the red eyes with a fingernail, and said:

“Crayon.”

Ringgo was staring at the carcass sizzling over the fire and at the trimmings on the ground.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

He swallowed and said:

“Mickey was a damned good little dog.”

“Yours?”

He nodded.

I went around with my flashlight on the ground. I found some footprints, such as they were.

“Anything?” Ringgo asked.

“Yeah.” I showed him one of the prints. “Made with rags tied around his shoes. They’re no good.”

We turned to the fire again.

“This is another show,” I said. “Whoever killed and cleaned the pup knew his stuff; knew it too well to think he could cook him decently like that. The outside will be burnt before the inside’s even warm, and the way he’s put on the spit he’d fall off if you tried to turn him.”

Ringgo’s scowl lightened a bit.

“That’s a little better,” he said, “Having him killed is rotten enough, but I’d hate to think of anybody eating Mickey, or even meaning to.”

“They didn’t,” I assured him. “They were putting on a show. This the sort of thing that’s been happening?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the sense of it?”

He glumly quoted Kavalov:

“Captain Cat-and-mouse.”

I gave him a cigarette, took one myself, and lighted them with a stick from the fire.

He raised his face to the sky, said, “Raining again; let’s go back to the house,” but remained by the fire, staring at the cooking carcass. The stink of scorched meat hung thick around us.

“You don’t take this very seriously yet, do you?” he asked presently, in a low, matter-of-fact voice.

“It’s a funny layout.”

“He’s cracked,” he said in the same low voice. “Try to see this. Honor meant something to him. That’s why we had to trick him instead of bribing him, back in Cairo. Less than ten years of dishonor can crack a man like that. He’d go off and hide and brood. It would be either shoot himself when the blow fell — or that. I was like you at first.” He kicked at the fire. “This is silly. But I can’t laugh at it now, except when I’m around Miriam and the commodore. When he first showed up I didn’t have the slightest idea that I couldn’t handle him. I had handled him all right in Cairo. When I discovered I couldn’t handle him I lost my head a little. I went down and picked a row with him. Well, that was no good either. It’s the silliness of this that makes it bad. In Cairo he was the kind of man who combs his hair before he shaves, so his mirror will show an orderly picture. Can you understand some of this?”

“I’ll have to talk to him first,” I said. “He’s staying in the village?”

“He has a cottage on the hill above. It’s the first one on the left after you turn into the main road.” Ringgo dropped his cigarette into the fire and looked thoughtfully at me, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know how you and the commodore are going to get along. You can’t make jokes with him. He doesn’t understand them, and he’ll distrust you on that account.”

“I’ll try to be careful,” I promised. “No good offering this Sherry money?”

“Hell, no,” he said softly. “He’s too cracked for that.”

We took down the dog’s carcass, kicked the fire apart, and trod it out in the mud before we returned to the house.

V

The country was fresh and bright under clear sunlight the next morning. A warm breeze was drying the ground and chasing raw-cotton clouds across the sky.

At ten o’clock I set out afoot for Captain Sherry’s. I didn’t have any trouble finding his house, a pinkish stuccoed bungalow with a terra cotta roof, reached from the road by a cobbled walk.

A white-clothed table with two places set stood on the tiled veranda that stretched across the front of the bungalow.

Before I could knock, the door was opened by a slim black man, not much more than a boy, in a white jacket. His features were thinner than most American negroes’, aquiline, pleasantly intelligent.

“You’re going to catch colds lying around in wet roads,” I said, “if you don’t get run over.”

His mouth-ends ran towards his ears in a grin that showed me a lot of strong yellow teeth.

“Yes, sir,” he said, buzzing his s’s, rolling the r, bowing. “The capitaine have waited breakfast that you be with him. You do sit down, sir. I will call him.”

“Not dog meat?”

His mouth-ends ran back and up again and he shook his head vigorously.

“No, sir.” He held up his black hands and counted the fingers. “There is orange and kippers and kidneys grilled and eggs and marmalade and toast and tea or coffee. There is not dog meat.”

“Fine,” I said, and sat down in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

I had time to light a cigarette before Captain Sherry came out.

He was a gaunt tall man of forty. Sandy hair, parted in the middle, was brushed flat to his small head, above a sunburned face. His eyes were gray, with lower lids as straight as ruler-edges. His mouth was another hard straight line under a close-clipped sandy mustache. Grooves like gashes ran from his nostrils past his mouth-corners. Other grooves, just as deep, ran down his cheeks to the sharp ridge of his jaw. He wore a gaily striped flannel bathrobe over sand-colored pajamas.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, and gave me a semi-salute. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “Don’t get up. It will be some minutes before Marcus has breakfast ready. I slept late. I had a most abominable dream.” His voice was a deliberately languid drawl. “I dreamed that Theodore Kavalov’s throat had been cut from here to here.” He put bony fingers under his ears. “It was an atrociously gory business. He bled and screamed horribly, the swine.”

I grinned up at him, asking:

“And you didn’t like that?”

“Oh, getting his throat cut was all to the good, but he bled and screamed so filthily.” He raised his nose and sniffed. “That’s honeysuckle somewhere, isn’t it?”

“Smells like it. Was it throat-cutting that you had in mind when you threatened him?”

“When I threatened him,” he drawled. “My dear fellow, I did nothing of the sort. I was in Udja, a stinking Moroccan town close to the Algerian frontier, and one morning a voice spoke to me from an orange tree. It said: ‘Go to Farewell, in California, in the States, and there you will see Theodore Kavalov die.’ I thought that a capital idea. I thanked the voice, told Marcus to pack, and came here. As soon as I arrived I told Kavalov about it, thinking perhaps he would die then and I wouldn’t be hung up here waiting. He didn’t, though, and too late I regretted not having asked the voice for a definite date. I should hate having to waste months here.”

“That’s why you’ve been trying to hurry it up?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Schrecklichkeit,” I said, “rocky skulls, dog barbecues, vanishing corpses.”

“I’ve been fifteen years in Africa,” he said. “I’ve too much faith in voices that come from orange trees where no one is to try to give them a hand. You needn’t fancy I’ve had anything to do with whatever has happened.”

“Marcus?”

Sherry stroked his freshly shaven cheeks and replied:

“That’s possible. He has an incorrigible bent for the ruder sort of African horse-play. I’ll gladly cane him for any misbehavior of which you’ve reasonably definite proof.”

“Let me catch him at it,” I said, “and I’ll do my own caning.”

Sherry leaned forward and spoke in a cautious undertone:

“Be sure he suspects nothing till you’ve a firm grip on him. He’s remarkably effective with either of his knives.”

“I’ll try to remember that. The voice didn’t say anything about Ringgo?”

“There was no need. When the body dies, the hand is dead.”

Black Marcus came out carrying food. We moved to the table and I started on my second breakfast.

Sherry wondered whether the voice that had spoken to him from the orange tree had also spoken to Kavalov. He had asked Kavalov, he said, but hadn’t received a very satisfactory answer. He believed that voices which announced deaths to people’s enemies usually also warned the one who was to die. “That is,” he said, “the conventional way of doing it, I believe.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try to find out for you. Maybe I ought to ask him what he dreamed last night, too.”

“Did he look nightmarish this morning?”

“I don’t know. I left before he was up.”

Sherry’s eyes became hot gray points.

“Do you mean,” he asked, “that you’ve no idea what shape he’s in this morning, whether he’s alive or not, whether my dream was a true one or not?”

“Yeah.”

The hard line of his mouth loosened into a slow delighted smile.

“By Jove,” he said, “That’s capital! I thought — you gave me the impression of knowing positively that there was nothing to my dream, that it was only a meaningless dream.”

He clapped his hands sharply.

Black Marcus popped out of the door.

“Pack,” Sherry ordered. “The bald one is finished. We’re off.”

Marcus bowed and backed grinning into the house.

“Hadn’t you better wait to make sure?” I asked.

“But I am sure,” he drawled, “as sure as when the voice spoke from the orange tree. There is nothing to wait for now: I have seen him die.”

“In a dream.”

“Was it a dream?” he asked carelessly.

When I left, ten or fifteen minutes later, Marcus was making noises indoors that sounded as if he actually was packing.

Sherry shook hands with me, saying:

“Awfully glad to have had you for breakfast. Perhaps we’ll meet again if your work ever brings you to northern Africa. Remember me to Miriam and Dolph. I can’t sincerely send condolences.”

Out of sight of the bungalow, I left the road for a path along the hillside above, and explored the country for a higher spot from which Sherry’s place could be spied on. I found a pip, a vacant ramshackle house on a jutting ridge off to the northeast. The whole of the bungalow’s front, part of one side, and a good stretch of the cobbled walk, including its juncture with the road, could be seen from the vacant house’s front porch. It was a rather long shot for naked eyes, but with field glasses it would be just about perfect, even to a screen of over-grown bushes in front.

When I got back to the Kavalov house Ringgo was propped up on gay cushions in a reed chair under a tree, with a book in his hand.

“What do you think of him?” he asked. “Is he cracked?”

“Not very. He wanted to be remembered to you and Mrs. Ringgo. How’s the arm this morning?”

“Rotten. I must have let it get too damp last night. It gave me hell all night.”

“Did you see Captain Cat-and-mouse?” Kavalov’s whining voice came from behind me. “And did you find any satisfaction in that?”

I turned around. He was coming down the walk from the house. His face was more gray than brown this morning, but what I could see of his throat, above the v of a wing collar, was uncut enough.

“He was packing when I left,” I said. “Going back to Africa.”

VI

That day was Thursday. Nothing else happened that day.

Friday morning I was awakened by the noise of my bedroom door being opened violently.

Martin, the thin-faced valet, came dashing into my room and began shaking me by the shoulder, though I was sitting up by the time he reached my bedside.

His thin face was lemon-yellow and ugly with fear.

“It’s happened,” he babbled. “Oh, my God, it’s happened!”

“What’s happened?”

“It’s happened. It’s happened.”

I pushed him aside and got out of bed. He turned suddenly and ran into my bathroom. I could hear him vomiting as I pushed my feet into slippers.

Kavalov’s bedroom was three doors below mine, on the same side of the building.

The house was full of noises, excited voices, doors opening and shutting, though I couldn’t see anybody.

I ran down to Kavalov’s door. It was open.

Kavalov was in there, lying on a low Spanish bed. The bedclothes were thrown down across the foot.

Kavalov was lying on his back. His throat had been cut, a curving cut that paralleled the line of his jaw between points an inch under his ear lobes.

Where his blood had soaked into the blue pillow case and blue sheet it was purple as grape-juice. It was thick and sticky, already clotting.

Ringgo came in wearing a bathrobe like a cape.

“It’s happened,” I growled, using the valet’s words.

Ringgo looked dully, miserably, at the bed and began cursing in a choked, muffled, voice.

The red-faced blonde woman — Louella Qually, the housekeeper — came in, screamed, pushed past us, and ran to the bed, still screaming. I caught her arm when she reached for the covers.

“Let things alone,” I said.

“Cover him up. Cover him up, the poor man!” she cried.

I took her away from the bed. Four or five servants were in the room by now. I gave the housekeeper to a couple of them, telling them to take her out and quiet her down. She went away laughing and crying.

Ringgo was still staring at the bed.

“Where’s Mrs. Ringgo?” I asked.

He didn’t hear me. I tapped his good arm and repeated the question.

“She’s in her room. She — she didn’t have to see it to know what had happened.”

“Hadn’t you better look after her?”

He nodded, turned slowly, and went out.

The valet, still lemon-yellow, came in.

“I want everybody on the place, servants, farm hands, everybody downstairs in the front room,” I told him. “Get them all there right away, and they’re to stay there till the sheriff comes.”

“Yes, sir,” he said and went downstairs, the others following him.

I closed Kavalov’s door and went across to the library, where I phoned the sheriff’s office in the county seat. I talked to a deputy named Hilden. When I had told him my story he said the sheriff would be at the house within half an hour.

I went to my room and dressed. By the time I had finished, the valet came up to tell me that everybody was assembled in the front room — everybody except the Ringgos and Mrs. Ringgo’s maid.

I was examining Kavalov’s bedroom when the sheriff arrived. He was a white-haired man with mild blue eyes and a mild voice that came out indistinctly under a white mustache. He had brought three deputies, a doctor and a coroner with him.

“Ringgo and the valet can tell you more than I can,” I said when we had shaken hands all around. “I’ll be back as soon as I can make it. I’m going to Sherry’s. Ringgo will tell you where he fits in.”

In the garage I selected a muddy Chevrolet and drove to the bungalow. Its doors and windows were tight, and my knocking brought no answer.

I went back along the cobbled walk to the car, and rode down into Farewell. There I had no trouble learning that Sherry and Marcus had taken the two-ten train for Los Angeles the afternoon before, with three trunks and half a dozen bags that the village expressman had checked for them.

After sending a telegram to the Agency’s Los Angeles branch, I hunted up the man from whom Sherry had rented the bungalow.

He could tell me nothing about his tenants except that he was disappointed in their not staying even a full two weeks. Sherry had returned the keys with a brief note saying he had been called away unexpectedly.

I pocketed the note. Handwriting specimens are always convenient to have. Then I borrowed the keys to the bungalow and went back to it.

I didn’t find anything of value there, except a lot of fingerprints that might possibly come in handy later. There was nothing there to tell me where my men had gone.

I returned to Kavalov’s.

The sheriff had finished running the staff through the mill.

“Can’t get a thing out of them,” he said. “Nobody heard anything and nobody saw anything, from bedtime last night, till the valet opened the door to call him at eight o’clock this morning, and saw him dead like that. You know any more than that?”

“No. They tell you about Sherry?”

“Oh, yes. That’s our meat, I guess, huh?”

“Yeah. He’s supposed to have cleared out yesterday afternoon, with his black man, for Los Angeles. We ought to be able to find the work in that. What does the doctor say?”

“Says he was killed between three and four this morning, with a heavyish knife — one clean slash from left to right, like a left-handed man would do it.”

“Maybe one clean cut,” I agreed, “but not exactly a slash. Slower than that. A slash, if it curved, ought to curve up, away from the slasher, in the middle, and down towards him at the ends — just the opposite of what this does.”

“Oh, all right. Is this Sherry a southpaw?”

“I don’t know,” I wondered if Marcus was. “Find the knife?”

“Nary hide nor hair of it. And what’s more, we didn’t find anything else, inside or out. Funny a fellow as scared as Kavalov was, from all accounts, didn’t keep himself locked up tighter. His windows were open. Anybody could of got in them with a ladder. His door wasn’t locked.”

“There could be half a dozen reasons for that. He—”

One of the deputies, a big-shouldered blond man, came to the door and said:

“We found the knife.”

The sheriff and I followed the deputy out of the house, around to the side on which Kavalov’s room was situated. The knife’s blade was buried in the ground, among some shrubs that bordered a path leading down to the farm hands’ quarters.

The knife’s wooden handle — painted red — slanted a little toward the house. A little blood was smeared on the blade, but the soft earth had cleaned off most. There was no blood on the painted handle, and nothing like a fingerprint.

There were no footprints in the soft ground near the knife. Apparently it had been tossed into the shrubbery.

“I guess that’s all there is here for us,” the sheriff said. “There’s nothing much to show that anybody here had anything to do with it, or didn’t. Now we’ll look after this here Captain Sherry.

I went down to the village with him. At the post office we learned that Sherry had left a forwarding address: General Delivery, St. Louis, Mo. The postmaster said Sherry had received no mail during his stay in Farewell.

We went to the telegraph office, and were told that Sherry had neither received nor sent any telegrams. I sent one to the Agency’s St. Louis branch.

The rest of our poking around in the village brought us nothing — except we learned that most of the idlers in Farewell had seen Sherry and Marcus board the southbound two-ten train.

Before we returned to the Kavalov house a telegram came from the Los Angeles branch for me:

Sherry’s trunks and bags in baggage room here not yet called for are keeping them under surveillance.

When we got back to the house I met Ringgo in the hall, and asked him:

“Is Sherry left-handed?”

He thought, and then shook his head. “I can’t remember,” he said. “He might be. I’ll ask Miriam. Perhaps she’ll know — women remember things like that.”

When he came downstairs again he was nodding:

“He’s very nearly ambidextrous, but uses his left hand more than his right. Why?”

“The doctor thinks it was done with a left hand. How is Mrs. Ringgo now?”

“I think the worst of the shock is over, thanks.”

VII

Sherry’s baggage remained uncalled for in the Los Angeles passenger station all day Saturday. Late that afternoon the sheriff made public the news that Sherry and the black were wanted for murder, and that night the sheriff and I took a train south.

Sunday morning, with a couple of men from the Los Angeles police department, we opened the baggage. We didn’t find anything except legitimate clothing and personal belongings that told us nothing.

That trip paid no dividends.

I returned to San Francisco and had bales of circulars printed and distributed.

Two weeks went by, two weeks in which the circulars brought us nothing but the usual lot of false alarms.

Then the Spokane police picked up Sherry and Marcus in a Stevens Street rooming house.

Some unknown person had phoned the police that one Fred Williams living there had a mysterious black visitor nearly every day, and that their actions were very suspicious. The Spokane police had copies of our circular. They hardly needed the H. S. monograms on Fred Williams’ cuff links and handkerchiefs to assure them that he was our man.

After a couple of hours of being grilled, Sherry admitted his identity, but denied having murdered Kavalov.

Two of the sheriff’s men went north and brought the prisoners down to the county seat.

Sherry had shaved off his mustache. There was nothing in his face or voice to show that he was the least bit worried.

“I knew there was nothing more to wait for after my dream,” he drawled, “so I went away. Then, when I heard the dream had come true, I knew you johnnies would be hot after me — as if one can help his dreams — and I — ah — sought seclusion.”

He solemnly repeated his orange-tree-voice story to the sheriff and district attorney. The newspapers liked it.

He refused to map his route for us, to tell us how he had spent his time.

“No, no,” he said. “Sorry, but I shouldn’t do it. It may be I shall have to do it again some time, and it wouldn’t do to reveal my methods.”

He wouldn’t tell us where he had spent the night of the murder. We were fairly certain that he had left the train before it reached Los Angeles, though the train crew had been able to tell us nothing.

“Sorry,” he drawled. “But if you chaps don’t know where I was, how do you know that I was where the murder was?”

We had even less luck with Marcus. His formula was:

“Not understand the English very good. Ask the capitaine. I don’t know.”

The district attorney spent a lot of time walking his office floor, biting his finger nails, and telling us fiercely that the case was going to fall apart if we couldn’t prove that either Sherry or Marcus was within reach of the Kavalov house at, or shortly before or after, the time of the murder.

The sheriff was the only one of us who hadn’t a sneaky feeling that Sherry’s sleeves were loaded with assorted aces. The sheriff saw him already hanged.

Sherry got a lawyer, a slick looking pale man with hornrim glasses and a thin twitching mouth. His name was Schaeffer. He went around smiling to himself and at us.

When the district attorney had only thumb nails left and was starting to work on them, I borrowed a car from Ringgo and started following the railroad south, trying to learn where Sherry had left the train. We had mugged the pair, of course, so I carried their photographs with me.

I displayed those damned photographs at every railroad stop between Farewell and Los Angeles, at every village within twenty miles of the tracks on either side, and at most of the houses in between. And it got me nothing.

There was no evidence that Sherry and Marcus hadn’t gone through to Los Angeles.

Their train would have put them there at ten-thirty that night. There was no train out of Los Angeles that would have carried them back to Farewell in time to kill Kavalov. There were two possibilities: an airplane could have carried them back in plenty of time; and an automobile might have been able to do it, though that didn’t look reasonable.

I tried the airplane angle first, and couldn’t find a flyer who had had a passenger that night. With the help of the Los Angeles police and some operatives from the Continental’s Los Angeles branch, I had everybody who owned a plane — public or private — interviewed. All the answers were no.

We tried the less promising automobile angle. The larger taxicab and hire-car companies said, “No.” Four privately owned cars had been reported stolen between ten and twelve o’clock that night. Two of them had been found in the city the next morning: they couldn’t have made the trip to Farewell and back. One of the others had been picked up in San Diego the next day. That let that one out. The other was still loose, a Packard sedan. We got a printer working on post card descriptions of it.

To reach all the small-fry taxi and hire-car owners was quite a job, and then there were the private car owners who might have hired out for one night. We went into the newspapers to cover these fields.

We didn’t get any automobile information, but this new line of inquiry — trying to find traces of our men here a few hours before the murder — brought results of another kind.

At San Pedro (Los Angeles’s seaport, twenty-five miles away) a negro had been arrested at one o’clock on the morning of the murder. The negro spoke English poorly, but had papers to prove that he was Pierre Tisano, a French sailor. He had been arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge.

The San Pedro police said that the photograph and description of the man we knew as Marcus fit the drunken sailor exactly.

That wasn’t all the San Pedro police said.

Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.

The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph — without the mustache — and description were Henry Somerton’s.

Henry Somerton’s signature on the register of the hotel to which he had gone between his two visits to the police matched the handwriting in Sherry’s note to the bungalow’s owner.

It was pretty clear that Sherry and Marcus had been in San Pedro — a nine-hour train ride from Farewell — at the time that Kavalov was murdered.

Pretty clear isn’t quite clear enough in a murder job: I carried the San Pedro desk sergeant north with me for a look at the two men.

“Them’s them, all righty,” he said.

VIII

The district attorney ate up the rest of his thumb nails.

The sheriff had the bewildered look of a child who had held a balloon in his hand, had heard a pop, and couldn’t understand where the balloon had gone.

I pretended I was perfectly satisfied.

“Now we’re back where we started,” the district attorney wailed disagreeably, as if it was everybody’s fault but his, “and with all those weeks wasted.”

The sheriff didn’t look at the district attorney, and didn’t say anything.

I said:

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve made some progress.”

“What?”

“We know that Sherry and the dinge have alibis.”

The district attorney seemed to think I was trying to kid him. I didn’t pay any attention to the faces he made at me, and asked:

“What are you going to do with them?”

“What can I do with them but turn them loose? This shoots the case to hell.”

“It doesn’t cost the county much to feed them,” I suggested. “Why not hang on to them as long as you can, while we think it over? Something new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?”

He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity.

“They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.”

The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes.

“Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded.

“No, but you’ll see I’m right.”

I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison.

Three days later something new turned up.

A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his — Weeks’s — place early on the morning of the murder.

Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train.

At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip.

A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car.

Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons — one seventeen, one fifteen — there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed.

He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased.

We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing.

With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried.

Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely.

He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly, the little he had seen of him, looked something like Sherry, but perhaps he had been a little hasty in saying positively that it was Sherry. He wasn’t, now that he had had time to think it over, really sure that he had actually got a good look at the man’s face in the dim morning light. Finally, all that Weeks would swear to was that he had seen a man who had seemed to look a little bit like Sherry.

It was funny as hell.

The district attorney, having no nails left, nibbled his finger-bones.

The jury said, “Not guilty.”

Sherry was freed, forever in the clear so far as the Kavalov murder was concerned, no matter what might come to light later.

Marcus was released.

The district attorney wouldn’t say good-bye to me when I left for San Francisco.

IX

Four days after Sherry’s acquittal, Mrs. Ringgo was shown into my office.

She was in black. Her pretty, unintelligent, Oriental face was not placid. Worry was in it.

“Please, you won’t tell Dolph I have come here?” were the first words she spoke.

“Of course not, if you say not,” I promised and pulled a chair over for her.

She sat down and looked big-eyed at me, fidgeting with her gloves in her lap.

“He’s so reckless,” she said.

I nodded sympathetically, wondering what she was up to.

“And I’m so afraid,” she added, twisting her gloves. Her chin trembled. Her lips formed words jerkily: “They’ve come back to the bungalow.”

“Yeah?” I sat up straight. I knew who they were.

“They can’t,” she cried, “have come back for any reason except that they mean to murder Dolph as they did father. And he won’t listen to me. He’s so sure of himself. He laughs and calls me a foolish child, and tells me he can take care of himself. But he can’t. Not, at least, with a broken arm. And they’ll kill him as they killed father. I know it. I know it.”

“Sherry hates your husband as much as he hated your father?”

“Yes. That’s it. He does. Dolph was working for father, but Dolph’s part in the — the business that led up to Hugh’s trouble was more — more active than father’s. Will you — will you keep them from killing Dolph? Will you?”

“Surely.”

“And you mustn’t let Dolph know,” she insisted, “and if he does find out you’re watching them, you mustn’t tell him I got you to. He’d be angry with me. I asked him to send for you, but he—” She broke off, looking embarrassed: I supposed her husband had mentioned my lack of success in keeping Kavalov alive. “But he wouldn’t.”

“How long have they been back?”

“Since the day before yesterday.”

“Any demonstrations?”

“You mean things like happened before? I don’t know. Dolph would hide them from me.”

“I’ll be down tomorrow,” I promised. “If you’ll take my advice you’ll tell your husband that you’ve employed me, but I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

“And you won’t let them harm Dolph?”

I promised to do my best, took some money away from her, gave her a receipt, and bowed her out.

Shortly after dark that evening I reached Farewell.

X

The bungalow’s windows were lighted when I passed it on my way uphill. I was tempted to get out of my coupé and do some snooping, but was afraid that I couldn’t out-Indian Marcus on his own grounds, and so went on.

When I turned into the dirt road leading to the vacant house I had spotted on my first trip to Farewell, I switched off the coupé’s lights and crept along by the light of a very white moon overhead.

Close to the vacant house I got the coupé off the path and at least partly hidden by bushes.

Then I went up on the rickety porch, located the bungalow, and began to adjust my field glasses to it.

I had them partly adjusted when the bungalow’s front door opened, letting out a slice of yellow light and two people.

One of the people was a woman.

Another least turn of the set-screw and her face came clear in my eyes — Mrs. Ringgo.

She raised her coat collar around her face and hurried away down the cobbled walk. Sherry stood on the veranda looking after her.

When she reached the road she began running uphill, towards her house.

Sherry went indoors and shut the door.

I took the glasses away from my eyes and looked around for a place where I could sit. The only spot I could find where sitting wouldn’t interfere with my view of the bungalow was the porch-rail. I made myself as comfortable as possible there, with a shoulder against the corner post, and prepared for an evening of watchful waiting.

Two hours and a half later a man turned into the cobbled walk from the road. He walked swiftly to the bungalow, with a cautious sort of swiftness, and he looked from side to side as he walked.

I suppose he knocked on the door.

The door opened, throwing a yellow glow on his face, Dolph Ringgo’s face.

He went indoors. The door shut.

My watch-tower’s fault was that the bungalow could only be reached from it roundabout by the path and road. There was no way of cutting cross-country.

I put away the field glasses, left the porch, and set out for the bungalow. I wasn’t sure that I could find another good spot for the coupé, so I left it where it was and walked.

I was afraid to take a chance on the cobbled walk.

Twenty feet above it, I left the road and moved as silently as I could over sod and among trees, bushes and flowers. I knew the sort of folks I was playing with: I carried my gun in my hand.

All of the bungalow’s windows on my side showed lights, but all the windows were closed and their blinds drawn. I didn’t like the way the light that came through the blinds helped the moon illuminate the surrounding ground. That had been swell when I was up on the ridge getting cock-eyed squinting through glasses. It was sour now that I was trying to get close enough to do some profitable listening.

I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find — fifteen feet from the building — to think the situation over.

Crouching there, I heard something.

It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.

I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.

Mrs. Ringgo jumped, stopped dead still in the path, and then cried:

“Is Dolph in there? Is he? Is he?”

I was trying to tell her that he was by nodding, but she made so much noise with her Is he’s that I had to say “Yeah” out loud to make her hear.

I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.

You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate score-keeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.

Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.

Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.

Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amber rug some four feet away. His upper teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip, and he was coughing little stomach coughs as he wriggled.

At the other end of the room, Ringgo was upright on his knees, steadily working the trigger of a black revolver in his good hand. The pistol was empty. It went snap, snap, snap, snap foolishly, but he kept on working the trigger. His broken arm was still in the splints, but had fallen out of the sling and was hanging down. His face was puffy and florid with blood. His eyes were wide and dull. The white bone handle of a knife stuck out of his back, just over one hip, its blade all the way in. He was clicking the empty pistol at Marcus.

The black boy was on his feet, feet far apart under bent knees. His left hand was spread wide over his chest, and the black fingers were shiny with blood. In his right hand he held a white bone-handled knife — its blade a foot long — held it, knife-fighter fashion, as you’d hold a sword. He was moving toward Ringgo, not directly, but from side to side, obliquely, closing in with shuffling steps, crouching, his hand turning the knife restlessly, but holding the point always towards Ringgo. Marcus’s eyes were bulging and red-veined. His mouth was a wide grinning crescent. His tongue, far out, ran slowly around and around the outside of his lips. Saliva trickled down his chin.

He didn’t see us. He didn’t hear us. All of his world just then was the man on his knees, the man in whose back a knife — brother of the one in the black hand — was wedged.

Ringgo didn’t see us. I don’t suppose he even saw the black. He knelt there and persistently worked the trigger of his empty gun.

I jumped over Sherry and swung the barrel of my gun at the base of Marcus’s skull. It hit. Marcus dropped.

Ringgo stopped working the gun and looked surprised at me.

“That’s the idea; you’ve got to put bullets in them or they’re no good,” I told him, pulled the knife out of Marcus’s hand, and went back to pick up the Luger that Sherry had stopped trying to get.

Mrs. Ringgo ran past me to her husband.

Sherry was lying on his back now. His eyes were closed.

He looked dead, and he had enough bullet holes in him to make death a good guess.

Hoping he wasn’t dead, I knelt beside him — going around him so I could kneel facing Ringgo — and lifted his head up a little from the floor.

Sherry stirred then, but I couldn’t tell whether he stirred because he was still alive or because he had just died.

“Sherry,” I said sharply. “Sherry.”

He didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t even twitch.

I raised the fingers of the hand that was holding up his head, making his head move just a trifle.

“Did Ringgo kill Kavalov?” I asked the dead or dying man.

Even if I hadn’t known Ringgo was looking at me I could have felt his eyes on me.

“Did he, Sherry?” I barked into the still face.

The dead or dying man didn’t move.

I cautiously moved my fingers again so that his dead or dying head nodded, twice.

Then I made his head jerk back, and let it gently down on the floor again.

“Well,” I said, standing up and facing Ringgo, “I’ve got you at last.”

XI

I’ve never been able to decide whether I would actually have gone on the witness stand and sworn that Sherry was alive when he nodded, and nodded voluntarily, if it had been necessary for me to do so to convict Ringgo.

I don’t like perjury, but I knew Ringgo was guilty, and there I had him.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide.

Ringgo believed Sherry had nodded, and then, when Marcus gave the show away, there was nothing much for Ringgo to do but try his luck with a plea of guilty.

We didn’t have much trouble getting the story out of Marcus. Ringgo had killed his beloved capitaine. The black boy was easily persuaded that the law would give him his best revenge.

After Marcus had talked, Ringgo was willing to talk.

He stayed in the hospital until the day before his trial opened. The knife Marcus had planted in his back had permanently paralyzed one of his legs, though aside from that he recovered from the stabbing.

Marcus had three of Ringgo’s bullets in him. The doctors fished two of them out, but were afraid to touch the third. It didn’t seem to worry him. By the time he was shipped north to begin an indeterminate sentence in San Quentin for his part in the Kavalov murder he was apparently as sound as ever.

Ringgo was never completely convinced that I had ever suspected him before the last minute when I had come charging into the bungalow.

“Of course I had, right along,” I defended my skill as a sleuth. That was while he was still in the hospital. “I didn’t believe Sherry was cracked. He was one hard, sane-looking scoundrel. And I didn’t believe he was the sort of man who’d be worried much over any disgrace that came his way. I was willing enough to believe that he was out for Kavalov’s scalp, but only if there was some profit in it. That’s why I went to sleep and let the old man’s throat get cut. I figured Sherry was scaring him up — nothing more — to get him in shape for a big-money shake-down. Well, when I found out I had been wrong there I began to look around.

“So far as I knew, your wife was Kavalov’s heir. From what I had seen, I imagined your wife was enough in love with you to be completely in your hands. All right, you, as the husband of his heir, seemed the one to profit most directly by Kavalov’s death. You were the one who’d have control of his fortune when he died. Sherry could only profit by the murder if he was working with you.”

“But didn’t his breaking my arm puzzle you?”

“Sure. I could understand a phoney injury, but that seemed carrying it a little too far. But you made a mistake there that helped me. You were too careful to imitate a left-hand cut on Kavalov’s throat; did it by standing by his head, facing his body when you cut him, instead of by his body, facing his head, and the curve of the slash gave you away. Throwing the knife out the window wasn’t so good, either. How’d he happen to break your arm? An accident?”

“You can call it that. We had that supposed fight arranged to fit in with the rest of the play, and I thought it would be fun to really sock him. So I did. And he was tougher than I thought, tough enough to even up by snapping my arm. I suppose that’s why he killed Mickey too. That wasn’t on the schedule. On the level, did you suspect us of being in cahoots?”

I nodded.

“Sherry had worked the game up for you, had done everything possible to draw suspicion on himself, and then, the day before the murder, had run off to build himself an alibi. There couldn’t be any other answer to it: he had to be working with you. There it was, but I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t prove it till you were trapped by the thing that made the whole game possible — your wife’s love for you sent her to hire me to protect you. Isn’t that one of the things they call ironies of life?”

Ringgo smiled ruefully and said:

“They should call it that. You know what Sherry was trying on me, don’t you?”

“I can guess. That’s why he insisted on standing trial.”

“Exactly. The scheme was for him to dig out and keep going, with his alibi ready in case he was picked up, but staying uncaught as long as possible. The more time they wasted hunting him, the less likely they were to look elsewhere, and the colder the trail would be when they found he wasn’t their man. He tricked me there. He had himself picked up, and his lawyer hired that Weeks fellow to egg the district attorney into not dropping the case. Sherry wanted to be tried and acquitted, so he’d be in the clear. Then he had me by the neck. He was legally cleared forever. I wasn’t. He had me. He was supposed to get a hundred thousand dollars for his part. Kavalov had left Miriam something more than three million dollars. Sherry demanded one-half of it. Otherwise, he said, he’d go to the district attorney and make a complete confession. They couldn’t do anything to him. He’d been acquitted. They’d hang me. That was sweet.”

“You’d have been wise at that to have given it to him,” I said.

“Maybe. Anyway I suppose I would have given it to him if Miriam hadn’t upset things. There’d have been nothing else to do. But after she came back from hiring you she went to see Sherry, thinking she could talk him into going away. And he lets something drop that made her suspect I had a hand in her father’s death, though she doesn’t even now actually believe that I cut his throat.

“She said you were coming down the next day. There was nothing for me to do but go down to Sherry’s for a showdown that night, and have the whole thing settled before you came poking around. Well, that’s what I did, though I didn’t tell Miriam I was going. The showdown wasn’t going along very well, too much tension, and when Sherry heard you outside he thought I had brought friends, and — fireworks.”

“What ever got you into a game like that in the first place?” I asked. “You were sitting pretty enough as Kavalov’s son-in-law, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but it was tiresome being cooped up in that hole with him. He was young enough to live a long time. And he wasn’t always easy to get along with. I’d no guarantee that he wouldn’t get up on his ear and kick me out, or change his will, or anything of the sort.

“Then I ran across Sherry in San Francisco, and we got to talking it over, and this plan came out of it. Sherry had brains. On the deal back in Cairo that you know about, both he and I made plenty that Kavalov didn’t know about. Well, I was a chump. But don’t think I’m sorry that I killed Kavalov. I’m sorry I got caught. I’d done his dirty work since he picked me up as a kid of twenty, and all I’d got out of it was damned little except the hopes that since I’d married his daughter I’d probably get his money when he died — if he didn’t do something else with it.”

They hanged him.