The Dog with the Wooden Leg

Chapter III. Mysterious Footsteps.

“I can feel the sun going down,” Marty remarked to Dick. “It’s below treetop level now and sinking lower every minute. I can tell by the coolness setting in; I don’t have to ask anyone, like she says.” He reached down and knuckled the stone of the path. “Sure, there’s been shade on it for the past half hour. Time to go, I guess.”

He carefully knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thrust it into his pocket stem-first. He reached for the tin cup, shook it regretfully.

“Didn’t have much of a day today, did we? Won’t have any changing to do at the cigar store this time. Maybe we better pick another bench tomorrow—”

He broke off short, listening. “Here’s someone coming now, ’way off. I’ll ask him what time he’s got, just to make doubly sure.”

The tread he had detected was still so far away that probably a person with normal vision and whose hearing therefore wasn’t so acutely developed as Marty’s, wouldn’t have been able to hear it at all. But the bush of evening had fallen on the air, the breeze was coming from that direction, and the soft scrape of shoe leather carried clearly to Marty’s sensitized faculties.

He sat back on the bench waiting for the stranger to reach the spot. The tread came on a little closer, but strangely enough without growing proportionately louder, almost as though it were being purposely muffled. Then suddenly it ceased altogether. A moment or two went by, and it never resumed again where it had broken off.

“That’s funny,” Marty soliloquized “He didn’t turn around and go back, because I would have heard bis steps receding. And he didn’t branch off in another direction, because I would have heard that, too, and anyway there are no other paths leading away from this one hereabouts. Must be standing there stock-still in the middle of the path. Either that or he stepped off it a minute onto the grass. Oh, well, he’ll step on again in a minute from where he left off. He was coming this way, so he’ll have to finish coming this way.”

But the soft tread never resumed, was left hanging in midair, as it were. As two, three, four minutes ticked by, the sense of expectancy, of waiting for it to continue from where it had left off, began to get on Marty’s nerves. He didn’t turn his head that way, because in his case that wouldn’t have helped; he had no vision to project. But he did sit with his head slightly bowed, listening with every nerve in his body. “What the devil happened to that fellow, was he snatched bodily up into the air?” he thought.

He reached down finally and lightly explored the side of Dick’s head. The dog’s ears were stiffly perked, its muzzle was pointing that way. So Dick’d heard it, too. A little uneasiness began to tinge what until now had just been idle curiosity with Marty. Whoever that was he’d heard approaching furtively along the path, that person was still around some place, taking pains not to let himself be heard. Why?

Marty didn’t move there on the bench, but he was as alive as a dynamo inside himself, straining his ears to catch every slightest vibration. Suddenly he was rewarded. A slight hiss reached him, not distinct enough even to be a rustle; the sound grass makes when a foot is moved through it. But what was important was, it was much nearer than where the footfalls had last sounded from, and it was no longer anywhere near the path, it was around well in back of them now.

So somebody was stalking him, lurking back there in the lengthening shadows of the park. Again why? What did he want from a helpless old blind man sitting on a bench? Uneasiness became fear, as a twig snapped, still nearer than the first warning rustle of grass had been. The skulker was doing his best not to be heard, and he was being pretty successful at it, only two little revelatory sounds in all that distance that he’d covered since leaving the open path, and even those two an ordinary person would have missed entirely.

Marty was breathing a little quicker now, but he still hadn’t moved a muscle. He knew it was hopeless to try to get up and run for it. What chance had he against even the slowest pursuer? To cry out for help would be equally futile; the twilight must be deepening every moment, the governesses and the children had all gone long ago, he could tell by the utter, complete silence there was no longer a living soul around this part of the park, Dick, of course, would be able to give a good account of himself if it came to the worst, but a knife or weighted club might enter into it, and he didn’t want harm to come to his faithful companion.

The best strategy was the old, old one of pretending unawareness and tap-tapping away in slow retreat, if he was allowed to. To show that he was on guard would only bring on whatever threatened all the quicker. He thrust the decoy cup a little farther from him along the bench. “If he’s figuring on holding me up, let him see I haven’t taken in a cent since I’ve been sitting here.” But somehow he had a feeling that the shadowy presence back there behind him wasn’t a mere footpad; he wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble. He would simply have snatched up the tin cup and run off.

Dick gave a sudden, single resentful bark. Marty understood it perfectly.

“So he’s hiding behind a tree or something, and you caught him looking out at us, huh?” he breathed. Then in an unnaturally loud voice, to cover up the warning signal, he exclaimed: “What’s the matter, boy, you getting hungry?” He felt for the dog’s collar, gave it a restraining tug, whispered: “Sh, Dick, quiet. I know all about it. Come on; let’s get out of here.”

He got up from the bench with elaborate slowness, pointed his stick to the ground, took a preliminary shuffle or two into mid-path, but he was quivering inside like a compass needle. Dick took up his position against the outside of his master’s right leg; he had a job to do now, and the mysterious skulker was forgotten. Besides, his master had ordered him to be silent, and one command was all Dick ever needed.

They advanced slowly some twenty yards down the path, and nothing happened. Had they left him lurking back there, or was he creeping on after them? It was important to know that, and there was only one way of finding out: reproducing the original utter stillness that had betrayed his presence. Even the slight tap of Dick’s leg, the shuffle of his own feet, was enough to mar that. But Marty was as cagy in his way as anyone.

He stopped short, stooped over, pretending to pick up and examine a nonexistent twig lying in the path and which he had felt through the worn sole of his shoe. Actually he was listening as he had never listened before, with not a move from Dick to disturb him. Was that tread coming on after him? Nothing for a long minute. Then—

Shuh-chuh. It was. A grain of grit or two between the furtively oncoming sole and the pathway cement made a microscopic grinding sound that was all that Marty needed. As tiny a noise as the beak of a bird pecking at a grain of corn. So tiny that maybe the very man himself who made it didn’t hear it. But then he didn’t have Marty’s ears: no one else did.

So he was back on the path again, and at about the position of the bench they had just quitted. Would he close in, now that his attempt at creeping up behind them and ambushing them had been frustrated by their getting up and moving away? No, evidently not. Not another sound came, so seeing them halted there ahead of him, he had evidently halted, too, was waiting for their next move. It was a regular cat-and-mouse play. The skin on the back of Marty’s neck crawled involuntarily. It wasn’t physical fear; as said before, he had Dick with him. It was the eeriness, the inexplicability of the thing, that had him terrified. It was no footpad, he was sure of that by now, or he would have made his larcenous attack before Marty could get any closer to the perimeter of the park and the safety of lights and passers-by; and he hadn’t. Was it some maniac?

Marty pretended to throw the imaginary twig he had been fiddling with away and struck out once more, still slowly, calmly, to all appearance unaware that he was being followed.

“Take it easy, now, boy,” he whispered to the dog. “If we can make that exit, I think we’ll be all right. He won’t come on any farther than that.”

Slowly they followed the twisting roundabout course of the pathway, and twice more Marty stopped to listen, once pretending to adjust Dick’s collar, another time pretending to retie his own shoelace. Evidently the nemesis had learned his lesson by that single revelatory bark Dick had given back there; he stayed so far behind them that even the dog wasn’t aware of his presence any more. But Marty could hear that soft whisper of a tread each time, feeling its way after them, stopping way back there when they stopped, but never quickly enough to avoid one last betraying footfall that sent its message to Marty.

“If I only had your eyes or you only had my voice,” he sighed to Dick.

The hum of traffic outside the park, far off at first, slowly drew nearer, louder, finally swirled protectively about them with a roar and a reek of gasoline as they came out the entrance and Dick nudged him to a stop at the curbing. There were pin points of sweat on Marty’s face.

“We made it,” he murmured.

Where was the stalker now? Was he standing there just inside the entrance behind them, looking frustratedly out after them, beyond his reach? Would he turn around and slink back into the evil shadow that had conjured him up? Or would he keep on after them, right up to their own door, right up to where they lived? “How’ll I know?” Marty said to himself, with renewed apprehension at the thought that he might be unwittingly bringing home some danger to Celia. “How’ll I be able to tell, with dozens of other footsteps around me, unless I identify his tread first?” And there hadn’t been enough of it to go by so far; not two good clear-cut steps in succession.

The traffic roar suddenly died out to a pulsing of waiting motors, there was a sharp click from the automatic light stanchion on the opposite corner, and Dick nudged him over the curb and on. Marty listened all the way over, but nothing followed across the asphalt. He climbed the opposite curb, the light switch clicked back again to green. Then just before the waiting motors raced into motion, and before they grew loud enough to drown it out, there was a quick passage of steps across, hurrying to beat traffic and therefore more unguarded.

About two dozen in succession, as clear as a bell, and Marty drank in every last one of them. A slight tick went with them, so there were metal tips on the soles. The fellow came down a little heavier on one foot than the other, one was a counterpoint to the other. And lastly and most important, Marty had counted three between each two footfalls, so that meant the man had good long legs; that gave Marty his pace. A medium-height man was usually two; a shorty, one. Three would be easy to keep track of, no matter how many other footsteps cluttered up the sidewalk. Three wasn’t often met with, three meant he was a good six feet or over. Marty had got all he needed out of that one incautious passage against the traffic light. He, the shadower, knew he was following a blind man, so he should have known better.

All the way down the first block that step, one-two-three, step, one-two-three, hung on after them, not so far behind as in the park, but at about ten yards distance now. Sometimes other steps blotted it out, but it always came through again to Marty’s keen ears. He stopped, just to make doubly sure, to test it, and it alone of all the others, stopped, too.

He knew that if he went up to a cop and complained someone was following him, the first thing the cop would say was: “But you’re blind. How can you tell if someone is or not?” Or if to humor him, the cop escorted him up to his own door, that would be the very thing Marty didn’t want, that would reveal where he lived.

“I’m not licked yet,” he muttered grimly to the dog. “I’m going to lose him if it takes all night. After all, I’m one up on him; I know that he’s tailing me, but he doesn’a know that I know. Pop Sabbatino’s market has a back entrance on an alley. He’ll see us go in there, but he’ll never see us come out again.”

The third crossing after the park was where he had to turn off the straightaway to get to Sabbatino’s; he knew that much. But he had to get the idea across to Dick. Dick was training to lead him home the shortest way; he didn’t know anything about detours. And if the watcher in the background noticed them disputing about it, he’d catch on what was up right away.

Marty turned left. Dick immediately got in front of him and tried to block him, head him back in the way they had been going.

“Cut it out,” Marty whispered tensely; “he’ll see you. Sabbatino. Sabbatino, Dick. Don’t you get it?”

The dog had been there with him, of course, on errands for Celia. But Dick wasn’t used to going there from the park, he was used to going there from the flat. He wouldn’t budge, thinking Marty had lost his bearings and it was up to him to set him right. And behind them, eyes were watching every move the two made, as they jockeyed stubbornly for leadership.

Suddenly Marty remembered a phrase Celia usually tacked on at the end of her instructions: “And a piece of liver for Dick.” He repeated it now.

The dog understood, gave in. They trudged up the side street toward their new destination.

There was a moment or two of silence in their wake.

“He’s watching us from the corner, letting us have our heads,” said Marty shrewdly.

Then on it came again, step, one-two-three, step, one-two-three. The dog nudged Marty aside again, toward a smell of oranges and fresh green vegetables, and the sidewalk underfoot changed to wooden flooring sprinkled with sawdust. A cash register trilled somewhere nearby.

A booming Italian voice hailed them heartily. “Hello, Marty! What’sa it gonna be tonight?”

“Just stopped in to say hello,” said Marty noncommitally. No sense taking Sabbatino into his confidence; the latter would probably tell him he was just imagining things. All these people with eyesight were always so sure they knew better than a blind man. He drummed his fingers on the glass counter top for a minute or two, to give the shadower time to look in and reassure himself that he was in there; then he would probably cringe back out of sight again, like a cat watching a mouse hole.

“Anyone looking in from the street?” Marty asked finally.

“Huh? Nomebody.”

“Sure? Take another look.”

“Issa no one there,” insisted the bewildered Sabbatino.

“Then take me over to the back door, Sabbatino; I’ll go out that way.”

“What’s a matt,’ you in troub’?” But the storekeeper did as he asked.

“No,” said Marty, “I’m not in trouble, and I aim to stay that way. Just sick of people gaping at me and Dick. Anyone looking in yet?”

“I can’t a tell, canno see the street from here, issa counter full of can’ goods ina way.”

“Good,” said Marty. “If anyone steps in the next ten-fifteen minutes and asks you what became of me, you never saw me, you don’t even know who I am.”

The back door of Sabbatino’s closed behind them, and Dick led him down a narrow delivery passage between two buildings to the next street over. They rounded the corner of that and rejoined the street they lived on, but above their house now, and not below it. Marty stood and listened a minute. Silence all around them; they’d finally thrown that step, one-two-three, off the track.

“It worked,” Marty exulted. “Now hurry up; let’s get in out of the open while we have the chance!”

The two of them all but ran the remaining distance to their door, Dick nearly tripping him up when it came time to turn him aside finally toward the right entrance. Marty lurched inside, drew a great breath of relief as he felt the walls of the narrow entrance hall safe around him and knew that he was screened from the street.

“I don’t know what that was all about,” he panted, “but I sure didn’t like it, and I’m staying indoors from now on!”