The Nameless Something

CHAPTER IV Tough Tactics

NEXT morning Bud Gregory shambled into the room in which Murfree had been placed, his craggy features woebegone. "Well?" Murfree said sourly.

"Mr. Murfree," said Bud Gregory miserably. "Those fellas certainly fooled me. That squinty-eyed fella, he told me they was good fellas. I been makin' out right good, bettin' on him in the dirt-track races. I ain't had to mend a car in a coupla weeks. I been eatin' hawg-meat and drinkin' beer and not botherin' nobody. But he fooled me!"

"Evidently," said Murfree. His head was horribly sore where it had been hit. He was sick with impotent fury.

He knew, now, that his guess in the car had been right. His captors were simply criminals. They could not see beyond that personal benefit any more than Bud Gregory could see beyond his personal aversion to sheriffs, policemen, and regularly scheduled work.

"He told me," mourned Bud Gregory, "that if I'd take that dinkus off his racin' car an' put it on another one, so's it'd work the same, that his frien's'd pay me a hundred dollars an' ten dollars a day for the use of it. But now they brought me up here 'and they say I got to fix cars thataway for all three of 'em, and if I don't, they'll fill me full of lead!"

He looked at Murfree as if for sympathy. But Murfree had none for him. When he'd waked from his unwholesome sleep, the night before, it was because the car had stopped. It had stopped here, and even in the darkness Murfree had known it was high in the mountains.

The air here was thin and cold. There was the feel of mountains all about. There was a stone wall and a locked doorway, and he'd insisted upon an interview and the results were unsatisfying.

This was a hideout, much more elaborately fitted out than was to be expected of a party of bandits, but their equipment did not mean greater intelligence. His desperate argument for the release of Bud Gregory and himself that they might tackle the menace facing all America, had been laughed at. It wasn't believable. He couldn't even tell them what sort of device he wanted Bud Gregory to make for the defense of America. He didn't know.

So his arguments were dismissed as amusingly phony. His captors wanted the getaway cars Bud Gregory could fix up for them. They couldn't imagine Bud Gregory as usually employed on anything else. They laughed at Murfree, dizzy and sick from having been knocked out, and put off until morning the question of what they should do with so ridiculously implausible a government man —or to them—detective.

Murfree glared at Bud Gregory.

"Just what do you think they're going to do to me?" Murfree asked bitterly.

Bud Gregory blinked. He had been so absorbed in his own troubles—actual forced labor under threat of death—that he had not thought about Murfree.

"I dunno," answered Gregory.

"Holdup men!" said Murfree savagely, "Robbers! Thieves! They'll stick up a bank. shoot down anybody who interferes, and streak it away in the cars you'll fix up for them—cars that can dodge through traffic the cops can't follow through, and flee faster than the cops can follow. That's the idea, isn't it?"

Bud Gregory blinked again.

"But sooner or later the cops will track them down! And you don't like sheriffs and policemen? You'll be in a nice fix when the cops arrive and find you working for them!" Bud Gregory squirmed.

"Besides all that, there'll be my murder to account for!" Murfree went on angrily. "I know them now! Do you think they'll turn me loose to tell of their plans and methods? No! They're going to kill me, and you'll be in a jam on that account! I told you I didn't have any detectives with me. I didn't. But plenty of detectives knew where I was going and who I was looking for!

"If you'd played ball with me, everything would have been all square for you. But—I went to look for you. I've vanished. They'll find me murdered, and you in the gang who murdered me. They'll credit you with murdering me, and they'll hang you!"

PART of this was nonsense, and the rest of it was bluff. Murfree was furiously certain that he'd be killed, and he knew that no police work was going on anywhere in the United States, beyond an attempt to prevent looting in the cities and some efforts to preserve order among the hordes of refugees. But Bud Gregory would not realize that.

"And if the law doesn't hang you," Murfree finished, in fine wrath, "your friends will kill you sooner or later. When you're no more use to them, do you think they'll turn you loose to talk, either? Do you think they'll pay you ten dollars a day for what you've done, when a three-cent cartridge will settle the account? Oh, no! You're a dead man the same as I am—unless you do something!"

"But Mr. Murfree!" said Bud Gregory plaintively. "What can I do? All I want is not to bother nobody and not have nobody bother me."

"You might work out some sort of weapon, hang it!" Murfree snarled. Then he said savagely, "Have you had breakfast?"

Bud Gregory brightened.

"Yes, suh! After they ate, they told me to fix somethin' for myself. I opened up a couple of cans of beans. Sure! I made out all right."

"I didn't!" snapped Murfree.

He was acutely aware that he was not being dignified. But he was filled with the particularly corrosive and horrible fury of a man who is impotent to act in an all-important emergency because of an absurdity. The United States was in the most deadly danger in its history, in fact, perhaps in the only deadly danger in all its history. Its only hope lay in a semi-illiterate mountaineer, whose only desire was to sit in utter uselessness.

Murfree's own prospective murder did not cause him one-tenth of the raging revolt he felt for the idiocy that seemed to rule the cosmos. He was, in fact, half crazy with rebellion at mankind and his own maddening sensation of futility. .

"Get me something to eat," he snapped. "Coffee, anyhow. They'll shoot me this morning to save the trouble. of feeding me. If you had the brains of a goldfish, you'd end this situation in seconds! But you won't do a thing! You'll stand by and watch them kill me, then you'll meekly do whatever they tell you to do, and if the police don't catch you first and hang you, these thugs will murder you offhand when they're through with you. Get out and bring me some coffee!"

Bud Gregory shambled unhappily out of the room. It was seemingly a very casual kind of confinement that restrained Murfree, but when he gazed out of the windows of his room, he grew dizzy. There was a drop of several hundred feet from the window-sill.

This hideout was a small house within a high stone wall above sheer wilderness. It was somewhere on the side of a mountain, apparently on a bold spur jutting out from a precipitous cliff.

As a matter of fact, Murfree learned later that it had been built by a motion-picture director with a wife for respectability and redheads for a hobby, and that it had been acquired for a hideout by his present hosts after the director had been extensively shot up by them, for hire.

There was certainly no escape on this side. Bud Gregory had come in by a seemingly unlocked door, but Murfree was cagey. He peered cautiously out of his door, and then ventured into the next room. He saw why his door did not need to be barred.

The rooms of the house opened on a patio, a courtyard, and a rising mountainside showed on only one side. With what he'd seen from his window, everything was clear. The house was built on a spur sticking out of a precipice, and there was empty space on three sides. It could only be left toward the mountain, and that way was undoubtedly barred. And of course, it could only be approached from the mountain, which made for privacy for a man with a hobby, or security for men with bad consciences.

MORE immediately daunting, though, was the fact that two out of three of his captors were out in that patio. They looked as if they had hangovers and were in a particularly foul mood. As Murfree watched, the beefy racing-driver strolled out and joined them, and the three of them snarled at Bud Gregory, who apologetically shambled out of sight, while the three continued to snap at each other. It was obvious that all was not sweetness and light in this place. The thugs argued profanely. After a moment Murfree caught words.

"He's lyin'! He says he's got to have some parts. Let 'im take a radio to pieces and get 'em. If he don't fix our cars the way we want 'em, let's beat him up!"

The racing driver began to rage.

"Since he don't think we mean it, we could haul his friend out and let Gregory see what'll happen to him if he gets stubborn," he said. "Mebbe that'll make him work!"

Murfree felt a little cold chill and a monstrous rage. They were going to shoot him in cold blood to scare Bud Gregory. And there was absolutely nothing to be done about it.

Then he saw Bud Gregory's head. He'd stopped inside the house on the farther side of the courtyard. He'd listened to them. And his jaw had dropped open. He looked abysmally scared. He vanished.

Maybe he'd duck out. Maybe he'd improvise some incredible device that would open doors, and flee, leaving Murfree to be killed out of hand because he was known to be a government man and was believed to be a detective. If Bud did escape, he would hide again with a passionate earnestness, avoiding police and sheriffs and saying nothing whatever of what he knew.

In that case, the United States was finished. Or if it survived, it would be only as the mutilated remnant of itself. Murfree's own death was the most trivial of incidents in the holocaust certain to occur.

Time passed. The three in the courtyard drank from pocket flasks. One of them pulled out a blued-steel weapon and looked at it reflectively. That would kill Murfree. They discussed some plan they meant to carry out when Bud Gregory had given them uncatchable getaway cars. They cheered up as they talked.

Bud Gregory remained absent. Presently one of them snarled into the doorway into which he had vanished. After a moment Bud came out, holding placatingly a square bit of plank on which was a distinctly messy assembly of small radio parts. He expostulated nervously. He couldn't work so fast, and he needed some parts.

"You're a liar!" snarled the beefy man. "Go get that other guy and bring 'im here. We're gonna show you somethin'!"