The Talking Clock

Chapter Seven

“New York license plates,” said Johnny Fletcher, stepping out from the foliage at the side of the road. “It’s the same car that was going north a few minutes ago.”

“This one had a dame,” Sam Cragg said.

“So did the first. All alone. And not bad at all… There it turns…”

Sam headed back for the trees, but Johnny remained on the road. “Let’s see what it’s all about,” he called to Sam.

The car was an olive-green coupe. As it hurtled down upon Johnny the driver blasted the air with the horn and began applying brakes. Johnny stepped to the shoulder of the road and the coupe squealed past and made a quick turn in the road.

It slipped up behind him. “Lift, Mister?” called the girl in the coupe.

Johnny pointed to Sam Cragg and smiled. “There’s two of us.”

“’S all right,” said the girl. “I’m not afraid.”

Johnny shrugged. “Okay, lady. We’re not either. Come on, Sam…”

He opened the door and slipped in beside the girl. Sam Cragg followed warily. It was a tight fit in the coupe, but if the girl didn’t mind, Johnny most certainly didn’t. She was pretty young, not more than nineteen or twenty. Blond and with nice, fresh features.

She shifted into second, zoomed into high and sent the coupe hurtling southward. “Cars are few up this way,” she said. “I passed you and got to thinking that it was pretty far to the next town.”

“It’s a lot farther to where we’re going.”

“How far is that? Minneapolis?”

“New York.”

“Why, I’m from New York!”

“I saw the license. Uh… headin’ there now?”

“Not exactly. I… I have some business… I mean, I’m visiting up here at a resort. Near… Brooklands.”

Johnny could feel Sam’s body against his shudder. He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Brooklands is back a ways, isn’t it?”

Her face turned for an instant to him. He saw that it was clouded. “Why,” she said, hesitantly, “don’t… you know?”

He shook his head. “No. I’ve never been there.” He added instantly. “Maybe I have at that. Yeah.”

The wheel swerved just a little.

Johnny said, gently, “I think you’d better let us out. You’re pretty young for this sort of thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the New York license plates, the fact that you passed us going north, came back, passed again and returned. To pick us up… for a ride?”

“Johnny,” exclaimed Sam in alarm.

Johnny nudged him to be quiet. “You’re the Kid’s… girl?”

She gasped. “Then you are! I knew it. I had a hunch, when I saw you popping into the woods the first time I passed you. You’re the men who were with Tom…”

“Who were in jail with him, when it happened. Well… do you think we kill — did it?”

The wheel swerved wildly and her foot loosened its pressure on the accelerator. Johnny said, quickly, “We didn’t. But if we had, you shouldn’t have… picked us up. You’re just—”

“Who did it?” she cried, fiercely. “If you two didn’t, who did?”

“There was another man in jail. A tramp…”

“A tramp? An ordinary… tramp? Are you sure?”

Johnny shrugged. “I was at the time. You see, the Kid and this tramp were already in jail when we were tossed in. I didn’t pay much attention to the tramp, because that’s just what he looked like. An old-time bindle stiff.” His nose wrinkled. “But the Kid… well, I could see that he wasn’t used to anything like that. We got pretty friendly. He’d mentioned that the authorities had notified his family…”

“That was two days ago. I reached Brooklands this morning… an hour after you… an hour after you ran away.”

“We’ve been doing Daniel Boone stuff all day,” Johnny said ruefully. “Uh… what’re they saying back there? That me and Sam did it?”

She nodded. “All three of you.”

“Three? Um. They think we were all together. And… the Kid?”

Her mouth trembled for a moment, but then she stiffened it. “Choked to death…”

Johnny put his hand into his coat pocket and fingered the pawn ticket that young Tom Quisenberry had given him. He kept it in his pocket.

He said: “What about his family?”

“His father’s on the way to Brooklands. Probably just getting there now, since he went by train, I drove. Thirty hours straight through from New York.”

Johnny grunted. “What about his mother?”

“There’s a stepmother. She… well, it is mainly because of her that Tom left home. But there’s Tom’s grandfather, Simon Quisenberry. He thought a lot of Tom.”

“Simon Quisenberry? Would he be the big clock and watch man?”

“Yes. He owns the Quisenberry Clock Company. He… he collects antique clocks, too. He’s pretty old — and sick. As a matter of fact, he’s not expected to live more than a few days more.”

They were approaching a small town, a tiny hamlet really, for it did not contain more than forty or fifty buildings. The girl slowed up going through and Johnny saw the state trooper standing beside his motorcycle at a filling station.

He frowned and looked in the rear-vision mirror. The trooper was rolling his bike out to the concrete slab. He said to the girl:

“Step on it. That cop’s coming.”

Sam groaned. “Here we go!”

They were slammed back against the leather upholstery, as the girl gave the coupe the gas. Johnny saw the speedometer needle leap from forty-five to fifty-five then to sixty and beyond.

“He’s coming,” he said. “Slow up when you take the curve ahead and we’ll hop out.”

“But you can’t!…” the girl cried desperately.

“Got to,” said Johnny grimly. “We can’t afford to be taken back. Slow down!”

The car zoomed around the curve and the brakes began squealing as the girl applied them. Sam had the door open before the car came to a halt.

Johnny crowded him. “I’ve got something of the Kid’s!” he cried. “Meet us in Columbus, Ohio…”

Sam leaped to the road shoulder, missed his footing and plunged into a ditch. Johnny jumped, ran headlong to the fringe of brush near-by. In the distance he heard the put-put-put of a roaring motorcycle.

The girl was meshing gears, zooming her car away.

“Duck, Sam!” cried Johnny.

The motorcycle came around the turn as they gained shelter.

Then it was run again. The motorcycle would overtake the girl and she’d tell the trooper that she had picked up a couple of hitchhikers, but that they had dropped off. The cop would come back, search for them a while, then scoot back to the hamlet and turn in the alarm.

In a little while they would be beating the woods here.

Johnny figured out the time element and thought that he had a half hour before the search would become really intensive. When they reached the graveled parallel secondary road a half mile back of the concrete pavement, he went into a trot that had Sam Cragg panting and groaning before they had covered a quarter mile. Then Johnny’s perseverance was rewarded. An old, battered flivver of the vintage 1928 was standing in the front yard of a ramshackle frame house.

Johnny went boldly up to it, climbed in and started the motor. He backed the car out to the road where Sam was waiting as a man came running out of the house waving and yelling. Clamping his jaw grimly, Johnny turned the car in the road.

“Come on, Sam!” he ordered.

Sam piled in, complaining. “Car stealing, now!”

“Better than a murder charge, Sam!”

He roared the car up the graveled road at the terrific speed of thirty-two miles an hour. Two miles ahead, he turned right, went three miles, then turned right again.

“Hey, you’re going back north!” Sam cried.

“I know. That’s one direction they won’t expect us to go. If the gas will only hold out… Damn, it shows empty.”

He stopped the car and investigated the tank. There were two or three gallons in it. They did not register because the indicator was broken.

Relieved, Johnny started out again. Stopping again, after a few miles, he consulted his road map acquired from Clarence Hackett, the lemon extract man. He located their position, then turned due east.

Twenty minutes later, still rolling along a secondary graveled road, he said, “Well, here we go into Wisconsin. The cops here shouldn’t be fussy about us, since we haven’t done anything in their state.”

He didn’t know that by crossing a state line in a stolen automobile he had violated a Federal statute. It was just as well that he didn’t know it, for after a few minutes the motor of the flivver coughed and spit and then expired. The gas tank was bone dry.

They pushed the car to the side of the road. “Here we go, again,” Johnny said.

“It’ll be dark in a few minutes,” Sam said, suggestively.

“Yes? Well, as nearly as I can figure, we’re ten to fifteen miles from Spooner, Wisconsin.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That shows your ignorance, Sam. Spooner, Wisconsin happens to be a railroad division point. All the freight trains stop there. Catch on?”

“So now we ride the rods,” Sam said, in disgust.

“We don’t have to. We can walk. I’d guess that it wasn’t more than fourteen hundred and fifty miles to New York.”

“We ride the rods. But what about food?”

“Tomorrow, pal. Tonight we travel.”