Two Clues: 1. The Clue of the Runaway Blonde; 2. The Case of the Hungry Horse

1

Cold afternoon sunlight made a carpet of long shadows back of the eucalyptus trees along the road as Sam Beckett opened the gate of the old Higbee place and drove his tractor into the eighty-acre field.

Things had been moving swiftly. Only the night before, the Higbee heirs had finally quit squabbling long enough to agree on a selling price. John Farnham, the realtor, had made a hurried trip to see Beckett the next morning. Within a few hours, Beckett had gone over the property again, and the heirs had signed on the dotted line, the money went into title escrow, and Sam turned his horses into the Higbee place to pasture. Now he was starting plowing. He’d work until midnight, or longer, if he didn’t get too sleepy.

Out in the center of the field the old homestead was hemmed in by big shade trees. The dirt road ran to it in a diagonal fine from the gate. But Beckett had no use for the big rambling house. It would cost more to fix it up than it was worth.

He lowered the plow and started up the tractor. As he plowed up roads and green-sod with utter impartiality, the rich black soil rolled out in smooth billowing streams. The welcome smell of moist, fertile earth filled his nostrils.

Low, sullen clouds drifted by overhead and to the east. Only in the west, where a wind from the ocean was temporarily pushing back the heavy clouds, was there a strip of blue sky. And the setting sun, glinting through under the clouds, turned the lower dragging wisps of moisture to a reddish purple which held a trace of orange, a color peculiar to wintry sunsets in Southern California.

The monotony of the tractor’s motor, the steady strain of watching the furrow, lulled Sam Beckett into a state of half-hypnotism where minutes marched by unnoticed.

The long shadows dissolved in dusk. Sam Beckett switched on the headlights and kept going. His eyes were fixed on the strip between grass and plowed earth, keeping it lined up just to the left of the right front wheel.

The chill night air flowed past his legs and stung his cheeks. His hands grasped the wheel until the knuckles felt numb, but his eyes remained automatically fixed on that slowly moving strip of ground, green on one side, black on the other.

The horses he had let out to pasture seemed unusually restless, because of the new environment, the green grass and the springy soil, perhaps. They galloped and snorted, chasing each other around the field. At times they plunged over into the heavy going of the plowed land.

Over at Beckett’s place a cow was pleading for the return of her calf, an intermittent, mournful bellowing repeated at regular intervals.

Sam Beckett paid no attention to these things. He kept himself absorbed with his plowing, grinding steadily around the field, turning neat, straight furrows.

Somewhere back of the clouds was a moon, a day or so past the full. After it came up, enough light filtered through the cloud-bank to disclose the weird outlines of objects in a colorless, ghostly world.

Something over there on the right looked like a sack of potatoes.

Sam Beckett jerked his head, rubbed his eyes, looked again. Then he pushed out the clutch and reduced the motor to idling speed. He climbed stiffly down from the seat and stumbled over the furrows toward the object, expecting it to disappear at any moment, an optical illusion of the night and the fatigue of too much work. But the object didn’t disappear. As Beckett approached, it seemed darker and more solid. Beckett saw a pair of high-heeled shoes, legs, a skirt, somewhat disarranged — and then he was kneeling by the side of the limp body of a young woman lying face down in the freshly plowed earth.

“Hey!” Beckett shouted, his ears dulled by the after-noise of the tractor engine. “What’s the matter?”

He touched her. She was warm to his touch, but there was a peculiar, inanimate lack of response, and Beckett suddenly withdrew his hand.

The hand felt sticky and seemed dark in the weak moonlight filtering through the cloud-bank.

Abruptly, Sam Beckett found himself running back toward the tractor. He climbed to the seat, raised the plow, and turned the tractor around. Opening the throttle, he started jolting and lurching over the freshly plowed furrows toward the gate, his mind trying to shake off the weariness of his physical fatigue, trying to adjust itself to this startling development.

Even then, it didn’t occur to him to notice the exact time.

Sheriff Bill Eldon finished the office work on his desk, rolled a cigarette, and settled back in the creaky swivel chair to glance through the paper before going home. Occasionally he worked nights at his office in the courthouse, and he always remained late if his wife’s sister, Doris, was a visitor at the house. Doris was there tonight.

The sheriff could get along all right with Doris because he made it a rule to get along all right with everyone. But he was careful to take her in small doses. Doris felt that her brother-in-law was far too “easygoing,” and she lost no chance to air her convictions. She had a suspicious nature, a hard, driving personality. Her shrewd, glittering little eyes were as impudently appraising as those of a blue-jay, and her tongue was constantly in motion.

The passing years had turned the sheriff’s hair white. They had accented his slow drawl and his whimsical sense of humor. These things were a constant source of irritation to his energetic sister-in-law, who thought a man should have some “git-up-an’-git” to him. Of late, she had been referring to him as “the old man” whenever she had occasion to mention him. This was on an average of a dozen times an hour.

The sheriff skimmed through the headlines of the Gazette. The Higbee heirs had worked out a partial compromise, he noticed, by which title could be conveyed to the old homestead. It was reported that a sale was in process of negotiation.

Bill Eldon knew that the purchaser must be Sam Beckett, who owned the eighty acres directly across from the Higbee place.

The sheriff browsed through the front page, turned to the inside page and read the “Personal Mention Column” with that detailed knowledge of the community which enabled him to get a great deal more news out of the column than was actually printed. He noticed that Elsie Farnham had gone to the city for a visit, and the sheriff’s brow puckered. That meant she and John had split up. Elsie’s visit would be duly announced as a separation after a few weeks. Ever since she...

The telephone rang.

Mechanically, Eldon reached for it, picked it up and said, “Hello,” before it dawned on him that in all probability this was his sister-in-law calling to tell him that it was high time for him to come home; that if the County expected him to work overtime, the County should pay him for it; that he was too easygoing anyway and people were always taking advantage of him; that...

“Hello! Sheriff!” The man’s voice was excited. “This is Sam Beckett. There’s a dead woman down at my place!”

“Who is she?”

“Don’t know.”

“How long she been dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did she die?”

“I think somebody stuck a knife into her. I just found her.”

The sheriff said, “Don’t touch anything. I’m coming right out.”

He left the office on the run, climbed in the County car and drove rapidly down Chestnut Street, which paralleled Main Street. He didn’t use the siren. To cronies, he sometimes explained that using sirens in a small city was mostly “showing off.” He said that you could make just as good time by taking the side streets and driving steadily and carefully as you could by hitting the main street and scaring everyone to death.

But the sheriff did switch on the official red spotlight, and, once outside of the city, sent the car lurching forward in a swift rush of gliding speed.

It was ten miles to Sam Beckett’s place, and the sheriff made it in ten minutes flat from the time he had started the motor on the County car.

Sam Beckett, looking shaken and bewildered, was waiting for him. Mrs. Beckett was standing beside him, making the fitful, useless motions of a frail, nervous woman under the influence of great excitement.

“You all alone, Sheriff?” she asked, apprehensively, almost incredulously.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Land sakes, you two hadn’t oughta go traipsing around there all alone! You can’t tell what’s over there.”

“What did you see, Sam?” Eldon asked.

“This girl lying face down, right in the fresh plowed ground. She’s sort of blonde like. Ain’t much more than twenty, I’d say. Nice clothes and — this hole in her back. Looks like she’d been stabbed.”

“You make any tracks around the place?”

“Just where I walked up to her.”

“Okay, let’s go see.”

Beckett said, nervously, “I was plowing and she was lying there right on the plowed ground, and no one had left any tracks. If somebody killed her, he must have...”

The sheriff climbed on the tractor and stood with his feet braced on the drawbar. “Let’s go over in this,” he said.

“Now you be careful!” Mrs. Beckett fired a shrill warning after them.

“We’ll be careful, ma’am.”

The sheriff felt of his belt.

“Got your gun?” Mrs. Beckett asked.

Eldon laughed. “Wasn’t looking for my gun. I was looking to see if my flashlight was hanging on my belt. It’s okay.”

The sheriff opened the gate when they crossed over to the old Higbee place. “Keep right in your same tracks, Sam,” he said, “just as well as you can.”

Beckett nodded and drove back across the plowed ground, keeping in the same tracks he had made before. By following those tracks, it was easy to return to the place where the headlights illuminated the huddled, inanimate object lying on the plowed field.

“Those footprints,” the sheriff said, “are they yours?”

“They’re mine.”

“There aren’t any other footprints at all, Sam?”

“That’s what I noticed,” Beckett said uneasily. “I was telling you there wasn’t any tracks.”

“She just didn’t float down here, Sam.”

“The way I figure it,” Sam said, “is that she must have been stabbed and then probably started running. She ran across the field, and the first furrow she came to, she pitched forward and fell on her face, and didn’t have strength enough to get up. She died right there. Then I came along with the plow and didn’t see her the first time around. After that it was easy to miss her.”

“How come you missed her the first time?”

“That was before the moon came up, and I was watching right where the front wheels were going, I kept looking down, way down.”

The sheriff climbed down from the tractor, being careful to step in the same tracks Beckett had made. He bent over the body. His flashlight sent its beam up and down the still figure. His fingers felt for a pulse, but he was careful not to move the body. Then he stepped back to the tractor and said, “Back up, Sam. Keep in your same tracks. When you get to hard ground, stop.”

On hard ground the sheriff once more left the tractor and, with his flashlight close to the ground, moved slowly along, giving each blade of grass a hawklike scrutiny.

“No blood,” he said.

“I could have plowed up the blood.”

“You could have. But if this girl had been running after she’d been stabbed, the blood would have dropped down on her skirt. The blood’s only on her coat.”

“By gosh, that’s so!” Beckett exclaimed. “I never thought of that.”

The sheriff went on, “Tell you what you do, Sam. Go back and telephone Undersheriff Quinlan. Tell him to get a photographer and to get in touch with the coroner. Looks to me as though we’re up against something mighty puzzling here. Me, I’ll stay here and kinda watch that things aren’t disturbed. Tell Quinlan I’ve got the County car. He’ll have to come out in his car.”

“Okay,” Beckett said, the relief in his voice indicating that he was only too glad to get away.

“Okay. After you phone George, better come back with your tractor. I want to have the photographer stand up on the tractor and take a shot looking down at the body just to show the way it’s lying, and that there aren’t any tracks.”

“Except mine,” Beckett said.

“Except yours,” the sheriff remarked tonelessly.

2

Beryl Quinlan, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the undersheriff, had been sitting within reaching distance of the telephone for more than an hour. Roy Jasper was scheduled to call from Fort Bixling. And it spoke volumes for Beryl’s feeling toward Roy that she would wait for an hour in any one place simply to talk with him over the telephone.

In the living room, Beryl’s father was having a mysterious low-voiced conference with three of the town’s leading citizens. They had no idea that Beryl was in the reception room waiting for her call. Seated in the big chair by the telephone, she was too completely engrossed to concern herself with the import of the occasional snatches of conversation which drifted out through the curtained doorway of the living room. But she did recognize the voice of the real-estate agent, John Farnham, generally known as a “crusader,” and, later, the voices of Edward Lyons and Bertram Glasco.

“I couldn’t do it,” Quinlan said in a low voice which somehow seemed to lack finality. “Bill Eldon is my superior officer.”

“Bill Eldon’s crowding seventy,” Glasco said from the smug complacency of his fifty-two years of well-fed prosperity. He was a political bigwig, caring only for power, and was reputed to be able to make or break any man in the county politically.

“Well, now,” Lyons interposed quickly, conscious of his own sixty-six years, “it isn’t his age that’s the matter with him. It’s the general way he does things. He’s old-fashioned. He’s too unchangeable — too dated. That’s it, he’s dated.”

Lyons beamed at the astuteness of his own diagnosis. Publisher of the Rockville Gazette, he was also a political opportunist whose entire influence had been built up by a shrewd ability to forecast the trends in local political opinion. He had a habit of being on the winning side. And after identifying himself with the winner, he managed to impress upon the uninitiated, and some few of the cognoscente as well, the vote-getting importance of the Gazette.

“Your duty,” Glasco suavely pointed out to Quinlan, “is to the County, its people. You’re drawing pay from them. Personally, I don’t think Bill should run again, and I don’t think he would if he were faced with a hot fight.”

“It might not be a hot fight,” Quinlan said.

Lyons cleared his throat. “The Gazette would make it hot.”

“See here, George,” Glasco hastily interposed, “if, in the next important case that breaks, you’d just ride along and not make any suggestions, Bill Eldon would dig a hole for himself and fall in it — flat on his face.”

“Is it your idea that I should lie down on the job?”

“No, no. Not at all,” Glasco protested hastily. “Just follow his instructions. Do whatever Sheriff Eldon tells you to, but don’t go out of your way to make suggestions.”

“I don’t think I’d like to do that,” Quinlan said somewhat dubiously.

“The point is,” Glasco hurriedly went on, “suppose old Bill does make a botch of some big case. Then he wouldn’t run again. Then the question is — would you run?”

“Oh sure — if Bill wasn’t running.”

“But suppose he became obstinate and did run. Would you be willing to resign a few months before election, and then give the voters a chance to say whether it hadn’t been because you were so efficient as an undersheriff that they’d been keeping Bill in the Sheriff’s Office?”

“I wouldn’t want to run against Bill.”

“It isn’t what you’d want to do. It’s what...”

At that moment the telephone rang, and Quinlan, pushing back his chair, showed he welcomed the interruption. Beryl Quinlan promptly lifted the receiver and said, “Hello,” in the dulcet voice she reserved for boy-friends and important company. The sound of her voice so close at hand froze the little group in the living room into surprised immobility.

The operator said, “I have a long-distance call for Miss Beryl Quinlan. Is she there?”

“Speaking,” Beryl said.

“Just a moment.”

Roy Jasper’s voice was eager. “Hello! Hello!”

“Roy!” Beryl exclaimed.

“Oh, darling, I thought...”

The crisp voice interrupted, “Drop twenty-five cents for three minutes, please.”

Then Beryl’s end of the line went dead, and she had to wait agonized seconds until once more she heard Roy’s eager voice. “Say, Beryl! Have I got news for you! I’m going to be able to make it! Yes, sir, your G.I.’s coming home!”

“Oh, Roy!”

“Going to be glad to see me?”

“Am I!”

“How’s everything?”

“Oh, fine — especially now.”

“You were there at the telephone, weren’t you?”

“Well... yes.”

“Honey, I think I’m breaking down their resistance... I may get a discharge.”

“Oh, Roy, you wouldn’t try to kid me would you?”

“No fooling.”

“When?”

“I can’t tell you when. Pretty soon, perhaps. But I’m getting off for a two-week furlough. I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll save a date for me?”

“Am!”

“Dancing?”

“That will be lovely!”

“Know something?”

“What?”

“I’m crazy to see you.”

Beryl’s youthfully clear voice, held low in an effort to insure privacy, was, nevertheless, distinctly audible to the anxious group in the living room. She said, “It’ll be nice — seeing you.”

Glasco growled irritably, “She wasn’t out there all the time, was she?”

“I don’t think so,” George Quinlan said apologetically. He went to the door of the living room and stared moodily out at the telephone. Then in aggrieved gesture to emphasize his desire for privacy, he pulled the heavy curtains closer together. Beryl’s voice continued to penetrate through the curtains.

The four men sat uncomfortably silent while the cryptic conversation went on, until the operator’s businesslike tone advised the talkers that the three minutes were up.

Roy promptly said, “Bye, Honey,” and hung up the telephone. Beryl clung to the receiver for a moment or two after the connection was severed, as though loath to relinquish the channel over which Roy’s voice had come. Then she hung up.

Almost instantly the phone started ringing again. Beryl eagerly snatched up the receiver. “Hello! Hello!” she said. “Hello, Roy!”

A man’s heavy voice, sharp with excitement, said, “I want George Quinlan, the undersheriff, right away. It’s murder!”

“Just a minute,” Beryl said. “Father, oh, Father! Here’s a call. The man says it’s a murder.”

Quinlan jerked back the heavy curtains and strode to the telephone. He picked up the receiver, listened to Sam Beckett’s hurried, voice. The undersheriff asked a couple of routine questions and then said, “I’ll be right out.”

He hung up and walked back to the living room. His face was without expression but his eyes couldn’t keep from showing his relief. “Woman murdered out on the old Higbee place,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Bill Eldon’s out there. It’s an impossible case on the face of it. Sam Beckett found her lying face down on a freshly plowed field with no tracks. They want me to go out right away. I’ve got to get a photographer and notify the coroner.”

Lyon’s eyes sparkled. “I’ll be right along,” he said.

“Don’t let on you got the tip from me,” Quinlan warned. “Bill might not like it.”

“Bill never gives us a break,” Lyons observed testily.

Bertram Glasco rubbed his hands. “This may be it, George. A body lying face down on a freshly plowed field with no tracks. That sounds as though it might be something way beyond Bill Eldon’s range.”

Lyons said, “Let him show the voters what an old fogy he is. It’ll serve him right.”

Quinlan interposed, “If you boys will excuse me, I’ll have to rush for it.”

Farnham said, “I have every confidence in the ability of Sheriff Eldon to solve crimes. My objection is that he tolerates gambling. I wish you a good night, gentlemen. No, no, George, you have work to do. Don’t bother to show me out.”

He slipped out through the curtained doorway.

Quinlan said angrily, “It’d take an army to stop all the gambling in this county. And suppose you broke up the little poker games that run in the lodge rooms around the county...”

“Forget it, George,” Glasco said. “He’s just the front for our campaign.”

“You can’t ever satisfy him,” Quinlan grumbled.

“We know it,” Glasco soothed.

“I’ve got to go, boys,” Quinlan said. “Sorry, but you know how it is.”

Quinlan shot out the door. Lyons turned to Glasco. “Can’t depend on George,” he said. “I told you so.”

“He’ll come around all right,” Glasco said. “It might be a good thing to play this murder up big, Ed. And you might be able to work in a little stuff about how old Bill doesn’t have any knowledge of fingerprint classification, doesn’t know anything about the paraffin test for firearms. You can mention that he depends on George for all the modern stuff. Let it creep between the lines that Bill’s getting to be an old fogy. Then if he slips up on...”

Lyons interrupted testily, “Hell’s bells, I’m two paragraphs ahead of you. When it comes to politics, don’t ever forget that the Gazette has been in business a long time. Candidates the Gazette supports get elected. Well, I’m going to rush out there and cover this story right from the start.”

Glasco watched him out of the door, then said in a low voice, vibrant with feeling, “You mean you support the men who are going to get elected, you damned old buzzard.”

He heard the sound of a quick intake of breath, whirled and saw Beryl Quinlan sitting motionless by the telephone, lips slightly parted, watching him with wide, startled eyes.

Glasco hesitated for a moment, then walked past her, saying nothing, because there was nothing to say.

3

The little group examined the huddled figure in the light of a floodlight Sam Beckett had rigged on the tractor. They all agreed there were no footprints. The photographer took flashlight photographs from half a dozen different positions, placing his tripod on the light trailer which Sam Beckett had put on the back of the tractor in place of the plow which had been there.

“Well, Jim,” the sheriff said to James Logan, the coroner, “guess you can move her now. Poor kid, she can’t be over nineteen or twenty.”

“Stab wound in the back,” Logan said, crisply businesslike, “and the knife isn’t there. You got a murder case on your hands, Bill.”

“Uh huh.”

The coroner was plainly puzzled, slightly impatient. “You can’t murder a girl in a freshly plowed field with soil as soft as this and not leave some sort of tracks.”

“Uh huh,” the sheriff announced, and then, raising his voice, said, “I want everybody here to remember that when they go out, they’re to go out on Sam Beckett’s tractor. I don’t want any footprints in this plowed ground, no footprints at all. You understand?”

No one said anything.

The sheriff turned to Quinlan and drew him to one side. “What do you make of it, George?” he asked.

“Well, it looks to me...” Quinlan cleared his throat.

“Yeh, go ahead,” the sheriff invited.

“Well, it’s a murder all right,” Quinlan said somewhat lamely. “I’m just wondering... just wondering...”

“About what?”

“About Sam Beckett.”

“What about him?”

“That body couldn’t have got there the way he said.”

The sheriff fished a sack of tobacco from his vest pocket, skilfully curled a piece of rice paper around his left forefinger, shook grains of tobacco into the paper and caught the drawstring of the tobacco sack in his teeth to pull it shut. “Go ahead, George.”

“Well, Beckett must inadvertently have stepped right in the murderer’s tracks. That’s the only thing that could have happened. And then you came along and walked in Beckett’s tracks and... Well, that the only way it could have been. And that blots out the murderer’s tracks.”

The sheriff tilted back his sweat-stained sombrero to scratch the grizzled hair around the back of his head. “Well,” he said, “maybe we can look around a bit, come daylight.”

Quinlan moved away. The sheriff caught Sam Beckett and drew him to one side. “Sam, take everybody out of here on your tractor. Don’t let anybody walk out.” And then he added in a lower voice,

“Come back in about an hour and pick me up. Don’t tell anybody I’m staying. Make a couple of trips. Move the body out in the first trip.”

Beckett nodded and Bill Eldon moved away in the darkness, the tip of his cigarette glowing now and again, then dropping to the earth and being extinguished.

Sam Beckett’s tractor moved slowly across the plowed ground to the gate, following the ruts which had now been worn in the soft soil.

The sheriff sat squatting on his heels, cowboy fashion, watching the activity at the gate as parked automobiles roared into noise, headlights splashed on, and taillights glowed in sinister blood-red meteor-like trails.

Slowly the calm of silence descended, broken here and there by little night noises. The field became dark and silent as it had lain for many months while the heirs of old Marvin Higbee squabbled among themselves.

Somewhere behind the sheriff, a horse snorted.

Bill Eldon straightened. He turned toward the vague patch of blackness which marked the trees around the old Higbee homestead and walked slowly, the green springy grass muffling his steps. His legs moved with that peculiar high-kneed motion which characterizes the best hunters when they are stalking game. He carefully refrained from using his flashlight.

A few minutes later when the big gloomy house loomed just ahead of the sheriff, the officer loosened his six gun in a holster worn shiny with age. He catfooted along the shadow of the trees, found an advantageous place and once more squatted on his heels, waiting.

An owl hooted suddenly, puncturing the silence with its weird cry. A faint rustling sounded in the dead leaves on the ground over to his right. The sheriff cocked his head slightly to one side the better to listen to that rustling. Then as the sound became the unmistakable scurrying of some small animal, he turned back toward the house. For some twenty minutes he sat motionless, until the noises made by small nocturnal animals reassured him. Then he straightened to his feet and went forward.

The doors of the big house were closed. The windows had been boarded up. A “No Trespassing” sign had been nailed to the front of the house.

The sheriff cautiously switched on his flashlight as he inspected the front door and then moved around to the back door. Both doors were closed and locked.

A side door on the east caught the sheriff’s eye. There were spider webs on the side of that door which had been freshly broken.

The sheriff turned the knob.

The door creaked open, rusty hinges squawking at his intrusion.

Stale, musty air assailed Bill Eldon’s nostrils. His flashlight illuminated a small hallway thick with dust and hung with spider webs.

The sheriff pushed across the hallway and entered what had at one time been the living room. A rat, caught in the beam of his flashlight, gave a frightened squeak and scurried for shelter.

Old Marvin Higbee had died over a year ago. Since then, the heirs had been engaged in such bitter quarreling that none of them had ever lived in the house or tried to keep it up. Now the living room presented a weird sight. Rats were nesting in the upholstery of the davenport, while spiders were entrenched in webs spun from chandeliers. The floors were thick with dust, and the pictures on the walls hung at crazy angles.

During his lifetime, Higbee had been chairman of the board of one of the local banks and had amassed a comfortable fortune as a highly successful contractor. The Higbee place had been the scene of much hospitality. A widower, Marvin Higbee had no children. But he left a sister, Carlotta, and two brothers, Oscar and Robert, when he died after a brief illness. His will bequeathed ten thousand dollars to Oscar, ten thousand to Robert, and the balance of the estate to his sister, Carlotta Higbee Lane. When the will was offered for probate, however, Mrs. Kidder, who had been Higbee’s housekeeper, calmly advanced the claim that she was, in reality, Mrs. Marvin Higbee. There had been a common-law marriage, she said. Because she had not been provided for in the will, she maintained that she was entitled to the rights of a wife.

There had followed a period during which dirty linen had been aired in public. The two brothers, Oscar and Robert, contended not only that Mrs. Kidder was an adventuress and a liar, but also that Carlotta had exerted undue influence on Marvin at the time he made his will. The result had been a legal Donnybrook Fair in which the big country home had become a forgotten side issue.

The sheriff stooped to hold his flashlight near the floor. As he did so, the oblique illumination disclosed prints which had theretofore been invisible.

The officer studied the dust-covered carpet carefully. He could make out the prints of a woman’s shoes and those of at least one man. They had walked back and forth, intersecting each other’s paths. They had made a veritable crazy quilt of tracks, seemingly as purposeless as the tracks left by kangaroo rats dancing wildly about in the moonlight.

The old mansion could tell many a tale, the sheriff meditated. Higbee had been a deep one — with women, in politics, and in business. For a while, Farnham, the crusader, had been after Higbee’s scalp, claiming collusion on the big school-construction job. Glasco had been trying to get the Gazette to demand an inquiry, but suddenly the whole thing had been dropped. Higbee’s charm, fascinating to women, had seemed to be as effective with his political enemies. And Higbee, big, vital, breezy, had gone on his way until death had intervened. No amount of backslapping, the sheriff reflected, could make death change its mind.

Moving cautiously, the sheriff entered other rooms of the house. Everywhere, when he dropped his flashlight to a lower angle, he found the same pattern of zigzagging, intersecting, vague footprints in the dust.

Dust had been carefully cleaned from a table in the kitchen. On that table the sheriff found waxed paper, bread crumbs, a lipstick, and a hammered silver cigarette case. At one end of the table there was a charred streak some two inches long and bordered with gray ash, which had apparently been made by a burning cigarette.

The sheriff examined the linoleum floor. One burnt match was lying underneath the table, and also on the floor were two cigarette stubs, both of which had been pinched out. One held the tell-tale red of lipstick.

Eldon picked up the cigarette case and turned it over. He saw that a heart had been engraved on the side, an arrow intersecting the heart. There were two initials on the arrow, R at the feathered end and B over the point of the arrow.

After studying the cigarette case thoughtfully, the sheriff placed it back on the table just as he had found it. Then he turned around and, to the accompaniment of squeaking boards and scurrying rodents, left the house as he had entered it. He took care to close the creaking side door behind him.

It was nearly eleven when the Quinlan telephone rang stridently, insistently.

Beryl threw a robe around her shoulders and ran from her bedroom. “I’ll get it, Mother,” she called as she passed her mother’s door.

“Thank you, dear.”

Beryl fairly flew down the stairs. She raised the receiver and said breathlessly, “Yes, yes, hello. This is Beryl Quinlan.”

The drawling voice of the sheriff came over the wire. “Your father there, Beryl?”

“Why, no. Isn’t he with you? He hasn’t come back yet.”

“Hasn’t got back yet?” the sheriff asked.

“Why, no, he went out to investigate that murder.”

“I see.”

“Can I take a message?”

The sheriff said, “If you will, please. When he comes in, tell him I want to get in touch with him right away. Someone left a silver cigarette case out here at the Higbee place and I want him to look it over for fingerprints.”

“Very well. I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him to bring that fingerprint outfit of his and to be sure to bring his camera. It’s a silver cigarette case with a heart engraved on it and an arrow through the heart. There’s an R on one end of the arrow and a B on the other. You tell him, will you, Beryl?”

“I’ll... tell him... Goodbye.” The words came haltingly. And the hand that slowly lowered the receiver back into place seemed to have turned to ice.

The cigarette case she had given Roy for Christmas!

And then another thought, which for some time had been uneasily asking for attention, suddenly popped out to the front of her consciousness. Long Distance had told Roy to deposit twenty-five cents. If he had been at Fort Bixling the rate would have been eighty-five cents.

“Beryl,” her mother called from the head of the stairs, “what is it? Nothing’s happened to your father, has it. Your voice sounded...”

Beryl’s laugh was harsh. “Good Heavens, no, Mumsie! Go back to bed. I’ve... I’ve got to go find Father.”

“Find Father? Why, Beryl, what’s the matter? What’s happened? Tell me. Don’t try to keep it from me.”

“Don’t be a goose, Mumsie. It was the sheriff. He wanted Dad, that’s all, wants him to take some fingerprints right away.”

“But your father’s with the sheriff.”

“No, he left.”

“Well, the only thing you can do then is wait for him to come in and...”

“Oh, I think I can find him,” Beryl said casually, dashing upstairs. “He’ll probably be at the Gazette office.”

“Then why don’t you telephone?”

Beryl’s cold fingers were frantically divesting herself of her pajamas, picking up lingerie. “He might not be there, Mumsie. He might be some other place where I could just run onto him. I’ll drive up and down the main drag, and see if the car’s parked somewhere. Remember, he took his own car. I can spot it as far as I can see it.”

“I wish you’d telephone, dear.”

“Nonsense. I’ll jump in my little whoopee and have Dad located in no time. You be a good girl, Mumsie, and don’t worry. And if Dad should come home — tell him I have a message for him.”

“Can’t you tell me what the message is, and I...”

“I’ll tell him,” Beryl said. “Tell him to wait for me,” and she went streaking down the stairs.

4

It was nearly midnight when the sheriff drifted into the coroner’s office.

“George here?” he asked.

“Yeah, he’s in back with the doctor.”

“What did the doctor find?”

“Stab wound in the back — left side. Think it went straight in.”

The sheriff said, “I’ve been trying to get hold of him. I... Here he comes now.”

George Quinlan stepped out of the back room. “There isn’t a drop of blood on the skirt, Bill,” he said. “It was a stab wound. Missed the heart, but severed one of the big blood vessels. Death was almost instantaneous. She might have lived for a matter of seconds. It’s hard to tell.”

The sheriff nodded. Then he beckoned the undersheriff out to one side. “Been lookin’ for you, George. Did you see your daughter?”

“She got me on the phone a few seconds ago, said she’d been driving around looking for me. Said you had some fingerprints. I was just starting for the office to pick up the fingerprint outfit.”

“I told her to try and get in touch with you,” the sheriff said. “There’s been a couple of people in the old Higbee house, walking back and forth across the floors, sort of zigzagging like, and out in the kitchen I found where some sandwiches had been eaten, and there’s a girl’s lipstick and a cigarette case. I thought there might be some prints and...”

“You didn’t touch those things?” Quinlan asked.

“Well, just sort of picked them up and looked them over,” the sheriff admitted.

“Let’s hope you didn’t smudge any fingerprints. Gosh, Bill, I’ve told you a dozen times that you’ve got to be careful handling things that...”

“I know, I know,” the sheriff said, “but I thought it was pretty important to see the other side of that case. Had to turn it over, you know.”

“How about the lipstick?”

“I didn’t touch that.”

Quinlan said, “Let’s go. I’ll stop by the office and get my fingerprint outfit.”

“You got your car here?”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ll meet you out there,” the sheriff said.

“You want to take a look at the body?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Not right now. Get prints of her fingers?”

“Yes.”

“What do you make of her?”

“Natural blonde, blue eyes, smooth skin, a beautiful girl, somewhere between nineteen and twenty.”

“Too bad,” the sheriff said, and then added after a moment, “I’ll be seeing you out there.”

There was little traffic on Main Street at this hour, so the sheriff swung out close to the center of the street. He opened up the County car, but didn’t use the siren. This time it took him nearly fifteen minutes to get to the Higbee gate.

The sheriff got out of the car and opened the gate. Then he paused as his headlights disclosed tire tracks which had been superimposed on the tracks left by the tractor.

Quinlan drove up to find the sheriff down on hands and knees studying those tracks with the aid of his spotlight.

“What’s the idea?” the undersheriff asked, jumping out to stand beside the sheriff. “You found something?”

“A car’s been in here,” the sheriff said.

“You mean since the tractor came out?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t get stuck?”

“No. The tractor had packed down the earth hard enough so a car could drive in all right.”

“Well, now, that’s something,” Quinlan said. “Wonder who it could have been. Probably some of the newspaper people snooping around. It wouldn’t have done any harm to have put a lock on that gate.”

“Or left somebody here,” the sheriff said.

Quinlan’s silence showed that he felt very definitely someone should have been left in charge but that that had been a matter for the sheriff.

“Tell anything by the tracks?” Quinlan asked.

“Not much. Tires worn pretty smooth and only occasionally you can get a bit of the pattern on the sides. And if you’ll look over here on the left you can see where the front wheels swung just a little bit out of the ruts. Now, that must have been when the car was going out, because they’re the last tracks that were made. So this’ll be the right front wheel on the car. And you notice that little nick out of the tire, on the side? Better remember that, George. We may run onto a car like that again if we keep our eyes open.”

Quinlan said, “Hadn’t I better get the photographer and have a picture taken of these tracks?”

“Can’t you do it?”

“No. I’ve got a fingerprint camera and that’s all. Anyway, that’s a little beyond my technique.”

“Well, just make some measurements of that gouged-out place in the tire and sort of sketch the pattern you can see on the side,” the sheriff said, “and we’ll get going. I want to do some more work in that house.”

Quinlan said, “If that should turn out to be important evidence...” and stopped.

“Well,” the sheriff said, “I guess you and I can remember those tracks well enough to identify the automobile, can’t we?”

“Yes, but...”

“Go on.”

“Nothing.”

“All right,” Bill Eldon said at length. “Tell you what you do, George. Take a page from your notebook and just tear off a bit here and there until we get it so it just fits that place out of the right front tire.”

Quinlan nodded. He took a page from his notebook and bent over the tracks in the moist earth, carefully tearing off little bits of paper until he had the pattern to suit him. “It’s an exact fit, Bill.”

“All right,” the sheriff said. “You keep it. Now let’s drive on to the house. I want you to take a look at that cigarette case.”

“We’ll obliterate these tracks,” Quinlan objected.

“But we’ll know the car if we ever run across it on account of that tire,” the sheriff drawled. “Come on, George.”

Quinlan started to say something and then checked himself.

They drove through the plowed strip of ground to the level field where the car jolted along over the weed-encrusted road, through the big shade trees, to the Higbee house.

The sheriff led the way to the creaking side door which he opened.

The scurrying of rats and mice for shelter was distinctly audible as a composite sound of pattering tiny feet beating a tattoo of panic on the floor.

The sheriff paused long enough to lower the angle of the flashlight. “At least one woman, and at least one man,” he pointed out. “Sort of zigzagging around.”

Quinlan’s half-articulate comment was little more than a grunt.

Bill Eldon shifted the beam of his flashlight. “This way to the kitchen, George.”

They entered the kitchen. The beam of the flashlight showed the table with its waxed paper, the lipstick, the cigarette stubs, and the charred groove in the table. The beam of the flashlight illuminated the silver cigarette case, glanced from it in a splash of reflected light on the cobweb-encrusted ceiling.

Quinlan opened the fingerprint outfit he was carrying, carefully gripped the corners of the cigarette case with rubber-tipped tongs and dusted powder over the silver.

“Hump! That’s funny.”

“What’s the matter?”

“There isn’t a print on it.”

“Maybe the person who handled it was wearing gloves,” the sheriff said. “How about the lipstick?”

Quinlan managed to get two prints from the lipstick that were legible enough to give results.

The sheriff seemed unimpressed to the point of disinterest. His flashlight was exploring around on the floor. “One burnt match,” he said. “That’s significant.”

“I don’t get it.”

“If you were lighting three cigarettes how many matches would you use?”

Quinlan grinned. “If a good-looking girl was sitting across the table from me I’d use one — wait a minute, I’d use two.”

“That’s right. But there’s only one.”

“Then something must have happened to one of the burnt matches. Perhaps a pack rat carried it away.”

“Nope,” the sheriff drawled. “It ain’t that. The way I figure it, the man was a chainsmoker. He and the girl sat down here at the table. They had some sandwiches, then they settled down for a smoke. He lit her cigarette, and lit his own. After they’d smoked their cigarettes, he lit his second one from the stub of the first. The girl only smoked one cigarette. When she’d finished it, she took out her lipstick and started to fix up her mouth — and it was then something happened, right at that particular moment.”

“How do you fix it as being at that time?”

“Because they jumped up and they were startled. The man put his cigarette down on the table, and never had a chance to get back to pick it up. It lay there and burnt that groove. The woman dropped her lipstick.”

“And then?” Quinlan asked.

“And some time after that,” the sheriff said, “the girl was found stabbed in a plowed field with no tracks going in either direction, not even her own.”

“How long after that?” Quinlan asked.

“That, son,” the sheriff said, “is something we’ve got to find out. By puttin’ two and two together, you get an answer, and it don’t seem to be the right one.”

It began to rain about three in the morning, a fine, misty cold rain. By daylight the tangled grass and weeds of the field were glistening with moisture, and the dark lumps on the ridges of the plowed ground reflected the sullen daylight which filtered through the low bank of clouds.

The bent figures of the sheriff and George Quinlan moved slowly along over the boundary between the grassy field and the freshly plowed earth. With the thoroughgoing patience of veteran trackers, they inched their way along, covering every foot of ground.

Daylight was well advanced and the drizzle had stopped when they returned to their point of beginning.

“Well,” Quinlan said, “that settles it. No one left this piece of ground after the murder was committed, so the body must have come in from the outside — unless it was dropped from an airplane.”

The sheriff straightened. He rolled and lit a cigarette. “I noticed one thing back there in the house, George. You remember where those drapes hang over the door? There’s a long braided silk doodad with tassels on it — but there’s only one. Shouldn’t there be two?”

Quinlan laughed. “Shucks, Bill, the way this place has been left it’s lucky there’s even one. But there should be two. I’ve got the same sort of drapes at home.”

The sheriff thought for a while. “What do you s’pose frightened those people after they’d just eaten?”

“I’m darned if I know,” Quinlan said. “I’m an officer, not a mind reader. It must have been shortly before the murder, and that must have been after dark. Seems strange they’d have been eating sandwiches then. They must have planned to stay all night searching. And speaking of eating, I’m going home, change my wet clothes, and have some breakfast.”

“Well, now,” the sheriff drawled, “guess I’ll drop in at a restaurant and...”

“A restaurant!”

“Uh huh. My sister-in-law’s stayin’ up at my house.”

Quinlan laughed. “Come on up with me — no, hang it, if you don’t change your wet clothes you’ll catch cold. Get up to your house and get into some dry clothes.”

The sheriff looked down at his wet trousers, sighed wearily and said, “Well, I s’pose I’ve got to.”

5

It was a few minutes before nine when Beryl Quinlan saw Boy Jasper turn the corner and come walking toward the house.

Beryl ran to the door, whipped it open, and dashed down the stairs.

Roy saw her coming and flung up his arm in a gesture of greeting.

They met at the edge of the sidewalk.

“Roy!”

“Hi, Beryl!”

She gave him her lips in a swift eager kiss, then pulled away.

“Hey,” he said, “what’s the idea of such a nervous little peck?”

“We may have an audience. Come on, I want to talk to you. When did you leave the fort?”

“Last night — late.”

“Been up all night?”

“Just about. Couldn’t get a bus until after midnight. Travel sure is heavy these days.”

“Where were you when you telephoned me, at the fort?”

“Just outside of the fort, a row of telephone booths there. Why?”

“Oh, just wondering. Let’s not go in for a minute. Dad’s been out pretty much all night on a case and came home soaking wet, took a hot bath, changed his clothes, and has to go to the office in a minute. The family will engulf you if you go inside. Let’s sit out on the porch.”

“Suits me,” Roy said. “This isn’t front-porch weather, though. Been raining here?”

“Just a drizzle. It quit about an hour and a half ago. Let’s sit here. How about a cigarette?”

“How about a kiss, Baby? We don’t have an audience here.” She gave him her lips.

“That’s better. What’s the matter, Honey?”

“Just getting a good look at you. How about the discharge?”

“Don’t know yet. Think I may get it.”

“And how about my cigarette?”

Roy casually produced a silver cigarette case, snapped the catch with his thumb, opened it and extended it to Beryl.

“Roy!” she exclaimed.

He glanced up quizzically at the sound of her voice.

“That’s the case I gave you for Christmas.”

“Sure. What’s funny about that?”

“I... I thought perhaps you’d lost it.”

His forehead puckered into a puzzled frown. “Now what gave you that idea? And do you really want a cigarette?”

“Of course,” she said, taking a cigarette.

He took one and lit her cigarette, then his own. He dropped the case back into his pocket, regarding her thoughtfully. “What’s the big idea?” he asked.

“I... Oh, nothing... Roy, how much did you pay for that telephone call last night?”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I really got even with the telephone company that time,” he said. “I let one of the other boys come in and place a call to a nearby town while I was waiting. The rate there is only twenty-five cents. I guess the operator got the calls mixed. Anyway she told me mine was twenty-five cents and that’s all I paid, twenty-five cents.”

“What happened to the other boy?”

“Don’t worry about him,” Roy said. “He wouldn’t have paid any more than twenty-five cents on his call, and they couldn’t make him. I got to feeling a little cheap about it afterwards. I hope they don’t take it out of the telephone girl’s salary, but, honey, you know how it is. I’ve been stuck so many times when I’d stay in a hotel, and put in a call...”

“That’s wasn’t the fault of the telephone company. That was the fault of the girl at the hotel switchboard. She didn’t clear the line right away and naturally the telephone company had to charge you for all that extra time.”

“Well,” he admitted, “I felt cheap about it afterwards, but there was nothing I could do. You see, honey, you were on the line and I didn’t want to take time then telling her she’d made a mistake in my favor and having her wait and look up the call. I...”

The door opened. George Quinlan took two or three steps before he caught sight of the couple from the corner of his eye. He whirled almost apprehensively, then laughed nervously and said, “I didn’t know you two were out here. Hello, Roy. When did you get in?”

“Just now.”

Quinlan came across and shook hands. “Been up all night,” he said, “and I’m a little jumpy. Had breakfast?”

“Yes, thanks, had it more than an hour ago.”

“There’s some coffee on the table. Mrs. Quinlan will be glad to see you.”

“We’ll be in a minute,” Beryl said, and then smiling at her father said, “tell Mother, will you?”

That gave the undersheriff his cue. He said, “I will. See you later, Roy,” and went back into the house.

“What’s the big case?” Roy asked.

“A murder down at the old Higbee place. I understand she’s a girl around my age, blonde, stabbed in the back.”

“The old Higbee place?” Jasper asked, frowning.

“Yes. A man named Beckett bought the place and had started to plow. He found the body.”

“Beckett?” Roy repeated the name after her as though trying to refresh his recollection. “Oh, yes, Sam Beckett. I know him. What in the world was this girl doing in the old Higbee place?”

“No one knows. They don’t seem to have any clue as yet to her identity.”

Jasper finished his cigarette. Almost mechanically he opened the cigarette case, took out another, and lit the second cigarette from the end of the first. “Guess that’s going to keep your father busy,” he said. “How about going in and getting some of that coffee, Beryl?”

6

Sheriff Bill Eldon propped the Rockville Morning Register in front of his coffee cup.

The Register had gone to press about two o’clock in the morning, and had relied on large headlines and bold-faced type to obscure the fact that the paper had but few facts concerning the murder.

The editorial attitude of the paper was hostile to the entire County administration and Sheriff Eldon expected no quarter from it. On the other hand, it did a pretty good job of news coverage, although it occasionally slipped some editorial barb into its factual reporting.

Bill Eldon read the account carefully and then slowly reread it in order to give himself that semblance of preoccupation which would curb the conversation of his sister-in-law.

Finally Doris could stand it no longer. She said, “Well, if you ask me, somebody’s making an awful fool out of you officers.”

The sheriff’s silence was a courteous suggestion that no one was asking her.

“Or,” Doris went on, “perhaps you’re making fools of yourselves.”

“Could be,” the sheriff admitted laconically.

“Will you kindly tell me, Bill Eldon, how in the name of sense any person can walk over moist, freshly plowed, loamy soil and not leave any footprints?”

“I didn’t say it could be done.”

“The newspaper says it has been done.”

“Well, I’m not responsible for what the newspapers say.”

“The way they talk about you makes you sound like an old fossil.”

“The Register is on the opposite side of the political fence.”

“Well, the Gazette doesn’t seem to be putting you up on any pedestal.”

“It won’t be out until tonight.”

“I’m not talking about this case. I’m talking about the way they’ve been writing you up lately.”

“They’re friendly.”

“Well, you’d better watch out for friends like that.”

The sheriff was silent.

“It does seem to me,” Doris went on exasperatedly, “that if you had more git-up-an’-git you’d command more respect.”

The sheriff grinned. “You don’t get respect from the opposite political party — not publicly and in print, anyway. If you move along slow and easy, you’re an old fossil. If you have git-up-an’-git you’re trying to cover your incompetence behind a smoke-screen of hysterical activity.”

There was a moment of welcome silence while Doris thought this over. “Well,” she demanded at length, “who is this girl?”

“We don’t know.”

“What are you doing to find out?”

“We’ve got a couple of clues we’re working on.”

“What clues?”

“Cleaning marks on her jacket and skirt, the name of a score sewed to the inside of the jacket.”

“A local store?”

“No, one in San Rodolpho.”

The sheriff’s wife interposed to say quietly, “Bill, you want me to send that suit out to be cleaned and pressed?”

“Please.”

“How soon do you want it back?”

“Soon as I can get it!”

“You going to get some sleep today?”

“Afraid I’ll have to keep going today. I...”

The telephone rang.

The sheriff went to the phone. He heard a woman’s voice say, “Long-distance call from San Rodolpho,” and then the voice of Everett Gilmer, the chief of police in San Rodolpho. “Hello, Bill. Think I’ve got your party located. The Acme Cleaners has a record of cleaning the jacket. The girl’s name is Elizabeth Dow. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing. She live there?”

“Apparently so. We have an address in an apartment house. She’s moved from there, but we’re tracing her. The description fits. Want to come down?”

The sheriff hesitated a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ll be down. See what you can find out and have it ready for me by the time I get there. I’ll stop by the courthouse and pick up some photographs.”

The sheriff hung up the telephone and glanced over at the table. Seeing the alert angle at which the head of his sister-in-law was cocked, he said suddenly, “I’ve got to rush out. I’ll be back this evening.”

“Where are you going?” Doris demanded so eagerly that the words all ran together into one continuous rattle of sound.

“Out,” the sheriff said.

Everett K. Gilmer, chief of police of San Rodolpho, was a big bluff man whose twinkling eyes radiated cordiality to brother officers, but could assume an ominous hardness when scrutinizing prisoners. He said to Bill Eldon, “Well, Sheriff, I’ve got a line on her. If you’ve got some photos we might just check with someone who can make an identification.”

“Who you got?”

“Woman who runs the apartment house where she had an apartment for a while. She moved after that and left a forwarding address. But I thought we’d better check up first with someone who can make an absolute identification. If she’s the one, I’ve got quite a lot on her. And I think she’s the one.”

“Let’s go,” the sheriff agreed.

They drove to a frame house that had at one time been an example of three-storied prosperity, but with the encroachment of paved streets and the spread of the business area, had now been turned into an apartment house.

The heavy-set woman who ran the place promptly identified the photographs which Sheriff Eldon produced.

“That’s the girl. That’s Elizabeth, all right. What’s happened to her?”

“She was killed.”

“How?”

“Stabbed.”

“Good Heavens! And such a nice girl, too!”

“Any idea who might have done it? Enemies or anything of that sort?”

“No. While she was here she was just as quiet and well-behaved as anyone could ask.”

“Know anything about her friends or relatives?”

“No, I don’t. I took over the place just before she moved out and...”

“We got some more recent stuff lined up, Bill,” Gilmer interposed. “Just wanted to make sure that was the party before I started following the other trails.”

“Her mother had died just before she moved out,” the apartment manager volunteered, “somewhere in — now, let me see. I think it was somewhere in Colorado. I remember she got a wire saying her mother was very low and she flew out, and then wrote me that her mother had passed away and that she’d stay for the funeral and move to another apartment when she got back, and she sent me two weeks’ rent and asked if that would be all right.”

“Know where that letter is?”

“I burnt it.”

“About when was this?”

“About five or six months ago. I can look up the date when she left if you want.”

“I already have that,” Gilmer said to the sheriff. “It was in August.”

“That’s right,” the woman said. “I think it was around August.”

Bill Eldon nodded to Gilmer. “Let’s go, Everett.”

They went to the telegraph office and wired the Denver police to consult statistical records and rush any information concerning a party by the name of Dow who had died in Colorado within the last few months.

Thereafter Chief Gilmer and Bill Eldon spent a couple of hours plodding along in the dull monotony of routine leg-work, tracing Elizabeth Dow from one lodging house to another, finding where she had been employed and locating friends who had known her.

From this scattered pattern of information the sheriff and Gilmer pieced together a mosaic showing a clear picture of a young woman, vivacious, intelligent, alert, a steady, dependable worker, a loyal friend filled with the joy of life, yet respecting herself and commanding the respect of her friends. There had been one or two boy friends, but for the most part she had preferred a group of intimates to the less social but more intimate companionship of a tete-a-tete. She had been employed as cashier in a cafeteria. Her nimble fingers, quick eyes, and winning personality had made for adept efficiency as well as for popularity with customers.

The day before had been her day off, and about ten o’clock she had been seen with a young man who was strange to the girl’s set, although he had been seen with her off and on during the past week. The couple had sat for half an hour talking earnestly at a table in the cafeteria. And then Elizabeth Dow had secured a cardboard container and put up a lunch, roast beef sandwiches, deviled eggs, crisp lettuce, and pie. Then she and the young man, a tall, dark chap in Army uniform, had left the cafeteria. That had been around eleven. Neither one had been seen since.

At this point in the investigation, a wire came in from the Denver police:

ELVIRA DOW AGED FIFTY-SIX DIED CORONARY THROMBOSIS AUGUST 23RD, BURIED HERE, FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS MADE BY DAUGHTER ELIZABETH WHO REGISTERED HOTEL GIVING ADDRESS YOUR CITY.

“Well,” Gilmer said, “that’s all there is to it. Find the man who was with her and we’ve got the murderer. You say there was waxed paper on the table there in that old house?”

“That’s right.”

“Find this chap in uniform. That’ll be all there is to it.”

The sheriff reached for his battered sombrero and put it on. He started for the door, and then paused to regard the chief of police with thought-puckered eyes. “You know, Everett,” he said, “it may not be that simple. When you’ve been in office as long as I have you get so you pay more attention to people and less to clues.”

7

Rush Medford, the district attorney, stepped out from his private office to the entrance room to receive George Quinlan.

“Hello, George. I asked you to come up here because I wanted to talk with you — confidentially.”

Quinlan glanced significantly at the unlocked door of the reception office, then at the closed door of Medford’s private office. Medford, towering his voice, went on hastily, “I have a man waiting in there, George. I want you to meet him. I want you to give him every bit of help you can. His name’s Walworth — Martin Walworth. Ever hear of him?”

Quinlan shook his head.

“Famous all over the state as a criminologist. He...”

“Oh, yes! I’ve heard of him. I place him now.”

The district attorney said confidentially, “I’m calling him in, George, at the suggestion of some very, very influential citizens. They feel that there’s a soft spot in the County administration. You know, old Bill prides himself on paying more attention to people’s reactions than to material evidence. Some whimsical eccentricity on his part that’s going to get us all into trouble one of these days. You know how it is when word gets around that the crowd in the courthouse has been in office too long. There’s always a tendency to make a clean sweep. And that takes in all of us.”

“What do you expect Walworth to do?” Quinlan asked.

The district attorney smiled. “I expect him to solve this mystery very quickly and very competently, demonstrating to the voters of this county the fact that the old hit-or-miss methods of investigating a crime are as obsolete as the horse and buggy. The modern criminologist uses scientific equipment and streamlined efficiency.”

“You mean you’re going to use him to show the sheriff up?”

“I mean I’m going to use him to solve the mystery.”

“The sheriff won’t like that,” Quinlan said.

“Of course he won’t like it. But there’s a murder to be solved, and the county has some rights I certainly trust that you have no objections.”

“No,” Quinlan said, “I haven’t any objections.”

“Come on in,” Medford invited and opened the door of his private office.

Martin Walworth was a short-bodied, heavy-featured man with bushy eyebrows and huge spectacles. His round black pupils were pin-points of perpetual scrutiny in the center of pale, steady eyes. He didn’t get up or shake hands when the district attorney performed the introduction.

“No weapon was found?” Walworth asked after a few preliminaries.

“No weapon,” Quinlan admitted.

“The autopsy seems to have been handled in rather a careless manner,” Walworth said. “However, I’m hopeful of getting a fairly good description of the murder weapon by an investigation which I shall make personally. There were no fingerprints whatever on the cigarette case?”

“None whatever.”

The criminologist’s eyes were stern with accusation. “Do I understand that the sheriff picked it up?”

“He said he picked it up.”

“But there were no fingerprints?”

“None.”

“Not latents that were smudged, but...”

“No. There were none.”

Walworth grunted. “Then someone wiped it,” he said, “wiped it clean — after the sheriff picked it up.”

“Looked as though it might have been wiped with something like a chamois skin, polished as smooth and slick as a whistle,” Quinlan admitted.

“After the sheriff picked it up.”

Quinlan nodded. “I guess it has to be that way.”

“But you didn’t say so,” the district attorney accused, “not until after Walworth pointed it out.”

“I didn’t volunteer any suggestions. The fact speaks for itself,” Quinlan said.

Walworth grunted. “And there were no tracks in the soft soil?”

“No tracks.”

“That, manifestly, is impossible.”

“You can see the photographs and...”

“Photographs, bah! They are taken with a synchronized flash. That makes the picture flat as a pancake. The lighting should have been scientifically controlled.”

Quinlan said nothing.

“Obviously,” Walworth went on, “the fact in itself is impossible. Therefore someone is lying. It may be this Beckett.”

“It may be,” Quinlan admitted.

The district attorney interposed hastily, “Here in the country where a good many people know each other and... well, you have to be a little careful, you know, Mr. Walworth... Political considerations as well as a person’s integrity...”

“I understand,” Walworth said. “Is there any other evidence?”

Quinlan told him about the car which had driven into the field after the tractor had made its last trip out.

Walworth digested that information with the profound expression of a deep thinker. “This piece that was gouged out of the right front tire,” he said, “you said you used a piece of paper to get the outline of that?”

“Yes.”

“Where is that paper?”

Almost involuntarily, Quinlan’s hand dropped to his pocket. Then he remembered. The triangular piece of paper had been in the pocket of the wet suit he had taken off to have sent to the cleaner. Because the paper had no weight, no bulk, he had overlooked it. To confess his negligence in this was unthinkable. He tried to keep his voice casual.

“I have it at home.”

Walworth’s comment was short and to the point.

“Get it,” he said, and then added disgustedly, “what a slipshod way of identifying a tire!”

Quinlan parked his car in front of his house and, because he intended to start back for the courthouse almost at once, left the door open.

He walked across the sidewalk, turned to the right on the smaller walk which skirted the house and went around to the back porch.

He entered quietly and climbed the stairs to his room. He wondered if his wife had made a careful search of his pockets in preparing the wet suit for the cleaners. If she hadn’t, could he get hold of the suit before the bit of paper had been ruined?

Quinlan’s pulse gave an involuntary reaction to the relief he felt as he looked at the place on the top of his dresser which was reserved for his personal trinkets. Every minute since his talk with the criminologist had been a thought-tortured nightmare of apprehension that the piece of paper might have been irrevocably lost. But there it was, lying on the dresser, a mud-soiled triangular slip of paper, silent tribute to the thorough-going loyalty of a steadfast helpmeet.

Quinlan picked up the paper, turned and walked quietly back down the stairs.

From the living room, he heard Beryl’s clear voice, remarkable for its low-pitched carrying power, saying into the telephone, “Rate Clerk, will you please give me the long distance rate to San Rodolpho — after seven o’clock at night, please?... Thank you very much.”

Quinlan left the house by the back door. He noticed that his daughter’s car was parked in front of the garage, a ramshackle, juvenile thing she had picked up herself a couple of years or so ago.

She should sell that car, the undersheriff thought speculatively, looking at it without quite seeing it, a whoopee that was getting on its last legs, a jalopy that would start going to pieces pretty fast but which was worth money now. When new cars came...

Then a sudden discovery jarred George Quinlan’s mind into a new line of activity. He stood regarding a triangular nick in the right front tire, his eyes locked in a stare of incredulous dismay.

Almost mechanically, Quinlan moved the few steps necessary to hold the triangular tom bit of paper over the gouged-out place in the tire.

The mud-stained triangle of paper his wife had carefully saved for him was a perfect pattern, just fitting the hole in the tire.

Quinlan straightened, holding the paper between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The hand seemed strange to him.

Once, when he had been arresting a man charged with some minor crime, the prisoner had unexpectedly whirled and delivered a smashing punch to the side of Quinlan’s head. The blow had lashed out so fast and hard that not only had Quinlan failed to see it coming, but the smashing impact had, for the moment, robbed him of all memory. And as his senses had begun to struggle for orientation, he had fancied himself in the midst of a strange world wherein surroundings that should have been familiar failed to have any significance whatever.

Now, in the same way, Quinlan’s mind was reeling from the impact of his discovery. It seemed only last week that Beryl had been a baby, getting her first tooth... The worry over whooping cough — the starting of school — blossoming into a young woman — and now this.

Gradually Quinlan’s mind reasserted itself. There was Martin Walworth waiting at the courthouse with the district attorney for this triangular piece of paper. Walworth would make a life-size photograph. The Rockville Gazette would publish it. Everyone in the community from service-station attendants on down would be looking for an automobile with this triangular gouge on the side of the tread on the right front tire.

His first instinctive desire being to protect Beryl, Quinlan thought of changing the tire and putting on the spare. Then he took a deep breath and let his faith in his daughter assert itself. Surely Beryl could have had no part in a murder! It was simply that there were things that needed explaining, and George Quinlan, man of action, had never been one to postpone that which needed doing. Slowly he turned and walked back to the house.

Beryl was crossing the kitchen as the undersheriff opened the back door. She glanced up and smiled casually. Then she caught his eyes and stopped in her tracks.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Upstairs. She... she’s coming down now. Why, Dad?”

“Come to the front room. I want to talk with you. I don’t want her to hear.”

Silently Beryl followed her father into the living room. George Quinlan indicated a chair, but Beryl didn’t sit down. Instead, she remained standing, very trim, very erect, and very white.

“Your car,” Quinlan said with a gesture of weariness. “Last night, after the murder, did you go to the Higbee place?”

For a long moment she hesitated, and in that moment Quinlan knew the most awful suspense he had ever experienced. If she should lie to him now, it would rip his soul to tattered shreds.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was... The sheriff telephoned. He asked me to look for you.”

George Quinlan ceased to be the father. He was now only a representative of the law, his eyes keeping a steady, insistent pressure upon his daughter’s mind, his questions probing her thoughts. “What did the sheriff tell you?”

“Told me he’d found a cigarette case. He wanted you to take fingerprints.”

“Did he ask you to look for me?”

“He asked me where you were — asked me to try and find you.”

“And you went to the Higbee place?”

“Yes.”

“Looking for me?”

There was a pause, a pause long enough for George Quinlan to be conscious of his perspiring hands, of the hammering of his heart, but his eyes didn’t waver.

“No.”

“Why did you go there?”

“I went... Oh, Dad!” Her lips quivered at the edges, and tears swam into her eyes. Then the mouth became firm. She brushed aside the refuge of tears and met her father eye to eye. “I went there because I thought it was Roy’s cigarette case.”

“Was it?”

“I... I thought so.”

“Was it?”

“Apparently not.”

“What did you do?”

“I took a chamois skin from the car and wiped every single fingerprint off of it.”

“Why?”

“Because... because it was Roy’s cigarette case and he had called me... well, he said it was from Fort Bixling, but I think now it was from San Rodolpho, and I... Dad, I don’t know why I did it. Don’t ask me why. I can’t tell you. All I know is that I thought I had a chance to protect Roy, and all of a sudden it seemed more important to me to do that than anything else on earth. I didn’t care if they killed me, I was going to protect him.”

A vast weariness settled on George Quinlan. This was the end of the trail so far as he was concerned. He was discredited, finished. “You say it wasn’t Roy’s cigarette case after all?”

“Dad, I don’t know. I can’t understand it. Roy was here this morning. He... I asked him for a cigarette... He acted just as naturally as could be, reached into his pocket, took out the silver cigarette case and... and afterwards, after he’d gone, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen the engraving on it. He’d acted so completely offhand about the whole thing that it had put me off my guard. I...”

“Where’s Roy now?”

“At the hotel, I guess. He wanted to clean up and get a short sleep. He wants to come out here a little later. He...”

“Say nothing about this to him,” Quinlan said. “Say nothing about it to anyone.”

“Dad... I... I’m sorry.”

Quinlan looked at her as though she were some stranger in the house.

“Will it make... make much difference?” she asked.

For almost twenty years George Quinlan had been trying to stand between Beryl and life, trying to protect her, to ward off the blows that Fate might deal, telling little white lies when he thought those might be necessary to reassure her. Now, looking at her, he suddenly realized that the time for this had passed. She was a woman, not a child, and she had become a woman by reason of her own act.

“Will it, Dad? Will it make much difference, you know, a good deal?”

“Yes,” Quinlan said and walked out, letting it go at that.

8

As he walked past Beryl’s automobile, the thought occurred to Quinlan once more to change the tire on her car. He shook it off and walked out to where he had left his car. The door swinging open was a grim reminder of the extent of the gap which existed between his life of only a few minutes ago and the maelstrom of events into which he had been swept.

“George, oh, George!”

His wife was calling from the upstairs window.

Quinlan turned. “Yes, dear?”

“You’ll be home for dinner tonight?”

It needed only that homely touch to bring him back to realities. His answer was mechanical. “I don’t know, dear — yet. I’ll telephone.”

“Okay, let me know,” she called cheerily.

Quinlan got in the car. A new worry had entered his mind, the thought of what this would mean to Martha. A man might have enough resilience and dogged determination to slug his way through to a come-back, but Martha couldn’t take it. As the wife of the undersheriff she enjoyed a certain position in the social life of the community. People liked her for herself, but in addition to that liking extended a recognition of the importance of her husband’s position.

Quinlan carefully placed the damning triangle of paper in between the leaves of his notebook. It would hold flat there. It...

It was at that moment that a thought struck him.

Changing the tire on Beryl’s automobile might or might not stave off discovery, but there was one absolutely certain way by which George Quinlan could give his daughter complete immunity from what she had done.

Hardly realizing the full significance of what he was doing, Quinlan tore another sheet of paper from the notebook. Seemingly without orders from Quinlan’s mind, but working mechanically and with some volition of their own, his fingers shaped a new triangle, a triangle not quite so broad at the base, a little more pointed. He had only to walk into the district attorney’s office, hand that triangle to Martin Walworth and walk out, and Beryl’s connection with the murder at the Higbee homestead need never be known.

He started the car and drove directly to the courthouse.

The district attorney’s secretary was at her desk. “You may go in. They are expecting you,” she said.

Quinlan entered the private office. Martin Walworth had moved over to occupy the district attorney’s swivel chair. Edward Lyons, publisher of the Rockville Gazette, was seated at the other side of the desk, his 6B pencil sprawling huge notes on folded newsprint that Quinlan could read over Lyons’ shoulder.

Printed on top of one of the sheets of newsprint, apparently to be used as headlines, were the words, SHERIFF’S SLIPSHOD METHODS MAY RESULT IN MURDERER’S ESCAPE, DECLARES CRIMINOLOGIST.

Rush Medford, his face suffused with smiles, was standing behind Walworth, and Bertram Glasco, puffing contentedly on a cigar, was nodding his head as though not only agreeing with something the criminologist had said, but also signifying his continuing agreement with anything the man might be going to say.

John Farnham, sitting very erect in a chair to the right of the criminologist, was watching Walworth with fixed intensity. Leave it to Farnham not to approve entirely of anything or anyone, Quinlan thought. Farnham was a typical dour-faced crusader who would never be happy, never satisfied. A one-time cowboy, he still did a little horse-trading in addition to his real-estate business, and Quinlan couldn’t help thinking that while he was sanctimoniously honest in his real-estate transactions, his reputation as a horse-trader was such that the initiated seldom dealt with him. There had been a bay saddle-horse Farnham had sold Beckett a couple of months ago. Quinlan had seen it in the Higbee place. Farnham had said the horse was twelve, but Quinlan would bet a month’s salary it was at least...

“Do you have that piece of paper, George?” Medford asked.

Quinlan opened the notebook. There was, he noticed, just the slightest tremor as his fingers took out the triangular piece of paper which he handed to the district attorney, who in turn passed it across to Walworth.

“That the triangle?” Walworth asked Quinlan, and it seemed to Quinlan that the man’s eyes were unnecessarily intense in their boring scrutiny.

Quinlan nodded.

Walworth picked up the piece of paper. He turned it over to look at the other side and then said to Lyons, “Now, this is an excellent example of what I’ve been talking about. This piece of paper represents the outline of a piece of rubber that has been gouged out of a tire. There are no identification marks on the paper — none whatever. In the first place, the tire pattern should have been preserved with a plaster mold. But unsatisfactory as this paper method is, it’s rendered doubly so by the fact that there are no identifying marks on it. That triangle of paper should have been initialed by the sheriff and the undersheriff right on the ground so that there wouldn’t have been any possible chance of a mistake or... or of substitution. As it is, it’s quite possible the defense attorney will rip the case wide open by claiming anyone could have substituted another piece of paper in place of the original, and that this piece is one that was substituted.”

Glasco said hastily, “That’s all right, Walworth. The sheriff is slipping, but Quinlan here is all right. He’s going to be the next sheriff. We don’t want to have any criticism of him. Ain’t that right, Ed?”

Edward Lyons, scribbling rapidly with his pencil, nodded emphatically.

Walworth almost contemptuously jerked Rush Medford’s desk pen out of its well, handed it to Quinlan and said, “Write your name on the back of this piece of paper so you can identify it in court.”

Quinlan leaned over the desk. The tension of his nerves was such that the signature which came jerking from the point of the pen was an angular travesty on his usual handwriting

“Now then,” Walworth said, “we’ll print thousands of perfect facsimiles of this slip of paper and put a copy in the hands of every service station in the county. The original, Mr. Medford, will be carefully preserved where it can’t be tampered with.”

Quinlan said, “You won’t want me any more?”

“Better stick around, George,” Glasco told him amiably. “This is really good. Mr. Walworth is analyzing the crime, pointing out just where Bill slipped up on...”

“I’ve got to see a man,” Quinlan apologized. “I’d like to stay, but this visit I’ve got to make is important.”

“Go ahead,” Medford said somewhat impatiently. “But just don’t talk to anybody about the case, and — don’t say anything about this.”

Quinlan paused only briefly at the desk of the Palace Hotel. “You have a Roy Jasper here,” he said. “What room’s he in?”

“Two-o-five. But he’s out. He checked in, cleaned up and went right out again.”

“You knew him?” Quinlan asked.

“Sure. Talked with him. He’d been up all night, needed a bath and shave. Said he tried to sleep for a couple of hours, but he couldn’t make it — had too much on his mind.”

Quinlan phoned his house from the lobby. “Beryl,” he said when she answered the telephone, “I want to get in touch with Roy.”

“Yes, Dad, I know.”

“He isn’t there?”

“No, Dad.”

“If you hear from him, find out where he is and let me know. If he comes there, get a call through to me right away.”

Beryl said with dignity, “If he telephones or if I see him, Dad, I’ll tell him that you want to get in touch with him right away, and for him to call you.”

“That isn’t what I said,” Quinlan said angrily.

“Father, you can’t doubt Roy. You simply can’t do it. If I tell him to call you, I know he will.”

There was something in his daughter’s voice that left Quinlan feeling strangely helpless. He just didn’t know how to cope with this grown-up daughter, and he couldn’t bring himself to threaten her as he would have threatened any other recalcitrant citizen.

He heard Beryl hang up at the other end of the line, and he slowly dropped his own receiver into place.

9

The Rockville Gazette created a sensation when it hit the streets at five o’clock that evening. Headlines screamed across the top of the page: CONSULTING CRIMINOLOGIST CALLED IN BY DISTRICT ATTORNEY MEDFORD TO SOLVE BAFFLING CASE.

Quinlan noticed that Lyons had toned down his headlines on the interview he had had with Walworth so that now they read: SLIPSHOD METHODS OF LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS GIVE CRIMINALS GREATEST BREAK, SAYS WALWORTH.

Over the left was a silhouette, a photograph in actual size of the torn triangular piece of paper Quinlan had given to Walworth. Accompanying the photograph in bold letters was the caption: CAN THIS BE CUT IN TIRE OF KILLER’S CAR? A boxed-in notice in boldfaced type suggested that each reader of the paper cut out this triangle and watch for a car whose right front tire held a gouged-out place in the side of the tread corresponding with the shape of this piece of paper.

Quinlan glanced through the paper and the vague accusation of the article, the unfair tone of the entire account of the crime itself, added to his worries.

For the fifth time within an hour he called his house.

The promptness with which Beryl answered the phone showed that she was once more sitting by the telephone, waiting.

“Anything from Roy?” the undersheriff asked.

“No, Dad.”

“Let me know if he calls.”

“I’ll tell him you want to hear from him,” she said.

Quinlan hung up. That interchange of comments between father and daughter had not varied substantially since he had begun calling her at frequent intervals asking for a report.

Sheriff Bill Eldon opened the door to find Quinlan nervously pacing the office, chewing a cigar into shreds.

“Hello, George. Anything new at this end?”

“You’ve seen the paper.”

The sheriff nodded. “Sort of a smear, isn’t it?”

“They’re really going to town.”

“You met Walworth?”

“Yes.”

“What sort?”

“I imagine he’s very able.”

“Cordial?”

Quinlan glanced in the direction of the paper.

The sheriff smiled. “To you, I mean.”

Quinlan paced the floor for a few turns, then abruptly whirled to face the sheriff. “Bill,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you something.”

“Take it easy,” Eldon said.

“Bill, I’ve put you in a spot. I want to...”

“Nothing to apologize for.”

“But I want to tell you about this.”

“Won’t it keep?”

“No.”

“We’ve got that murder case to work on now, George.”

“Well, this is... this has something to do with it, only it’s personal.”

“If it’s personal, it’ll keep.”

Quinlan frowned in exasperation.

“I’ve got some information,” the sheriff went on, talking quickly, his characteristic drawl scarcely noticeable now. “Found out quite a bit about the girl. Got her located and identified. She’s an Elizabeth Dow from San Rodolpho, working as cashier in a cafeteria there, and her mother was Elvira Dow. That name mean anything to you, George?”

Quinlan shook his head.

“Didn’t to me, either,” the sheriff said, “until I got to thinking. Seems to me I remember that name of Dow. It’s an unusual name. Thought I’d come back to the office and dig through the files of the local papers. You take the Register, George, and I’ll take the Gazette, and we’ll see what we can find. Look through the personal mention columns — just sort of give them a once-over.”

“That’ll be almost an endless job,” Quinlan protested.

“Oh, it won’t take us over two or three hours.”

“Two or three hours!” Quinlan stormed. “Here you have a red-hot murder case on your hands, with the district attorney bringing in a consulting criminologist, the cards all stacked against you, the Gazette just fairly itching to lift your political scalp, and you talk about looking through the personal columns for two or three hours. Good Heavens! If it’s that important, why don’t you hire some girl to run through them instead of wasting your time...”

“Take it easy, George. Take it easy!” the sheriff drawled. “You know the County doesn’t give us the money to hire a girl. It expects us to...”

“Bill, there’s something I want to tell you.”

“Sure, sure,” the sheriff said soothingly, “but let’s chase down this name first. I seem to remember it, somebody outside — sort of a Red Cross business. No, that ain’t it, either. It’s a nurse. That’s it! Say, George, ring up the hospital. Ask them if they know anything about a nurse by the name of Dow.”

Quinlan reluctantly called the hospital and after a few minutes relayed the information to the sheriff. “They don’t know of anyone.”

“Well, now,” the sheriff said, “that’s too bad. I had a pretty strong hunch that name of Dow was connected with a nurse. Well, I guess we’ve got to dig through these columns of personal mention. Don’t see what else there is to be done.”

“We...”

Abruptly the door opened. A delegation came trooping into the office, Rush Medford in the lead, Martin Walworth, the criminologist, following behind, then John Farnham, his face a mask of austere self-righteousness, with Bertram Glasco bringing up the rear.

“Sheriff,” the district attorney said, “I want you to meet Martin Walworth,” and then he added reproachfully, “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you all afternoon.”

“I was out of town,” the sheriff said to the district attorney, and put out his hand to the criminologist. “How de do, how are you?”

Walworth’s handshake was perfunctory.

The district attorney, in the voice of a lawyer making a prepared speech, said, “Sheriff, this murder at the Higbee place is an important case. This county can’t afford to let the murderer get away by slipshod methods. At the behest of influential citizens, my office has, therefore, called in Martin Walworth, the famous consulting criminologist.”

The sheriff said, “That’s fine. Who’s he consulting with?”

Medford flushed. “That’s his title. He’s a consulting criminologist.”

“Then he doesn’t consult with anyone?”

“He solves crimes. He advises officers how to catch criminals.”

“That’s fine. I’m always willing to take advice from anyone — or is he supposed to give me advice?”

“He’s supposed to solve the crime,” Medford said.

“You mean he isn’t going to give advice? He’s going to just go ahead and solve it all by himself?”

“He’s working with me,” Medford said.

“To solve the case,” Walworth announced calmly, “and I think I am well on the way to having it solved.”

“Yes?” the sheriff asked, and then added quite casually, “Sit down, boys.”

“I take it,” Walworth said, disregarding the invitation, “no attempt was ever made to trace that cigarette case which you found.”

“What do you mean, to trace it?”

“To find out who owns it.”

“Well, now, I don’t know just what you mean by tracing it, or just how you’d go about...”

“Exactly,” Walworth interrupted. “However, a moment’s thought should have convinced you that the distinctive part of that case was the engraving. It was obviously done by some jeweler who had sold the case. It took only a few minutes to call the local jewelers and find out that none of them had done it. Then I got in touch with the Los Angeles police and asked them to cover the better class jewelry stores and inquire from the engravers there. It took less than two hours for that to yield results.”

“Well, now,” the sheriff said, his tone indicating his pleased surprise. “What did you find out?”

“The case was sold by Weed Sisson and Company to a young woman who paid cash for it. She’s about nineteen years of age, rather tall, slender, dark hair, very dark eyes and has an unusual speaking voice, a clear flute-like quality that is definitely noticeable. She weighs about a hundred and fifteen, and wears a pale pink tourmaline ring on the finger of her left hand.”

Quinlan cleared his throat.

“Anything else?” the sheriff asked quickly.

“And we’ve located the car that left that track, the one that drove out of the Higbee place after you had gone away and left the place without any guard and without making a search to see if an automobile was parked anywhere in the field.”

“Now wait a minute, son,” the sheriff said. “You mean the car that drove in and then turned around and drove out?”

“I mean the car that drove out,” Walworth said. “At least that’s all we know. You saw the tracks going out, and that’s all you could and did see. If there were tracks going in, the tracks made by the car going out obliterated them.”

“Well, now,” the sheriff said with something of a drawl, “we can talk about that later. I saw tracks going in and out. But you said you’d located the car.”

“Well, we’ve located the license number of the car, and we’ve wired to find out the owner of the car. The report will come in here.”

“Well, well, you might as well sit down, boys,” the sheriff said.

They hesitated a moment, then to the tune of scraping chairs seated themselves into an inquisitorial half circle.

“How did you locate the car?” Quinlan asked, and his voice sounded dry and husky.

“The Gazette hadn’t been on the street more than twenty minutes,” Lyons announced triumphantly, “until a service-station man rang up. He had sold gas to a car and happened to notice that there was a gouge in the right front tire. He spoke to the young woman who was driving it, a brunette about nineteen with a very sweet clear voice. She said she didn’t want to do anything about it, but the owner of the service station thought he might write her a follow-up, and see if he couldn’t get a repair job out of it, so he jotted down her license number. It...”

The telephone rang sharply.

Walworth said, “That will be the call, I guess,” and reached for the telephone.

Bill Eldon’s shoulder managed to get in the way. “I’m taking my phone calls,” he said, and scooped up the telephone. “Sheriff’s office,” he announced.

But the voice of Central said, “I have a person-to-person call for Mr. Martin Walworth. Is he there?”

So the sheriff surrendered the telephone with what grace he could and watched the criminologist’s face as he heard the metallic sounds which emanated from the receiver.

“You’re certain?” Walworth asked into the telephone, and then snapped, “spell it.”

After that he hung up and turned to face the others.

“You folks know a Beryl Quinlan of 1792 Walnut Drive?” he asked, collectively. But his eyes, hard and accusing, were boring into those of George Quinlan.

It was impossible to miss the collective gasp which emanated from the others.

Martin Walworth swung around to George Quinlan, “Is she a relative of yours?”

John Farnham answered the question. “A daughter,” he said.

The brief period of tense silence which followed that statement was again broken by the strident ringing of the telephone.

Sheriff Eldon picked up the receiver, said, “Sheriff’s office, Bill Eldon speaking.” Then he said, “Wait a minute... Huh?... What’s that?... Oh, I see... All right... Uh huh... Wait for about fifteen or twenty minutes, will you?... Okay, goodbye.”

The sheriff hung up the telephone, saying nothing to any of the others.

Walworth’s manner was that of a teacher who is demonstrating some problem which to him is entirely simple, but which is puzzling a roomful of pupils. “May I ask,” he inquired sarcastically, “whether this Beryl Quinlan is around nineteen, a rather tall dark girl with dark eyes and an unusually clear voice?”

He needed no answer other than the glances which these men gave each other.

“That, gentlemen,” Walworth said, “probably disposes of your murder case. It will account for the ‘B’ on the cigarette case.”

Rush Medford took charge at that point. “I think,” he announced, “that, under the circumstances, it would be better if the district attorney’s office handled this by itself from this point on,” and with that he strode toward the door, jerked it open and stood to one side, waiting for the others to precede him.

They made a self-righteous little procession as they stalked through the door, but Bertram Glasco couldn’t help stopping for one final dig at the discomfited undersheriff. “This,” he said, “probably accounts for something that puzzled me in our conversation last night.”

And with that he marched out into the corridor. Rush Medford closed the door with a mild slam, and Bill Eldon and George Quinlan were left alone in the sheriff’s office.

“Well,” Quinlan said, “I guess that does it.”

“Does what?”

“Wipes me out,” Quinlan said gloomily. “And I guess I’ve dragged you down along with me, Bill.”

“What did Glasco mean when he said something about last night?” Eldon asked.

“They wanted me to run against you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them I wouldn’t do it as long as you wanted to run.”

“Then what?”

“Then they suggested that the next big case that came along I sort of keep in the background and let you run the thing all by yourself and see if you wouldn’t bungle on fingerprints or something of that sort.”

Eldon nodded. “I thought something like that might be in the wind. And that’s why Rush Medford called Martin Walworth in as a special investigator.”

Quinlan only nodded. He felt so utterly dejected that he didn’t want to talk. They’d go and get Beryl. Rush Medford would take her to his office, go through the old rigmarole of advising her she didn’t need to talk, call in a court reporter to take down every word she said, and...

The sheriff calmly lifted the telephone, dialed a number. Quinlan slumped in his chair, chin on his chest, heard the sheriff’s fatherly voice say, “Hello, Beryl? That you?... Where’s your car?... Go down and get in it quick and go out to the Stanwood Auto Camp, rent a cabin under your own name. Be sure you use your own name and give the correct license of your car. Then look around. You’ll find a friend of yours there. Your father and I will be out in a few minutes, but get started now.”

The sheriff hung up the telephone.

“You can’t do that, Bill,” Quinlan said.

“Why not?”

“That’s compounding a felony. You know the district attorney is on his way out there to question her concerning what happened, and...”

“Well?” the sheriff interrupted.

“You can’t advise her to avoid him.”

The sheriff grinned. “I’m asking her to go where I can question her.”

“But the district attorney wants to take a statement from her.”

“And I want to take a statement from her. Rush Medford wants to solve this murder case, and I want to solve it. Buck up, George. We’re going places. Know who telephoned just a minute ago?”

“No,” Quinlan said dispiritedly.

“Roy Jasper. He’s out at the Stanwood camp. I told him to wait there.”

“I don’t see where we can do any good,” Quinlan said.

Bill Eldon put a sympathetic hand on the undersheriff’s shoulder. “Now, don’t get down in the dumps, George. You can’t blame Beryl for what she did. My gosh! I didn’t even bother to stop her.”

“You didn’t bother to do what?” Quinlan ejaculated.

“To stop her.”

“You mean you knew...”

“Of course I did,” the sheriff said. “I picked up the cigarette case and recognized it right away.”

“You recognized it? How?”

The sheriff said, “On your mantelpiece there’s a picture of Roy Jasper. He’s in uniform, and if you’ll remember he’s holding this cigarette case out in front of him half open just as though he was offering someone a cigarette. You can see the engraving on the side clearly.”

“Why, yes,” Quinlan said. “I do remember now. How did you happen to notice that, Bill?”

“Oh, I just notice lots of things,” the sheriff said. “It’s a habit a man gets when he’s been fooling around with crime as long as I have. You see, George, I never had a chance to study up on all this fingerprint business, and things of that sort, and because I don’t do so good on those things I have to keep up on other stuff. I always felt that you have to know and understand people in order to make a good officer. It’s easier to understand people than it is to understand all this scientific stuff about whorls and loops. Now, Beryl isn’t going to be mixed up in any murder, and you know it.”

“She’s mixed up in one now,” Quinlan said dejectedly.

Bill Eldon shook his head. “I thought that was Roy’s cigarette case,” he said, “so I went to a telephone and in place of telephoning the coroner’s office or the Gazette and locating you myself, I telephoned Beryl and told her about wanting to get hold of you, and about finding this cigarette case down there, and that we wanted you to fingerprint it. So then I went back where I could watch, and waited to see what happened.”

“What was the object in doing that?”

“I wanted to see whether Beryl knew where the cigarette case was. I was very careful to tell her that I found it in the Higbee place and describe it to her, but I didn’t tell her where in the Higbee place I’d found it.”

“And what did she do?”

“Did just what I thought she’d do,” the sheriff said. “Drove down there.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Watched her.”

“You didn’t stop her?”

“No. I saw Beryl drive down, stop her car, open the gate, get in, drive up to the old Higbee place and then she had to do quite a bit of looking around before she found what she wanted.

“Then I watched her drive out and close the gate behind her. I really thought she’d taken the cigarette case with her, but she was too smart for that. She’d just wiped the fingerprints off of it and left it.”

“She had no right to do that,” Quinlan said.

“She didn’t, for a fact,” the sheriff admitted cheerfully, “but I thought it was best to let her play it that way.”

“Why?”

“Because then she’d go to Roy Jasper and get him to tell her just exactly what had happened, and he’d tell her where he wouldn’t tell either you or me. All I had to be certain of was that Beryl hadn’t been in the house when the cigarette case had been dropped. She proved that to me when she had to fumble around looking for it. If she’d gone right to the kitchen where the cigarette case had been left, I’d have had to stop her when she drove out and ask her questions. I’d have hated to do it, too, because Beryl’s such a nice girl.”

Quinlan was having difficulty in adjusting himself to these new developments. “Then you knew before I got there what car it was that had the triangular piece out of the right front tire?”

“Sure.”

“Then why did you have me go through all that business of tearing out a piece of paper and all that?”

“Well, George,” the sheriff said, “I sort of wanted to see what you’d do. That’s why I gave you that triangular piece of paper to keep. I thought perhaps...”

“Don’t think for a minute I wasn’t tempted,” Quinlan interrupted bitterly. “I even went so far as to tear out a substitute piece of paper. But when it came to a showdown I couldn’t use it.”

“I know,” the sheriff said soothingly. “Well, let’s go out to the auto camp and see what’s happening. I’ll call my house first.” Sheriff Eldon called his house. Then, when the answer came, his face winced with displeasure. “Hello, Doris,” he said. “Where’s Merna? Is she there?... I see... Well, take a message for her, will you? Tell her that I want her to start looking through the personal mention in the back issues of the papers beginning about six or seven months ago and see if she can find some mention of an Elvira Dow. I think she...”

The sheriff was interrupted by a burst of high-pitched staccato noises which came rattling over the wire with the insistent stridency of static on a radio.

Slowly the look of annoyance on his face faded to a whimsical smile. “All right, Doris,” he said, “I guess it’s a good thing to have a gossip in the family after all.”

He hung up and grinned at Quinlan. “Looks as though we’re getting somewhere, George. That was the old Human Encyclopedia, my sister-in-law, who sticks that long nose of hers into more different business of more different people than you’d ever suspect. She was visiting here when old Higbee died, and she eagerly devoured all the scandal about his common-law marriage to his housekeeper, and all the stink that was raised. Elvira Dow was the nurse who lived at the house for about ten days after Marvin Higbee had his stroke. She was with him up until the time of his death.”

“Then this girl who was murdered was...”

“Elvira Dow’s daughter. Put that together with the fact that people were zigzagging back and forth around the house looking for something, and we begin to get an answer. We...”

The telephone rang sharply. Eldon answered it, listened to the harsh tones of a rasping voice, and said, “So what?” After an interval he slammed the receiver back into place.

Quinlan looked at him questioningly.

“Rush Medford,” the sheriff said. “He’s down at your place. Your wife told him Beryl got a call a few minutes ago and then jumped in her whoopee and went tearing out.”

Quinlan groaned. “And I suppose he suspects me!”

Eldon grinned. “Come on, son. Kinda looks as though we gotta move fast.”

10

The little group in the cabin at the Stanwood Auto Court talked in low voices.

“All right, Roy,” the sheriff said, “I think it’s your move.”

Roy Jasper shifted his position uneasily. “I didn’t want Beryl to know about this,” he said. “I suppose I was foolish. After all, there was no reason why... Oh well, it would have meant explaining and...”

“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.

“It began last week,” Roy said, “when I was in San Rodolpho on official business. I ate in a cafeteria and... well, the cashier was a good-looking blonde, and I got to passing the time of day with her. I told her I was from Rockville and that I certainly hated to be so close to home without going on up to see my friends, and she laughed and wanted to know whether it was friends, plural, or a friend, singular, and we got to chatting.”

“Then what?”

“Well, then she asked me about whether I knew Marvin Higbee, and I told her he was dead, and she asked a few questions about the place, and I told her something about the lawsuit. Well...” Roy hesitated.

“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.

“Well, I could see this girl kept wanting to talk about Higbee, and finally she told me the story. Her mother nursed Higbee during his last illness, and then in Colorado her mother became critically ill and sent for the daughter. The daughter was there for a couple of days before the mother died, and the mother told her that Higbee had said to her in effect, ‘If anything happens and I shouldn’t pull through, you’ve got to do something for me. He’ll pay you for it and pay you well — make him pay. I told him he’d have to pay,’ but he wouldn’t tell her any more than that, just that she’d be paid well for what she was to do. He’d had a stroke and it had paralyzed one side. Then the day before he died, he had another stroke and knew he wasn’t going to make it. The nurse could see that he wanted to tell her something very badly, but there was always someone else in the room. No one trusted anyone else, people were waiting, watching. The housekeeper kept flitting around, and the doctor was there, in and out, and Carlotta, the man’s favorite sister, was there almost constantly, and business associates kept standing around.

“Finally, she thought in desperation, Higbee said to her, talking apparently with great effort, ‘Remember, I said you’d have to do something,’ and she nodded, and just then Carlotta came and stood by the bed, and Higbee frowned and said with the effort that talking costs a man who has had a stroke, ‘The joke is behind the joker,’ and that was all.

“Carlotta kept asking, ‘What was that? What about a joker?’ But he closed his eyes and pretended he couldn’t hear her. But the nurse felt certain that it was a message for her, but she never was able to figure it out. Higbee died the next day, and there was, of course, no further necessity for a nurse. Well, Elizabeth kept thinking over what her mother had told her, and after her mother’s death she began to wonder if it hadn’t been related to something in the house, so she started pumping me about the Higbee place, and I told her all I knew. Elizabeth wanted me to go with her and see if we couldn’t find something in the house, but of course, she swore me to absolute secrecy.

“Well, it was an adventure, and I was there in San Rodolpho on official business. I got off once to come up and see Beryl, but the rest of the time they held me there so I couldn’t go anywhere. Then I went back to Fort Bixling, and then I got this furlough and... well, I’d promised Elizabeth that I’d get in touch with her the first chance I had. So I did, and she insisted that I mustn’t call anyone, or let anyone know about what we were going to do. She said she’d drive me up in her car, and that after I’d helped her locate what she wanted I could get in touch with my friends up here. I think she was just a little bit hurt that I was so eager to... Well, you know.”

Beryl nodded.

“So when I left Camp Bixling yesterday morning, I took the bus up to San Rodolpho. I’d telephoned her that I was coming. She met me in the cafeteria. We talked for a while, and then we went over and had some lunch put up, got in her car and drove up to the old Higbee place. It certainly was a mess. I found that a passkey I’d picked up in a hardware store would work the lock on the side door, and we went in and prowled all around the place.”

“Find anything?” the sheriff asked.

Roy said, “At the time, I didn’t think that we had, but now-well, now I don’t know.”

The sheriff raised his eyebrows, asking a silent question.

“You see,” Roy said, “we had made pretty much of a search around the place, and were sitting down eating lunch, in fact we’d finished lunch and I’d had a cigarette, and I think she had, when all of a sudden we heard a car drive up. Well, you know, there’d been so much trouble among the heirs, and, after all, we’d really broken into the place — I’d used a passkey — so we jumped up and ran to the window. It was all covered with cobwebs, but I could vaguely see a car and people coming to the house. So I grabbed her hand and we ran away from the window and dashed for the side door. We played hide and seek around there for a while until the people walked around the other side of the house, then we ran out and jumped in her car and drove away.”

“You saw those people?”

“Yes, after we’d got out of the house. It was Sam Beckett and John Farnham. They didn’t see us. Farnham was evidently selling the place to Beckett. Anyway, I let Elizabeth drive me back to San Rodolpho, and I waited until evening and then telephoned Beryl. I didn’t want to tell Beryl that I was in San Rodolpho so I told her I was just leaving Fort Bixling, and... well, that’s all there was to it. I stuck around there, took the night bus and came up here. Now, Elizabeth must have uncovered some clue to something she didn’t want me to know about. After she took me back to San Rodolpho she must have turned right around and driven right back up here. She told me she had a bad headache and was going up to her room and go to bed. And by that time — I was thinking of Beryl. Elizabeth had been all right to kill a little time with when I was down where I couldn’t see Beryl, but once I could get up here I was kicking myself for the time I’d wasted out of my furlough. When a soldier’s in a strange town and is lonely, he’ll do anything just to talk with some friendly girl. Well, that was it. I’d promised her I’d go up to the Higbee place with her and look it over, and I went, and that’s all there was to it as far as I know.”

“And you left your cigarette case there?” Beryl asked.

“Yes.”

“But you had one the next morning when you showed up that...”

Roy said, “I felt miserable about that. You see, Beryl, you sent me the cigarette case for Christmas, but I already had one cigarette case, so I used it for a spare. Then after I lost your... well, I intended to go back to the Higbee place and pick up the one with the engraving on it, but the one that I showed you this morning was the spare. It was silver, about the same type as the one you gave me except for the engraving, and I held it so you couldn’t see that the engraving wasn’t on it. I was afraid that I couldn’t explain to you about Elizabeth without you getting sore.”

“You mustn’t feel that way, Roy — ever.”

“I know,” he said, “now. But I wasn’t sure. I...”

A car drew up outside. The sound of excited voices mingled with hurried steps. A perfunctory knock on the door was followed by a turning of the knob and the influx of an excited group.

“There they are!” Lyons proclaimed dramatically.

District Attorney Rush Medford demanded angrily, “What’s the idea?”

“Idea of what?” the sheriff drawled innocently.

“Spiriting these people away.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows went up. “We didn’t spirit them anywhere. We’re questioning them.”

“I’m putting this young man under arrest for the murder of Elizabeth Dow.”

“Got any evidence?” the sheriff asked.

“All the evidence in the world. That is, we will have as soon as we check some fingerprints. Beryl Quinlan thought she was wiping all the fingerprints off that cigarette case and she did — off the outside. But what everyone overlooked was the fact that at some time when the case had been empty and the owner was filling it with fresh cigarettes, he had left his fingerprints on the inside, back of the cigarettes.

“Mr. Walworth very shrewdly deduced he’d find fingerprints there and carefully removed the cigarettes, then dusted the interior of the case, and we got some very fine latents. In my official capacity as district attorney of this county, Sheriff, I order you to take this man into custody.”

“Suit yourself, but I’m not going to be the one to swear out the complaint,” Bill Eldon drawled.

“I will swear out the complaint,” Martin Walworth said, but then added hastily, “in the event it appears that this young man’s fingerprints check with the latents I found on the inside of the cigarette case.”

“We’ll determine that in short order,” the district attorney said.

They drove to the courthouse. Walworth made prints of Roy Jasper’s fingertips. There was no concealing his anxiety as he focused a magnifying glass on the latent prints and then compared them with the prints he had taken from Jasper’s fingers.

Suddenly his face broke into a smile. He nodded triumphantly to the district attorney. “I think congratulations are in order,” he said. “We have the right man!” He snapped the cigarette case shut with something of a flourish.

11

The night had turned clear and calm. Wintry stars blazed down with steady splendor. The pulsing throb of the motor on Sam Beckett’s tractor punctuated the cold silence. The tractor headlights cast twin rows of illumination down the field which surrounded the old Higbee place.

The murder of Elizabeth Dow had been a dramatic chapter in Sam Beckett’s farming operations. But, murder or no murder, the plowing had to be done, and Sam Beckett on the tractor was slowly rolling the soil into furrows which streamed out behind the tractor-driven plow.

Sheriff Eldon parked the County car at the gate and said to George Quinlan, “Looks as though were going to have to walk, George. We can’t drive this car through that freshly plowed ground.”

Quinlan nodded.

Together the two men trudged along the plowed furrows, sinking to their ankles in the soft soil. They reached the strip of hard ground where the plows had not yet bitten into the soil, and walked more rapidly along the old abandoned roadway to where the Higbee house loomed as a massive shadow against the stars.

“Think there’s something we’ve overlooked?” Quinlan asked anxiously.

“Gosh, yes,” the sheriff admitted, “lots and lots of things we’ve overlooked. The human mind just ain’t thorough enough to look for all the things it should see, or even to see the things that are yelling for attention. But that message now, George. Higbee said, ‘The joke is behind the joker.’ Now that must mean something.”

“But what?” Quinlan asked.

“Well, now,” the sheriff said, “the old-time kings used to have ’em — the little fellows with bells that danced around and made jokes.”

“Well?”

“I noticed that one of the pictures there was of a court scene with people talking, and this here court jester or joker with his cap and bells was out in the front part of the picture doing a little dance. Now you know that just might be what old Higbee had reference to.”

“Could be,” Quinlan agreed without enthusiasm. “By gosh, Bill, I hope you’re right.”

The sheriff said, “We gotta be right, George. They’ve got us in a vise and they’re beginning to screw it up pretty tight.”

They entered the house, and the sheriff, using his flashlight, led the way into the big front room where a rat, perched defiantly on the back of what had once been an overstuffed chair, regarded them with glittering, malevolent eyes. The beam of the sheriff’s flashlight fastened on the picture entitled “Court Scene in the Middle Ages.”

There were the monarchs, the court beauties resplendent with dresses cut low in front, billowing out behind. There were statesmen gathered in a serious little group, and down in the foreground was the court jester waving his fool’s sceptre, dancing and grinning, the bells on his cap jiggled into wild motion by his gyrations.

Quinlan approached the picture and tilted it out from the wall. His face, illuminated by reflections from the beam of the sheriff’s spotlight, showed bitter disappointment.

“Wait a minute,” the sheriff told him reassuringly. “You can’t expect a man as smart as Higbee to have just pushed something up behind a picture where an accidental jar would have knocked it to the floor. When he said behind the joker, he really meant what he said. It must be behind the joker.”

The sheriff took the picture down, placed it on a table, took a heavy-bladed pocket knife from his trousers and began prying at the brads which held the back of the picture in place. The brads came out easily, and the sheriff lifted out the cardboard section which backed the picture. He gave a low whistle.

Age had discolored the back of the picture, but that discoloration was slightly less pronounced over an oblong space some two and a half inches wide by six inches long.

“Gone!” Quinlan exclaimed.

The sheriff scratched the grizzled hair along the back of his head.

For some seconds they regarded the dismantled picture. Then the sheriff said, “Notice this was exactly behind the jester in the picture.”

Quinlan’s nod was perfunctory. “Knowing where it was isn’t going to help us to tell where it is,” he said.

Bill Eldon rehung the picture, and was meticulously careful to see that it was hanging straight.

“Now, clues,” the sheriff said, when the picture had been hung to suit him, “are peculiar things. They’re combinations of a little bit of everything. Lots of clues get thrown out the window, just lots of them. Now, take that girl for instance, lying face down and stabbed. Notice something about her, George?”

“What?”

“No purse.”

“You mean she... Say! That’s right! She didn’t have any purse.”

“No purse,” the sheriff said. “That wouldn’t mean so much by itself, because she might have been running and somebody was chasing her and caught up with her and stabbed her, and her purse might have been left at the place where she started to run, or she may have left it somewhere here in the house. But we don’t find it here in the house...”

“Go on,” Quinlan said eagerly.

“Simple as can be,” the sheriff observed. “This Dow girl was pretty smart. You have to be quick-thinking to be a cashier in a cafeteria. That’s not the sort of job you can go to sleep on. Well, she got Roy Jasper to come up here to the house with her, show her around, and take the responsibility of getting the door open. Then she started searching, and the probabilities are she hadn’t searched very long before she stumbled onto this picture and that gave her an idea she was on the right track.

“So what does she do? Does she tell Roy what she’s discovered and then let him dismantle the picture with her? She does not. She stalls along and pretends she hasn’t noticed anything, gets rid of Roy, and then later on comes back by herself. It’s late afternoon. She doesn’t drive her car inside the gate. She leaves it down the road a ways and walks in. And just as she’s congratulating herself on being smart, the gate opens and Sam Beckett comes through with a tractor and starts plowing.

“The girl can’t walk out in broad daylight and stumble across that plowed ground where Sam Beckett will ask her what she’s been up to and who she is. So she waits for darkness to make her getaway.

“So she sits still, and by and by it begins to get dark all right, and she hears all the little night noises — and then she hears a new noise. Someone else has been hiding in the house, someone else who was waiting for it to get dark. She hears cautious steps, a board creaks, all the night noises stop — all except this steady, stealthy approach of someone who’s been hiding in the house — waiting.

“She fights back panic, clutches her purse, gropes her way to the side door and starts running. And the thing behind her, the thing that’s been waiting for darkness to make its stealthy approach, starts running, too.”

“Gosh, Bill,” Quinlan said, “you’re building up quite a scene from just a few clues — from the absence of a few clues, in fact.”

“But that’s the way it had to be,” the sheriff said with cold logic. “If she’d come in after Beckett started plowing, her tracks would be in the plowed ground, and by counting the furrows where these tracks quit, you could tell just how far Beckett had got with his plowing before she walked in. But there aren’t any tracks. So both the girl and the person who killed her must have come in before the plowing started.”

“Guess you’re right, Bill.”

“Well, she broke and ran. What did she run for?”

“Her automobile.”

“No, George, I don’t think so. You have to put yourself in her shoes. She ran for the closest protection she could find.”

“The tractor!” Quinlan exclaimed.

“Now you’re gettin’ it, Son. She’d been hiding from the man on the tractor, but now, all of a sudden, she wanted to be near him mighty bad. She was running for the tractor — and something made her swerve.”

“How do you know she swerved? Maybe she just didn’t get there.”

“Nope. The body was found on the plowed ground. That means she got to the furrow the tractor was plowing, and swerved. Now what would make her detour away from safety like that just when she was getting close?”

Quinlan shook his head. Then after a moment he said, “The trouble with all this is it leaves the murderer in here. How could he have got out if there were no tracks?”

“He left tracks, George.”

“He couldn’t have, Bill. He didn’t.”

“Oh bosh!” the sheriff said. “Sure he left tracks. He left the sort of tracks that nobody bothered to look at. That’s the angle I’m working on now, the way the fellow got out of here.”

“You mean he went out on Sam Beckett’s tractor? You mean that...?”

The sheriff suddenly slid from the end of the table. “Come on, son,” he said to Quinlan. “We’ve got a job to do — and we’ve got to do it fast.”

Lights blazed in the office of Rush Medford. Edward Lyons sat near the telephone where he could rush in reports to his newspaper. Martin Walworth, his bushy eyebrows drawn to ominous lines, gave Roy Jasper and Beryl Quinlan the benefit of his accusing gaze. The court reporter, his pen moving smoothly over a shorthand notebook, took down the questions and answers.

Rush Medford looked up as Bill Eldon and the undersheriff entered the room. There was exasperation on his face. For more than an hour and a half now they had been grilling the suspects and they knew just as much as they had known before, no more, no less.

Sheriff Eldon’s slow drawl came as a sharp change from the staccato bark of questions which had been fired by the criminologist. The sheriff pulled off his big sombrero, grinned at the district attorney, turned to Walworth and said, “Well, I guess I have to admit some of these rule-of-thumb methods aren’t as good as these modern scientific methods.”

Walworth said angrily, “If these two would consent to a lie-detector test I’d very soon tell you what’s...”

“You mean they won’t?” the sheriff interrupted.

Beryl Quinlan said, “As long as you are antagonistic to my father we aren’t going to cooperate. We’ll answer questions, and that’s all.”

“Come, come,” the sheriff said soothingly. “Why don’t you take a lie-detector test, Beryl? It might help things along.”

“We will if you say so.”

Walworth heaved an audible sigh of relief. “I’d want them to step in this room one at a time,” he said.

“Sure, sure,” the sheriff announced. “Go ahead, Beryl.”

The district attorney glanced suspiciously at the sheriff, but his suspicions seemed allayed by the guileless expression on the veteran’s grizzled countenance.

Walworth had his apparatus all set up and it took him only a few minutes to take Beryl Quinlan into another office where he spent some twelve minutes with her on the lie-detector. Then he called for Roy Jasper, strapped the electrodes and controls to him, and again propounded his questions.

At the end of that time, Walworth rejoined the others.

“They’re telling the truth,” he announced glumly.

“I thought so,” the sheriff said. “You know, I don’t know much about these new-fangled things, so us old timers have to rely on human nature and character, and figuring what a person would do under certain circumstances and...”

“That,” Walworth announced harshly, “is all bosh. The man doesn’t live who can judge guilt or innocence by physiognomy or by trusting to the perceptions of his auditory nerves. It’s merely a means by which the old-fashioned officer gave free rein to his prejudices. It’s no more reliable than locating a well by a forked willow stick.”

“Well, well, well,” the sheriff said, “now I’d always put a lot of store by all that, and I’ve seen some mighty good wells...”

Medford interrupted to ask pointedly, “Did you have any reason for this visit, Sheriff?”

“Sure,” the sheriff said. “I just come to ask Walworth a question. I’ve been reading somewhere about the identification of hairs. Seems to me like I read you can identify hair — not only what kind of a hair it is, but you can tell a lot about the age and condition of the person or animal it came from.”

“Yes,” Walworth said shortly. He was definitely not encouraging this cordiality on the part of the sheriff.

“Well, now,” the sheriff went on, “that’s fine, because it occurs to me that you might be able to help me solve this case.”

“I’ll solve it myself,” Walworth said.

“Now, now,” the sheriff cautioned. “No need to get on your high horse like that. I just thought we might sort of work together, since you’re here.”

“I’ve been retained by the district attorney to solve this case,” Walworth said.

“Well, now, that’s fine,” the sheriff beamed, “because I’m employed by the County to do the same thing, so we might as well sort of work along together.”

“I have my methods, and you have yours.”

“Sure, sure. Now take your methods, for instance. How do you think the murderer got out of that Higbee place without leaving tracks on the plowed ground?”

“I think tracks were there, but they were obliterated by slipshod methods. I think that Sam Beckett must have walked in the tracks of the murderer, and when you subsequently walked in the tracks of Sam Beckett you managed to obliterate the murderer’s tracks. That’s the only logical explanation.”

The sheriff grinned. “And suppose his tracks were obliterated — the tracks he made going up to the body? Then what? How’d he get out of the place? He was in the middle of a field and soft plowed ground was all around him — just like a man who’s painted himself into the middle of a floor by beginning at the outer edge of the room.”

The sheriff ceased speaking and grinned at Walworth’s evident discomfiture.

“Well, now,” the sheriff went on, at length, “suppose this girl had found a paper that was sort of incriminating to some people, and someone wanted to get that paper, someone that was snooping around the house watching her. She started to run. Well, she was young and trim, and maybe this man felt he couldn’t catch her, running after her, but just suppose he’d already arranged for a means of quick escape — something that required the use of a silk rope with tassels on it — the twisted silk rope that held the drapes over that door, for instance.”

Walworth looked at the sheriff as though doubting the officer’s sanity. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“A horse,” the sheriff said. “That cord was about eight feet long, long enough to tie around a horse’s neck, make a half hitch over his nose — and when the girl ran out of the house with whatever it was the man wanted, he ran out and got on his horse.

“It was dark and he couldn’t see her, but he knew she’d run for the tractor, so he galloped his horse straight for the tractor. The girl could see him ’cause she was looking up, and a man on a horse shows up against the sky, even when it’s cloudy, while a man on a horse, looking down, has a hard time seeing something on the ground at night. But by galloping toward the tractor, the man made the girl think he could see her, and she swerved and screamed, and then the man on the horse did see her.”

“And all this time the man on the tractor didn’t see or hear anything?” Walworth asked skeptically.

The sheriff grinned. “Guess you’ve never plowed on a tractor at night,” he said. “What with the roar of the motor, and having to watch the furrows, you don’t see or hear much.”

“Go ahead,” Walworth said curtly.

“Well,” the sheriff went on, “this man caught up with the girl and jumped off. By that time, the girl had been running a long way and the man was fresh. He caught her just as she stumbled and fell, right on the edge of the plowed ground. The purse was what he wanted. After he stabbed her, he got the purse. And the horse, being a trained cattle horse, stood there stock still as long as the rope was dragging on the ground. The man finished his murder, got back on the horse and rode in a series of aimless circles around the plowed ground so it wouldn’t look as though a horse was being directed by a rider in a straight line to the fence. But the man got to the fence all right after making a few turns. He rode the horse alongside the fence, slid off on the other side of the fence, untied the silk rope, and turned the horse loose. The horse wandered back around the plowed ground. Because we were all looking for the tracks of a murderer and because a whole field full of horses were galloping around and cutting didoes, nobody paid any attention to the horse tracks in the plowed ground. The man that was doing the plowing came on around, and because he was watching the edge of the plowed ground pretty sharp, plowed right past the figure on the ground without seeing it. In fact, he didn’t see it until he’d made a couple more turns and the moon had come up.”

Sheriff Eldon’s audience was listening with rapt attention.

“So I sort of thought,” the sheriff said, “that if you’d take that microscope and examine the pants of this here murderer, you might find where some of the horse’s hairs were worked into the man’s pants, and then if you could prove that they were the same hairs from the old bay saddle-horse that John Farnham sold Sam Beckett a while ago, you just might find someone to put that lie-detector on,”

Walworth looked at the sheriff blankly.

“You see,” the sheriff went on, “the murderer would have to be somebody that knew how to ride pretty well, and who knew which one of the horses in that field was saddle-broke.”

Farnham got to his feet. “What in hell are you talking about?” he demanded.

“Just thought it might be a good plan to take a look at those pants of yours,” the sheriff said, “and then I thought maybe you’d like to take a lie-detector test, seeing we’re going in for some of this new-fangled business.”

“You’re crazy!” Farnham said. “But look at my pants all you damn please.”

“Not those pants,” the sheriff said. “You probably went home and took your pants off and left them to be sent to the cleaner, but you see, John, I read in the paper that your wife had gone away for a long visit, and it occurred to me that if you’re sort of batching around the place, there wouldn’t be anybody to send stuff out to the cleaners, so the pants may still be in your house. You know, it’s a great thing in these country towns to read the newspapers and keep up with...”

Farnham lost his head, rushed the sheriff.

The neat agility with which the sheriff swung to one side was matched only by the smoothly timed precision with which his left hand blocked Farnham’s blow. His right came up in a smashing impact to the jaw.

“Well, now,” the sheriff said, tugging handcuffs from his belt, “I thought maybe he’d lose his head.”

12

To the little group gathered in the front room of John Farnham’s house, Martin Walworth displayed his findings.

“These trousers,” he said, “have numerous hairs from a bay horse worked into the cloth. It’s very evident that this horse was being ridden bareback. I’ll want real tests, but I would say from the texture of the hairs that it was a horse from fifteen to twenty years old.”

“Tut, tut,” the sheriff said reproachfully. “He told Beckett it was twelve.”

“And,” Walworth went on, “on the coat of the same suit there are not only hairs from the same horse, but on the right coat sleeve near the cuff are unmistakable stains of human blood. An examination will show whether this blood is of the same type as that of the young woman who was killed. The subject refuses to take a lie-detector test.”

“Well, now,” the sheriff said in his slow drawl, “having gone that far, I guess we might as well go a little farther and sort of look around and see if we can’t find the purse that he took from that girl. He probably wanted to get rid of it somewhere, and — well, you know, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he might have buried it out in the backyard. Just suppose we sort of take a look around there.”

The search of the backyard proved fruitless. But the sheriff worked with painstaking patience. He went over every inch of the ground and then searched the house.

Eventually they found what they wanted in a closet in the basement. Back of some preserves was a purse containing the driving license of Elizabeth Dow, whose address was San Rodolpho. And in that purse was a folded paper. On that paper were two photographs and ten fingerprints. One of the photographs was of John Farnham’s profile; one was full-face. The sheriff read the paper and grinned. “Now, Higbee was a smooth one,” he said. “When John Farnham came to this county and started in being a real-estate agent, a professional reformer and a political crusader, the rest of us just took him as a pain in the neck, but old Marvin Higbee evidently got some detectives and spent a little money finding out where Farnham came from. Maybe he got some fingerprints from letting Farnham’s hand get pressed against a glass window some time. But you see what he got — this little dodger says: ‘Wanted fob Embezzlement.’ No wonder Farnham quit agitating for an investigation of that school-construction job. Higbee had this and he let Farnham know he had it. You can consider how Farnham felt when Higbee died, the fruitless searches he must have made — and then the feeling of security — until he knew someone else was searching. Well, there’s your motive, men.”

The district attorney stretched out his hand. “I’ll take charge of that,” he said.

“Well, now,” the sheriff drawled, “it seems to me that I’m still the sheriff of this here county. I uncovered the evidence and if you don’t mind, boys, I think the sheriff’s office is going to take charge of it. And if anybody else thinks different, why, the line forms on the right, and you can put your coats on that old chair over there until we get done with the argument. I’m kinda old, but I’m still spry.”

No one said anything.

The sheriff took the purse and paper into his custody. “And now,” he said to Martin Walworth, “you’ve really educated me, sir. You have, for a fact. It seems that evidence should be fixed up so it can’t be substituted, and since you’ve been called in as a criminologist by the district attorney to help clean up this crime, and since the bill is going to be passed on to the taxpayers, whom I happen to represent, you might just as well sign your name on the margin of this here piece of paper so there won’t be any chance of its being substituted or any smart lawyers raising any question as to whether or not it’s the same piece of paper we found hidden in the house here. Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly.”

Old Bill Eldon seemed tired as he settled down in his favorite easy chair.

“You’re home early,” his wife said.

“Yep. Got all finished up down at the courthouse.”

“Thought you were working on that murder case,” Doris said.

“I was.”

Her eyes snapped with interest. “You mean you’ve got it solved?”

“That’s right.”

“Who did it?”

“John Farnham.”

“John Farnham!” Doris almost screamed. “How’d you know it was John Farnham?”

“It almost had to be John,” the sheriff said wearily.

“What clues pointed to him?”

“No clues,” the sheriff said, “just human nature.”

His wife asked, “What was it, Bill? Are you too tired to tell us?”

“No,” the sheriff said, “I’m not too tired. But I just got sort of sick of the case. You see, Elizabeth Dow was murdered when she got to snooping around and found an old paper Marvin Higbee had left in the house. Well, that old paper had been there for a long time and nobody had bothered about it, but the minute the Dow girl started looking, somebody sat up and took notice.

“Well, naturally, you’d sort of figure that it was because Elizabeth Dow went there that the murderer became alarmed and felt he had to do something, so the question was, who knew she went there? Well, it seems that Roy Jasper knew it, but he didn’t tell anyone, and it seems her automobile was parked out in front when Sam Beckett and John Farnham drove up. Sam Beckett was only interested in buying the place, but John Farnham was in the real-estate business and he was trying to get Beckett to buy it. Well, that’s all there was to it. As soon as I heard that, I knew what must have happened.”

“What?” his wife asked curiously.

“Why,” the sheriff said, “anybody that knows anything about real-estate people knows that when a place is for sale and a realtor who has it listed comes up and finds a car parked and somebody apparently looking over the place, he does just one thing — takes the license number of the car and looks it up to see who was interested. It’s a habit that real-estate people have. So when John Farnham looked up the license number and found the name Elizabeth Dow, he immediately put two and two together, because he knew that Elvira Dow had nursed Higbee in his last illness. So Farnham closed the deal with Sam Beckett and then beat it down to San Rodolpho to see Elizabeth Dow. But he met her coming back — only, of course, she didn’t recognize him.

“So John tagged along behind her car to see where she was going. When it turned out to be the Higbee place again, John followed her in, got a carving knife out of the drawer in the sideboard, and... Oh, shucks! There wasn’t anything to it soon as you got to figuring Farnham would naturally note the license number of any car parked at the place.”

“And that’s the way you solved the case?” Doris asked.

“That’s about it.”

Doris sniffed, “And to think the taxpayers hand you money for that! Why, everyone knows how real-estate people jot down car numbers!”

The sheriff chuckled. “This here consulting criminologist didn’t know it. If he did he didn’t think of it — not until after I pointed it out to him.”