Continental Op Stories quotes

Where the house had been, was now a mound of blackened ruins.

We poked around in the ashes for a few minutes⁠—not that we expected to find anything, but because it’s the nature of man to poke around in ruins.

A garage in the rear, whose interior gave no evidence of recent occupation, had a badly scorched roof and front, but was otherwise undamaged.

“Tell me about it,” I suggested, drawing up the chair that he hadn’t thought to offer me.

But he wanted results, it seemed, and not questions, and so I wasted nearly an hour getting information that he could have given me in fifteen minutes.

He’s a big bruiser of a man, something over two hundred pounds of hard red flesh, and a czar from the top of his bullet head to the toes of his shoes that would have been at least number twelves if they hadn’t been made …

… big bruiser of a man, something over two hundred pounds of hard red flesh, and a czar from the top of his bullet head to the toes of his shoes that would have been at least number twelves if they hadn’t been made to measure.

He had made his several millions by sandbagging everybody that stood in his way, and the rage that he’s burning up with now doesn’t make him any easier to deal with.

His wicked jaw is sticking out like a knob of granite and his eyes are filmed with blood—he’s in a lovely frame of mind. For a while it looks as if the Continental Detective Agency is going to lose a client;

about five feet five inches tall, and slender. She had blue eyes, brown hair—very thick and long—was pale and very nervous. Her photographs, of which I took a handful, showed that her eyes were large, her nose small and regular, and her chin obstinately pointed.

She was not beautiful, but in the one photograph where a smile had wiped off the sullenness of her mouth, she was at least pretty.

When she left the house she had worn a light tweed skirt and jacket with a London tailor’s labels in them, a buff silk shirtwaist with stripes a shade darker, brown wool stockings, low-heeled brown oxfords, and an untrimmed grey felt hat.

Of course, Gatewood was right in claiming that this was the most effective way of catching the kidnappers—but it would have been tough on his daughter if her captors happened to be persons of sufficiently hardened character.

And kidnappers as a rule aren’t lambs.

I looked at the letter they had sent. It was printed with pencil on ruled paper of the kind that is sold in pads by every stationery dealer in the world.

I found Eva Duthie’s apartment after about five minutes of searching vestibule directories, and got her out of bed.

She was an undersized blonde girl of somewhere between nineteen and twenty-nine, depending upon whether you judged by her eyes or by the rest of her face.

“I haven’t seen or heard from Mr. Rathbone for nearly a month,” she said.

Nothing happened for a while. I found that I had fallen across the doorway that gave to the stairs and the front cellar. I figured that I couldn’t move without making a noise that would draw lead, so I lay still.

Then began a game that made up in tenseness what it lacked in action.

The part of the cellar where we were was about twenty by twenty feet and blacker than a new shoe. There were two doors. One, on the opposite side, opened into the yard and was, I supposed, locked.

The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired.

I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.

The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.

That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.

Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.

We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detail-studying, patience-taxing grind of picking up the murderer’s trail.

From any crime to its author there is a trail.

It may be—as in this case—obscure; but, since matter cannot move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is—there must be—a trail of some sort. And finding and following such trails is what a detective is paid to do.

This Porky Grout was a dirty little rat who would sell out his family—if he ever had one—for the price of a flop.

But with these lads who play both sides of the game it’s always a question of which side they’re playing when you think they’re playing yours.

“Think Porky was coming clean?” I asked.

Most of the tables were occupied when I came in, and half a dozen couples were dancing.

Few of the faces to be seen were strangers to the morning line up at police headquarters.

Peering through the smoke, I saw Orrett at once, seated alone in a far corner, looking at the dancers with the set blank face of one who masks an all-seeing watchfulness.

The faces of the police detectives brightened, and their eyes grew sharp. I suppose mine did, too.

There are many, many murders with never a woman in them anywhere; but seldom a very conspicuous killing.

“Who’s this Miss Dexter?” O’Gar took up the inquiry.

“A sleek kitten—that dame!

Rub her the right way, and she’ll purr pretty. Rub her the wrong way⁠—and look out for the claws!

”

The deck was deserted.

A heavy fog, wet as rain⁠—the fog of San Francisco Bay’s winter nights⁠—lay over boat and water, and had driven everyone else inside.

It hung about us, thick and impenetrable; I couldn’t see so far as the end of the boat, in spite of the lights glowing overhead.

It came quite close to me, and I halloed until I was breathless and my throat was raw. But the boat’s siren, crying its warning, drowned my shouts.

The boat went on and the fog closed in behind it.

The current was stronger now, and my attempts to attract the attention of the Sausalito ferry had left me weaker. I floated, letting the water sweep me where it would, resting.

When this nuisance was past I could go to sleep. I sniggered softly to myself as the lights drew abreast, feeling a foolish triumph in my cleverness in eluding the boat. Those damned horns. …

Life⁠—the hunger for life⁠—all at once surged back into my being.

I screamed at the passing boat, and with every iota of my being struggled toward it. Between strokes I tilted up my head and screamed. …

Beyond that, I don’t care what you do. You can apprehend criminals by the carload. As you may have gathered by now, I’m not exactly in love with my wife’s father; and he’s no more fond of me.

To be frank, if hating weren’t such an effort⁠—if it didn’t require so much energy⁠—I think I should hate the old devil.

But if you want to, and can, catch the man who shot at him, I’d be glad to have you do it. But—”

His voice was losing its calmness again, so I picked up my hat, said something about starting to work at once, and went out.

I don’t like eloquence: if it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if it is effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.

I spent the next couple of hours questioning the Estep servants, to no great advantage. None of them had been near the front of the house at the time of the shooting, and none had seen Mrs. Estep immediately prior to her husband’s death.

Half a block of this, and I got an idea!

I’m not what you’d call a brilliant thinker⁠—such results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck⁠—but I do have my flashes of intelligence.

And this was one of them.

And before we could head her off, she had hit upon it—silence!

We got not another word out of her; and that is the only way in the world to beat the grilling game.

The average suspect tries to talk himself out of being arrested;

“It’s something on you,” I said, truthfully again. “It doesn’t do the second Mrs. Estep any direct good, maybe; but you and the first wife are stacked up together against her. Anything, therefore, that hurts you two will help her, somehow.

I admit I’m wandering around in the dark; but I’m going ahead wherever I see a point of light⁠—and I’ll come through to daylight in the end.

Nailing you for Boyd’s murder is one point of light.”

And, again, in the dark, we had thought him alive; it wasn’t until later that we knew he had been dead when he came down the steps.

Little things, those, but a private detective on the witness stand⁠—unless he is absolutely sure of every detail⁠—has an unpleasant and ineffectual time of it.

“I do,” I repeated, thinking these things over, “and I’m satisfied to go to the bat with what I’ve got on you and what I can collect between now and the time you and your accomplice go to trial.”

That part was plausible enough.

I’ve testified before juries all the way from the City of Washington to the State of Washington, and I’ve never seen one yet that wasn’t anxious to believe that a private detective was a double-crossing specialist who goes around with a cold deck in one pocket, a complete forger’s outfit in another, and who counts that day lost in which he railroads no innocent to the hoosegow.

“There was once a young doctor in a town a long way from here,” Ledwich began. “He got mixed up in a scandal—a pretty rotten one—and escaped the pen only by the skin of his teeth. The state medical board revoked his license.

The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account.

Ninety-nine percent of detective work is a patient collecting of details⁠—and your details must be got as nearly firsthand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.

Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment—only three blocks from the Hall of Justice—and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.

My hearing was no better than my sight—or not so good. There wasn’t a sound in the world.

I moved in a silence that was more complete than any silence I had ever known. I was a ghost fighting ghosts.

I found presently that my feet were under me again, though some squirming thing was on my back, and kept me from standing upright. A hot, damp thing like a hand was across my face.

Then we fought some more.

But you can’t throw a brass cuspidor through a glass door into California Street between Montgomery and Kearny without attracting attention⁠—it’s too near the heart of daytime San Francisco.

So presently—when I was on the floor again with six or eight hundred pounds of flesh hammering my face into the boards—we were pulled apart, and I was dug out of the bottom of the pile by a squad of policemen.

“But don’t you think, Thomas … Yes, my dear, but … Of course you’re right, Thomas, but. …”

Two old folks enjoying a chance contact with the world that they had dropped out of.

Darkness settled. The old man turned on a light in a tall lamp that threw a soft yellow circle upon us, and left the rest of the room dim.

A white face beneath a bobbed mass of flame-colored hair. Smoke-grey eyes that were set too far apart for trustworthiness—though not for beauty—laughed at me; and her red mouth laughed at me, exposing the edges of little sharp animal-teeth.

She was beautiful; as beautiful as the devil, and twice as dangerous.

She laughed at me—a fat man all trussed up with red plush rope, and with the corner of a green cushion in my mouth—and she turned to the ugly man.

Needless to say, they will wait a long while—they are out of it now. But between ourselves there must be no more treachery. If we’re to get clear, we must help each other.”

According to the best dramatic rules, these folks should have made sarcastic speeches to me before they left, but they didn’t.

They passed me without even a farewell look, and went out of sight into the darkness of the hall.

Then I did another not at all heroic thing. I turned on all the lights in the room, lighted a cigarette (we all like to pose a little now and then), and sat down on the bed to await my capture.

I might have stalked my enemies through the dark house, and possibly have nabbed them; but most likely I would simply have succeeded in getting myself shot. And I don’t like to be shot.

She came creeping up the hall, an automatic in each hand, hesitated for an instant outside the door, and then came in on the jump.

Immediately he was back with a large photograph in a carved ivory frame. It was one of these artistic photographs—a thing of shadows and hazy outlines—not much good for identification purposes.

She was beautiful⁠—right enough⁠—but that meant nothing; that’s the purpose of an artistic photograph.

“This the only one you have?”

“No. Those things didn’t matter to me.

She was Jeanne Delano, and that was enough for me.

”

There was nothing like that! She was a girl with something terrible hanging over her; something that called her to Baltimore suddenly; something that has taken her away from me. Money?

What could money have to do with it? I love her!

”

He was a coward. He was a liar. He was a thief, and a hophead. He was a traitor to his kind and, if not watched, to his employers. A nice bird to deal with!

But detecting is a hard business, and you use whatever tools come to hand.

This Porky was an effective tool if handled right, which meant keeping your hand on his throat all the time and checking up every piece of information he brought in.

Most of his fellows thought him too much the coward to be dangerous; they thought he would be afraid to betray them; afraid of the summary vengeance that crookdom visits upon the squealer.

But they didn’t take into account Porky’s gift for convincing himself that he was a lionhearted fellow, when no danger was near.

So he went freely where he desired and where I sent him, and brought me otherwise unobtainable bits of information upon matters in which I was interested.

“Time to waste is one thing I ain’t got.”

“If you’d saved up all the time different judges have given you, you’d have plenty.”

I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing.

I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-a-million-dollar business and a pretty place in local politics.

“A roughneck with a manicure,” somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy.

Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable-car.

He got to his feet, glaring at me.

“I don’t think,” he said disagreeably; “I’m a police detective.”

I knew by that that somebody had been panning him for not finding the murderer.

Alone in the library, I cocked an eye at the ceiling and considered the information Lina Best had given me.

But I soon gave that up⁠—no use trying to guess at things that will work out for themselves in a while.

I found a book, and spent the next half-hour reading about a sweet young she-chump and a big strong he-chump and all their troubles.

One cool article, this baby! I couldn’t figure her.

I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, whether she was the owner of the world’s best poker face or was just naturally stupid.

But whichever she was, she was thoroughly and completely it!

I wheeled on the girl just in time to take another rap on the head, and then one of Tennant’s fists took me over the ear.

I went down in one of those falls that get pugs called quitters⁠—my eyes were open, my mind was alive, but my legs and arms wouldn’t lift me up from the floor.

Tennant took my own gun out of a pocket, and with it held on me, sat down in a Morris chair, to gasp for the air I had pounded out of him. The girl sat in another chair;

But the fifteen years that had slid by since then had dulled my appetite for rough stuff. I don’t mean that I shuddered whenever I considered the possibility of some bird taking a poke at me; but

I didn’t call that day a total loss in which nobody tried to puncture my short, fat carcass.

“The man I want found,” the lawyer went on, as we sat down, “is an English architect named Norman Ashcraft. He is a man of about thirty-seven, five feet ten inches tall, well built, and fair-skinned, with light hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Ryan had been led astray, had been convinced that I had mistaken him for another crook, and that I was not interested in the Ashcraft letter. I would be safe—reasonably safe—in letting the situation go as it stood.

But loose ends worry me. And you can’t always count on people doing and thinking what you want.

This bird was a hophead, and he had given me a phony-sounding name, so …

“Buy me a little drink?” she asked.

The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me.

I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.

The beer wasn’t bad, for green beer; but at four bits a bottle it wasn’t anything to write home about.

This Tijuana happens to be in Mexico⁠—by about a mile⁠—but it’s an American town, run by Americans, who sell American artificial booze at American prices.

If you know your way around the United States you can find lots of places—especially near the Canadian line—where good booze can be bought for less than you are soaked for poison in Tijuana.

It was a drinking contest pure and simple. He was trying to drink me into a pulp—a pulp that would easily give up all of its secrets—and I was trying the same game on him. Neither of us made much progress.

Neither he nor I was young enough in the world to blab much when we were drunk that wouldn’t have come out if we had been sober.

Few grown men do, unless they get to boasting, or are very skillfully handled. All that afternoon we faced each other over the table in the center of the room, drank and entertained each other.

I don’t remember whether I finally conquered the desire to dance or not. I remember Kewpie sitting on the table, grinning her boy’s grin at me, and saying:

“You ought to stay oiled all the time, Shorty; it improves you.”

I don’t know whether I made any answer to that or not. Shortly afterward, I know, I spread myself beside the Englishman on the floor and went to sleep.

I always feel sorry for them, and wonder why they don’t chuck their jobs and find another line of work that wouldn’t be so hard on their emotions.

A sleuth who doesn’t grow a tough shell is in for a gay life⁠—day in and day out poking his nose into one kind of woe or another.

I showed the Filipino to O’Gar first, and then the two women. We didn’t find any more. Detail work occupied all of us—O’Gar, the eight men under him, and me—for the next few hours. The house had to be gone over from roof to cellar.

There wasn’t any special meaning to that speech, except that it might tangle things up a little more.

One way of finding what’s at the bottom of either a cup of coffee or a situation is to keep stirring it up until whatever is on the bottom comes to the surface.

I had been playing that system thus far on this affair.

“Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much.

Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!

”

“

A penalty of femininity⁠—I forgot to mind my own business.

But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night, and when I opened the door he was here.

“if I’d been a hero an’ grabbed him, an’ got myself all mussed up. Well, I ain’t foolish like old man Coplin, gettin’ himself plugged in the foot, or Blanche Eveleth, gettin’ her nose busted.

I’m a sensible man that knows when he’s licked; an’ I ain’t jumpin’ at no guns!

”

An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn’t worth a damn one way or the other.

Even positive and immediate identifications aren’t always the goods.

A lot of people who don’t know any better—and some who do, or should—have given circumstantial evidence a bad name. It is misleading sometimes. But for genuine, undiluted, prewar untrustworthiness, it can’t come within gunshot of human testimony.

“Stickup, gunman. He’s got the makings of a good one. He can shoot, and he’s plain crazy.

He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences.

I wish he was. It’s these careful, sensible birds that are easiest caught. I’d swear the Kid was in on a coupla jobs that were turned in Brookline last month. But I can’t fit him to ’em.

“Aw, applesauce! You ops are all the time trying to make out nobody else could do your work.

These crooks can’t be such tough mugs⁠—or they wouldn’t let you catch ’em!

”

Passing the vestibule into which the Kid had plunged, I got a one-eyed view of him, on his knees, still trying to get a dark gun untangled from his overcoat. Excited faces were in the doorway behind him. There was no excitement in the street.

People are too accustomed to automobile noises nowadays to pay much attention to the racket of anything less than a six-inch gun.

By the time I reached Franklin Street, the Cadillac had gained another block on me. It was spinning to the left, up Eddy Street.

That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything.

License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.

All day I had been building up hunger. I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose. Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.

That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything. License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.

All day I had been building up hunger. I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose.

Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.

So far, so good. I had started with the Whosis Kid, dropped him to take Maurois, and now let him go to see who this woman was.

I didn’t know what this confusion was all about, but I seemed to be learning who it was all about.

“Where to?” I asked presently.

I didn’t kid myself that my beauty and personality were responsible for any of her warmth. I was a thick-armed male with big fists. She was in a jam.

She spelled my name P-r-o-t-e-c-t-i-o-n. I was something to be put between her and trouble.

Another complication: I am neither young enough nor old enough to get feverish over every woman who doesn’t make me think being blind isn’t so bad.

Another complication: I am neither young enough nor old enough to get feverish over every woman who doesn’t make me think being blind isn’t so bad.

I’m at that middle point around forty where a man puts other feminine qualities⁠—amiability, for one⁠—above beauty on his list.

This brown woman annoyed me. She was too sure of herself. Her work was rough. She was trying to handle me as if I were a farmer boy. But in spite of all this, I’m constructed mostly of human ingredients.

He had been banged up earlier in the evening. That would cut down his steam some. I wanted to hang around this apartment a little longer, if it could be managed. If Billie wanted to tussle—and it looked as if he did—he could.

It was easy to meet him halfway: anything I said would be used against me.

I grinned at his red face, and suggested to the woman, solemnly:

He didn’t know anything at all. His idea of a fight was to stand up and throw fists at your head—right, left, right, left.

His fists were as large as wastebaskets.

They wheezed through the air. But always at the head—the easiest part to get out of the way.

There was room enough for me to go in and out. I did that. I hammered his belly. I thumped his heart. I mauled his belly again.

Every time I hit him he grew an inch, gained a pound and picked up another horsepower.

I don’t fool when I hit, but nothing I did to this human mountain—not even making him swallow his hunk of tobacco—had any visible effect on him.

He came in on the wrong side. I made him miss, and got clear. The other time he caught me on the forehead. A chair kept me from going down. The smack hurt me. It must have hurt him more.

A skull is tougher than a knuckle.

I got out of his way when he closed in, and let him have something to remember on the back of his neck.

“You cannot think that thing! Do not those weeks in Boston say it is not possible? For one like the Kid—or like any other—am I to betray you? You know me not more than to think I am like that?”

She was an actress. She was appealing, and pathetic, and anything else you like⁠—including dangerous.

The Frenchman took his sleeve away from her and stepped back a step. White lines ringed his mouth below his tiny mustache, and his jaw muscles bulged. His one good eye was worried.

I wasn’t altogether dissatisfied with the shape things were taking. Something was going to happen in these rooms. But I wasn’t friendly enough to any present to care especially what happened to whom. For myself, I counted on coming through all in one piece.

Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed.

I’ve had twenty years of experience at dodging that. I can count on being one of the survivors of whatever blowup there is. And I hope to take most of the other survivors for a ride.

But I put the temptation away and made myself wait a bit longer. No use going off half-cocked. With a gun in my hand, facing the Kid and Maurois, I still would have less than an even break. That’s not enough.

The idea in this detective business is to catch crooks, not to put on heroics.

Maurois was pouring the stones back in the bag when I looked at him again. He started to put the bag in his pocket. The Whosis Kid stopped him with a hand on his arm.

From there I went up on Van Ness Avenue and found a Wayne Ferris in an automobile salesroom: a sleek-haired young man whose very nice manners and clothes completely hid anything else—brains for instance—he might have had.

He was very willing to help me, and he knew nothing. It took him a long time to tell me so.

A nice boy.

The Old Man, with his gentle eyes behind gold spectacles and his mild smile, hiding the fact that fifty years of sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject. (

Whitey Clayton used to say the Old Man could spit icicles in August.

)

We learned that some of the jewelry in the pawnshop was Mrs. Correll’s. The Locomobile was brought back from Sacramento. Mrs. Correll was buried. Ruth Banbrock was buried. The newspapers found other mysteries.

Reddy and I dug and dug, and all we brought up was dirt.

The following Monday brought me close to the end of my rope. There seemed nothing more to do but sit back and hope that the circulars with which we had plastered North America would bring results.

I gave that section of the hill a good strong play, calling at all the houses within shooting distance of the yellow one. Nobody knew anything about it, or about its occupants.

The folks on the Hill aren’t a curious lot⁠—perhaps because most of them have something to hide on their own account.

My climbing uphill and downhill got me nothing until I succeeded in learning who owned the yellow house. The owner was an estate whose affairs were in the hands of the West Coast Trust Company.

That was nice.

The crazier the people you are sleuthing act, as a rule, the nearer you are to an ending of your troubles.

Reddy arrived within a minute or two of the time his wife had promised. He came in buttoning his clothes.

Don’t tell anybody anything, except that I told you to keep quiet. That includes your father. Tell him I told you not to tell him even where you saw me. Got it?”

Gratitude is nice to think about afterward, but it takes time when there’s work to be done.

As soon as I was alone with the dead man I stepped over him and knelt in front of the safe, pushing letters and papers away, hunting for photographs. None was in sight. One compartment of the safe was locked.

Boiling like a coffee pot before we were five miles out of Filmer, the automobile stage carried me south into the shimmering heat, blinding sunlight, and bitter white dust of the Arizona desert.

I was the only passenger. The driver felt as little like talking as I. All morning we rode through cactus-spiked, sage-studded oven-country, without conversation, except when the driver cursed the necessity of stopping to feed his clattering machine more water.

All these things were hot. All of them tried to get rid of their heat by throwing it on the car. My fat melted in the heat.

The heat dried my perspiration before I could feel its moisture.

The dazzling light scorched my eyeballs; puckered my lids; cooked my mouth. Alkali stung my nose; was gritty between my teeth.

It was a nice ride! I understood why the natives were a hard lot.

A morning like this would put any man in a mood to kill his brother, and would fry his brother into not caring whether he was killed.

The sun climbed up in the brazen sky. The higher it got, the larger and hotter it got. I wondered how much hotter it would have to get to explode the cartridges in the gun under my arm.

“So you’re the new deputy sheriff?” the sallow man questioned the back of my head.

Somebody had kept my secret right out in the open!

There was no use trying to cover up.

I didn’t like this, but it wasn’t a surprise. I had known I was a lamb being led to the slaughter. This was the third time it had happened to me. I might as well get it over with.

A city man in range country is bound to find himself sitting on a disagreeable bone sooner or later.

I’m a city man. I can sit any street car or taxicab in the world, and I can even ride a horse if he’ll cooperate. But when the horse doesn’t want to stay under me—the horse wins.

This was the third time it had happened to me. I might as well get it over with. A city man in range country is bound to find himself sitting on a disagreeable bone sooner or later. I’m a city man.

I can sit any street car or taxicab in the world, and I can even ride a horse if he’ll cooperate. But when the horse doesn’t want to stay under me⁠—the horse wins.

Rollo was going to win. I wasn’t foolish enough to waste strength fighting him.

I had the buckskin’s confidence by this time. We were old friends. He didn’t mind showing me his secret stuff. He did things no horse could possibly do.

Looking down, I was surprised not to see his kidneys and liver⁠—because I knew damned well he was turning himself inside out.

I landed in the same clump of brush that had got me once before.

I didn’t know whether I could have got up again if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I closed my eyes and rested.

If I hadn’t done what I had set out to do, I was willing to fail.

Small, Dunne and Milk River carried me indoors and spread me on a bunk.

That suited me.

I was sore and stiff, but my bruises weren’t wasted.

I had bought myself a place of some sort in this desert community, and maybe even a friend or two. In less than a day I had accomplished what, by milder means, would have taken weeks, or months.

I had battled around a little, but there was no doubt that he had me shaded on smartness. To offset that, his hands were lumpy and battered, while mine weren’t. And he was—or had been—used to gloves, while bare knuckles was more in my line.

Popular belief has it that you can do more damage with bare hands than with gloves, but, as usual, popular belief is wrong.

The chief value of gloves is the protection they give your hands.

I stopped trying to outsmart him.

His left hand played a three-note tune on my face before I could get in to him.

I smacked both hands into his body, and felt happy when the flesh folded softly around them. He got away quicker than I could follow, and shook me up with a sock on the jaw.

Keeping after me, he swarmed all over me.

The evening air was full of fists.

I pushed my feet into the ground and stopped the hurricane with a couple of pokes just above where his shirt ran into his pants.

He went down after a while, from an accumulation of punches rather than from any especial one, and couldn’t get up.

His face didn’t have a mark on it that I was responsible for. Mine must have looked as if it had been run through a grinder.

“Maybe I ought to wash up before we eat,” I said to Milk River as I took my coat and gun.

“Lunger!” She tapped her chest. “A croaker told me I’d last longer out here. Like a boob, I fell for it.

Living out here isn’t any different from dying in the big city.

”

I couldn’t find out what her grift was.

She talked a blend of thieves’ slang and high-school English, and didn’t say much about herself.

We were getting along fine when Milk River came in.

If he got any fun out of confusing me, he was welcome. I was confused enough now, so far as the directions were concerned. I hadn’t the least idea where I might be. But that didn’t disturb me so much.

If I was going to be cut down, a knowledge of my geographical position wouldn’t make it any more pleasant. If I was going to come out all right, one place was still as good as another.

We did a lot more of the winding around, we did some stair-climbing and some stair-descending, and the rest of the foolishness. I figured I’d been indoors nearly half an hour by now, and I had seen nobody but my guide.

The door was opened by another Chinese. But this one was none of your Cantonese runts. He was a big meat-eating wrestler—bull-throated, mountain-shouldered, gorilla-armed, leather-skinned.

The god that made him had plenty of material, and gave it time to harden.

Holding back the curtain that covered the door, he stepped to one side. I went in, and found his twin standing on the other side of the door.

I liked him. He had humor, brains, nerve, everything. To jam him in a cell would be a trick you’d want to write home about.

He was my idea of a man worth working against.

But I didn’t kid myself into thinking I had anything on him. Dummy Uhl had given me a connection between The Whistler’s Hotel Irvington and Chang Li Ching.

I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with the day’s work so far. I hadn’t done anything brilliant, but I had got a look at my destination, or thought I had.

If I was butting my head against a stone wall, I at least knew where the wall was and had seen the man who owned it.

In the office, a message from Dick Foley was waiting for me. He had rented a front apartment up the street from the Irvington and had put in a couple of hours trailing The Whistler.

That was something to worry about.

I had company, and he was slicker than I.

He could open doors or windows under my nose. That wasn’t so good.

Weight on rubber heels, I backed away from my chair until the frame of the cellar door touched my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this party.

I like an even break or better, and this didn’t look like one.

So when a thin line of light danced out of the kitchen to hit the chair in the passsageway, I was three steps cellar-ward, my back flat against the stair-wall.

When my gun had run out of bullets and my lungs out of air, I was alone.

I was glad to be alone. I knew why men go off and live in caves by themselves.

And I didn’t blame them!

Garthorne was willing enough. He didn’t like Prohibition—it had caused most of his troubles.

Rum-running sounded romantic to him⁠—shots in the dark, signal lights off the starboard bow, and so on.

The Whistler, it seemed, had boats and booze and waiting customers, but his landing arrangements were out of whack. He had his eye on a little cove down the shore line that was an ideal spot to land hooch.

Then he suddenly woke up to the fact that she wasn’t as indifferent as he. That had been a shock to him—one he couldn’t stand. He had seen things straight for the first time. He had thought of it before as simply a wit-matching game.

Affection made it different⁠—even though the affection was all on one side.

“I told The Whistler I was through this afternoon,” he finished.

She was—maybe I can make it clear this way. Hsiu Hsiu was as perfect a bit of feminine beauty as could be imagined. She was perfect! Then comes this queen of something—and Hsiu Hsiu’s beauty went away.

She was a candle in the sun.

She was still pretty—prettier than the woman in the doorway, if it came to that—but you didn’t pay any attention to her. Hsiu Hsiu was a pretty girl: this royal woman in the doorway was—I don’t know the words.

… profits they took from the world with both hands in their younger days now stowed away at safe percentages, have bought into the island colony so they may spend what is left of their lives nursing their livers and improving their golf among their kind.

They admit to the island only as many storekeepers, working-people, and similar riffraff as are needed to keep them comfortably served.

It was some time after midnight. I was sitting in a second-story room in Couffignal’s largest house, surrounded by wedding presents whose value would add up to something between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.

There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats and floating forts larger than Couffignal.

It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.

Hogarth was still going strong when the lights went out.

There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats and floating forts larger than Couffignal. It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.

Hogarth was still going strong when the lights went out.

In the dark, I got rid of the glowing end of my cigarette by grinding it in one of the sandwiches. Putting the book down, I picked up gun and flashlight, and moved away from the chair.

In the dark, I got rid of the glowing end of my cigarette by grinding it in one of the sandwiches. Putting the book down, I picked up gun and flashlight, and moved away from the chair.

Listening for noises was no good. The storm was making hundreds of them.

What I needed to know was why the lights had gone off. All the other lights in the house had been turned off some time ago. So the darkness of the hall told me nothing.

“He left her at home with me, of course, and I furtively crept out and away from her while she was trying for the first time in her life to put water in a samovar.

This is not the night for one to stay at home!

”

I pushed the girl into the nearest doorway, and jumped in after her.

Bullets ripped through walls with the sound of hail tapping on leaves.

That was the thing I had taken for an exceptionally heavy rifle—a machine gun.

I frowned and beat my brains together.

You can’t fight machine guns and hand grenades with peaceful villagers and retired capitalists.

No matter how well led and armed they are, you can’t do anything with them. For that matter, how could anybody do much against a game of that toughness?

Well, always our capital shrank, and always the day approached on which we should be shabby and hungry, the day when we should become familiar to readers of your Sunday papers—charwomen who had been princesses, dukes who now were butlers.

There was no place for us in the world. Outcasts easily become outlaws.

Why not? Could it be said that we owed the world any fealty? Had not the world sat idly by and seen us despoiled of place and property and country?

But here are you people with absolutely no criminal experience trying to swing a trick that needed the highest sort of criminal skill. Look at how you all played around with me! Amateur stuff!

A professional crook with any intelligence would have either let me alone or knocked me off.

No wonder you flopped! As for the rest of it—your troubles—I can’t do anything about them.”

“You’re still all twisted up,” I said brusquely, standing now and adjusting my borrowed crutch. “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it.

You might just as well expect a hound to play tiddlywinks with the fox he’s caught.

We’re wasting time anyway. I’ve been thinking the police or Marines might come up here and save me a walk. You’ve been waiting for your mob to come back and grab me. I could have told you they were being arrested when I left them.”

“Quite so.” The Old Man’s voice and smile were as pleasantly polite as if the corpse at his feet had been a part of the pattern in the carpet.

Fifty years of sleuthing have left him with no more emotion than a pawnbroker.

“He seems to have been stabbed in the left breast, a rather large wound that was staunched with this piece of silk”—one of his feet poked at a rumpled ball of red cloth on the floor—“which seems to be a sarong.”

“He seems to have been stabbed in the left breast, a rather large wound that was staunched with this piece of silk”—one of his feet poked at a rumpled ball of red cloth on the floor—“which seems to be a sarong.”

Today is never Tuesday to the Old Man: it seems to be Tuesday.

“On his person,” he went on, “I have found some nine hundred dollars in bills of various denominations, and some silver; a gold watch and a pocket knife of English manufacture; a Japanese silver coin, 50 sen; tobacco, pipe and matches; a Southern Pacific timetable;

Rounding into Montgomery Street, I found few sightseers ahead of me. The middle of the street was filled with trucks, touring cars, taxis—deserted there.

Up in the next block⁠—between Bush and Pine Streets⁠—hell was on a holiday.

The holiday spirit was gayest in the middle of the block, where the Seaman’s National Bank and the Golden Gate Trust Company faced each other across the street.

The holiday spirit was gayest in the middle of the block, where the Seaman’s National Bank and the Golden Gate Trust Company faced each other across the street.

For the next six hours I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.

Late that afternoon I took a recess from bloodhounding and went up to the office for a powwow with the Old Man. He was leaning back in his chair, staring out the window, tapping on his desk with the customary long yellow pencil.

We who worked under him were proud of his cold-bloodedness.

We used to boast that he could spit icicles in July, and we called him Pontius Pilate among ourselves, because he smiled politely when he sent us out to be crucified on suicidal jobs.

He turned from the window as I came in, nodded me to a chair, and smoothed his mustache with the pencil. On his desk the afternoon papers screamed the news of the Seaman’s National Bank and Golden Gate Trust Company double-looting in five colors.

I couldn’t quarrel with that.

If the Old Man said something was so, then it probably was, because he was one of these cautious babies who’ll look out of the window at a cloudburst and say, “It seems to be raining,” on the off-chance that somebody’s pouring water off the roof.

“And who is this arch-gonif?” I asked.

So Jack came to the agency. He thought gumshoeing would be fun.

In spite of the fact that he’d rather catch the wrong man than wear the wrong necktie, he was a promising young thief-catcher.

A likable youngster, well-muscled for all his slimness, smooth-haired, with a gentleman’s face and a gentleman’s manner, nervy, quick with head and hands, full of the don’t-give-a-damn gaiety that belonged to his youthfulness.

It wasn’t much of a scream in volume. Even now, when it had increased in strength, it barely reached our ears. But in it—in that one wailing voice—everything that fears death seemed to cry out its fear. I heard Jack’s teeth click.

I’ve got horny skin all over what’s left of my soul, but just the same my forehead twitched. The scream was so damned weak for what it said.

The skull-cracker moved. Five gliding strides carried him back to the house. He didn’t touch one of the six or seven front steps. He went from pavement to vestibule in a spring no monkey could have beaten for swiftness, ease or silence.

In front of this crack I waited a moment, listening to nothing but a throbbing snore somewhere far down the hallway. I put a palm against the door and eased it open another foot. No sound.

The room was black as an honest politician’s prospects.

I slid my hand across the frame, across a few inches of wallpaper, found a light button, pressed it.

Dick Foley was on his corner when I got there.

He was a swarthy little Canadian who stood nearly five feet in his high-heeled shoes, weighed a hundred pounds minus, talked like a Scotchman’s telegram, and could have shadowed a drop of salt water from the Golden Gate to Hong Kong without ever losing sight of it.

“You know Angel Grace Cardigan?” I asked him.

“Who do you think you are—Joan of Arc? Would your brother Frank be in stir now if his partner, Johnny the Plumber, hadn’t put the finger on him for the Great Falls bulls? Come to life, dearie!

You’re a thief among thieves, and those who don’t double-cross get crossed.

Who rubbed your Paddy the Mex out? Pals! But you mustn’t slap back at ’em because it wouldn’t be clubby. My God!”

“You will be presently.

The wolves are gathering, and Red O’Leary’s the lamb.

You could pick a tenderer one if you had a free hand, maybe. But these bimbos once helped pluck a bank, and when payday came there wasn’t anything in their envelopes, not even any envelopes. The word got out that maybe Red knew how come.

Men brought their weapons over to mingle with me. The game was to nudge me away from my door. O’Leary would have liked it. But I was no fire-haired young rowdy.

I was pushing forty, and I was twenty pounds overweight. I had the liking for ease that goes with that age and weight.

Little ease I got.

For the rest I trusted to my arms and legs, and saved bullets.

The night was young and I had only a dozen pills⁠—six in the gun, six my pocket.

It was a swell bag of nails. Swing right, swing left, kick, swing right, swing left, kick. Don’t hesitate, don’t look for targets. God will see that there’s always a mug there for your gun or blackjack to sock, a belly for your foot.

“That’s the kind of hombre he was,” he went on. “

He’d trust even his own brother.

I went to Sacramento that afternoon and caught a train east. A girl in Pittsburgh helped me spend the fifteen thousand. Her name was Laurel. She liked rye whisky with milk for a chaser.

This Newhall killing turned the spotlight on that part of the country. So I thought I’d come up and collect that hundred thousand and give things a chance to settle down there.

Honest, brother, I haven’t killed a millionaire in weeks, if that’s what’s worrying you.

”

I pushed the muzzle of the pocketed gun toward the man—pulled the trigger.

The shot ruined seventy-five dollars’ worth of overcoat for me. But it took the man away from my neck.

That was lucky. Another man was on my back.

“Oh! Why didn’t they let me alone?” she wailed, shuddering. “

It’s a rotten thing, living.

”

“

I’m a detective⁠—I know everything. Be a good girl.

”

“

The Rock of Gibraltar is a leaf in the breeze beside him.

Give me a note for him to take down. Andrew MacElroy is his name.”

“Very much. Watch yourself.

You’ll be swimming in nitroglycerine all the way.

”

“After that failure, he wanted me to try again, but I refused to have a hand in any more fiascos.

There’s nothing sillier than a murder that doesn’t come off.

Ann Newhall is quite innocent of everything except folly. I don’t think she has the slightest suspicion that I have had any part in the dirty work beyond refraining from having everybody arrested. That, my dear Sherlock, about concludes the confession.”

“I?” She wrinkled her forehead. “Oh, that my husband had hired you to prove that I had been Jeffrey’s mistress.”

She repeated the word mistress as if she liked the shape of it in her mouth.

“Knowing my husband, I find that hard to believe.”

“Seven months ago, on his twenty-first birthday, this Lionel Grantham got hold of the money his father had left him—a nice wad. Till then the boy had had a tough time of it. His mother had, and has, highly developed middle-class notions of refinement.

His father had been a genuine aristocrat in the old manner⁠—a hard-souled, soft-spoken individual who got what he wanted by simply taking it; with a liking for old wine and young women, and plenty of both, and for cards and dice and running horses⁠—and fights, whether he was in them or watching them.

“While he lived the boy had a he-raising. Mrs. Grantham thought her husband’s tastes low, but he was a man who had things his own way. Besides, the Grantham blood was the best in America. She was a woman to be impressed by that.

Besides, the Grantham blood was the best in America. She was a woman to be impressed by that. Eleven years ago—when Lionel was a kid of ten—the old man died.

Mrs. Grantham swapped the family roulette wheel for a box of dominoes and began to convert the kid into a patent leather Galahad.

“I’ve never seen him, but I’m told the job wasn’t a success. However, she kept him bundled up for eleven years, not even letting him escape to college.

“He seems to have behaved fairly well during his wandering.

I suppose just being free gave him all the excitement he needed.

But a few weeks ago the trust company that handles his affairs got instructions from him to turn some railroad bonds into cash and ship the money to him in care of a Belgrade bank.

“I don’t know,” he said gloomily. Then his face brightened. “Go to Vasilije Djudakovich. He is Minister of Police. He is the man for you! He can help you, and you may trust him.

He has a digestion instead of a brain.

He’ll not understand a thing you tell him. Yes, Djudakovich is your man!”

He opened it, bowed me through it, wheezed, “Asseyez-vous, s’il vous plaît,” closed the door and left me. I was in an office, a large, square one. Everything in it was large. The four windows were double-size.

The chairs were young benches, except the leather one at the desk, which could have been the rear half of a touring car.

A couple of men could have slept on the desk. Twenty could have eaten at the table.

His white vest was the size and shape of a hoop-skirt, and in spite of that it strained at the buttons.

His eyes were almost invisible between the cushions of flesh around them, and were shaded into a colorless darkness, like water in a deep well.

His mouth was a fat red oval among the yellow hairs of his whiskers and mustache. He came into the room slowly, ponderously, and I was surprised that the floor didn’t creak nor the room tremble.

The soldier turned up the collar of his coat as he came. Nobody ever did anything I liked more. A man stalking another wouldn’t have done that. He didn’t know I was there. He was hunting a hiding place for himself.

The game was even. If he found me, he had the gun, but I had seen him first.

His sheepskin coat rasped against the wood as he went by me, bending low as he passed my corner for the back of the pile, so close to me that the same raindrops seemed to be hitting both of us.

The mud I was kneeling in soaked through my pants-legs, wetting my knees and shins. The rough wood filed skin off my face every time I breathed.

My mouth was as dry as my knees were wet, because I was breathing through it for silence.

An automobile came around the bend, headed for the city. I heard the soldier grunt softly, heard the click of his gun as he cocked it. The car came abreast, went on. The soldier blew out his breath and started scratching himself and humming again.

His cap fell off. I caught his hair with both hands and yanked myself into a sitting position. His teeth went into my leg. I called him disagreeable things and put my thumbs in the hollows under his ears.

It didn’t take much pressure to teach him that he oughtn’t to bite people.

When he lifted his face to howl, I put my right fist in it, pulling him into the punch with my left hand in his hair. It was a nice solid sock.

“No.” He blushed. “

It’s embarrassing to have one’s family sending guardians after one.

”

“What for?” I asked. “

It’s crazy, God knows, but not silly. Your judgment was gummy, but your nerve’s all right.

You’ve been talking as if this were all dead and buried. Has it flopped?”

“Vasilije,” she told me, sipping wine between phrases, “is a peculiar man, an original. He is interested in nothing except his comfort.

Comfort to him means enormous amounts of food and drink and at least sixteen hours of sleep each day, and not having to move around much during his eight waking hours.

Outside of that he cares for nothing. To guard his comfort he has made the police department a model one. They’ve got to do their work smoothly and neatly.

“

Give me a revolution, nice man!

” Her eyes were black with excitement, her voice throaty, her mouth laughing, her body trembling. “I detest Einarson. Use him and break him for me. But give me a revolution!”

Mentally, he wasn’t a heavyweight. His revolution was crude stuff. It would get over chiefly because there wasn’t much opposition. He had plenty of willpower, I imagined, but I didn’t put a big number on that.

People who haven’t much brains have to develop willpower to get anywhere.

I didn’t know whether he had guts or not, but before an audience I guessed he’d make a grand showing, and most of this act would be before an audience. Off in a dark corner I had an idea he would go watery.

I didn’t know whether he had guts or not, but before an audience I guessed he’d make a grand showing, and most of this act would be before an audience. Off in a dark corner I had an idea he would go watery.

He believed in himself⁠—absolutely. That’s ninety percent of leadership, so there was no flaw in him there.

He didn’t trust me. He had taken me in because as things turned out it was easier to do so than to shut the door against me.

“I’m told he was a good Minister of Police because inefficiency would spoil his comfort. Maybe he’d be a good dictator or king for the same reason. I’ve seen him once. He’s a bloated mountain, but there’s nothing ridiculous about him.

He weighs a ton, and moves without shaking the floor.

I’d be afraid to try on him what I did to you.”

I pushed through the crowd toward him.

He recognized me with the eyes of a park sleeper being awakened from sweet dreams by a nightstick on his shoe-soles.

He excused himself to the others and took me down a corridor to a room with stained glass windows and richly carved office furniture.

“No.” I reached for her. “But I hate mobs, lynchings—they sicken me. No matter how wrong the man is, if a mob’s against him, I’m for him.

The only thing I ever pray to God for is a chance some day to squat down behind a machine gun with a lynching party in front of me.

I had no use for Einarson, but I wouldn’t have given him that! Well, what’s done is done. What was the document?”

“No.” I reached for her. “But I hate mobs, lynchings—they sicken me.

No matter how wrong the man is, if a mob’s against him, I’m for him.

The only thing I ever pray to God for is a chance some day to squat down behind a machine gun with a lynching party in front of me. I had no use for Einarson, but I wouldn’t have given him that!

It was a wandering daughter job.

The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan.

The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan.

She grew out of childhood with a kink that made her dislike the polished side of life, like the rough.

By the time she was twenty-one, in 1926, she definitely preferred Tenth Avenue to Fifth, grifters to bankers, and Hymie the Riveter to the Honorable Cecil Windown, who had asked her to marry him.

… Vassos’ customers was Babe McCloor, two hundred and fifty pounds of hard Scotch-Irish-Indian bone and muscle, a black-haired, blue-eyed, swarthy giant who was resting up after doing a fifteen-year hitch in Leavenworth for ruining most of the smaller post offices between New Orleans and Omaha.

Babe was keeping himself in drinking money while he rested by playing with pedestrians in dark streets.

Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that. Jealousy spoiled the Greek’s judgment. He kept the speakeasy door locked one night when Babe wanted to come in. Babe came in, bringing pieces of the door with him.

Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that. Jealousy spoiled the Greek’s judgment. He kept the speakeasy door locked one night when Babe wanted to come in.

Babe came in, bringing pieces of the door with him.

Vassos got his gun out, but couldn’t shake Sue off his arm. He stopped trying when Babe hit him with the part of the door that had the brass knob on it. Babe and Sue went away from Vassos’ together.

She disappeared around a corner of the dim corridor, and presently a muffled electric bell rang. It rang three times. I heard her keys jingle and one of them grate in a lock. The lock clicked. I heard the doorknob rattle as she turned it.

Then a long moment of silence was ended by a scream that filled the corridor from wall to wall.

I jumped for the corner, swung around it, saw an open door ahead, went through it, and slammed the door shut behind me.

“God only knows what he’d want to do it for, why he’d want to get rid of the kind of meal ticket she was going to be. But you couldn’t always guess what he was getting at. He pulled plenty of dumb ones.

He was too slick without being smart.

If he was going to kill her, though, that would be about the way he’d go about it.”

I kicked McCloor’s ankle, but couldn’t get his foot from under him. I rammed my right fist into the small of his back and got a left-handful of his wet hair, swinging on it. He shook his head, dragging me off my feet.

He punched me in the side and I could feel my ribs and guts flattening together like leaves in a book.

I swung my fist against the back of his neck. That bothered him. He made a rumbling noise down in his chest, crunched my shoulder in his left hand, and chopped at me with the gun in his right.

“It could,” I said. “

Don’t be kicking holes in my theory. It’s got enough as it stands.

But, if she committed suicide this time, there’s no reason why she couldn’t have tried it once before—say after a quarrel with Joe a month ago—and failed to bring it off. That would have put the arsenic in her.

“No real proof,” the Old Man protested mildly, “except the autopsy’s finding—chronic poisoning.”

I was never one to let experts’ guesses stand in my way.

I said:

Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills.

The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.

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