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The Golden Horseshoe and Other Stories

Collected Case Files of the Continental Op

The Middle Years, Vol. 1

Dashiell Hammett

Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Contents

Foreword: “Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

Introduction: The Middle Years, 1924–1925

“The House in Turk Street”

“The Girl with Silver Eyes”

“The Golden Horseshoe”

About the Author

FOREWORD

“Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

The Continental Op: The Complete Case Files is the first electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett’s collected Continental Op stories to be licensed by either Hammett or his estate—and the first English-language volume of any kind to include all twenty-eight of the Op’s standalone stories. But, as with most of Hammett’s publishing history, the saga of the case-hardened, inelegant, unnamed operative from the Continental Detective Agency is anything but straightforward. The players in the Op’s publishing-life drama are several—including Hammett; his paramour and executrix, Lillian Hellman; Hellman’s allies; Hammett’s family; and various publishing advocates and political adversaries. Add to that the relative novelty of electronic books. Hammett’s 1920s publishing contracts did not anticipate his “little fat detective” on the luminous, ephemeral pages so lately familiar to modern readers. And yet, the Op was the product of an era of tumult, who survived gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, and neglect. He’s learned to adapt.

The Op stories were published individually during the early years of Hammett’s writing career, between 1923 and 1930. All but two were featured in Black Mask, the leading light of pulp magazines—a favorite among working-class readers, crime-fiction aficionados, and anyone who longed for a coin’s worth of well-crafted thrills. In June of 1929, near the end of the run, Hammett sent a note to Harry Block, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He had just sent Block a draft of his third novel, The Maltese Falcon, which he described as “by far the best thing” he’d done so far.

Also I’ve about two hundred and fifty thousand words of short stories in which the Continental Op appears. I know you’re not likely to be wildly enthusiastic about the short-story idea; but don’t you think that something quite profitable for both of us could be done with them by making a quite bulky collection of them—selling them by the pound, as it were? I don’t know anything about the manufacturing costs—how far bulkiness could be carried at a fairly low cost without eating up the profits. I’d want to rewrite the stories we included, of course, and there are possibly fifty or sixty of the quarter-million that I’d throw out as not worth bothering about. In the remainder there are some good stories, and altogether I think they’d give a more complete and true picture of a detective at work than has been given anywhere else.

Almost immediately Hammett had second thoughts about republishing the Op tales. “I’d rather forget them,” he told Block. The hardboiled pioneer was ready, in contemporary lexis, to retool his brand—to abandon the constraints and expectations of the crime-fiction genre and to shift his focus from the Continental Detective Agency’s anonymous foot soldier to more sophisticated conflicts starring independent detectives, non-detectives, and ex-detectives. It wasn’t long before the Continental Op’s work-a-day exploits were overshadowed by the deeper, darker, and splashier successes of Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, 1930), Ned Beaumont (The Glass Key, 1931), and Nick Charles (The Thin Man, 1934). Hammett’s hardworking, hardboiled protagonist was relegated to the sidelines.

During the thirteen-year hiatus that followed, the Continental Op was available to readers primarily in Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (each reworked from four linked Black Mask stories released 1927–1929, both published by Knopf in 1929). Red Harvest was ahead of its time—a vivid and exquisitely informed exploration of corruption, pragmatism, and ambiguity, set in Montana mining country. While it was optioned for film, Hammett’s fans could easily have overlooked the Op’s dubious debut as Willie Bindbugel in Ben Hecht’s wildly divergent film adaptation of the novel, released by Paramount as Roadhouse Nights in 1930. Willie played an investigative reporter, rather than a hardboiled detective, in a story that was more action-comedy than crime. Today, the film is most notable as a vehicle for Jimmy Durante in his first big-screen appearance.

The Dain Curse, Hammett’s second novel, featured the Op negotiating San Franciscan family drama, religious fervor, insanity, and drug-induced confusion in a tangled contest between the supernatural and sober reality. Hammett titled the expository final chapter “The Circus” and later described the book as a “silly story.” It is generally considered the least of his five novels. Still, The Dain Curse was a solid performance that garnered largely favorable reviews, earned a spot on the New York Times recommended holiday books list, and won the Op (and Hammett) his first printing in England. The Op was less fortunate in Hollywood, where, despite the fledgling film industry’s thirst for talking-picture storylines, Hammett’s ornate detective thriller came to naught.

The Continental Op’s fortunes rebounded in 1943, when Lawrence Spivak (with Frederick Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, jointly known as Ellery Queen) made arrangements to publish a string of digest-size paperback collections featuring Hammett’s short fiction. Hammett, serving in Alaska with the US Army Signal Corps, agreed unenthusiastically to a deal with Spivak’s Mercury Publications. “I signed the contract,” he told Lillian Hellman, “but don’t take that as a hint that I want it especially.” All but one of the twenty-eight Continental Op standalone tales were reprinted (in sometimes liberally re-edited form) between 1943 and 1951, under Best Seller Mysteries, Jonathan Press Mystery, Mercury Mystery, and Ellery Queen Selects imprints. Once again, the Op was widely available in the working-class world he represented.

Between 1951 and 1961—the last decade of Hammett’s life—virtually no one published the Op, Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont, Nick Charles, or any of Hammett’s fiction. It was the era of the Red scare, with its blacklists and committee hearings, and the beginnings of the Cold War, rife with anti-Soviet fear mongering and jingoistic conservatism. Hammett had made no secret of his leftwing affiliations, and with the taint of the Red brush he became unmarketable. His income was devastated, his publishers wary, the radio shows based on his work cancelled.

“Financially,” Hammett told his wife, Jose, in March of 1951, “this year’s going to be a holy terror and so—from the looks of things right now—are the next few years to come.” Hammett’s estimation was dead-on. He spent five of the last six months of 1951 imprisoned on a contempt of court charge after claiming his Fifth Amendment rights in US District Court. He would neither name the contributors to the Civil Rights Congress of New York bail fund he chaired nor provide information on the whereabouts of four Communist Party leaders who had skipped out on bail the CRC fund had provided. Hammett served his time without regret, but when he was released on December 9, both his health and his finances had crumbled beyond repair. His final bids at political engagement, teaching, and innovative fiction withered away over the course of the next two years. He lived in increasing seclusion and frugality in upstate New York, dependent on the kindness of friends and his monthly veteran’s pension of $131.10.

Hammett died on January 10, 1961. His only significant asset—$7,914.23 held in escrow by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf—was dwarfed by Federal and New York State tax liens totaling nearly $175,000. While a portion of the shortfall might be attributed to slipshod tax reporting on Hammett’s part—he had failed to file returns while he was serving in the Army—the bulk is plainly a bitter byproduct of the US government’s retaliatory anti-communist campaigns. Lillian Hellman attached another $40,000 in claims for repayment of personal loans, in addition to his final medical, funeral, and administrative expenses. She was executrix for the Dashiell Hammett estate and with the approval of the IRS she put the rights to Hammett’s entire body of work up for auction, with the understanding that the sale price (a minimum of $5,000) would settle his outstanding debt.

Lillian Hellman wrote to Hammett’s daughters Mary and Jo to ask if they would be willing to go in with her to make an offer. There is no record of Mary’s reply. But Jo wrote back in June of 1963: “We will be able to send the thousand but it will be a month or six weeks before the cash is available. Is this satisfactory? Please let us know what has developed with the proposed tax settlement.” Hellman ignored Jo’s letter, disregarded her request for updates, and chose instead to pool resources with her friend Arthur Cowan. At the sale in November, she and Cowan won all rights to Hammett’s works with the minimum bid of $5,000. One year later Cowan was killed in a car accident, leaving his share of the Hammett library under Hellman’s complete control. “I am now the sole owner of the estate,” she told Jo.

Having captured Hammett’s literary rights at a bargain-basement rate, Hellman set herself to an ambitious campaign to restore his stifled reputation. She arranged for Random House to publish The Novels of Dashiell Hammett in 1965, followed by Dell paperback editions of The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man in 1966. With that, Hammett’s five major works were back in the marketplace.

The Continental Op made his comeback in The Big Knock-Over collection in 1966, edited and introduced by Hellman. All but one of the nine Op tales she selected had been published originally between 1925 and 1929—which is to say, Hellman’s choices comprised the bulk of the second half of Hammett’s Op oeuvre. Her introduction offers tribute and reminiscence, her glowing portrait of Hammett and the Hammett-Hellman relationship pointedly sentimental rather than squarely factual. “I don’t want modesty for either of us,” she explains. She glosses over Hammett’s early life (his wife and daughters dispatched in just twelve words) with petty inaccuracies, then fleshes out Hammett’s later years with a deft synthesis of personal history and private moments. Some of Hellman’s stories are almost certainly true. But truth, Hellman explained years later, is “slippery, tricky, unreliable.” Hammett’s fiction remained authentic, however, and The Big Knock-Over, published five years after his death, was received enthusiastically. And with it, Hellman’s inaugural foray into the reconstruction of her lover’s life slipped quietly into public consciousness.

The Continental Op collection followed in 1974, edited and introduced by Steven Marcus. He was a friend of Hellman and a respected literary and cultural scholar, but even so Hellman maintained tight control over the editorial process. Early on Marcus suggested twenty-four pieces of Hammett fiction, broken into three sections: Op stories, non-Op stories, and the first, unfinished draft of The Thin Man. Hellman objected, again and again; the book got shorter and shorter. “I do agree with you that Dash grew as a writer … but I don’t think we can base an anthology on the growth since most readers would properly be more interested in the results of the growth,” she argued. In the end, the collection included just seven Op selections, hopscotching between 1924 and 1930. Marcus divided his introduction into two parts—biographical and critical. There are golden echoes of Hellman’s reminisces in the first—especially where they touch on the Hammett-Hellman relationship—and threads of Marxist, Hobbesian, and nihilistic rationale weaving backwards and forwards through the second. Marcus, too, leaves his fingerprints on the Hammett legacy.

Through all of this, barring his ersatz appearance in Roadhouse Nights, the Op was noticeably absent from Hollywood. Hellman did what she could to capitalize on the character’s film and television potential, but it was tough going. Film rights to Red Harvest had been sold to Knopf along with print rights in 1929, as was then the standard. Knopf assigned rights to Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, who, probably in 1972, assigned rights to PEA Films—whose claims continue to constrain Red Harvest’s film and television prospects. Hellman sold film and television rights to several other Op stories to Fast Film and PEA Films in 1974 and 1975—deals that brought her income, but left Hammett’s meaty, middle-aged detective in the wings, future opportunities further entangled. The Dain Curse, perhaps improbably, broke the Op’s dry streak in 1978 with a three-part mini-series on CBS, starring James Coburn as detective Hamilton Nash. The Op had a name and, at last, a legitimate film credit. In the decades before and after, filmic roles for Hammett’s seminal gumshoe have been more inspirational (read uncredited or unrecognizable), than sanctioned or celebrated.

When Lillian Hellman died in 1984 control of the Hammett literary estate passed into a literary trust administered by three of her friends. While the trustees’ oversight was uneven and unenthusiastic, under their tenure two important story collections came to fruition. The first was Nightmare Town, comprising twenty pieces of short fiction, spanning eleven years. The book was slow to come together, as the editors waded through a labyrinth of Hammett-Hellman-Random House permissions and decisions. Nightmare Town was published in 1999, with an introduction by William F. Nolan, who rightly described the anthology as “the largest collection of [Hammett’s] shorter works and by far the most comprehensive.” Seven stories featuring the Continental Op were included.

Just two years later, the prestigious Library of America published Hammett’s Crime Stories and Other Writings, succeeding Nightmare Town as the most comprehensive compilation of Hammett’s short fiction. Steven Marcus, then free from Hellman’s micro-managing oversight, selected twenty-seven pieces, including all but eight of the twenty-eight Op stories. Contractual limitations dealing with reprints in competing publications made full inclusion problematic. Nevertheless, the volume is handsome and enlightening. Margaret Atwood, a Hammett fan of longstanding, said it took readers “back to the beginning of the line” and showed why Hammett’s popularity had risen so rapidly. The mere presence of Crime Stories and Other Writings among Library of America’s illustrious volumes is proof of esteem for Hammett’s work that survived his pulp fiction origins nearly eight decades earlier.

Lillian Hellman’s appointees to the Dashiell Hammett literary trust ceded control to the Hammett family in 2003. Because rights to the five novels had already been transferred to Jo Hammett, in 1995 in a negotiated agreement based on copyright extension law, the change in administration applied mainly to Hammett’s short stories—and to the Op in particular. The new trustees (including Hammett’s grandson, Evan Marshall, and the editors of this volume) took seriously their responsibility to Hammett’s legacy. What followed was a new season of engagement and publication, in the United States and abroad. Hammett never ventured overseas, but his Op is a veteran traveler, with recent excursions that include Brazil, Italy, Romania, Poland, Germany, England, and, most notably, France, where a Hammett renaissance has resulted in a flock of new translations and paperback compilations, as well as, in 2011, an omnibus volume that collected virtually all of Hammett’s available fiction.

This electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories comes 93 years after his “little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit” narrated his first investigation in Black Mask magazine in 1923. It is the first opportunity for readers across the globe to enjoy both what Hammett called “a more complete and true picture of a detective at work” and to witness the growth of his creator, who changed the face of not just American crime fiction, but realistic, literary, and entertaining fiction worldwide. The stories are presented chronologically, with section introductions providing context and insights into Hammett’s evolution under his three Black Mask editors—George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody, and Joseph Thompson Shaw. Headnotes original to each story’s publication are included, along with Hammett’s remarks in letters to the editors. “Three Dimes”—an incomplete Continental Op adventure preserved in Hammett’s archive—is included as a bonus to the complete volume.

We offer no pulp paper. No cloth-covered boards or dust jacket. No lurid cover art. No sewn binding or ribbon. Just Hammett’s words, as originally published in Black Mask, True Detective Stories, and Mystery Stories. Our only modifications are silent corrections to spelling and typographical errors preserved on the rare, fragile pages of Hammett’s original magazine offerings. Modern publishing provides distinct advantages to those of us who edit—who collect and prepare materials for publication—leaving us grateful for today’s more durable manuscripts, nimble word-processing technologies, and the easy mutability of e-files.

Hammett, however, was a man of an earlier era—writing with typewriters or pen, pencil, and paper, computers unconceived. He read bound books, hardcopy magazines, and newspapers in those decades when “papers” was not a metaphor. His image lingers in vintage shades of black and white, bound up with the Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles, washed in afterlife with Lillian Hellman’s painterly recollections. It’s tempting, then, to imagine our crime-fiction champion rejecting e-reading in favor of bookbinding’s tactile pleasures and traditions. “I tell you, it wasn’t like this when I was young,” Hammett wrote in 1950. “The world’s going to hell: some people claim radio and movies are responsible, but I think it started with the invention of the wheel. If man had been meant to revolve he wouldn’t have been born with flat feet.”

He was kidding, of course.

Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today’s e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It’s a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.

J.M.R.

INTRODUCTION

The Middle Years: 1924–1925

The character of Black Mask and of Hammett’s fiction changed abruptly when Philip C. Cody, described by H. L. Mencken as “a mild and pleasant fellow who was almost stone deaf,” succeeded Sutton as editor. Cody was spread as thinly as his predecessor with regard to his editorial duties. He was vice-president and general manager of Warner Publications, a growing concern that included Field and Stream, Black Mask, and other pulps, as well as a short-lived book club started in 1925. Cody had doubled as circulation manager of Black Mask, and he brought to the editor’s chair a sense of marketing that Sutton lacked. Cody transformed Black Mask into a magazine that offered increased emphasis on action-packed crime fiction, enlivened by violence and punctuated with sexual titillation. He nurtured a small stable of favorite writers and encouraged them write stories of substantial length.

The effect on Hammett was immediately clear. His stories more than doubled in length after “One Hour,” a story that the editors of this collection assume to have been accepted by Sutton though it was published in the 1 April 1924 Black Mask, the first that carried Cody’s name as editor. With two exceptions (“The Tenth Clew” at 11,419 words and “Zigzags of Treachery” at 14,521 words), Hammett’s Op stories for Sutton averaged just under 6,000 words apiece. The ten Op stories published by Cody between April 1924 and March 1926 averaged about 14,000 words each. And the Op got meaner. During the course of the nine Op stories written for Sutton, the Op usually didn’t carry a gun, and he was not directly involved in any lethal activity. Hammett’s first story for Cody features six murders, three of which are committed with cause by the Op. During the rest of Cody’s tenure, Hammett’s stories average some six dead bodies each. The Op was turning blood simple. The plots become more complicated; the women more seductive and dangerous; the crooks more professional. Dramatic confrontation rather than simple description increasingly served to advance the plot. Notably in “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (June 1924), the first of a handful of stories in which the Op struggles to overcome a dangerous attraction to a beautiful woman, Hammett’s Op begins to reveal his emotions. And Hammett’s settings began to exhibit an international flair, as in “The Golden Horseshoe” (November 1924), “The Gutting of Couffignal” (December 1925), and “The Creeping Siamese” (March 1926).

Cody may have been the boss, but his vision was implemented by associate editor Harry C. North, who had served under Sutton, as well. North seems to have conducted an extensive editorial correspondence with his authors, and he minced no words in expressing his editorial opinion. Cody unleashed him. The communications with Hammett are lost, but North’s style can be gleaned from his letters to Erle Stanley Gardner, who published more than 100 stories in Black Mask between 1924 and 1943. That correspondence reveals North to be a man with a sharp editorial eye and firm opinions. His entire reply to an early submission by Gardner was “This stinks.” His editorial principle was also simply stated: he advised Gardner: “If you could once appreciate the fact that the publisher of Black Mask is printing the magazine to make money and nothing else, perhaps you would be more nearly able to guess our needs.”

Cody wasted no time asserting his authority, but he let North do the dirty work of rejecting two of Hammett’s stories. The rejection must have taken place almost immediately after Cody took control, but the account of it did not appear until August 1924, four months after Cody’s ascension, when he published Hammett’s response to Harry North’s rejection letter under the headline “Our Own Short Story Course”:

We recently were obliged to reject two of Mr. Hammett’s detective stories. We didn’t like to do it, for Mr. Hammett and his Continental Detective Agency had become more or less fixtures in BLACK MASK. But in our opinion, the stories were not up to the standard of Mr. Hammett’s own work—so they had to go back.

In returning the manuscripts, we enclosed the “Tragedy in One Act,” referred to in the letter which follows. The “Tragedy” was simply a verbatim report of the discussion in this office, which led to the rejection of the stories.

We are printing Mr. Hammett’s letter below; first, to show the difference between a good author and a poor one; and secondly, as a primary course in short story writing. We believe that authors—especially young authors, and also old authors who have fallen into the rut—can learn more about successful writing from the hundred or so words following, than they can possibly learn from several volumes of so-called short story instruction. Mr. Hammett has gone straight to the heart of the whole subject of writing—or of painting, singing, acting … or of just living for that matter. As the advertising gentry would say, here is the “Secret” of success.

I don’t like that “tragedy in one act” at all; it’s too damned true-to-life. The theatre, to amuse me, must be a bit artificial.

I don’t think I shall send “Women, Politics, and Murder” back to you—not in time for the July issue anyway. The trouble is that this sleuth of mine has degenerated into a meal-ticket. I liked him at first and used to enjoy putting him through his tricks; but recently I have fallen into the habit of bringing him out and running him around whenever the landlord, or the butcher, or the grocer shows signs of nervousness.

There are men who can write like that, but I’m not one of them. If I stick to the stuff I want to write—the stuff I enjoy writing—I can make a go of it, but when I try to grind out a yarn because I think there’s a market for it, then I flop.

Whenever, from now on, I get hold of a story that fits my sleuth, I shall put him to work, but I’m through with trying to run him on a schedule.

Possibly I could patch up “The Question’s One Answer” and “Women, Politics, and Murder” enough to get by with them, but my frank opinion of them is that neither is worth the trouble. I have a liking for honest work, and honest work as I see it is work that is done for the worker’s enjoyment as much as for the profit it will bring him. And henceforth that’s my work.

I want to thank both you and Mr. Cody for jolting me into wakefulness. There’s no telling how much good this will do me. And you may be sure that whenever you get a story from me hereafter,—frequently, I hope,—it will be one that I enjoyed writing.

DASHIELL HAMMETT

San Francisco, Cal.

Meanwhile, Cody published “The House on Turk Street” (15 April 1924) and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (June 1924), Hammett’s first set of linked stories and the strongest fiction he had written to that point. Together these stories form a 25,000 word novelette and begin to treat the characters and themes Hammett perfected five years later in The Maltese Falcon.

Hammett didn’t like Cody and North, but he needed the money they paid him. Two months after Cody became editor, Hammett’s disability payment from the U.S. Veterans Bureau was discontinued due to his improving health. It is not known how much he was paid for his Black Mask stories, but the base rate is believed to have been a penny a word, though Mencken claimed to have paid a bit less. Other pulps were paying their star writers two cents a word by the mid 1920s and as much as three cents a word by the end of the decade. Because of his popularity Hammett presumably commanded the top rate, but his income was limited by a schedule imposed by Cody, and generally observed, of no more than a story every other month. During Cody’s tenure, from 1 April 1924 until Hammett quit writing for him in March 1926, Hammett published 15 stories in Black Mask of which ten featured the Op. If he made two cents a word under Cody, he earned about $4500 in the two years he wrote for him, or an average of about $300 a story. During that time he also published four stories (one of which was narrated by the Op) in other pulps, as well as a smattering of non fiction and poems; those publications would have earned him no more than another $1000. In September 1925, Hammett learned that his wife was pregnant with their second child. With another mouth to feed, Hammett asked Cody for more money, threatening to quit the magazine if he were denied. Gardner, an attorney, claimed he offered to take a cut in his own pay rate for Hammett’s sake, but Cody refused Hammett on the grounds that it would be unfair to other Black Mask authors. The circumstances are unclear, but Hammett claimed Cody owed him $300, which Cody refused to pay. Hammett quit the magazine in anger early in 1926. His last story for Cody was “The Creeping Siamese” published in March.

R.L.

THE HOUSE IN TURK STREET

Black Mask, 15 April 1924

We wouldn’t consider an issue complete without one of Mr. Hammett’s stories in it, and after you’ve read this tale, you’ll understand why.

I had been told that the man for whom I was hunting lived in a certain Turk Street block, but my informant hadn’t been able to give me his house number. Thus it came about that late one rainy afternoon I was canvassing this certain block, ringing each bell, and reciting a myth that went like this:

“I’m from the law office of Wellington and Berkeley. One of our clients—an elderly lady—was thrown from the rear platform of a street car last week and severely injured. Among those who witnessed the accident, was a young man whose name we don’t know. But we have been told that he lives in this neighborhood.” Then I would describe the man I wanted, and wind up: “Do you know of anyone who looks like that?”

All down one side of the block the answers were:

“No,” “No,” “No.”

I crossed the street and started to work the other side. The first house: “No.”

The second: “No.”

The third. The fourth.

The fifth—

No one came to the door in answer to my first ring. After a while, I rang again. I had just decided that no one was at home, when the knob turned slowly and a little old woman opened the door. She was a very fragile little old woman, with a piece of grey knitting in one hand, and faded eyes that twinkled pleasantly behind gold-rimmed spectacles. She wore a stiffly starched apron over a black dress and there was white lace at her throat.

“Good evening,” she said in a thin friendly voice. “I hope you didn’t mind waiting. I always have to peep out to see who’s here before I open the door—an old woman’s timidity.”

She laughed with a little gurgling sound in her throat.

“Sorry to disturb you,” I apologized. “But—”

“Won’t you come in, please?”

“No; I just want a little information. I won’t take much of your time.”

“I wish you would come in,” she said, and then added with mock severity, “I’m sure my tea is getting cold.”

She took my damp hat and coat, and I followed her down a narrow hall to a dim room, where a man got up as we entered. He was old too, and stout, with a thin white beard that fell upon a white vest that was as stiffly starched as the woman’s apron.

“Thomas,” the little fragile woman told him; “this is Mr.—”

“Tracy,” I said, because that was the name I had given the other residents of the block; but I came as near blushing when I said it, as I have in fifteen years. These folks weren’t made to be lied to.

Their name, I learned, was Quarre; and they were an affectionate old couple. She called him “Thomas” every time she spoke to him, rolling the name around in her mouth as if she liked the taste of it. He called her “my dear” just as frequently, and twice he got up to adjust a cushion more comfortably to her frail back.

I had to drink a cup of tea with them and eat some little spiced cookies before I could get them to listen to a question. Then Mrs. Quarre made little sympathetic clicking sounds with her tongue and teeth, while I told about the elderly lady who had fallen off a street car. The old man rumbled in his beard that it was “a damn shame,” and gave me a fat and oily cigar. I had to assure them that the fictitious elderly lady was being taken care of and was coming along nicely—I was afraid they were going to insist upon being taken to see her.

Finally I got away from the accident itself, and described the man I wanted. “Thomas,” Mrs. Quarre said; “isn’t that the young man who lives in the house with the railing—the one who always looks so worried?”

The old man stroked his snowy beard and pondered.

“But, my dear,” he rumbled at last; “hasn’t he got dark hair?”

She beamed upon her husband and then upon me.

“Thomas is so observant,” she said with pride. “I had forgotten; but the young man I spoke of does have dark hair, so he couldn’t be the one who saw the accident at all.”

The old man then suggested that one who lived in the block below might be my man. They discussed this one at some length before they decided that he was too tall and too old. Mrs. Quarre suggested another. They discussed that one, and voted against him. Thomas offered a candidate; he was weighed and discarded. They chattered on:

“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. The room was a large one, and heavy with the thick hangings and bulky horse-hair furniture of a generation ago. I burned the cigar the old man had given me, and slumped comfortably down in my chair, letting them run on, putting in a word or two whenever they turned to me. I didn’t expect to get any information here; but I was comfortable, and the cigar was a good one. Time enough to go out into the drizzle when I had finished my smoke.

Something cold touched the nape of my neck.

“Stand up!”

I didn’t stand up: I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. I sat and blinked at the Quarres.

And looking at them, I knew that something cold couldn’t be against the back of my neck; a harsh voice couldn’t have ordered me to stand up. It wasn’t possible!

Mrs. Quarre still sat primly upright against the cushions her husband had adjusted to her back; her eyes still twinkled with friendliness behind her glasses; her hands were still motionless in her lap, crossed at the wrists over the piece of knitting. The old man still stroked his white beard, and let cigar smoke drift unhurriedly from his nostrils.

They would go on talking about the young men in the neighborhood who might be the man I wanted. Nothing had happened. I had dozed.

“Get up!”

The cold thing against my neck jabbed deep into the flesh.

I stood up.

“Frisk him,” the harsh voice came from behind.

The old man carefully laid his cigar down, came to me, and ran his hands over my body. Satisfied that I was unarmed, he emptied my pockets, dropping the contents upon the chair that I had just left.

Mrs. Quarre was pouring herself some more tea.

“Thomas,” she said; “you’ve overlooked that little watch pocket in the trousers.”

He found nothing there.

“That’s all,” he told the man behind me, and returned to his chair and cigar.

“Turn around, you!” the harsh voice ordered.

I turned and faced a tall, gaunt, raw-boned man of about my own age, which is thirty-five. He had an ugly face—hollow-cheeked, bony, and spattered with big pale freckles. His eyes were of a watery blue, and his nose and chin stuck out abruptly.

“Know me?” he asked.

“No.”

“You’re a liar!”

I didn’t argue the point: he was holding a level gun in one big freckled hand.

“You’re going to know me pretty well before you’re through with me,” this big ugly man threatened. “You’re going to—”

“Hook!” a voice came from a portièred doorway—the doorway through which the ugly man had no doubt crept up behind me. “Hook, come here!”

The voice was feminine—young, clear, and musical.

“What do you want?” the ugly man called over his shoulder.

“He’s here.”

“All right!” He turned to Thomas Quarre. “Keep this joker safe.”

From somewhere among his whiskers, his coat, and his stiff white vest, the old man brought out a big black revolver, which he handled with no signs of either weakness or unfamiliarity.

The ugly man swept up the things that had been taken from my pockets, and carried them through the portières with him.

Mrs. Quarre smiled brightly up at me.

“Do sit down, Mr. Tracy,” she said.

I sat.

Through the portières a new voice came from the next room; a drawling baritone voice whose accent was unmistakably British; cultured British.

“What’s up, Hook?” this voice was asking.

The harsh voice of the ugly man:

“Plenty’s up, I’m telling you! They’re onto us! I started out a while ago; and as soon as I got to the street, I seen a man I knowed on the other side. He was pointed out to me in Philly five-six years ago. I don’t know his name, but I remembered his mug—he’s a Continental Detective Agency man. I came back in right away, and me and Elvira watched him out of the window. He went to every house on the other side of the street, asking questions or something. Then he came over and started to give this side a whirl, and after a while he rings the bell. I tell the old woman and her husband to get him in, stall him along, and see what he says for himself. He’s got a song and dance about looking for a guy what seen an old woman bumped by a street car—but that’s the bunk! He’s gunning for us. There ain’t nothing else to it. I went in and stuck him up just now. I meant to wait till you come, but I was scared he’d get nervous and beat it. Here’s his stuff if you want to give it the once over.”

The British voice:

“You shouldn’t have shown yourself to him. The others could have taken care of him.”

Hook:

“What’s the diff? Chances is he knows us all anyway. But supposing he didn’t, what diff does it make?”

The drawling British voice:

“It may make a deal of difference. It was stupid.”

Hook, blustering:

“Stupid, huh? You’re always bellyaching about other people being stupid. To hell with you, I say! If you don’t like my style, to hell with you! Who does all the work? Who’s the guy that swings all the jobs? Huh? Where—”

The young feminine voice:

“Now, Hook, for God’s sake don’t make that speech again. I’ve listened to it until I know it by heart!”

A rustle of papers, and the British voice:

“I say, Hook, you’re correct about his being a detective. Here is an identification card among his things.”

The Quarres were listening to the conversation in the next room with as much interest as I, but Thomas Quarre’s eyes never left me, and his fat fingers never relaxed about the gun in his lap. His wife sipped tea, with her head cocked on one side in the listening attitude of a bird.

Except for the weapon in the old man’s lap, there was not a thing to persuade the eye that melodrama was in the room; the Quarres were in every other detail still the pleasant old couple who had given me tea and expressed sympathy for the elderly lady who had been injured.

The feminine voice from the next room:

“Well, what’s to be done? What’s our play?”

Hook:

“That’s easy to answer. We’re going to knock this sleuth off, first thing!”

The feminine voice:

“And put our necks in the noose?”

Hook, scornfully:

“As if they ain’t there if we don’t! You don’t think this guy ain’t after us for the L. A. job, do you?”

The British voice:

“You’re an ass, Hook, and a quite hopeless one. Suppose this chap is interested in the Los Angeles affair, as is probable; what then? He is a Continental operative. Is it likely that his organization doesn’t know where he is? Don’t you think they know he was coming up here? And don’t they know as much about us—chances are—as he does? There’s no use killing him. That would only make matters worse. The thing to do is to tie him up and leave him here. His associates will hardly come looking for him until tomorrow—and that will give us all night to manage our disappearance.”

My gratitude went out to the British voice! Somebody was in my favor, at least to the extent of letting me live. I hadn’t been feeling very cheerful these last few minutes. Somehow, the fact that I couldn’t see these people who were deciding whether I was to live or die, made my plight seem all the more desperate. I felt better now, though far from gay; I had confidence in the drawling British voice; it was the voice of a man who habitually carries his point.

Hook, bellowing:

“Let me tell you something, brother: that guy’s going to be knocked off! That’s flat! I’m taking no chances. You can jaw all you want to about it, but I’m looking out for my own neck and it’ll be a lot safer with that guy where he can’t talk. That’s flat. He’s going to be knocked off!”

The feminine voice, disgustedly:

“Aw, Hook, be reasonable!”

The British voice, still drawling, but dead cold:

“There’s no use reasoning with you, Hook, you’ve the instincts and the intellect of a troglodyte. There is only one sort of language that you understand; and I’m going to talk that language to you, my son. If you are tempted to do anything silly between now and the time of our departure, just say this to yourself two or three times: ‘If he dies, I die. If he dies, I die.’ Say it as if it were out of the Bible—because it’s that true.”

There followed a long space of silence, with a tenseness that made my not particularly sensitive scalp tingle. Beyond the portière, I knew, two men were matching glances in a battle of wills, which might any instant become a physical struggle, and my chances of living were tied up in that battle.

When, at last, a voice cut the silence, I jumped as if a gun had been fired; though the voice was low and smooth enough.

It was the British voice, confidently victorious, and I breathed again.

“We’ll get the old people away first,” the voice was saying. “You take charge of our guest, Hook. Tie him up neatly. But remember—no foolishness. Don’t waste time questioning him—he’ll lie. Tie him up while I get the bonds, and we’ll be gone in less than half an hour.”

The portières parted and Hook came into the room—a scowling Hook whose freckles had a greenish tinge against the sallowness of his face. He pointed a revolver at me, and spoke to the Quarres:

“He wants you.”

They got up and went into the next room, and for a while an indistinguishable buzzing of whispers came from that room.

Hook, meanwhile, had stepped back to the doorway, still menacing me with his revolver; and pulled loose the plush ropes that were around the heavy curtains. Then he came around behind me, and tied me securely to the high-backed chair; my arms to the chair’s arms, my legs to the chair’s legs, my body to the chair’s back and seat; and he wound up by gagging me with the corner of a cushion that was too well-stuffed for my comfort. The ugly man was unnecessarily rough throughout; but I was a lamb. He wanted an excuse for drilling me, and I wanted above all else that he should have no excuse.

As he finished lashing me into place, and stepped back to scowl at me, I heard the street door close softly, and then light footsteps ran back and forth overhead.

Hook looked in the direction of those footsteps, and his little watery blue eyes grew cunning.

“Elvira!” he called softly.

The portières bulged as if someone had touched them, and the musical feminine voice came through.

“What?”

“Come here.”

“I’d better not. He wouldn’t—”

“Damn him!” Hook flared up. “Come here!”

She came into the room and into the circle of light from the tall lamp; a girl in her early twenties, slender and lithe, and dressed for the street, except that she carried her hat in one hand. 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.

“What do you want?”

He spoke in an undertone, with a furtive glance at the ceiling, above which soft steps still padded back and forth.

“What say we shake him?”

Her smoke-grey eyes lost their merriment and became hard and calculating.

“There’s a hundred thousand he’s holding—a third of it’s mine. You don’t think I’m going to take a Mickey Finn on that, do you?”

“Course not! Supposing we get the hundred-grand?”

“How?”

“Leave it to me, kid; leave it to me! If I swing it, will you go with me? You know I’ll be good to you.”

She smiled contemptuously, I thought—but he seemed to like it.

“You’re whooping right you’ll be good to me,” she said. “But listen, Hook: we couldn’t get away with it—not unless you get him. I know him! I’m not running away with anything that belongs to him unless he is fixed so that he can’t come after it.”

Hook moistened his lips and looked around the room at nothing. Apparently he didn’t like the thought of tangling with the owner of the British drawl. But his desire for the girl was too strong for his fear of the other man.

“I’ll do it!” he blurted. “I’ll get him! Do you mean it, kid? If I get him, you’ll go with me?”

She held out her hand.

“It’s a bet,” she said, and he believed her.

His ugly face grew warm and red and utterly happy, and he took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. In his place, I might have believed her myself—all of us have fallen for that sort of thing at one time or another—but sitting tied up on the side-lines, I knew that he’d have been better off playing with a gallon of nitro than with this baby. She was dangerous! There was a rough time ahead for this Hook!

“This is the lay—” Hook began, and stopped, tongue-tied.

A step had sounded in the next room.

Immediately the British voice came through the portières, and there was an edge of exasperation to the drawl now:

“This is really too much! I can’t”—he said reahly and cawnt—“leave for a moment without having things done all wrong. Now just what got into you, Elvira, that you must go in and exhibit yourself to our detective friend?”

Fear flashed into her smoke-grey eyes, and out again, and she spoke airily:

“Don’t be altogether yellow,” she said. “Your precious neck can get along all right without so much guarding.”

The portières parted, and I twisted my head around as far as I could get it for my first look at this man who was responsible for my still being alive. I saw a short fat man, hatted and coated for the street, and carrying a tan traveling bag in one hand.

Then his face came into the yellow circle of light, and I saw that it was a Chinese face. A short fat Chinese, immaculately clothed in garments that were as British as his accent.

“It isn’t a matter of color,” he told the girl—and I understood now the full sting of her jibe; “it’s simply a matter of ordinary wisdom.”

His face was a round yellow mask, and his voice was the same emotionless drawl that I had heard before; but I knew that he was as surely under the girl’s sway as the ugly man—or he wouldn’t have let her taunt bring him into the room. But I doubted that she’d find this Anglicized oriental as easily handled as Hook.

“There was no particular need,” the Chinese was still talking, “for this chap to have seen any of us.” He looked at me now for the first time, with little opaque eyes that were like two black seeds. “It’s quite possible that he didn’t know any of us, even by description. This showing ourselves to him is the most arrant sort of nonsense.”

“Aw, hell, Tai!” Hook blustered. “Quit your bellyaching, will you? What’s the diff? I’ll knock him off, and that takes care of that!”

The Chinese set down his tan bag and shook his head.

“There will be no killing,” he drawled, “or there will be quite a bit of killing. You don’t mistake my meaning, do you, Hook?”

Hook didn’t. His Adam’s apple ran up and down with the effort of his swallowing, and behind the cushion that was choking me, I thanked the yellow man again.

Then this red-haired she-devil put her spoon in the dish.

“Hook’s always offering to do things that he has no intention of doing,” she told the Chinese.

Hook’s ugly face blazed red at this reminder of his promise to get the Chinese, and he swallowed again, and his eyes looked as if nothing would have suited him better than an opportunity to crawl under something. But the girl had him; her influence was stronger than his cowardice.

He suddenly stepped close to the Chinese, and from his advantage of a full head in height scowled down into the round yellow face that was as expressionless as a clock without hands.

“Tai,” the ugly man snarled; “you’re done. I’m sick and tired of all this dog you put on—acting like you was a king or something. I’ve took all the lip I’m going to take from a Chink! I’m going to—”

He faltered, and his words faded away into silence. Tai looked up at him with eyes that were as hard and black and inhuman as two pieces of coal. Hook’s lips twitched and he flinched away a little.

I stopped sweating. The yellow man had won again. But I had forgotten the red-haired she-devil.

She laughed now—a mocking laugh that must have been like a knife to the ugly man.

A bellow came from deep in his chest, and he hurled one big fist into the round blank face of the yellow man.

The force of the punch carried Tai all the way across the room, and threw him on his side in one corner.

But he had twisted his body around to face the ugly man even as he went hurtling across the room—a gun was in his hand before he went down—and he was speaking before his legs had settled upon the floor—and his voice was a cultured British drawl.

“Later,” he was saying; “we will settle this thing that is between us. Just now you will drop your pistol and stand very still while I get up.”

Hook’s revolver—only half out of his pocket when the oriental had covered him—thudded to the rug. He stood rigidly still while Tai got to his feet, and Hook’s breath came out noisily, and each freckle stood ghastily out against the dirty scared white of his face.

I looked at the girl. There was contempt in the eyes with which she looked at Hook, but no disappointment.

Then I made a discovery: something had changed in the room near her!

I shut my eyes and tried to picture that part of the room as it had been before the two men had clashed. Opening my eyes suddenly, I had the answer.

On the table beside the girl had been a book and some magazines. They were gone now. Not two feet from the girl was the tan bag that Tai had brought into the room. Suppose the bag had held the bonds from the Los Angeles job that they had mentioned. It probably had. What then? It probably now held the book and magazines that had been on the table! The girl had stirred up the trouble between the two men to distract their attention while she made a switch. Where would the loot be, then? I didn’t know, but I suspected that it was too bulky to be on the girl’s slender person.

Just beyond the table was a couch, with a wide red cover that went all the way down to the floor. I looked from the couch to the girl. She was watching me, and her eyes twinkled with a flash of mirth as they met mine coming from the couch. The couch it was!

By now the Chinese had pocketed Hook’s revolver, and was talking to him:

“If I hadn’t a dislike for murder, and if I didn’t think that you will perhaps be of some value to Elvira and me in effecting our departure, I should certainly relieve us of the handicap of your stupidity now. But I’ll give you one more chance. I would suggest, however, that you think carefully before you give way to any more of your violent impulses.” He turned to the girl. “Have you been putting foolish ideas in our Hook’s head?”

She laughed.

“Nobody could put any kind in it.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, and then came over to test the lashings about my arms and body.

Finding them satisfactory, he picked up the tan bag, and held out the gun he had taken from the ugly man a few minutes before.

“Here’s your revolver, Hook, now try to be sensible. We may as well go now. The old man and his wife will do as they were told. They are on their way to a city that we needn’t mention by name in front of our friend here, to wait for us and their share of the bonds. 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.

Suddenly the Chinese was in the room again, running tiptoe—an open knife in one hand, a gun in the other. This was the man I had been thanking for saving my life!

He bent over me.

The knife moved on my right side, and the rope that held that arm slackened its grip. I breathed again, and my heart went back to beating.

“Hook will be back,” Tai whispered, and was gone.

On the carpet, three feet in front of me, lay a revolver.

The street door closed, and I was alone in the house for a while.

You may believe that I spent that while struggling with the red plush ropes that bound me. Tai had cut one length, loosening my right arm somewhat and giving my body more play, but I was far from free. And his whispered “Hook will be back” was all the spur I needed to throw my strength against my bonds.

I understood now why the Chinese had insisted so strongly upon my life being spared. I was the weapon with which Hook was to be removed. The Chinese figured that Hook would make some excuse as soon as they reached the street, slip back into the house, knock me off, and rejoin his confederates. If he didn’t do it on his own initiative, I suppose the Chinese would suggest it.

So he had put a gun within reach—in case I could get loose—and had loosened my ropes as much as he could, not to have me free before he himself got away.

This thinking was a side-issue. I didn’t let it slow up my efforts to get loose. The why wasn’t important to me just now—the important thing was to have that revolver in my hand when the ugly man came into this room again.

Just as the front door opened, I got my right arm completely free, and plucked the strangling cushion from my mouth. The rest of my body was still held by the ropes—held loosely—but held. There was no time for more.

I threw myself, chair and all, forward, breaking the fall with my free arm. The carpet was thick. I went down on my face, with the heavy chair atop me, all doubled up any which way; but my right arm was free of the tangle, and my right hand grasped the gun.

My left side—the wrong side—was toward the hall door. I twisted and squirmed and wrestled under the bulky piece of furniture that sat on my back.

An inch—two inches—six inches, I twisted. Another inch. Feet were at the hall door. Another inch.

The dim light hit upon a man hurrying into the room—a glint of metal in his hand.

I fired.

He caught both hands to his belly, bent double, and slid out across the carpet.

That was over. But that was far from being all. I wrenched at the plush ropes that held me, while my mind tried to sketch what lay ahead.

The girl had switched the bonds, hiding them under the couch—there was no question of that. She had intended coming back for them before I had time to get free. But Hook had come back first, and she would have to change her plan. What more likely than that she would now tell the Chinese that Hook had made the switch? What then? There was only one answer: Tai would come back for the bonds—both of them would come. Tai knew that I was armed now, but they had said that the bonds represented a hundred thousand dollars. That would be enough to bring them back!

I kicked the last rope loose and scrambled to the couch. The bonds were beneath it: four thick bundles of Liberty Bonds, done up with heavy rubber bands. I tucked them under one arm, and went over to the man who was dying near the door. His gun was under one of his legs, I pulled it out, stepped over him, and went into the dark hall.

Then I stopped to consider.

The girl and the Chinese would split to tackle me. One would come in the front door and the other in the rear. That would be the safest way for them to handle me. My play, obviously, was to wait just inside one of those doors for them. It would be foolish for me to leave the house. That’s exactly what they would be expecting at first—and they would be lying in ambush.

Decidedly, my play was to lie low within sight of this front door and wait until one of them came through it—as one of them surely would, when they had tired of waiting for me to come out.

Toward the street door, the hall was lighted with the glow that filtered through the glass from the street lights. The stairway leading to the second-story threw a triangular shadow across part of the hall—a shadow that was black enough for any purpose. I crouched low in this three-cornered slice of night, and waited.

I had two guns: the one the Chinese had given me, and the one I had taken from Hook. I had fired one shot; that would leave me eleven still to use—unless one of the weapons had been used since it was loaded. I broke the gun Tai had given me, and in the dark ran my fingers across the back of the cylinder. My fingers touched one shell—under the hammer. Tai had taken no chances; he had given me one bullet—the bullet with which I had dropped Hook.

I put that gun down on the floor, and examined the one I had taken from Hook. It was empty. The Chinese had taken no chances at all! He had emptied Hook’s gun before returning it to him after their quarrel.

I was in a hole! Alone, unarmed, in a strange house that would presently hold two who were hunting me—and that one of them was a woman didn’t soothe me any—she was none the less deadly on that account.

For a moment I was tempted to make a dash for it; the thought of being out in the street again was pleasant; but I put the idea away. That would be foolishness, and plenty of it. Then I remembered the bonds under my arm. They would have to be my weapon; and if they were to serve me, they would have to be concealed.

I slipped out of my triangular shadow and went up the stairs. Thanks to the street lights, the upstairs rooms were not too dark for me to move around. Around and around I went through the rooms, hunting for a place to hide the Liberty Bonds.

But when suddenly a window rattled, as if from the draught created by the opening of an outside door somewhere, I still had the loot in my hands.

There was nothing to do now but to chuck them out of a window and trust to luck. I grabbed a pillow from a bed, stripped off the white case, and dumped the bonds into it. Then I leaned out of an already open window and looked down into the night, searching for a desirable dumping place: I didn’t want the bonds to land on an ash-can or a pile of bottles, or anything that would make a racket.

And, looking out of the window, I found a better hiding-place. The window opened into a narrow court, on the other side of which was a house of the same sort as the one I was in. That house was of the same height as this one, with a flat tin roof that sloped down the other way. The roof wasn’t far from me—not too far to chuck the pillow-case. I chucked it. It disappeared over the edge of the roof and crackled softly on the tin.

If I had been a movie actor or something of the sort, I suppose I’d have followed the bonds; I suppose I’d have jumped from the sill, caught the edge of the roof with my fingers, swung a while, and then pulled myself up and away. But dangling in space doesn’t appeal to me; I preferred to face the Chinese and the red-head.

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.

The girl found me.

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. And when she saw me sitting peacefully on the side of the bed, her eyes snapped scornfully at me, as if I had done something mean. I suppose she thought I should have given her an opportunity to put lead in me.

“I got him, Tai,” she called, and the Chinese joined us.

“What did Hook do with the bonds?” he asked point blank.

I grinned into his round yellow face and led my ace.

“Why don’t you ask the girl?”

His face showed nothing, but I imagined that his fat body stiffened a little within its fashionable British clothing. That encouraged me, and I went on with my little lie that was meant to stir things up.

“Haven’t you rapped to it,” I asked; “that they were fixing up to ditch you?”

“You dirty liar!” the girl screamed, and took a step toward me.

Tai halted her with an imperative gesture. He stared through her with his opaque black eyes, and as he stared the blood slid out of her face. She had this fat yellow man on her string, right enough, but he wasn’t exactly a harmless toy.

“So that’s how it is?” he said slowly, to no one in particular. “So that’s how it is?” Then to me: “Where did they put the bonds?”

The girl went close to him and her words came out tumbling over each other:

“Here’s the truth of it, Tai, so help me God! I switched the stuff myself. Hook wasn’t in it. I was going to run out on both of you. I stuck them under the couch downstairs, but they’re not there now. That’s the God’s truth!”

He was eager to believe her, and her words had the ring of truth to them. And I knew that—in love with her as he was—he’d more readily forgive her treachery with the bonds than he would forgive her for planning to run off with Hook; so I made haste to stir things up again. The old timer who said “Divide to conquer,” or something of the sort, knew what he was talking about.

“Part of that is right enough,” I said. “She did stick the bonds under the couch—but Hook was in on it. They fixed it up between them while you were upstairs. He was to pick a fight with you, and during the argument she was to make the switch, and that is exactly what they did.”

I had him!

As she wheeled savagely toward me, he stuck the muzzle of an automatic in her side—a smart jab that checked the angry words she was hurling at me.

“I’ll take your guns, Elvira,” he said, and took them.

There was a purring deadliness in his voice that made her surrender them without a word.

“Where are the bonds now?” he asked me.

I grinned.

“I’m not with you, Tai. I’m against you.”

He studied me with his little eyes that were like black seeds for a while, and I studied him; and I hoped that his studying was as fruitless as mine.

“I don’t like violence,” he said slowly, “and I believe you are a sensible person. Let us traffic, my friend.”

“You name it,” I suggested.

“Gladly! As a basis for our bargaining, we will stipulate that you have hidden the bonds where they cannot be found by anyone else; and that I have you completely in my power, as the shilling shockers used to have it.”

“Reasonable enough,” I said, “go on.”

“The situation, then, is what gamblers call a standoff. Neither of us has the advantage. As a detective, you want us; but we have you. As thieves, we want the bonds; but you have them. I offer you the girl in exchange for the bonds, and that seems to me an equitable offer. It will give me the bonds and a chance to get away. It will give you no small degree of success in your task as a detective. Hook is dead. You will have the girl. All that will remain is to find me and the bonds again—by no means a hopeless task. You will have turned a defeat into more than half of a victory, with an excellent chance to make it a complete one.”

“How do I know that you’ll give me the girl?”

He shrugged.

“Naturally, there can be no guarantee. But, knowing that she planned to desert me for the swine who lies dead below, you can’t imagine that my feelings for her are the most friendly. Too, if I take her with me, she will want a share in the loot.”

I turned the lay-out over in my mind, and looked at it from this side and that and the other.

“This is the way it looks to me,” I told him at last. “You aren’t a killer. I’ll come through alive no matter what happens. All right; why should I swap? You and the girl will be easier to find again than the bonds, and they are the most important part of the job anyway. I’ll hold on to them, and take my chances on finding you folks again. Yes, I’m playing it safe.”

And I meant it, for the time being, at least.

“No, I’m not a killer,” he said, very softly; and he smiled the first smile I had seen on his face. It wasn’t a pleasant smile: and there was something in it that made you want to shudder. “But I am other things, perhaps, of which you haven’t thought. But this talking is to no purpose. Elvira!”

The girl, who had been standing a little to one side, watching us, came obediently forward.

“You will find sheets in one of the bureau drawers,” he told her. “Tear one or two of them into strips strong enough to tie up your friend securely.”

The girl went to the bureau. I wrinkled my head, trying to find a not too disagreeable answer to the question in my mind. The answer that came first wasn’t nice: torture.

Then a faint sound brought us all into tense motionlessness.

The room we were in had two doors: one leading into the hall, the other into another bedroom. It was through the hall door that the faint sound had come—the sound of creeping feet.

Swiftly, silently, Tai moved backward to a position from which he could watch the hall door without losing sight of the girl and me—and the gun poised like a live thing in his fat hand was all the warning we needed to make no noise.

The faint sound again, just outside the door.

The gun in TaI’s hand seemed to quiver with eagerness.

Through the other door—the door that gave to the next room—popped Mrs. Quarre, an enormous cocked revolver in her thin hand.

“Let go it, you nasty heathen,” she screeched.

Tai dropped his pistol before he turned to face her, and he held his hands up high—all of which was very wise.

Thomas Quarre came through the hall door then; he also held a cocked revolver—the mate of his wife’s—though, in front of his bulk, his didn’t look so enormously large.

I looked at the old woman again, and found little of the friendly fragile one who had poured tea and chatted about the neighbors. This was a witch if there ever was one—a witch of the blackest, most malignant sort. Her little faded eyes were sharp with ferocity, her withered lips were taut in a wolfish snarl, and her thin body fairly quivered with hate.

“I knew it,” she was shrilling. “I told Tom as soon as we got far enough away to think things over. I knew it was a frame-up! I knew this supposed detective was a pal of yours! I knew it was just a scheme to beat Thomas and me out of our shares! Well, I’ll show you, you yellow monkey! And the rest of you too! I’ll show the whole caboodle of you! Where are them bonds? Where are they?”

The Chinese had recovered his poise, if he had ever lost it.

“Our stout friend can tell you perhaps,” he said. “I was about to extract the information from him when you so—ah—dramatically arrived.”

“Thomas, for goodness sakes don’t stand there dreaming,” she snapped at her husband, who to all appearances was still the same mild old man who had given me an excellent cigar. “Tie up this Chinaman! I don’t trust him an inch, and I won’t feel easy until he’s tied up. Tie him, up, and then we’ll see what’s to be done.”

I got up from my seat on the side of the bed, and moved cautiously to a spot that I thought would be out of the line of fire if the thing I expected happened.

Tai had dropped the gun that had been in his hand, but he hadn’t been searched. The Chinese are a thorough people; if one of them carries a gun at all, he usually carries two or three or more. (I remember picking up one in Oakland during the last tong war, who had five on him—one under each armpit, one on each hip, and one in his waistband.) One gun had been taken from Tai, and if they tried to truss him up without frisking him, there was likely to be fireworks. So I moved off to one side.

Fat Thomas Quarre went phlegmatically up to the Chinese to carry out his wife’s orders—and bungled the job perfectly.

He put his bulk between Tai and the old woman’s gun.

Tai’s hands moved.

An automatic was in each.

Once more Tai ran true to racial form. When a Chinese shoots, he keeps on shooting until his gun is empty.

When I yanked Tai over backward by his fat throat, and slammed him to the floor, his guns were still barking metal; and they clicked empty as I got a knee on one of his arms. I didn’t take any chances. I worked on his throat until his eyes and tongue told me that he was out of things for a while.

Then I looked around.

Thomas Quarre was huddled against the bed, plainly dead, with three round holes in his starched white vest—holes that were brown from the closeness of the gun that had put them there.

Across the room, Mrs. Quarre lay on her back. Her clothes had somehow settled in place around her fragile body, and death had given her once more the gentle friendly look she had worn when I first saw her. One thin hand was on her bosom, covering, I found later, the two bullet-holes that were there.

The red-haired girl Elvira was gone.

Presently Tai stirred, and, after taking another gun from his clothes, I helped him sit up. He stroked his bruised throat with one fat hand, and looked coolly around the room.

“So this is how it came out?” he said.

“Uh-huh!”

“Where’s Elvira?”

“Got away—for the time being.”

He shrugged.

“Well, you can call it a decidedly successful operation. The Quarres and Hook dead; the bonds and I in your hands.”

“Not so bad,” I admitted, “but will you do me a favor?”

“If I may.”

“Tell me what the hell this is all about!”

“All about?” he asked.

“Exactly! From what you people have let me overhear, I gather that you pulled some sort of job in Los Angeles that netted you a hundred-thousand-dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds; but I can’t remember any recent job of that size down there.”

“Why, that’s preposterous!” he said with what, for him, was almost wild-eyed amazement. “Preposterous! Of course you know all about it!”

“I do not! I was trying to find a young fellow named Fisher who left his Tacoma home in anger a week or two ago. His father wants him found on the quiet, so that he can come down and try to talk him into going home again. I was told that I might find Fisher in this block of Turk Street, and that’s what brought me here.”

He didn’t believe me. He never believed me. He went to the gallows thinking me a liar.

When I got out into the street again (and Turk Street was a lovely place when I came free into it after my evening in that house!) I bought a newspaper that told me most of what I wanted to know.

A boy of twenty—a messenger in the employ of a Los Angeles stock and bond house—had disappeared two days before, while on his way to a bank with a wad of Liberty Bonds. That same night this boy and a slender girl with bobbed red hair had registered at a hotel in Fresno as J. M. Riordan and wife. The next morning the boy had been found in his room—murdered. The girl was gone. The bonds were gone.

That much the paper told me. During the next few days, digging up a little here and a little there, I succeeded in piecing together most of the story.

The Chinese—whose full name was Tai Choon Tau—had been the brains of the mob. Their game had been a variation of the always-reliable badger game. Tai selected the victims, and he must have been a good judge of humans, for he seems never to have picked a bloomer. He would pick out some youth who was messenger or runner for a banker or broker—one who carried either cash or negotiable securities in large quantities around the city.

The girl Elvira would then make this lad, get him all fussed up over her—which shouldn’t have been very hard for her—and then lead him gently around to running away with her and whatever he could grab in the way of his employer’s bonds or currency.

Wherever they spent the first night of their flight, there Hook would appear—foaming at the mouth and loaded for bear. The girl would plead and tear her hair and so forth, trying to keep Hook—in his rôle of irate husband—from butchering the youth. Finally she would succeed, and in the end the youth would find himself without either girl or the fruits of his thievery.

Sometimes he had surrendered to the police. Two we found had committed suicide. The Los Angeles lad had been built of tougher stuff than the others. He had put up a fight, and Hook had had to kill him. You can measure the girl’s skill in her end of the game by the fact that not one of the half dozen youths who had been trimmed had said the least thing to implicate her; and some of them had gone to great trouble to keep her out of it.

The house in Turk Street had been the mob’s retreat, and, that it might be always a safe one, they had not worked their game in San Francisco. Hook and the girl were supposed by the neighbors to be the Quarres’ son and daughter—and Tai was the Chinese cook. The Quarres’ benign and respectable appearances had also come in handy when the mob had securities to be disposed of.

The Chinese went to the gallows. We threw out the widest and finest-meshed of drag-nets for the red-haired girl; and we turned up girls with bobbed red hair by the scores. But the girl Elvira was not among them.

I promised myself that some day. …

THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES

Complete Detective Novelette

Black Mask, June 1924

Mr. Hammett has written some lively and unusual tales about his realistic detective from the Continental Detective Agency, whose name has never been disclosed; but for action, shrewd detective-work, sheer interest, and surprise, his latest, herewith, surpasses them all.

I

A bell jangled me into wakefulness. I rolled to the edge of my bed and reached for the telephone. The neat voice of the Old Man—the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager—came to my ears:

“Sorry to disturb you, but you’ll have to go up to the Glenton Apartments on Leavenworth Street. A man named Burke Pangburn, who lives there, phoned me a few minutes ago asking to have someone sent up to see him at once. He seemed rather excited. Will you take care of it? See what he wants.”

I said I would and, yawning, stretching and cursing Pangburn—whoever he was—got my fat body out of pajamas and into street clothes.

The man who had disturbed my Sunday morning sleep—I found when I reached the Glenton—was a slim, white-faced person of about twenty-five, with big brown eyes that were red-rimmed just now from either sleeplessness or crying, or both. His long brown hair was rumpled when he opened the door to admit me; and he wore a mauve dressing-robe spotted with big jade parrots over wine-colored silk pajamas.

The room into which he led me resembled an auctioneer’s establishment just before the sale—or maybe one of these alley tea-rooms. Fat blue vases, crooked red vases, lanky yellow vases, vases of various shapes and colors; marble statuettes, ebony statuettes, statuettes of any material; lanterns, lamps and candlesticks; draperies, hangings and rugs of all sorts; odds and ends of furniture that were all somehow queerly designed; peculiar pictures hung here and there in unexpected places. A hard room to feel comfortable in.

“My fiancée,” he began immediately in a high-pitched voice that was within a notch of hysteria, “has disappeared! Something has happened to her! Foul play of some horrible sort! I want you to find her—to save her from this terrible thing that. …”

I followed him this far and then gave it up. A jumble of words came out of his mouth—“spirited away … mysterious something … lured into a trap”—but they were too disconnected for me to make anything out of them. So I stopped trying to understand him, and waited for him to babble himself empty of words.

I have heard ordinarily reasonable men, under stress of excitement, run on even more crazily than this wild-eyed youth; but his dress—the parroted robe and gay pajamas—and his surroundings—this deliriously furnished room—gave him too theatrical a setting; made his words sound utterly unreal.

He himself, when normal, should have been a rather nice-looking lad: his features were well spaced and, though his mouth and chin were a little uncertain, his broad forehead was good. But standing there listening to the occasional melodramatic phrase that I could pick out of the jumbled noises he was throwing at me, I thought that instead of parrots on his robe he should have had cuckoos.

Presently he ran out of language and was holding his long, thin hands out to me in an appealing gesture, saying,

“Will you?” over and over. “Will you? Will you?”

I nodded soothingly, and noticed that tears were on his thin cheeks.

“Suppose we begin at the beginning,” I suggested, sitting down carefully on a carved bench affair that didn’t look any too strong.

“Yes! Yes!” He was standing legs apart in front of me, running his fingers through his hair. “The beginning. I had a letter from her every day until—”

“That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”

“She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancée. And now she is gone, and I know that—”

The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.

Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:

This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano—forwarded from his publishers—praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether or not she was really beautiful, he thought she was, and he had fallen hard.

This Delano girl had been living in San Francisco for only a little while, and when the poet met her she was living alone in an Ashbury Avenue apartment. He did not know where she came from or anything about her former life. He suspected—from certain indefinite suggestions and peculiarities of conduct which he couldn’t put in words—that there was a cloud of some sort hanging over the girl; that neither her past nor her present were free from difficulties. But he hadn’t the least idea what those difficulties might be. He hadn’t cared. He knew absolutely nothing about her, except that she was beautiful, and he loved her, and she had promised to marry him.

Then, on the third of the month—exactly twenty-one days before this Sunday morning—the girl had suddenly left San Francisco. He had received a note from her, by messenger.

This note, which he showed me after I had insisted point blank on seeing it, read:

Burkelove:

Have just received a wire, and must go East on next train. Tried to get you on the phone, but couldn’t. Will write you as soon as I know what my address will be. If anything. (These two words were erased and could be read only with great difficulty.) Love me until I’m back with you forever.

Your JEANNE.

Nine days later he had received another letter from her, from Baltimore, Maryland. This one, which I had a still harder time getting a look at, read:

Dearest Poet:

It seems like two years since I have seen you, and I have a fear that it’s going to be between one and two months before I see you again.

I can’t tell you now, beloved, about what brought me here. There are things that can’t be written. But as soon as I’m back with you, I shall tell you the whole wretched story.

If anything should happen—I mean to me—you’ll go on loving me forever, won’t you, beloved? But that’s foolish. Nothing is going to happen. I’m just off the train, and tired from traveling.

Tomorrow I shall write you a long, long letter to make up for this.

My address here is 215 N. Stricker St. Please, Mister, at least one letter a day! Your own

JEANNE.

For nine days he had had a letter from her each day—with two on Monday to make up for the none on Sunday—and then her letters had stopped. And the daily letters he had sent to the address she gave—215 N. Stricker Street—had begun to come back to him, marked “Not known.”

He had sent a telegram, and the telegraph company had informed him that its Baltimore office had been unable to find a Jeanne Delano at the North Stricker Street address.

For three days he had waited, expecting hourly to hear from the girl, and no word had come. Then he had bought a ticket for Baltimore.

“But,” he wound up, “I was afraid to go. I know she’s in some sort of trouble—I can feel that—but I’m a silly poet. I can’t deal with mysteries. Either I would find nothing at all or, if by luck I did stumble on the right track, the probabilities are that I would only muddle things; add fresh complications, perhaps endanger her life still further. I can’t go blundering at it in that fashion, without knowing whether I am helping or harming her. It’s a task for an expert in that sort of thing. So I thought of your agency. You’ll be careful, won’t you? It may be—I don’t know—that she won’t want assistance. It may be that you can help her without her knowing anything about it. You are accustomed to that sort of thing; you can do it, can’t you?”

II

I turned the job over and over in my mind before answering him. The two great bugaboos of a reputable detective agency are the persons who bring in a crooked plan or a piece of divorce work all dressed up in the garb of a legitimate operation, and the irresponsible person who is laboring under wild and fanciful delusions—who wants a dream run out.

This poet—sitting opposite me now twining his long, white fingers nervously together—was, I thought, sincere; but I wasn’t so sure of his sanity.

“Mr. Pangburn,” I said after a while, “I’d like to handle this thing for you, but I’m not sure that I can. The Continental is rather strict, and, while I believe this thing is on the level, still I am only a hired man and have to go by the rules. Now if you could give us the endorsement of some firm or person of standing—a reputable lawyer, for instance, or any legally responsible party—we’d be glad to go ahead with the work. Otherwise, I am afraid—”

“But I know she’s in danger!” he broke out. “I know that— And I can’t be advertising her plight—airing her affairs—to everyone.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t touch it unless you can give me some such endorsement.” I stood up. “But you can find plenty of detective agencies that aren’t so particular.”

His mouth worked like a small boy’s, and he caught his lower lip between his teeth. For a moment I thought he was going to burst into tears. But instead he said slowly:

“I dare say you are right. Suppose I refer you to my brother-in-law, Roy Axford. Will his word be sufficient?”

“Yes.”

Roy Axford—R. F. Axford—was a mining man who had a finger in at least half of the big business enterprises of the Pacific Coast; and his word on anything was commonly considered good enough for anybody.

“If you can get in touch with him now,” I said, “and arrange for me to see him today, I can get started without much delay.”

Pangburn crossed the room and dug a telephone out from among a heap of his ornaments. Within a minute or two he was talking to someone whom he called “Rita.”

“Is Roy home? … Will he be home this afternoon? … No, you can give him a message for me, though. … Tell him I’m sending a gentleman up to see him this afternoon on a personal matter—personal with me—and that I’ll be very grateful if he’ll do what I want. … Yes. … You’ll find out, Rita. … It isn’t a thing to talk about over the phone. … Yes, thanks!”

He pushed the telephone back into its hiding place and turned to me.

“He’ll be at home until two o’clock. Tell him what I told you and if he seems doubtful, have him call me up. You’ll have to tell him the whole thing; he doesn’t know anything at all about Miss Delano.”

“All right. Before I go, I want a description of her.”

“She’s beautiful!” he exclaimed. “The most beautiful woman in the world!”

That would look nice on a reward circular.

“That isn’t exactly what I want,” I told him. “How old is she?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Height?”

“About five feet eight inches, or possibly nine.”

“Slender, medium or plump?”

“She’s inclined toward slenderness, but she—”

There was a note of enthusiasm in his voice that made me fear he was about to make a speech, so I cut him off with another question.

“What color hair?”

“Brown—so dark that it’s almost black—and it’s soft and thick and—”

“Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?”

“Long and thick and—”

“What color eyes?”

“You’ve seen shadows on polished silver when—”

I wrote down grey eyes and hurried on with the interrogation.

“Complexion?”

“Perfect!”

“Uh-huh. But is it light, or dark, or florid, or sallow, or what?”

“Fair.”

“Face oval, or square, or long and thin, or what shape?”

“Oval.”

“What shaped nose? Large, small, turned-up—”

“Small and regular!” There was a touch of indignation in his voice.

“How did she dress? Fashionably? And did she favor bright or quiet colors?”

“Beaut—” And then as I opened my mouth to head him off he came down to earth with:

“Very quietly—usually dark blues and browns.”

“What jewelry did she wear?”

“I’ve never seen her wear any.”

“Any scars, or moles?” The horrified look on his white face urged me on to give him a full shot. “Or warts, or deformities that you know?”

He was speechless, but he managed to shake his head.

“Have you a photograph of her?”

“Yes, I’ll show you.”

He bounded to his feet, wound his way through the room’s excessive furnishings and out through a curtained doorway. 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?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to borrow it, but I’ll get it back to you as soon as I have my copies made.”

“No! No!” he protested against having his ladylove’s face given to a lot of gumshoes. “That would be terrible!”

I finally got it, but it cost me more words than I like to waste on an incidental.

“I want to borrow a couple of her letters, or something in her writing, too,” I said.

“For what?”

“To have photostatic copies made. Handwriting specimens come in handy—give you something to go over hotel registers with. Then, even if going under fictitious names, people now and then write notes and make memorandums.”

We had another battle, out of which I came with three envelopes and two meaningless sheets of paper, all bearing the girl’s angular writing.

“She have much money?” I asked, when the disputed photograph and handwriting specimens were safely tucked away in my pocket.

“I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing that one would pry into. She wasn’t poor; that is, she didn’t have to practice any petty economies; but I haven’t the faintest idea either as to the amount of her income or its source. She had an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, but naturally I don’t know anything about its size.”

“Many friends here?”

“That’s another thing I don’t know. I think she knew a few people here, but I don’t know who they were. You see, when we were together we never talked about anything but ourselves. You know what I mean: there was nothing we were interested in but each other. We were simply—”

“Can’t you even make a guess at where she came from, who she was?”

“No. Those things didn’t matter to me. She was Jeanne Delano, and that was enough for me.”

“Did you and she ever have any financial interests in common? I mean, was there ever any transaction in money or other valuables in which both of you were interested?”

What I meant, of course, was had she got into him for a loan, or had she sold him something, or got money out of him in any other way.

He jumped to his feet, and his face went fog-grey. Then he sat down again—slumped down—and blushed scarlet.

“Pardon me,” he said thickly. “You didn’t know her, and of course you must look at the thing from all angles. No, there was nothing like that. I’m afraid you are going to waste time if you are going to work on the theory that she was an adventuress. 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!”

III

R. F. Axford received me in an office-like room in his Russian Hill residence: a big blond man, whose forty-eight or -nine years had not blurred the outlines of an athlete’s body. A big, full-blooded man with the manner of one whose self-confidence is complete and not altogether unjustified.

“What’s our Burke been up to now?” he asked amusedly when I told him who I was. His voice was a pleasant vibrant bass.

I didn’t give him all the details.

“He was engaged to marry a Jeanne Delano, who went East about three weeks ago and then suddenly disappeared. He knows very little about her; thinks something has happened to her; and wants her found.”

“Again?” His shrewd blue eyes twinkled. “And to a Jeanne this time! She’s the fifth within a year, to my knowledge, and no doubt I missed one or two who were current while I was in Hawaii. But where do I come in?”

“I asked him for responsible endorsement. I think he’s all right, but he isn’t, in the strictest sense, a responsible person. He referred me to you.”

“You’re right about his not being, in the strictest sense, a responsible person.” The big man screwed up his eyes and mouth in thought for a moment. Then: “Do you think that something has really happened to the girl? Or is Burke imagining things?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was a dream at first. But in a couple of her letters there are hints that something was wrong.”

“You might go ahead and find her then,” Axford said. “I don’t suppose any harm will come from letting him have his Jeanne back. It will at least give him something to think about for a while.”

“I have your word for it then, Mr. Axford, that there will be no scandal or anything of the sort connected with the affair?”

“Assuredly! Burke is all right, you know. It’s simply that he is spoiled. He has been in rather delicate health all his life; and then he has an income that suffices to keep him modestly, with a little over to bring out books of verse and buy doo-daws for his rooms. He takes himself a little too solemnly—is too much the poet—but he’s sound at bottom.”

“I’ll go ahead with it, then,” I said, getting up. “By the way, the girl has an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, and I’d like to find out as much about it as possible, especially where her money came from. Clement, the cashier, is a model of caution when it comes to giving out information about depositors. If you could put in a word for me it would make my way smoother.”

“Be glad to.”

He wrote a couple of lines across the back of a card and gave it to me; and, promising to call on him if I needed further assistance, I left.

IV

I telephoned Pangburn that his brother-in-law had given the job his approval. I sent a wire to the agency’s Baltimore branch, giving what information I had. Then I went up to Ashbury Avenue, to the apartment house in which the girl had lived.

The manager—an immense Mrs. Clute in rustling black—knew little, if any, more about the girl than Pangburn. The girl had lived there for two and a half months; she had had occasional callers, but Pangburn was the only one that the manager could describe to me. The girl had given up the apartment on the third of the month, saying that she had been called East, and she had asked the manager to hold her mail until she sent her new address. Ten days later Mrs. Clute had received a card from the girl instructing her to forward her mail to 215 N. Stricker Street, Baltimore, Maryland. There had been no mail to forward.

The single thing of importance that I learned at the apartment house was that the girl’s two trunks had been taken away by a green transfer truck. Green was the color used by one of the city’s largest transfer companies.

I went then to the office of this transfer company, and found a friendly clerk on duty. (A detective, if he is wise, takes pains to make and keep as many friends as possible among transfer company, express company and railroad employees.) I left the office with a memorandum of the transfer company’s check numbers and the Ferry baggage-room to which the two trunks had been taken.

At the Ferry Building, with this information, it didn’t take me many minutes to learn that the trunks had been checked to Baltimore. I sent another wire to the Baltimore branch, giving the railroad check numbers.

Sunday was well into night by this time, so I knocked off and went home.

V

Half an hour before the Golden Gate Trust Company opened for business the next morning I was inside, talking to Clement, the cashier. All the traditional caution and conservatism of bankers rolled together wouldn’t be one-two-three to the amount usually displayed by this plump, white-haired old man. But one look at Axford’s card, with “Please give the bearer all possible assistance” inked across the back of it, made Clement even eager to help me.

“You have, or have had, an account here in the name of Jeanne Delano,” I said. “I’d like to know as much as possible about it: to whom she drew checks, and to what amounts; but especially all you can tell me about where her money came from.”

He stabbed one of the pearl buttons on his desk with a pink finger, and a lad with polished yellow hair oozed silently into the room. The cashier scribbled with a pencil on a piece of paper and gave it to the noiseless youth, who disappeared. Presently he was back, laying a handful of papers on the cashier’s desk.

Clement looked through the papers and then up at me.

“Miss Delano was introduced here by Mr. Burke Pangburn on the sixth of last month, and opened an account with eight hundred and fifty dollars in cash. She made the following deposits after that: four hundred dollars on the tenth; two hundred and fifty on the twenty-first; three hundred on the twenty-sixth; two hundred on the thirtieth; and twenty thousand dollars on the second of this month. All of these deposits except the last were made with cash. The last one was a check—which I have here.”

He handed it to me: a Golden Gate Trust Company check.

Pay to the order of Jeanne Delano, twenty thousand dollars.

(Signed) BURKE PANGBURN.

It was dated the second of the month.

“Burke Pangburn!” I exclaimed, a little stupidly. “Was it usual for him to draw checks to that amount?”

“I think not. But we shall see.”

He stabbed the pearl button again, ran his pencil across another slip of paper, and the youth with the polished yellow hair made a noiseless entrance, exit, entrance, and exit.

The cashier looked through the fresh batch of papers that had been brought to him.

“On the first of the month, Mr. Pangburn deposited twenty thousand dollars—a check against Mr. Axford’s account here.”

“Now how about Miss Delano’s withdrawals?” I asked.

He picked up the papers that had to do with her account again.

“Her statement and canceled checks for last month haven’t been delivered to her yet. Everything is here. A check for eighty-five dollars to the order of H. K. Clute on the fifteenth of last month; one ‘to cash’ for three hundred dollars on the twentieth, and another of the same kind for one hundred dollars on the twenty-fifth. Both of these checks were apparently cashed here by her. On the third of this month she closed out her account, with a check to her own order for twenty-one thousand, five hundred and fifteen dollars.”

“And that check?”

“Was cashed here by her.”

I lighted a cigarette, and let these figures drift around in my head. None of them—except those that were fixed to Pangburn’s and Axford’s signatures—seemed to be of any value to me. The Clute check—the only one the girl had drawn in anyone else’s favor—had almost certainly been for rent.

“This is the way of it,” I summed up aloud. “On the first of the month, Pangburn deposited Axford’s check for twenty thousand dollars. The next day he gave a check to that amount to Miss Delano, which she deposited. On the following day she closed her account, taking between twenty-one and twenty-two thousand dollars in currency.”

“Exactly,” the cashier said.

VI

Before going up to the Glenton Apartments to find out why Pangburn hadn’t come clean with me about the twenty thousand dollars, I dropped in at the agency, to see if any word had come from Baltimore. One of the clerks had just finished decoding a telegram.

It read:

Baggage arrived Mt. Royal Station on eighth. Taken away same day. Unable to trace. 215 North Stricker Street is Baltimore Orphan Asylum. Girl not known there. Continuing our efforts to find her.

The Old Man came in from luncheon as I was leaving. I went back into his office with him for a couple of minutes.

“Did you see Pangburn?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m working on his job now—but I think it’s a bust.”

“What is it?”

“Pangburn is R. F. Axford’s brother-in-law. He met a girl a couple of months ago, and fell for her. She sizes up as a worker. He doesn’t know anything about her. The first of the month he got twenty thousand dollars from his brother-in-law and passed it over to the girl. She blew, telling him she had been called to Baltimore, and giving him a phoney address that turns out to be an orphan asylum. She sent her trunks to Baltimore, and sent him some letters from there—but a friend could have taken care of the baggage and could have remailed her letters for her. Of course, she would have needed a ticket to check the trunks on, but in a twenty-thousand-dollar game that would be a small expense. Pangburn held out on me; he didn’t tell me a word about the money. Ashamed of being easy pickings, I reckon. I’m going to the bat with him on it now.”

The Old Man smiled his mild smile that might mean anything, and I left.

VII

Ten minutes of ringing Pangburn’s bell brought no answer. The elevator boy told me he thought Pangburn hadn’t been in all night. I put a note in his box and went down to the railroad company’s offices, where I arranged to be notified if an unused Baltimore-San Francisco ticket was turned in for redemption.

That done, I went up to the Chronicle office and searched the files for weather conditions during the past month, making a memorandum of four dates upon which it had rained steadily day and night. I carried my memorandum to the offices of the three largest taxicab companies.

That was a trick that had worked well for me before. The girl’s apartment was some distance from the street car line, and I was counting upon her having gone out—or having had a caller—on one of those rainy dates. In either case, it was very likely that she—or her caller—had left in a taxi in preference to walking through the rain to the car line. The taxicab companies’ daily records would show any calls from her address, and the fares’ destinations.

The ideal trick, of course, would have been to have the records searched for the full extent of the girl’s occupancy of the apartment; but no taxicab company would stand for having that amount of work thrust upon them, unless it was a matter of life and death. It was difficult enough for me to persuade them to turn clerks loose on the four days I had selected.

I called up Pangburn again after I left the last taxicab office, but he was not at home. I called up Axford’s residence, thinking that the poet might have spent the night there, but was told that he had not.

Late that afternoon I got my copies of the girl’s photograph and handwriting, and put one of each in the mail for Baltimore. Then I went around to the three taxicab companies’ offices and got my reports. Two of them had nothing for me. The third’s records showed two calls from the girl’s apartment.

On one rainy afternoon a taxi had been called, and one passenger had been taken to the Glenton Apartments. That passenger, obviously, was either the girl or Pangburn. At half-past twelve one night another call had come in, and this passenger had been taken to the Marquis Hotel.

The driver who had answered this second call remembered it indistinctly when I questioned him, but he thought that his fare had been a man. I let the matter rest there for the time; the Marquis isn’t a large hotel as San Francisco hotels go, but it is too large to make canvassing its guests for the one I wanted practicable.

I spent the evening trying to reach Pangburn, with no success. At eleven o’clock I called up Axford, and asked him if he had any idea where I might find his brother-in-law.

“Haven’t seen him for several days,” the millionaire said. “He was supposed to come up for dinner last night, but didn’t. My wife tried to reach him by phone a couple times today, but couldn’t.”

VIII

The next morning I called Pangburn’s apartment before I got out of bed, and got no answer. Then I telephoned Axford and made an appointment for ten o’clock at his office.

“I don’t know what he’s up to now,” Axford said good-naturedly when I told him that Pangburn had apparently been away from his apartment since Sunday, “and I suppose there’s small chance of guessing. Our Burke is nothing if not erratic. How are you progressing with your search for the damsel in distress?”

“Far enough to convince me that she isn’t in a whole lot of distress. She got twenty thousand dollars from your brother-in-law the day before she vanished.”

“Twenty thousand dollars from Burke? She must be a wonderful girl! But wherever did he get that much money?”

“From you.”

Axford’s muscular body straightened in his chair.

“From me?”

“Yes—your check.”

“He did not.”

There was nothing argumentative in his voice; it simply stated a fact.

“You didn’t give him a check for twenty thousand dollars on the first of the month?”

“No.”

“Then,” I suggested, “perhaps we’d better take a run over to the Golden Gate Trust Company.”

Ten minutes later we were in Clement’s office.

“I’d like to see my cancelled checks,” Axford told the cashier.

The youth with the polished yellow hair brought them in presently—a thick wad of them—and Axford ran rapidly through them until he found the one he wanted. He studied that one for a long while, and when he looked up at me he shook his head slowly but with finality.

“I’ve never seen it before.”

Clement mopped his head with a white handkerchief, and tried to pretend that he wasn’t burning up with curiosity and fears that his bank had been gypped.

The millionaire turned the check over and looked at the endorsement.

“Deposited by Burke,” he said in the voice of one who talks while he thinks of something entirely different, “on the first.”

“Could we talk to the teller who took in the twenty-thousand-dollar check that Miss Delano deposited?” I asked Clement.

He pressed one of his desk’s pearl buttons with a fumbling pink finger, and in a minute or two a little sallow man with a hairless head came in.

“Do you remember taking a check for twenty thousand from Miss Jeanne Delano a few weeks ago?” I asked him.

“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Perfectly.”

“Just what do you remember about it?”

“Well, sir, Miss Delano came to my window with Mr. Burke Pangburn. It was his check. I thought it was a large check for him to be drawing, but the bookkeepers said he had enough money in his account to cover it. They stood there—Miss Delano and Mr. Pangburn—talking and laughing while I entered the deposit in her book, and then they left, and that was all.”

“This check,” Axford said slowly, after the teller had gone back to his cage, “is a forgery. But I shall make it good, of course. That ends the matter, Mr. Clement, and there must be no more to-do about it.”

“Certainly, Mr. Axford. Certainly.”

Clement was all enormously relieved smiles and head-noddings, with this twenty-thousand-dollar load lifted from his bank’s shoulders.

Axford and I left the bank then and got into his coupé, in which we had come from his office. But he did not immediately start the engine. He sat for a while staring at the traffic of Montgomery Street with unseeing eyes.

“I want you to find Burke,” he said presently, and there was no emotion of any sort in his bass voice. “I want you to find him without risking the least whisper of scandal. If my wife knew of all this— She mustn’t know. She thinks her brother is a choice morsel. I want you to find him for me. The girl doesn’t matter any more, but I suppose that where you find one you will find the other. I’m not interested in the money, and I don’t want you to make any special attempt to recover that; it could hardly be done, I’m afraid, without publicity. I want you to find Burke before he does something else.”

“If you want to avoid the wrong kind of publicity,” I said, “your best bet is to spread the right kind first. Let’s advertise him as missing, fill the papers up with his pictures and so forth. They’ll play him up strong. He’s your brother-in-law and he’s a poet. We can say that he has been ill—you told me that he had been in delicate health all his life—and that we fear he has dropped dead somewhere or is suffering under some mental derangement. There will be no necessity of mentioning the girl or the money, and our explanation may keep people—especially your wife—from guessing the truth when the fact that he is missing leaks out. It’s bound to leak out somehow.”

He didn’t like my idea at first, but I finally won him over.

We went up to Pangburn’s apartment then, easily securing admittance on Axford’s explanation that we had an engagement with him and would wait there for him. I went through the rooms inch by inch, prying into each hole and hollow and crack; reading everything that was written anywhere, even down to his manuscripts; and I found nothing that threw any light on his disappearance.

I helped myself to his photographs—pocketing five of the dozen or more that were there. Axford did not think that any of the poet’s bags or trunks were missing from the pack-room. I did not find his Golden Gate Trust Company deposit book.

I spent the rest of the day loading the newspapers up with what we wished them to have; and they gave my ex-client one grand spread: first-page stuff with photographs and all possible trimmings. Anyone in San Francisco who didn’t know that Burke Pangburn—brother-in-law of R. F. Axford and author of Sandpatches and Other Verse—was missing, either couldn’t read or wouldn’t.

IX

This advertising brought results. By the following morning, reports were rolling in from all directions, from dozens of people who had seen the missing poet in dozens of places. A few of these reports looked promising—or at least possible—but the majority were ridiculous on their faces.

I came back to the agency from running out one that had—until run out—looked good, to find a note on my desk asking me to call up Axford.

“Can you come down, to my office now?” he asked when I got him on the wire.

There was a lad of twenty-one or -two with Axford when I was ushered into his office: a narrow-chested, dandified lad of the sporting clerk type.

“This is Mr. Fall, one of my employees,” Axford told me. “He says he saw Burke Sunday night.”

“Where?” I asked Fall.

“Going into a roadhouse near Halfmoon Bay.”

“Sure it was him?”

“Absolutely! I’ve seen him come in here to Mr. Axford’s office to know him. It was him all right.”

“How’d you come to see him?”

“I was coming up from further down the shore with some friends, and we stopped in at the roadhouse to get something to eat. As we were leaving, a car drove up and Mr. Pangburn and a girl or woman—I didn’t notice her particularly—got out and went inside. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw in the paper last night that he hadn’t been seen since Sunday. So then I thought to myself that—”

“What roadhouse was this?” I cut in, not being interested in his mental processes.

“The White Shack.”

“About what time?”

“Somewhere between eleven-thirty and midnight, I guess.”

“He see you?”

“No. I was already in our car when he drove up. I don’t think he’d know me anyway.”

“What did the woman look like?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see her face, and I can’t remember how she was dressed or even if she was short or tall.”

That was all Fall could tell me.

We shooed him out of the office, and I used Axford’s telephone to call up “Wop” Healey’s dive in North Beach and leave word that when “Porky” Grout came in he was to call up “Jack.” That was a standing arrangement by which I got word to Porky whenever I wanted to see him, without giving anybody a chance to tumble to the connection between us.

“Know the White Shack?” I asked Axford, when I was through phoning.

“I know where it is, but I don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, it’s a tough hole. Run by ‘Tin-Star’ Joplin, an ex-yegg who invested his winnings in the place when Prohibition made the roadhouse game good. He makes more money now than he ever heard of in his piking safe-ripping days. Retailing liquor is a sideline with him; his real profit comes from acting as a relay station for the booze that comes through Halfmoon Bay for points beyond; and the dope is that half the booze put ashore by the Pacific rum fleet is put ashore in Halfmoon Bay.

“The White Shack is a tough hole, and it’s no place for your brother-in-law to be hanging around. I can’t go down there myself without stirring things up; Joplin and I are old friends. But I’ve got a man I can put in there for a few nights. Pangburn may be a regular visitor, or he may even be staying there. He wouldn’t be the first one Joplin had ever let hide-out there. I’ll put this man of mine in the place for a week, anyway, and see what he can find.”

“It’s all in your hands,” Axford said. “Find Burke without scandal—that’s all I ask.”

X

From Axford’s office I went straight to my rooms, left the outer door unlocked, and sat down to wait for Porky Grout. I had waited an hour and a half when he pushed the door open and came in.

“’Lo! How’s tricks?”

He swaggered to a chair, leaned back in it, put his feet on the table and reached for a pack of cigarettes that lay there.

That was Porky Grout. A pasty-faced man in his thirties, neither large nor small, always dressed flashily—even if sometimes dirtily—and trying to hide an enormous cowardice behind a swaggering carriage, a blustering habit of speech, and an exaggerated pretense of self-assurance.

But I had known him for three years; so now I crossed the room and pushed his feet roughly off the table, almost sending him over backward.

“What’s the idea?” He came to his feet, crouching and snarling. “Where do you get that stuff? Do you want a smack in the—”

I took a step toward him. He sprang away, across the room.

“Aw, I didn’t mean nothin’. I was only kiddin’!”

“Shut up and sit down,” I advised him.

I had known this Porky Grout for three years, and had been using him for nearly that long, and I didn’t know a single thing that could be said in his favor. 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.

His cowardice was—for my purpose—his greatest asset. It was notorious throughout the criminal Coast; and though nobody—crook or not—could possibly think him a man to be trusted, nevertheless he was not actually distrusted. 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 lion-hearted 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.

For nearly three years I had used him with considerable success, paying him well, and keeping him under my heel. Informant was the polite word that designated him in my reports; the underworld has even less lovely names than the common stool-pigeon to denote his kind.

“I have a job for you,” I told him, now that he was seated again, with his feet on the floor.

His loose mouth twitched up at the left corner, pushing that eye into a knowing squint.

“I thought so.”

He always says something like that.

“I want you to go down to Halfmoon Bay and stick around Tin-Star Joplin’s joint for a few nights. Here are two photos”—sliding one of Pangburn and one of the girl across the table. “Their names and descriptions are written on the backs. I want to know if either of them shows up down there, what they’re doing, and where they’re hanging out. It may be that Tin-Star is covering them up.”

Porky was looking knowingly from one picture to the other.

“I think I know this guy,” he said out of the corner of his mouth that twitches.

That’s another thing about Porky. You can’t mention a name or give a description that won’t bring that same remark, even though you make them up.

“Here’s some money.” I slid some bills across the table. “If you’re down there more than a couple of nights, I’ll get some more to you. Keep in touch with me, either over this phone or the under-cover one at the office. And—remember this—lay off the stuff! If I come down there and find you all snowed up, I promise that I’ll tip Joplin off to you.”

He had finished counting the money by now—there wasn’t a whole lot to count—and he threw it contemptuously back on the table.

“Save that for newspapers,” he sneered. “How am I goin’ to get anywheres if I can’t spend no money in the joint?”

“That’s plenty for a couple of days’ expenses; you’ll probably knock back half of it. If you stay longer than a couple of days, I’ll get more to you. And you get your pay when the job is done, and not before.”

He shook his head and got up.

“I’m tired of pikin’ along with you. You can turn your own jobs. I’m through!”

“If you don’t get down to Halfmoon Bay tonight, you are through,” I assured him, letting him get out of the threat whatever he liked.

After a little while, of course, he took the money and left. The dispute over expense money was simply a preliminary that went with every job I sent him out on.

XI

After Porky had cleared out, I leaned back in my chair and burned half a dozen Fatimas over the job. The girl had gone first with the twenty thousand dollars, and then the poet had gone; and both had gone, whether permanently or not, to the White Shack. On its face, the job was an obvious affair. The girl had given Pangburn the work to the extent of having him forge a check against his brother-in-law’s account; and then, after various moves whose value I couldn’t determine at the time, they had gone into hiding together.

There were two loose ends to be taken care of. One of them—the finding of the confederate who had mailed the letters to Pangburn and who had taken care of the girl’s baggage—was in the Baltimore branch’s hands. The other was: Who had ridden in the taxicab that I had traced from the girl’s apartment to the Marquis Hotel?

That might not have any bearing upon the job, or it might. Suppose I could find a connection between the Marquis Hotel and the White Shack. That would make a completed chain of some sort. I searched the back of the telephone directory and found the roadhouse number. Then I went up to the Marquis Hotel.

The girl on duty at the hotel switchboard, when I got there, was one with whom I had done business before.

“Who’s been calling Halfmoon Bay numbers?” I asked her.

“My God!” She leaned back in her chair and ran a pink hand gently over the front of her rigidly waved red hair. “I got enough to do without remembering every call that goes through. This ain’t a boarding-house. We have more’n one call a week.”

“You don’t have many Halfmoon Bay calls,” I insisted, leaning an elbow on the counter and letting a folded five-spot peep out between the fingers of one hand. “You ought to remember any you’ve had lately.”

“I’ll see,” she sighed, as if willing to do her best on a hopeless task.

She ran through her tickets.

“Here’s one—from room 522, a couple weeks ago.”

“What number was called?”

“Halfmoon Bay 51.”

That was the roadhouse number. I passed over the five-spot.

“Is 522 a permanent guest?”

“Yes. Mr. Kilcourse. He’s been here three or four months.”

“What is he?”

“I don’t know. A perfect gentleman, if you ask me.”

“That’s nice. What does he look like?”

“Tall and elegant.”

“Be yourself,” I pleaded. “What does he look like?”

“He’s a young man, but his hair is turning gray. He’s dark and handsome. Looks like a movie actor.”

“Bull Montana?” I asked, as I moved off toward the desk.

The key to 522 was in its place in the rack. I sat down where I could keep an eye on it. Perhaps an hour later a clerk took it out and gave it to a man who did look somewhat like an actor. He was a man of thirty or so, with dark skin, and dark hair that showed grey around the ears. He stood a good six feet of fashionably dressed slenderness.

Carrying the key, he disappeared into an elevator.

I called up the agency then and asked the Old Man to send Dick Foley over. Ten minutes later Dick arrived. He’s a little shrimp of a Canadian—there isn’t a hundred and ten pounds of him—who is the smoothest shadow I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them.

“I have a bird in here I want tailed,” I told Dick. “His name is Kilcourse and he’s in room 522. Stick around outside, and I’ll give you the spot on him.”

I went back to the lobby and waited some more.

At eight o’clock Kilcourse came down and left the hotel. I went after him for half a block—far enough to turn him over to Dick—and then went home, so that I would be within reach of a telephone if Porky Grout tried to get in touch with me. No call came from him that night.

XII

When I arrived at the agency the next morning, Dick was waiting for me.

“What luck?” I asked.

“Damndest!” The little Canadian talks like a telegram when his peace of mind is disturbed, and just now he was decidedly peevish. “Took me two blocks. Shook me. Only taxi in sight.”

“Think he made you?”

“No. Wise head. Playing safe.”

“Try him again, then. Better have a car handy, in case he tries the same trick again.”

My telephone jingled as Dick was going out. It was Porky Grout, talking over the agency’s unlisted line.

“Turn up anything?” I asked.

“Plenty,” he bragged.

“Good! Are you in town?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet you in my rooms in twenty minutes,” I said.

The pasty-faced informant was fairly bloated with pride in himself when he came through the door I had left unlocked for him. His swagger was almost a cake-walk; and the side of his mouth that twitches was twisted into a knowing leer that would have fit a Solomon.

“I knocked it over for you, kid,” he boasted. “Nothin’ to it—for me! I went down there and talked to ever’body that knowed anything, seen ever’thing there was to see, and put the X-ray on the whole dump. I made a—”

“Uh-huh,” I interrupted. “Congratulations and so forth. But just what did you turn up?”

“Now le’me tell you.” He raised a dirty hand in a traffic-cop sort of gesture, and blew a stream of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “Don’t crowd me. I’ll give you all the dope.”

“Sure,” I said. “I know. You’re great, and I’m lucky to have you to knock off my jobs for me, and all that! But is Pangburn down there?”

“I’m gettin’ around to that. I went down there and—”

“Did you see Pangburn?”

“As I was sayin’, I went down there and—”

“Porky,” I said, “I don’t give a damn what you did! Did you see Pangburn?”

“Yes. I seen him.”

“Fine! Now what did you see?”

“He’s camping down there with Tin-Star. Him and the broad that you give me a picture of are both there. She’s been there a month. I didn’t see her, but one of the waiters told me about her. I seen Pangburn myself. They don’t show themselves much—stick back in Tin-Star’s part of the joint—where he lives—most of the time. Pangburn’s been there since Sunday. I went down there and—”

“Learn who the girl is? Or anything about what they’re up to?”

“No. I went down there and—”

“All right! Went down there again tonight. Call me up as soon as you know positively Pangburn is there—that he hasn’t gone out. Don’t make any mistakes. I don’t want to come down there and scare them up on a false alarm. Use the agency’s under-cover line, and just tell whoever answers that you won’t be in town until late. That’ll mean that Pangburn is there; and it’ll let you call up from Joplin’s without giving the play away.”

“I got to have more dough,” he said, as he got up. “It costs—”

“I’ll file your application,” I promised. “Now beat it, and let me hear from you tonight, the minute you’re sure Pangburn is there.”

Then I went up to Axford’s office.

“I think I have a line on him,” I told the millionaire. “I hope to have him where you can talk to him tonight. My man says he was at the White Shack last night, and is probably living there. If he’s there tonight, I’ll take you down, if you want.”

“Why can’t we go now?”

“No. The place is too dead in the daytime for my man to hang around without making himself conspicuous, and I don’t want to take any chances on either you or me showing ourselves there until we’re sure we’re coming face to face with Pangburn.”

“What do you want me to do then?”

“Have a fast car ready tonight, and be ready to start as soon as I get word to you.”

“Righto. I’ll be at home after five-thirty. Phone me as soon as you’re ready to go, and I’ll pick you up.”

XIII

At nine-thirty that evening I was sitting beside Axford on the front seat of a powerfully engined foreign car, and we were roaring down a road that led to Halfmoon Bay. Porky’s telephone call had come.

Neither of us talked much during that ride, and the imported monster under us made it a rather short ride. Axford sat comfortable and relaxed at the wheel, but I noticed for the first time that he had a rather heavy jaw.

The White Shack is a large building, square-built, of imitation stone. It is set away back from the road, and is approached by two curving driveways, which, together, make a semi-circle whose diameter is the public road. The center of this semi-circle is occupied by sheds under which Joplin’s patrons stow their cars, and here and there around the sheds are flower-beds and clumps of shrubbery.

We were still going at a fair clip when we turned into one end of this semi-circular driveway, and—

Axford slammed on his brakes, and the big machine threw us into the wind-shield as it jolted into an abrupt stop—barely in time to avoid smashing into a cluster of people who had suddenly loomed up before us.

In the glow from our headlights faces stood sharply out; white, horrified faces, furtive faces, faces that were callously curious. Below the faces, white arms and shoulders showed, and bright gowns and jewelry, against the duller background of masculine clothing.

This was the first impression I got, and then, by the time I had removed my face from the windshield, I realized that this cluster of people had a core, a thing about which it centered. I stood up, trying to look over the crowd’s heads, but I could see nothing.

Jumping down to the driveway, I pushed through the crowd.

Face down on the white gravel a man sprawled—a thin man in dark clothes—and just above his collar, where the head and neck join, was a hole. I knelt to peer into his face.

Then I pushed through the crowd again, back to where Axford was just getting out of the car, the engine of which was still running.

“Pangburn is dead—shot!”

XIV

Methodically, Axford took off his gloves, folded them and put them in a pocket. Then he nodded his understanding of what I had told him, and walked toward where the crowd stood around the dead poet. I looked after him until he had vanished in the throng. Then I went winding through the outskirts of the crowd, hunting for Porky Grout.

I found him standing on the porch, leaning against a pillar. I passed where he could see me, and went on around to the side of the roadhouse that afforded most shadow.

In the shadows Porky joined me. The night wasn’t cool, but his teeth were chattering.

“Who got him?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he whined, and that was the first thing of which I had ever known him to confess complete ignorance. “I was inside, keepin’ an eye on the others.”

“What others?”

“Tin-Star, and some guy I never seen before, and the broad. I didn’t think the kid was going out. He didn’t have no hat.”

“What do you know about it?”

“A little while after I phoned you, the girl and Pangburn came out from Joplin’s part of the joint and sat down at a table around on the other side of the porch, where it’s fairly dark. They eat for a while and then this other guy comes over and sits down with ’em. I don’t know his name, but I think I’ve saw him around town. He’s a tall guy, all rung up in fancy rags.”

That would be Kilcourse.

“They talk for a while and then Joplin joins ’em. They sit around the table laughin’ and talkin’ for maybe a quarter of a hour. Then Pangburn gets up and goes indoors. I got a table that I can watch ’em from, and the place is crowded, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my table if I leave it, so I don’t follow the kid. He ain’t got no hat; I figure he ain’t goin’ nowhere. But he must of gone through the house and out front, because pretty soon there’s a noise that I thought was a auto backfire, and then the sound of a car gettin’ away quick. And then some guy squawks that there’s a dead man outside. Ever’body runs out here, and it’s Pangburn.”

“You dead sure that Joplin, Kilcourse and the girl were all at the table when Pangburn was killed?”

“Absolutely,” Porky said, “if this dark guy’s name is Kilcourse.”

“Where are they now?”

“Back in Joplin’s hang-out. They went up there as soon as they seen Pangburn had been croaked.”

I had no illusions about Porky. I knew he was capable of selling me out and furnishing the poet’s murderer with an alibi. But there was this about it: if Joplin, Kilcourse or the girl had fixed him, and had fixed my informant, then it was hopeless for me to try to prove that they weren’t on the rear porch when the shot was fired. Joplin had a crowd of hangers-on who would swear to anything he told them without batting an eye. There would be a dozen supposed witnesses to their presence on the rear porch.

Thus the only thing for me to do was to take it for granted that Porky was coming clean with me.

“Have you seen Dick Foley?” I asked, since Dick had been shadowing Kilcourse.

“No.”

“Hunt around and see if you can find him. Tell him I’ve gone up to talk to Joplin, and tell him to come on up. Then you can stick around where I can get hold of you if I want you.”

I went in through a French window, crossed an empty dance-floor and went up the stairs that lead to Tin-Star Joplin’s living quarters in the rear second story. I knew the way, having been up there before. Joplin and I were old friends.

I was going up now to give him and his friends a shake-down on the off-chance that some good might come of it, though I knew that I had nothing on any of them. I could have tied something on the girl, of course, but not without advertising the fact that the dead poet had forged his brother-in-law’s signature to a check. And that was no go.

“Come in,” a heavy, familiar voice called when I rapped on Joplin’s living-room door.

I pushed the door open and went in.

Tin-Star Joplin was standing in the middle of the floor: a big-bodied ex-yegg with inordinately thick shoulders and an expressionless horse face. Beyond him Kilcourse sat dangling one leg from the corner of a table, alertness hiding behind an amused half-smile on his handsome dark face. On the other side of a room a girl whom I knew for Jeanne Delano sat on the arm of a big leather chair. And the poet hadn’t exaggerated when he told me she was beautiful.

“You!” Joplin grunted disgustedly as soon as he recognized me. “What the hell do you want?”

“What’ve you got?”

My mind wasn’t on this sort of repartee, however; I was studying the girl. There was something vaguely familiar about her—but I couldn’t place her. Perhaps I hadn’t seen her before; perhaps much looking at the picture Pangburn had given me was responsible for my feeling of recognition. Pictures will do that.

Meanwhile, Joplin had said:

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

And I had said:

“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. She had a mass of dark brown hair above an oval face of the color that pink ought to be. Her eyes were wide-set and of a grey shade that wasn’t altogether unlike the shadows on polished silver that the poet had compared them to.

I studied the girl, and she looked back at me with level eyes, and still I couldn’t place her. Kilcourse still sat dangling a leg from the table corner.

Joplin grew impatient.

“Will you stop gandering at the girl, and tell me what you want of me?” he growled.

The girl smiled then, a mocking smile that bared the edges of razor-sharp little animal teeth. And with the smile I knew her!

Her hair and skin had fooled me. The last time I had seen her—the only time I had seen her before—her face had been marble-white, and her hair had been short and the color of fire. She and an older woman and three men and I had played hide-and-seek one evening in a house in Turk Street over a matter of the murder of a bank messenger and the theft of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds. Through her intriguing three of her accomplices had died that evening, and the fourth—the Chinese—had eventually gone to the gallows at Folsom prison. Her name had been Elvira then, and since her escape from the house that night we had been fruitlessly hunting her from border to border, and beyond.

Recognition must have shown in my eyes in spite of the effort I made to keep them blank, for, swift as a snake, she had left the arm of the chair and was coming forward, her eyes more steel than silver.

I put my gun in sight.

Joplin took a half-step toward me.

“What’s the idea?” he barked.

Kilcourse slid off the table, and one of his thin dark hands hovered over his necktie.

“This is the idea,” I told them. “I want the girl for a murder a couple months back, and maybe—I’m not sure—for tonight’s. Anyway, I’m—”

The snapping of a light-switch behind me, and the room went black.

I moved, not caring where I went so long as I got away from where I had been when the lights went out.

My back touched a wall and I stopped, crouching low.

“Quick, kid!” A hoarse whisper that came from where I thought the door should be.

But both of the room’s doors, I thought, were closed, and could hardly be opened without showing gray rectangles. People moved in the blackness, but none got between me and the lighter square of windows.

Something clicked softly in front of me—too thin a click for the cocking of a gun—but it could have been the opening of a spring-knife, and I remembered that Tin-Star Joplin had a fondness for that weapon.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” A harsh whisper that cut through the dark like a blow.

Sounds of motion, muffled, indistinguishable … one sound not far away. …

Abruptly a strong hand clamped one of my shoulders, a hard-muscled body strained against me. I stabbed out with my gun, and heard a grunt.

The hand moved up my shoulder toward my throat.

I snapped up a knee, and heard another grunt.

A burning point ran down my side.

I stabbed again with my gun—pulled it back until the muzzle was clear of the soft obstacle that had stopped it, and squeezed the trigger.

The crash of the shot. Joplin’s voice in my ear—a curiously matter-of-fact voice:

“God damn! That got me.”

XV

I spun away from him then, toward where I saw the dim yellow of an open door. I had heard no sounds of departure. I had been too busy. But I knew that Joplin had tied into me while the others made their get-away.

Nobody was in sight as I jumped, slid, tumbled down the steps—any number at a time. A waiter got in my path as I plunged toward the dance-floor. I don’t know whether his interference was intentional or not. I didn’t ask. I slammed the flat of my gun in his face and went on. Once I jumped a leg that came out to trip me; and at the outer door I had to smear another face.

Then I was out in the semi-circular driveway, from one end of which a red tail-light was turning east into the county road.

While I sprinted for Axford’s car I noticed that Pangburn’s body had been removed. A few people still stood around the spot where he had lain, and they gaped at me now with open mouths.

The car was as Axford had left it, with idling engine. I swung it through a flower-bed and pointed it east on the public road. Five minutes later I picked up the red point of a tail-light again.

The car under me had more power than I would ever need, more than I would have known how to handle. I don’t know how fast the one ahead was going, but I closed in as if it had been standing still.

A mile and a half, or perhaps two—

Suddenly a man was in the road ahead—a little beyond the reach of my lights. The lights caught him, and I saw that it was Porky Grout!

Porky Grout standing facing me in the middle of the road, the dull metal of an automatic in each hand.

The guns in his hands seemed to glow dimly red and then go dark in the glare of my headlights—glow and then go dark, like two bulbs in an automatic electric sign.

The windshield fell apart around me.

Porky Grout—the informant whose name was a synonym for cowardice the full length of the Pacific Coast—stood in the center of the road shooting at a metal comet that rushed down upon him. …

I didn’t see the end.

I confess frankly that I shut my eyes when his set white face showed close over my radiator. The metal monster under me trembled—not very much—and the road ahead was empty except for the fleeing red light. My windshield was gone. The wind tore at my uncovered hair and brought tears to my squinted-up eyes.

Presently I found that I was talking to myself, saying, “That was Porky. That was Porky.” It was an amazing fact. It was no surprise that he had double-crossed me. That was to be expected. And for him to have crept up the stairs behind me and turned off the lights wasn’t astonishing. But for him to have stood straight up and died—

An orange streak from the car ahead cut off my wonderment. The bullet didn’t come near me—it isn’t easy to shoot accurately from one moving car into another—but at the pace I was going it wouldn’t be long before I was close enough for good shooting.

I turned on the searchlight above the dashboard. It didn’t quite reach the car ahead, but it enabled me to see that the girl was driving, while Kilcourse sat screwed around beside her, facing me. The car was a yellow roadster.

I eased up a little. In a duel with Kilcourse here I would have been at a disadvantage, since I would have had to drive as well as shoot. My best play seemed to be to hold my distance until we reached a town, as we inevitably must. It wasn’t midnight yet. There would be people on the streets of any town, and policemen. Then I could close in with a better chance of coming off on top.

A few miles of this and my prey tumbled to my plan. The yellow roadster slowed down, wavered, and came to rest with its length across the road. Kilcourse and the girl were out immediately and crouching in the road on the far side of their barricade.

I was tempted to dive pell-mell into them, but it was a weak temptation, and when its short life had passed I put on the brakes and stopped. Then I fiddled with my searchlight until it bore full upon the roadster.

A flash came from somewhere near the roadster’s wheels, and the searchlight shook violently, but the glass wasn’t touched. It would be their first target, of course, and …

Crouching in my car, waiting for the bullet that would smash the lense, I took off my shoes and overcoat.

The third bullet ruined the light.

I switched off the other lights, jumped to the road, and when I stopped running I was squatting down against the near side of the yellow roadster. As easy and safe a trick as can be imagined.

The girl and Kilcourse had been looking into the glare of a powerful light. When that light suddenly died, and the weaker ones around it went, too, they were left in pitch unseeing blackness, which must last for the minute or longer that their eyes would need to readjust themselves to the gray-black of the night. My stockinged feet had made no sound on the macadam road, and now there was only a roadster between us; and I knew it and they didn’t.

From near the radiator Kilcourse spoke softly:

“I’m going to try to knock him off from the ditch. Take a shot at him now and then to keep him busy.”

“I can’t see him,” the girl protested.

“Your eyes’ll be all right in a second. Take a shot at the car anyway.”

I moved toward the radiator as the girl’s pistol barked at the empty touring car.

Kilcourse, on hands and knees, was working his way toward the ditch that ran along the south side of the road. I gathered my legs under me, intent upon a spring and a blow with my gun upon the back of his head. I didn’t want to kill him, but I wanted to put him out of the way quick. I’d have the girl to take care of, and she was at least as dangerous as he.

As I tensed for the spring, Kilcourse, guided perhaps by some instinct of the hunted, turned his head and saw me—saw a threatening shadow.

Instead of jumping I fired.

I didn’t look to see whether I had hit him or not. At that range there was little likelihood of missing. I bent double and slipped back to the rear of the roadster, keeping on my side of it.

Then I waited.

The girl did what I would perhaps have done in her place. She didn’t shoot or move toward the place the shot had come from. She thought I had forestalled Kilcourse in using the ditch and that my next play would be to circle around behind her. To offset this, she moved around the rear of the roadster, so that she could ambush me from the side nearest Axford’s car.

Thus it was that she came creeping around the corner and poked her delicately chiseled nose plunk into the muzzle of the gun that I held ready for her.

She gave a little scream.

Women aren’t always reasonable: they are prone to disregard trifles like guns held upon them. So I grabbed her gun hand, which was fortunate for me. As my hand closed around the weapon, she pulled the trigger, catching a chunk of my forefinger between hammer and frame. I twisted the gun out of her hand; released my finger.

But she wasn’t done yet.

With me standing there holding a gun not four inches from her body, she turned and bolted off toward where a clump of trees made a jet-black blot to the north.

When I recovered from my surprise at this amateurish procedure, I stuck both her gun and mine in my pockets, and set out after her, tearing the soles of my feet at every step.

She was trying to get over a wire fence when I caught her.

XVI

“Stop playing, will you?” I said crossly, as I set the fingers of my left hand around her wrist and started to lead her back to the roadster. “This is a serious business. Don’t be so childish!”

“You are hurting my arm.”

I knew I wasn’t hurting her arm, and I knew this girl for the direct cause of four, or perhaps five, deaths; yet I loosened my grip on her wrist until it wasn’t much more than a friendly clasp. She went back willingly enough to the roadster, where, still holding her wrist, I switched on the lights.

Kilcourse lay just beneath the headlight’s glare, huddled on his face, with one knee drawn up under him.

I put the girl squarely in the line of light.

“Now stand there,” I said, “and behave. The first break you make, I’m going to shoot a leg out from under you,” and I meant it.

I found Kilcourse’s gun, pocketed it, and knelt beside him.

He was dead, with a bullet-hole above his collar-bone.

“Is he—” her mouth trembled.

“Yes.”

She looked down at him, and shivered a little.

“Poor Fag,” she whispered.

I’ve gone on record as saying that this girl was beautiful, and, standing there in the dazzling white of the headlights, she was more than that. She was a thing to start crazy thoughts even in the head of an unimaginative middle-aged thief-catcher. She was—

Anyhow, I suppose that is why I scowled at her and said:

“Yes, poor Fag, and poor Hook, and poor Tai, and poor kind of a Los Angeles bank messenger, and poor Burke,” calling the roll, so far as I knew it, of men who had died loving her.

She didn’t flare up. Her big grey eyes lifted, and she looked at me with a gaze that I couldn’t fathom, and her lovely oval face under the mass of brown hair—which I knew was phoney—was sad.

“I suppose you do think—” she began.

But I had had enough of this; I was uncomfortable along the spine.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ll leave Kilcourse and the roadster here for the present.”

She said nothing, but went with me to Axford’s big machine, and sat in silence while I laced my shoes. I found a robe on the back seat and gave it to her.

“Better wrap this around your shoulders. The windshield is gone. It’ll be cool.”

She followed my suggestion without a word, but when I had edged our vehicle around the rear of the roadster, and had straightened out in the road again, going east, she laid a hand on my arm.

“Aren’t we going back to the White Shack?”

“No. Redwood City—the county jail.”

A mile perhaps, during which, without looking at her, I knew she was studying my rather lumpy profile. Then her hand was on my forearm again and she was leaning toward me so that her breath was warm against my cheek.

“Will you stop for a minute? There’s something—some things I want to tell you.”

I brought the car to a halt in a cleared space of hard soil off to one side of the road, and screwed myself a little around in the seat to face her more directly.

“Before you start,” I told her, “I want you to understand that we stay here for just so long as you talk about the Pangburn affair. When you get off on any other line—then we finish our trip to Redwood City.”

“Aren’t you even interested in the Los Angeles affair?”

“No. That’s closed. You and Hook Riordan and Tai Choon Tau and the Quarres were equally responsible for the messenger’s death, even if Hook did the actual killing. Hook and the Quarres passed out the night we had our party in Turk Street. Tai was hanged last month. Now I’ve got you. We had enough evidence to swing the Chinese, and we’ve even more against you. That is done—finished—completed. If you want to tell me anything about Pangburn’s death, I’ll listen. Otherwise—”

I reached for the self-starter.

A pressure of her fingers on my arm stopped me.

“I do want to tell you about it,” she said earnestly. “I want you to know the truth about it. You’ll take me to Redwood City, I know. Don’t think that I expect—that I have any foolish hopes. But I’d like you to know the truth about this thing. I don’t know why I should care especially what you think, but—”

Her voice dwindled off to nothing.

XVII

Then she began to talk very rapidly—as people talk when they fear interruptions before their stories are told—and she sat leaning slightly forward, so that her beautiful oval face was very close to mine.

“After I ran out of the Turk Street house that night—while you were struggling with Tai—my intention was to get away from San Francisco. I had a couple of thousand dollars, enough to carry me any place. Then I thought that going away would be what you people would expect me to do, and that the safest thing for me to do would be to stay right here. It isn’t hard for a woman to change her appearance. I had bobbed red hair, white skin, and wore gay clothes. I simply dyed my hair, bought these transformations to make it look long, put color on my face, and bought some dark clothes. Then I took an apartment on Ashbury Avenue under the name of Jeanne Delano, and I was an altogether different person.

“But, while I knew I was perfectly safe from recognition anywhere, I felt more comfortable staying indoors for a while, and, to pass the time, I read a good deal. That’s how I happened to run across Burke’s book. Do you read poetry?”

I shook my head. An automobile going toward Halfmoon Bay came into sight just then—the first one we’d seen since we left the White Shack. She waited until it had passed before she went on, still talking rapidly.

“Burke wasn’t a genius, of course, but there was something about some of his things that—something that got inside me. I wrote him a little note, telling him how much I had enjoyed these things, and sent it to his publishers. A few days later I had a note from Burke, and I learned that he lived in San Francisco. I hadn’t known that.

“We exchanged several notes, and then he asked if he could call, and we met. I don’t know whether I was in love with him or not, even at first. I did like him, and, between the ardor of his love for me and the flattery of having a fairly well-known poet for a suitor, I really thought that I loved him. I promised to marry him.

“I hadn’t told him anything about myself, though now I know that it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. But I was afraid to tell him the truth, and I wouldn’t lie to him, so I told him nothing.

“Then Fag Kilcourse saw me one day on the street, and knew me in spite of my new hair, complexion and clothes. Fag hadn’t much brains, but he had eyes that could see through anything. I don’t blame Fag. He acted according to his code. He came up to my apartment, having followed me home; and I told him that I was going to marry Burke and be a respectable housewife. That was dumb of me. Fag was square. If I had told him that I was ribbing Burke up for a trimming, Fag would have let me alone, would have kept his hands off. But when I told him that I was through with the graft, had ‘gone queer,’ that made me his meat. You know how crooks are: everyone in the world is either a fellow crook or a prospective victim. So if I was no longer a crook, then Fag considered me fair game.

“He learned about Burke’s family connections, and then he put it up to me—twenty thousand dollars, or he’d turn me up. He knew about the Los Angeles job, and he knew how badly I was wanted. I was up against it then. I knew I couldn’t hide from Fag or run away from him. I told Burke I had to have twenty thousand dollars. I didn’t think he had that much, but I thought he could get it. Three days later he gave me a check for it. I didn’t know at the time how he had raised it, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had known. I had to have it.

“But that night he told me where he got the money; that he had forged his brother-in-law’s signature. He told me because, after thinking it over, he was afraid that when the forgery was discovered I would be caught with him and considered equally guilty. I’m rotten in spots, but I wasn’t rotten enough to let him put himself in the pen for me, without knowing what it was all about. I told him the whole story. He didn’t bat an eye. He insisted that the money be paid Kilcourse, so that I would be safe, and began to plan for my further safety.

“Burke was confident that his brother-in-law wouldn’t send him over for forgery, but, to be on the safe side, he insisted that I move and change my name again and lay low until we knew how Axford was going to take it. But that night, after he had gone, I made some plans of my own. I did like Burke—I liked him too much to let him be the goat without trying to save him, and I didn’t have a great deal of faith in Axford’s kindness. This was the second of the month. Barring accidents, Axford wouldn’t discover the forgery until he got his cancelled checks early the following month. That gave me practically a month to work in.

“The next day I drew all my money out of the bank, and sent Burke a letter, saying that I had been called to Baltimore, and I laid a clear trail to Baltimore, with baggage and letters and all, which a pal there took care of for me. Then I went down to Joplin’s and got him to put me up. I let Fag know I was there, and when he came down I told him I expected to have the money for him in a day or two.

“He came down nearly every day after that, and I stalled him from day to day, and each time it got easier. But my time was getting short. Pretty soon Burke’s letters would be coming back from the phoney address I had given him, and I wanted to be on hand to keep him from doing anything foolish. And I didn’t want to get in touch with him until I could give him the twenty thousand, so he could square the forgery before Axford learned of it from his cancelled checks.

“Fag was getting easier and easier to handle, but I still didn’t have him where I wanted him. He wasn’t willing to give up the twenty thousand dollars—which I was, of course, holding all this time—unless I’d promise to stick with him for good. And I still thought I was in love with Burke, and I didn’t want to tie myself up with Fag, even for a little while.

“Then Burke saw me on the street one Sunday night. I was careless, and drove into the city in Joplin’s roadster—the one back there. And, as luck would have it, Burke saw me. I told him the truth, the whole truth. And he told me that he had just hired a private detective to find me. He was like a child in some ways: it hadn’t occurred to him that the sleuth would dig up anything about the money. But I knew the forged check would be found in a day or two at the most. I knew it!

“When I told Burke that he went to pieces. All his faith in his brother-in-law’s forgiveness went. I couldn’t leave him the way he was. He’d have babbled the whole thing to the first person he met. So I brought him back to Joplin’s with me. My idea was to hold him there for a few days, until we could see how things were going. If nothing appeared in the papers about the check, then we could take it for granted that Axford had hushed the matter up, and Burke could go home and try to square himself. On the other hand, if the papers got the whole story, then Burke would have to look for a permanent hiding-place, and so would I.

“Tuesday evening’s and Wednesday morning’s papers were full of the news of his disappearance, but nothing was said about the check. That looked good, but we waited another day for good measure. Fag Kilcourse was in on the game by this time, of course, and I had had to pass over the twenty thousand dollars, but I still had hopes of getting it—or most of it—back, so I continued to string him along. I had a hard time keeping him off Burke, though, because he had begun to think he had some sort of right to me, and jealousy made him wicked. But I got Tin-Star to throw a scare into him, and I thought Burke was safe.

“Tonight one of Tin-Star’s men came up and told us that a man named Porky Grout, who had been hanging around the place for a couple of nights, had made a couple of cracks that might mean he was interested in us. Grout was pointed out to me, and I took a chance on showing myself in the public part of the place, and sat at a table close to his. He was plain rat—as I guess you know—and in less than five minutes I had him at my table, and half an hour later I knew that he had tipped you off that Burke and I were in the White Shack. He didn’t tell me all this right out, but he told me more than enough for me to guess the rest.

“I went up and told the others. Fag was for killing both Grout and Burke right away. But I talked him out of it. That wouldn’t help us any, and I had Grout where he would jump in the ocean for me. I thought I had Fag convinced, but— We finally decided that Burke and I would take the roadster and leave, and that when you got here Porky Grout was to pretend he was hopped up, and point out a man and a woman—any who happened to be handy—as the ones he had taken for us. I stopped to get a cloak and gloves, and Burke went on out to the car alone—and Fag shot him. I didn’t know he was going to! I wouldn’t have let him! Please believe that! I wasn’t as much in love with Burke as I had thought, but please believe that after all he had done for me I wouldn’t have let them hurt him!

“After that it was a case of stick with the others whether I liked it or not, and I stuck. We ribbed Grout to tell you that all three of us were on the back porch when Burke was killed, and we had any number of others primed with the same story. Then you came up and recognized me. Just my luck that it had to be you—the only detective in San Francisco who knew me!

“You know the rest: how Porky Grout came up behind you and turned off the lights, and Joplin held you while we ran for the car; and then, when you closed in on us, Grout offered to stand you off while we got clear, and now. …”

XVIII

Her voice died, and she shivered a little. The robe I had given her had fallen away from her white shoulders. Whether or not it was because she was so close against my shoulder, I shivered, too. And my fingers, fumbling in my pocket for a cigarette, brought it out twisted and mashed.

“That’s all there is to the part you promised to listen to,” she said softly, her face turned half away. “I wanted you to know. You’re a hard man, but somehow I—”

I cleared my throat, and the hand that held the mangled cigarette was suddenly steady.

“Now don’t be crude, sister,” I said. “Your work has been too smooth so far to be spoiled by rough stuff now.”

She laughed—a brief laugh that was bitter and reckless and just a little weary, and she thrust her face still closer to mine, and the grey eyes were soft and placid.

“Little fat detective whose name I don’t know”—her voice had a tired huskiness in it, and a tired mockery—“you think I am playing a part, don’t you? You think I am playing for liberty. Perhaps I am. I certainly would take it if it were offered me. But— Men have thought me beautiful, and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me and, doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don’t know, and he acts as if I were a hag—an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that. Am I so homely that any man has a right to look at me without even interest? Am I ugly?”

I shook my head.

“You’re quite pretty,” I said, struggling to keep my voice as casual as the words.

“You beast!” she spat, and then her smile grew gentle again. “And yet it is because of that attitude that I sit here and turn myself inside out for you. If you were to take me in your arms and hold me close to the chest that I am already leaning against, and if you were to tell me that there is no jail ahead for me just now, I would be glad, of course. But, though for a while you might hold me, you would then be only one of the men with which I am familiar: men who love and are used and are succeeded by other men. But because you do none of these things, because you are a wooden block of a man, I find myself wanting you. Would I tell you this, little fat detective, if I were playing a game?”

I grunted noncommittally, and forcibly restrained my tongue from running out to moisten my dry lips.

“I’m going to this jail tonight if you are the same hard man who has goaded me into whining love into his uncaring ears, but before that, can’t I have one whole-hearted assurance that you think me a little more than ‘quite pretty’? Or at least a hint that if I were not a prisoner your pulse might beat a little faster when I touch you? I’m going to this jail for a long while—perhaps to the gallows. Can’t I take my vanity there not quite in tatters to keep me company? Can’t you do some slight thing to keep me from the afterthought of having bleated all this out to a man who was simply bored?”

Her lids had come down half over the silver-grey eyes; her head had tilted back so far that a little pulse showed throbbing in her white throat; her lips were motionless over slightly parted teeth, as the last word had left them. My fingers went deep into the soft white flesh of her shoulders. Her head went further back, her eyes closed, one hand came up to my shoulder.

“You’re beautiful as all hell!” I shouted crazily into her face, and flung her against the door.

It seemed an hour that I fumbled with starter and gears before I had the car back in the road and thundering toward the San Mateo County jail. The girl had straightened herself up in the seat again, and sat huddled within the robe I had given her. I squinted straight ahead into the wind that tore at my hair and face, and the absence of the windshield took my thoughts back to Porky Grout.

Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle to San Diego, standing rigidly in the path of a charging metal monster, with an inadequate pistol in each hand. She had done that to Porky Grout—this woman beside me! She had done that to Porky Grout, and he hadn’t even been human! A slimy reptile whose highest thought had been a skinful of dope had gone grimly to death that she might get away—she—this woman whose shoulders I had gripped, whose mouth had been close under mine!

I let the car out another notch, holding the road somehow.

We went through a town: a scurrying of pedestrians for safety, surprised faces staring at us, street lights glistening on the moisture the wind had whipped from my eyes. I passed blindly by the road I wanted, circled back to it, and we were out in the country again.

XIX

At the foot of a long, shallow hill I applied the brakes and we snapped to motionlessness.

I thrust my face close to the girl’s.

“Furthermore, you are a liar!” I knew I was shouting foolishly, but I was powerless to lower my voice. “Pangburn never put Axford’s name on that check. He never knew anything about it. You got in with him because you knew his brother-in-law was a millionaire. You pumped him, finding out everything he knew about his brother-in-law’s account at the Golden Gate Trust. You stole Pangburn’s bank book—it wasn’t in his room when I searched it—and deposited the forged Axford check to his credit, knowing that under those circumstances the check wouldn’t be questioned. The next day you took Pangburn into the bank, saying you were going to make a deposit. You took him in because with him standing beside you the check to which his signature had been forged wouldn’t be questioned. You knew that, being a gentleman, he’d take pains not to see what you were depositing.

“Then you framed the Baltimore trip. He told the truth to me—the truth so far as he knew it. Then you met him Sunday night—maybe accidentally, maybe not. Anyway, you took him down to Joplin’s, giving him some wild yarn that he would swallow and that would persuade him to stay there for a few days. That wasn’t hard, since he didn’t know anything about either of the twenty-thousand-dollar checks. You and your pal Kilcourse knew that if Pangburn disappeared nobody would ever know that he hadn’t forged the Axford check, and nobody would ever suspect that the second check was phoney. You’d have killed him quietly, but when Porky tipped you off that I was on my way down you had to move quick—so you shot him down. That’s the truth of it!” I yelled.

All this while she had watched me with wide grey eyes that were calm and tender, but now they clouded a little and a pucker of pain drew her brows together.

I yanked my head away and got the car in motion.

Just before we swept into Redwood City one of her hands came up to my forearm, rested there for a second, patted the arm twice, and withdrew.

I didn’t look at her, nor, I think, did she look at me, while she was being booked. She gave her name as Jeanne Delano, and refused to make any statement until she had seen an attorney. It all took a very few minutes.

As she was being led away, she stopped and asked if she might speak privately with me.

We went together to a far corner of the room.

She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath was warm again on my cheek, as it had been in the car, and whispered the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable.

Then she walked out to her cell.

Black Mask, June 1924

From the author of “The Girl with the Silver Eyes”

Many thanks for the check for “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.”

Taken in a lump, the story is pure fiction, but most of its details are based on things that I’ve either run into myself or got second hand from other detectives. For instance, “Tin-Star” Joplin’s roadhouse is in California, though not near Halfmoon Bay, and he is exactly as I have set him down. “Porky” Grout’s original died of tuberculosis in Butte, Montana, two or three years ago. (Some day I’m going to do a psychological study of a stool-pigeon. They’re an interesting lot: almost without exception more cowardly even than the ordinary crook, yet they follow the most dangerous calling in the criminal world; for not only is their own world against them, but the detectives who use them seldom hesitate to sacrifice them if anything is gained thereby.) Jeanne Delano is partly real, but mostly “made up.” (It may be that the Redwood City jail will fail to hold her.”) Fag Kilcourse has perhaps a half a dozen originals: he isn’t an unusual type.

I simply shook these people up together, added a few more to round out the cast of characters, and siced my little fat detective on ’em.

Sincerely yours,

Dashiell Hammett

San Francisco

THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE

A Complete Novelette

Black Mask, November 1924

In our recent voting contest for favorite Black Mask authors, Dashiell Hammett received thousands of votes because of his series of stories of the adventures of his San Francisco detective. He has created one of the most convincing and realistic characters in all detective fiction. The story, herewith, is one of his best to date. We know you’ll enjoy it to the last word.

I

“I haven’t anything very exciting to offer you this time,” Vance Richmond said as we shook hands. “I want you to find a man for me—a man who is not a criminal.”

There was an apology in his voice. The last couple of jobs this lean, grey-faced attorney had thrown my way had run to gun-play and other forms of rioting, and I suppose he thought anything less than that would put me to sleep. Was a time when he might have been right—when I was a young sprout of twenty or so, newly attached to the Continental Detective Agency. 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. Four years ago he was a typical specimen of the clean-cut blond Britisher. He may not be like that now—those four years have been rather hard ones for him, I imagine.

“I want to find him for Mrs. Ashcraft, his wife. I know your Agency’s rule against meddling with family affairs, but I can assure you that no matter how things turn out there will be no divorce proceedings in which you will be involved.

“Here is the story. Four years ago the Ashcrafts were living together in England, in Bristol. It seems that Mrs. Ashcraft is of a very jealous disposition, and he was rather high-strung. Furthermore, he had only what money he earned at his profession, while she had inherited quite a bit from her parents. Ashcraft was rather foolishly sensitive about being the husband of a wealthy woman—was inclined to go out of his way to show that he was not dependent upon her money, that he wouldn’t be influenced by it. Foolish, of course, but just the sort of attitude a man of his temperament would assume. One night she accused him of paying too much attention to another woman. They quarreled, and he packed up and left.

“She was repentant within a week—especially repentant since she had learned that her suspicion had had no foundation outside of her own jealousy—and she tried to find him. But he was gone. It became manifest that he had left England. She had him searched for in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, and in the United States. She succeeded in tracing him from Bristol to New York, and then to Detroit, where he had been arrested and fined for disturbing the peace in a drunken row of some sort. After that he dropped out of sight until he bobbed up in Seattle ten months later.”

The attorney hunted through the papers on his desk and found a memorandum.

“On May 23, 1923, he shot and killed a burglar in his room in a hotel there. The Seattle police seem to have suspected that there was something funny about the shooting, but had nothing to hold Ashcraft on. The man he killed was undoubtedly a burglar. Then Ashcraft disappeared again, and nothing was heard of him until just about a year ago. Mrs. Ashcraft had advertisements inserted in the personal columns of papers in the principal American cities.

“One day she received a letter from him, from San Francisco. It was a very formal letter, and simply requested her to stop advertising. Although he was through with the name Norman Ashcraft, he wrote, he disliked seeing it published in every newspaper he read.

“She mailed a letter to him at the General Delivery window here, and used another advertisement to tell him about it. He answered it, rather caustically. She wrote him again, asking him to come home. He refused, though he seemed less bitter toward her. They exchanged several letters, and she learned that he had become a drug addict, and what was left of his pride would not let him return to her until he looked—and was at least somewhat like—his former self. She persuaded him to accept enough money from her to straighten himself out. She sent him this money each month, in care of General Delivery, here.

“Meanwhile she closed up her affairs in England—she had no close relatives to hold her there—and came to San Francisco, to be on hand when her husband was ready to return to her. A year has gone. She still sends him money each month. She still waits for him to come back to her. He has repeatedly refused to see her, and his letters are evasive—filled with accounts of the struggle he is having, making headway against the drug one month, slipping back the next.

“She suspects by now, of course, that he has no intention of ever coming back to her; that he does not intend giving up the drug; that he is simply using her as a source of income. I have urged her to discontinue the monthly allowance for a while. That would at least bring about an interview, I think, and she could learn definitely what to expect. But she will not do that. You see, she blames herself for his present condition. She thinks her foolish flare of jealousy is responsible for his plight, and she is afraid to do anything that might either hurt him or induce him to hurt himself further. Her mind is unchangeably made up in that respect. She wants him back, wants him straightened out; but if he will not come, then she is content to continue the payments for the rest of his life. But she wants to know what she is to expect. She wants to end this devilish uncertainty in which she has been living.

“What we want, then, is for you to find Ashcraft. We want to know whether there is any likelihood of his ever becoming a man again, or whether he is gone beyond redemption. There is your job. Find him, learn whatever you can about him, and then, after we know something, we will decide whether it is wiser to force an interview between them—in hopes that she will be able to influence him—or not.”

“I’ll try it,” I said. “When does Mrs. Ashcraft send him his monthly allowance?”

“On the first of each month.”

“Today is the twenty-eighth. That’ll give me three days to wind up a job I have on hand. Got a photo of him?”

“Unfortunately, no. In her anger immediately after their row, Mrs. Ashcraft destroyed everything she had that would remind her of him. But I don’t think a photograph would be of any great help at the post office. Without consulting me, Mrs. Ashcraft watched for her husband there on several occasions, and did not see him. It is more than likely that he has someone else call for his mail.”

I got up and reached for my hat.

“See you around the second of the month,” I said, as I left the office.

II

On the afternoon of the first, I went down to the post office and got hold of Lusk, the inspector in charge of the division at the time.

“I’ve got a line on a scratcher from up north,” I told Lusk, “who is supposed to be getting his mail at the window. Will you fix it up so I can get a spot on him?”

Post office inspectors are all tied up with rules and regulations that forbid their giving assistance to private detectives except on certain criminal matters. But a friendly inspector doesn’t have to put you through the third degree. You lie to him—so that he will have an alibi in case there’s a kick-back—and whether he thinks you’re lying or not doesn’t matter.

So presently I was downstairs again, loitering within sight of the A to D window, with the clerk at the window instructed to give me the office when Ashcraft’s mail was called for. There was no mail for him there at the time. Mrs. Ashcraft’s letter would hardly get to the clerks that afternoon, but I was taking no chances. I stayed on the job until the windows closed at eight o’clock, and then went home.

At a few minutes after ten the next morning I got my action. One of the clerks gave me the signal. A small man in a blue suit and a soft gray hat was walking away from the window with an envelope in his hand. A man of perhaps forty years, though he looked older. His face was pasty, his feet dragged, and, although his clothes were fairly new, they needed brushing and pressing.

He came straight to the desk in front of which I stood fiddling with some papers. Out of the tail of my eye I saw that he had not opened the envelope in his hand—was not going to open it. He took a large envelope from his pocket, and I got just enough of a glimpse of its front to see that it was already stamped and addressed. I twisted my neck out of joint trying to read the address, but failed. He kept the addressed side against his body, put the letter he had got from the window in it, and licked the flap backward, so that there was no possible way for anybody to see the front of the envelope. Then he rubbed the flap down carefully and turned toward the mailing slots. I went after him. There was nothing to do but to pull the always reliable stumble.

I overtook him, stepped close and faked a fall on the marble floor, bumping into him, grabbing him as if to regain my balance. It went rotten. In the middle of my stunt my foot really did slip, and we went down on the floor like a pair of wrestlers, with him under me. To botch the trick thoroughly, he fell with the envelope pinned under him.

I scrambled up, yanked him to his feet, mumbled an apology and almost had to push him out of the way to beat him to the envelope that lay face down on the floor. I had to turn it over as I handed it to him in order to get the address:

Mr. Edward Bohannon,

Golden Horseshoe Cafe,

Tijuana, Baja California,

Mexico.

I had the address, but I had tipped my mitt. There was no way in God’s world for this little man in blue to miss knowing that I had been trying to get that address.

I dusted myself off while he put his envelope through a slot. He didn’t come back past me, but went on down toward the Mission Street exit. I couldn’t let him get away with what he knew. I didn’t want Ashcraft tipped off before I got to him. I would have to try another trick as ancient as the one the slippery floor had bungled for me. I set out after the little man again.

Just as I reached his side he turned his head to see if he was being followed.

“Hello, Micky!” I hailed him. “How’s everything in Chi?”

“You got me wrong.” He spoke out of the side of his gray-lipped mouth, not stopping. “I don’t know nothin’ about Chi.”

His eyes were pale blue, with needlepoint pupils—the eyes of a heroin or morphine user.

“Quit stalling.” I walked along at his side. We had left the building by this time and were going down Mission Street. “You fell off the rattler only this morning.”

He stopped on the sidewalk and faced me.

“Me? Who do you think I am?”

“You’re Micky Parker. The Dutchman gave us the rap that you were headed here. They got him—if you don’t already know it.”

“You’re cuckoo,” he sneered. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about!”

That was nothing—neither did I. I raised my right hand in my overcoat pocket.

“Now I’ll tell one,” I growled at him. “And keep your hands away from your clothes or I’ll let the guts out of you.”

He flinched away from my bulging pocket.

“Hey, listen, brother!” he begged. “You got me wrong—on the level. My name ain’t Micky Parker, an’ I ain’t been in Chi in six years. I been here in Frisco for a solid year, an’ that’s the truth.”

“You got to show me.”

“I can do it,” he exclaimed, all eagerness. “You come down the drag with me, an’ I’ll show you. My name’s Ryan, an’ I been livin’ aroun’ the corner here on Sixth Street for six or eight months.”

“Ryan?” I asked.

“Yes—John Ryan.”

I chalked that up against him. Of course there have been Ryans christened John, but not enough of them to account for the number of times that name appears in criminal records. I don’t suppose there are three old-time yeggs in the country who haven’t used the name at least once; it’s the John Smith of yeggdom.

This particular John Ryan led me around to a house on Sixth Street, where the landlady—a rough-hewn woman of fifty, with bare arms that were haired and muscled like the village smithy’s—assured me that her tenant had to her positive knowledge been in San Francisco for months, and that she remembered seeing him at least once a day for a couple of weeks back. If I had been really suspicious that this Ryan was my mythical Micky Parker from Chicago, I wouldn’t have taken the woman’s word for it, but as it was I pretended to be satisfied.

That seemed to be all right then. 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 hop-head, and he had given me a phoney-sounding name, so …

“What do you do for a living?” I asked him.

“I ain’t been doin’ nothin’ for a coupla months,” he pattered, “but I expec’ to open a lunch room with a fella nex’ week.”

“Let’s go up to your room,” I suggested. “I want to talk to you.”

He wasn’t enthusiastic, but he took me up. He had two rooms and a kitchen on the third floor. They were dirty, foul-smelling rooms. I dangled a leg from the corner of a table and waved him into a squeaky rocking chair in front of me. His pasty face and dopey eyes were uneasy.

“Where’s Ashcraft?” I threw at him. He jerked, and then looked at the floor.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he mumbled.

“You’d better figure it out,” I advised him, “or there’s a nice cool cell down in the booby-hutch that will be wrapped around you.”

“You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”

“What of that? How’d you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”

“Vag, hell!” he snarled, looking up at me. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick. Does that look like you can vag me?”

I grinned down at him.

“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money’ll get you nothing in California. You’ve got no job. You can’t show where your money comes from. You’re made to order for the vag law.”

I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was—or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged—the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn’t on the wrong side of the criminal law.

“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I’d be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You’re—”

He twisted sidewise in his chair and one of his hands went behind him.

I kicked him out of his chair.

The table slipped under me or I would have stretched him. As it was, the foot that I aimed at his jaw took him on the chest and carried him over backward, with the rocking-chair piled on top of him. I pulled the chair off and took his gun—a cheap nickel-plated .32. Then I went back to my seat on the corner of the table.

He had only that one flash of fight in him. He got up sniveling.

“I’ll tell you. I don’t want no trouble, an’ it ain’t nothin’ to me. I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong. This Ashcraft told me he was jus’ stringin’ his wife along. He give me ten bucks a throw to get his letter ever’ month an’ send it to him in Tijuana. I knowed him here, an’ when he went south six months ago—he’s got a girl down there—I promised I’d do it for him. I knowed it was money—he said it was his ‘alimony’—but I didn’t know there was nothin’ wrong.”

“What sort of a hombre is this Ashcraft? What’s his graft?”

“I don’t know. He could be a con man—he’s got a good front. He’s a Englishman, an’ mostly goes by the name of Ed Bohannon. He hits the hop. I don’t use it myself”—that was a good one—“but you know how it is in a burg like this, a man runs into all kinds of people. I don’t know nothin’ about what he’s up to. I jus’ send the money ever’ month an’ get my ten.”

That was all I could get out of him. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me where Ashcraft had lived in San Francisco or who he had mobbed up with. However, I had learned that Bohannon was Ashcraft, and not another go-between, and that was something.

Ryan squawked his head off when he found that I was going to vag him anyway. For a moment it looked like I would have to kick him loose from his backbone again.

“You said you’d spring me if I talked,” he wailed.

“I did not. But if I had—when a gent flashes a rod on me I figure it cancels any agreement we might have had. Come on.”

I couldn’t afford to let him run around loose until I got in touch with Ashcraft. He would have been sending a telegram before I was three blocks away, and my quarry would be on his merry way to points north, east, south and west.

It was a good hunch I played in nabbing Ryan. When he was fingerprinted at the Hall of Justice he turned out to be one Fred Rooney, alias “Jamocha,” a peddler and smuggler who had crushed out of the Federal Prison at Leavenworth, leaving eight years of a tenner still unserved.

“Will you sew him up for a couple of days?” I asked the captain of the city jail. “I’ve got work to do that will go smoother if he can’t get any word out for a while.”

“Sure,” the captain promised. “The federal people won’t take him off our hands for two or three days. I’ll keep him air-tight till then.”

III

From the jail I went up to Vance Richmond’s office and turned my news over to him.

“Ashcraft is getting his mail in Tijuana. He’s living down there under the name of Ed Bohannon, and maybe has a woman there. I’ve just thrown one of his friends—the one who handled the mail and an escaped con—in the cooler.”

“Was that necessary?” Richmond asked. “We don’t want to work any hardships. We’re really trying to help Ashcraft, you know.”

“I could have spared this bird,” I admitted. “But what for? He was all wrong. If Ashcraft can be brought back to his wife, he’s better off with some of his shady friends out of the way. If he can’t, what’s the difference? Anyway, we’ve got one line on him safely stowed away where we can find it when we want it.”

The attorney shrugged, and reached for the telephone.

He called a number. “Is Mrs. Ashcraft there? … This is Mr. Richmond. … No, we haven’t exactly found him, but I think we know where he is. … Yes. … In about fifteen minutes.”

He put down the telephone and stood up.

“We’ll run up to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house and see her.”

Fifteen minutes later we were getting out of Richmond’s car in Jackson Street near Gough. The house was a three-story white stone building, set behind a carefully sodded little lawn with an iron railing around it.

Mrs. Ashcraft received us in a drawing-room on the second floor. A tall woman of less than thirty, slimly beautiful in a gray dress. Clear was the word that best fits her; it described the blue of her eyes, the pink-white of her skin, and the light brown of her hair.

Richmond introduced me to her, and then I told her what I had learned, omitting the part about the woman in Tijuana. Nor did I tell her that the chances were her husband was a crook nowadays.

“Mr. Ashcraft is in Tijuana, I have been told. He left San Francisco about six months ago. His mail is being forwarded to him in care of a cafe there, under the name of Edward Bohannon.”

Her eyes lighted up happily, but she didn’t throw a fit. She wasn’t that sort. She addressed the attorney.

“Shall I go down? Or will you?”

Richmond shook his head.

“Neither. You certainly shouldn’t go, and I cannot—not at present. I must be in Eureka by the day after tomorrow, and shall have to spend several days there.” He turned to me. “You’ll have to go. You can no doubt handle it better than I could. You will know what to do and how to do it. There are no definite instructions I can give you. Your course will have to depend on Mr. Ashcraft’s attitude and condition. Mrs. Ashcraft doesn’t wish to force herself on him, but neither does she wish to leave anything undone that might help him.”

Mrs. Ashcraft held a strong, slender hand out to me.

“You will do whatever you think wisest.”

It was partly a question, partly an expression of confidence.

“I will,” I promised.

I liked this Mrs. Ashcraft.

IV

Tijuana hadn’t changed much in the two years I had been away. Still the same six or seven hundred feet of dusty and dingy street running between two almost solid rows of saloons,—perhaps thirty-five of them to a row,—with dirtier side streets taking care of the dives that couldn’t find room on the main street.

The automobile that had brought me down from San Diego dumped me into the center of the town early in the afternoon, and the day’s business was just getting under way. That is, there were only two or three drunks wandering around among the dogs and loafing Mexicans in the street, although there was already a bustle of potential drunks moving from one saloon to the next. But this was nothing like the crowd that would be here the following week, when the season’s racing started.

In the middle of the next block I saw a big gilded horseshoe. I went down the street and into the saloon behind the sign. It was a fair sample of the local joint. A bar on your left as you came in, running half the length of the building, with three or four slot machines on one end. Across from the bar, against the right-hand wall, a dance floor that ran from the front wall to a raised platform, where a greasy orchestra was now preparing to go to work. Behind the orchestra was a row of low stalls or booths, with open fronts and a table and two benches apiece. Opposite them, in the space between the bar and the rear of the building, a man with a hair-lip was shaking pills out of a keno goose.

It was early in the day, and there were only a few buyers present, so the girls whose business it is to speed the sale of drinks charged down on me in a flock.

“Buy me a drink? Let’s have a little drink? Buy a drink, honey?”

I shooed them away—no easy job—and caught a bartender’s eye. He was a beefy, red-faced Irishman, with sorrel hair plastered down in two curls that hid what little forehead he had.

“I want to see Ed Bohannon,” I told him confidentially.

He turned blank fish-green eyes on me.

“I don’t know no Ed Bohannon.”

Taking out a piece of paper and a pencil I scribbled, Jamocha is copped, and slid the paper over to the bartender.

“If a man who says he’s Ed Bohannon asks for that, will you give it to him?”

“I guess so.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll hang around a while.”

I walked down the room and sat at a table in one of the stalls. A lanky girl who had done something to her hair that made it purple was camped beside me before I had settled in my seat.

“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.

“Yes,” I said, and ordered a bottle of beer for myself from the waiter who was already hanging over my shoulder.

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.

The purple-haired woman at my side downed her shot of whiskey, and was opening her mouth to suggest that we have another drink,—hustlers down there don’t waste any time at all,—when a voice spoke from behind me.

“Cora, Frank wants you.”

Cora scowled, looking over my shoulder.

Then she made that damned face at me again, said “All right, Kewpie. Will you take care of my friend here?” and left me.

Kewpie slid into the seat beside me. She was a little chunky girl of perhaps eighteen—not a day more than that. Just a kid. Her short hair was brown and curly over a round, boyish face with laughing, impudent eyes. Rather a cute little trick.

I bought her a drink and got another bottle of beer.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.

“Hooch.” She grinned at me—a grin that was as boyish as the straight look of her brown eyes. “Gallons of it.”

“And besides that?”

I knew this switching of girls on me hadn’t been purposeless.

“I hear you’re looking for a friend of mine,” Kewpie said.

“That might be. What friends have you got?”

“Well, there’s Ed Bohannon for one. You know Ed?”

I shook my head.

“No—not yet.”

“But you’re looking for him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I could tell you how to find him, if I knew you were all right.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said carelessly. “I’ve a few more minutes to waste, and if he doesn’t show up by then it’s all one to me.”

She cuddled against my shoulder.

“What’s the racket? Maybe I could get word to Ed.”

I stuck a cigarette in her mouth, one in my own, and lit them.

“Let it go,” I bluffed. “This Ed of yours seems to be as exclusive as all hell. Well, it’s no skin off my face. I’ll buy you another drink and then trot along.”

She jumped up.

“Wait a minute. I’ll see if I can get him. What’s your name?”

“Parker will do as well as any other,” I said, the name I had used on Ryan popping first into my mind.

“You wait,” she called back as she moved toward the back door. “I think I can find him.”

“I think so too,” I agreed.

Ten minutes went by, and a man came to my table from the front of the establishment. He was a blond Englishman of less than forty, with all the marks of the gentleman gone to pot on him. Not altogether on the rocks yet, but you could see evidence of the downhill slide plainly in the dullness of his blue eyes, in the pouches under his eyes, in the blurred lines around his mouth and the mouth’s looseness, and in the grayish tint of his skin. He was still fairly attractive in appearance—enough of his former wholesomeness remained for that.

He sat down facing me across the table.

“You’re looking for me?”

There was only a hint of the Britisher in his accent.

“You’re Ed Bohannon?”

He nodded.

“Jamocha was picked up a couple of days ago,” I told him, “and ought to be riding back to the Kansas big house by now. He got word out for me to give you the rap. He knew I was heading this way.”

“How did they come to get him?”

His blue eyes were suspicious on my face.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they picked him up on a circular.”

He frowned at the table and traced a meaningless design with a finger in a puddle of beer. Then he looked sharply at me again.

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He got word out to me by somebody’s mouthpiece. I didn’t see him.”

“You’re staying down here a while?”

“Yes, for two or three days,” I said. “I’ve got something on the fire.”

He stood up and smiled, and held out his hand.

“Thanks for the tip, Parker,” he said. “If you’ll take a walk with me I’ll give you something real to drink.”

I didn’t have anything against that. He led me out of the Golden Horseshoe and down a side street to an adobe house set out where the town fringed off into the desert. In the front room he waved me to a chair and went into the next room.

“What do you fancy?” he called through the door. “Rye, gin, tequila, Scotch—”

“The last one wins,” I interrupted his catalog.

He brought in a bottle of Black and White, a siphon and some glasses, and we settled down to drinking. When that bottle was empty there was another to take its place. We drank and talked, drank and talked, and each of us pretended to be drunker than he really was—though before long we were both as full as a pair of goats.

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.

“Y’ know,” he was saying somewhere along toward dark, “I’ve been a damn’ ass. Got a wife—the nicesh woman in the worl’. Wantsh me t’ come back to her, an’ all tha’ short of thing. Yet I hang around here, lappin’ up this shtuff—hittin’ the pipe—when I could be shomebody. Arc—architec’, y’ un’ershtand—good one, too. But I got in rut—got mixsh up with theshe people. C-can’t sheem to break ’way. Goin’ to, though—no spoofin’. Goin’ back to li’l wife, nicesh woman in the worl’. Don’t you shay anything t’ Kewpie. She’d raishe hell ’f she knew I wash goin’ t’ shake her. Nishe girl, K-kewpie, but tough. S-shtick a bloomin’ knife in me. Good job, too! But I’m goin’ back to wife. Breakin’ ’way from p-pipe an’ ever’thing. Look at me. D’ I look like a hop-head? Course not! Curin’ m’self, tha’s why. I’ll show you—take a smoke now—show you I can take it or leave it alone.”

Pulling himself dizzily up out of his chair, he wandered into the next room, bawling a song at the top of his voice:

“A dimber mort with a quarter-stone slum,

A-bubbin’ of max with her cove—

A bingo fen in a crack-o’-dawn drum,

A-waitin’ for—”

He came staggering into the room again carrying an elaborate opium layout—all silver and ebony—on a silver tray. He put it on the table and flourished a pipe at me.

“Have a li’l rear on me, Parker.”

I told him I’d stick to the Scotch.

“Give y’ shot of C. ’f y’d rather have it,” he invited me.

I declined the cocaine, so he sprawled himself comfortably on the floor beside the table, rolled and cooked a pill, and our party went on—with him smoking his hop and me punishing the liquor—each of us still talking for the other’s benefit, and trying to get the other to talk for our own.

I was holding down a lovely package by the time Kewpie came in, at midnight.

“Looks like you folks are enjoying yourselves,” she laughed, leaning down to kiss the Englishman’s rumpled hair as she stepped over him.

She perched herself on the table and reached for the Scotch.

“Everything’s lovely,” I assured her, though probably I didn’t say it that clear.

I was fighting a battle with myself just about then. I had an idea that I wanted to dance. Down in Yucatan, four or five months before—hunting for a lad who had done wrong by the bank that employed him—I had seen some natives dance the naual. And that naual dance was the one thing in the world I wanted to do just then. (I was carrying a beautiful bun!) But I knew that if I sat still—as I had been sitting all evening—I could keep my cargo in hand, while it wasn’t going to take much moving around to knock me over.

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.

V

The next two days were pretty much like the first one. Ashcraft and I were together twenty-four hours each of the days, and usually the girl was with us, and the only time we weren’t drinking was when we were sleeping off what we had been drinking. We spent most of those three days in either the adobe house or the Golden Horseshoe, but we found time to take in most of the other joints in town now and then. I had only a hazy idea of some of the things that went on around me, though I don’t think I missed anything entirely. On the second day someone added a first name to the alias I had given the girl—and thereafter I was “Painless” Parker to Tijuana, and still am to some of them. I don’t know who christened me, or why.

Ashcraft and I were as thick as thieves, on the surface, but neither of us ever lost his distrust of the other, no matter how drunk we got—and we got plenty drunk. He went up against his mud-pipe regularly. I don’t think the girl used the stuff, but she had a pretty capacity for hard liquor. I would go to sleep not knowing whether I was going to wake up or not; but I had nothing on me to give me away, so I figured that I was safe unless I talked myself into a jam. I didn’t worry much,—bedtime usually caught me in a state that made worry impossible.

Three days of this, and then, sobering up, I was riding back to San Francisco, making a list of what I knew and guessed about Norman Ashcraft, alias Ed Bohannon.

The list went something like this:

(1) He suspected, if he didn’t know, that I had come down to see him on his wife’s account: he had been too smooth and had entertained me too well for me to doubt that; (2) he apparently had decided to return to his wife, though there was no guarantee that he would actually do so; (3) he was not incurably addicted to drugs; he merely smoked opium and, regardless of what the Sunday supplements say, an opium smoker is little, if any, worse off than a tobacco smoker; (4) he might pull himself together under his wife’s influence, but it was doubtful: physically he hadn’t gone to the dogs, but he had had his taste of the gutter and seemed to like it; (5) the girl Kewpie was crazily in love with him, while he liked her, but wasn’t turning himself inside out over her.

A good night’s sleep on the train between Los Angeles and San Francisco set me down in the Third and Townsend Street station with nearly normal head and stomach and not too many kinks in my nerves. I put away a breakfast that was composed of more food than I had eaten in three days, and went up to Vance Richmond’s office.

“Mr. Richmond is still in Eureka,” his stenographer told me. “I don’t expect him back until the first of the week.”

“Can you get him on the phone for me?”

She could, and did.

Without mentioning any names, I told the attorney what I knew and guessed.

“I see,” he said. “Suppose you go out to Mrs. A’s house and tell her. I will write her tonight, and I probably shall be back in the city by the day after tomorrow. I think we can safely delay action until then.”

I caught a street car, transferred at Van Ness Avenue, and went out to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. Nothing happened when I rang the bell. I rang it several times before I noticed that there were two morning newspapers in the vestibule. I looked at the dates—this morning’s and yesterday morning’s.

An old man in faded overalls was watering the lawn next door.

“Do you know if the people who live here have gone away?” I called to him.

“I don’t guess so. The back door’s open, I seen this mornin’.”

He returned his attention to his hose, and then stopped to scratch his chin.

“They may of gone,” he said slowly. “Come to think on it, I ain’t seen any of ’em for—I don’t remember seein’ any of ’em yesterday.”

I left the front steps and went around the house, climbed the low fence in back and went up the back steps. The kitchen door stood about a foot open. Nobody was visible in the kitchen, but there was a sound of running water.

I knocked on the door with my knuckles, loudly. There was no answering sound. I pushed the door open and went in. The sound of water came from the sink. I looked in the sink.

Under a thin stream of water running from one of the faucets lay a carving knife with nearly a foot of keen blade. The knife was clean, but the back of the porcelain sink—where water had splashed with only small, scattered drops—was freckled with red-brown spots. I scraped one of them with a finger-nail—dried blood.

Except for the sink, I could see nothing out of order in the kitchen. I opened a pantry door. Everything seemed all right there. Across the room another door led to the front of the house. I opened the door and went into a passageway. Not enough light came from the kitchen to illuminate the passageway. I fumbled in the dusk for the light-button that I knew should be there. I stepped on something soft.

Pulling my foot back, I felt in my pocket for matches, and struck one. In front of me, his head and shoulders on the floor, his hips and legs on the lower steps of a flight of stairs, lay a Filipino boy in his underclothes.

He was dead. One eye was cut, and his throat was gashed straight across, close up under his chin. I could see the killing without even shutting my eyes. At the top of the stairs—the killer’s left hand dashing into the Filipino’s face—thumb-nail gouging into eye—pushing the brown face back—tightening the brown throat for the knife’s edge—the slash—and the shove down the steps.

The light from my second match showed me the button. I clicked on the lights, buttoned my coat, and went up the steps. Dried blood darkened them here and there, and at the second-floor landing the wall paper was stained with a big blot. At the head of the stairs I found another light-button, and pressed it.

I walked down the hall, poked my head into two rooms that seemed in order, and then turned a corner—and pulled up with a jerk, barely in time to miss stumbling over a woman who lay there.

She was huddled on the floor, face down, with knees drawn up under her and both hands clasped to her stomach. She wore a nightgown, and her hair was in a braid down her back.

I put a finger on the back of her neck. Stone-cold.

Kneeling on the floor—to avoid the necessity of turning her over—I looked at her face. She was the maid who had admitted Richmond and me four days ago.

I stood up again and looked around. The maid’s head was almost touching a closed door. I stepped around her and pushed the door open. A bedroom, and not the maid’s. It was an expensively dainty bedroom in cream and gray, with French prints on the walls. Nothing in the room was disarranged except the bed. The bed clothes were rumpled and tangled, and piled high in the center of the bed—in a pile that was too large. …

Leaning over the bed, I began to draw the covers off. The second piece came away stained with blood. I yanked the rest off.

Mrs. Ashcraft was dead there.

Her body was drawn up in a little heap, from which her head hung crookedly, dangling from a neck that had been cut clean through to the bone. Her face was marked with four deep scratches from temple to chin. One sleeve had been torn from the jacket of her blue silk pajamas. Bedding and pajamas were soggy with the blood that the clothing piled over her had kept from drying.

I put the blanket over her again, edged past the dead woman in the hall, and went down the front stairs, switching on more lights, hunting for the telephone. Near the foot of the stairs I found it. I called the police detective bureau first, and then Vance Richmond’s office.

“Get word to Mr. Richmond that Mrs. Ashcraft has been murdered,” I told his stenographer. “I’m at her house, and he can get in touch with me here any time during the next two or three hours.”

Then I went out of the front door and sat on the top step, smoking a cigarette while I waited for the police.

I felt rotten. I’ve seen dead people in larger quantities than three in my time, and I’ve seen some that were hacked up pretty badly; but this thing had fallen on me while my nerves were ragged from three days of boozing.

The police automobile swung around the corner and began disgorging men before I had finished my first cigarette. O’Gar, the detective sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail, was the first man up the steps.

“Hullo,” he greeted me. “What have you got hold of this time?”

I was glad to see him. This squat, bullet-headed sergeant is as good a man as the department has, and he and I have always been lucky when we tied up together.

“I found three bodies in there before I quit looking,” I told him as I led him indoors. “Maybe a regular detective like you—with a badge and everything—can find more.”

“You didn’t do bad—for a lad,” he said.

My wooziness had passed. I was eager to get to work. These people lying dead around the house were merely counters in a game again—or almost. I remembered the feel of Mrs. Ashcraft’s slim hand in mine, but I stuck that memory in the back of my mind. You hear now and then of detectives who have not become callous, who have not lost what you might call the human touch. 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. The neighbors had to be grilled. The employment agencies through which the servants had been hired had to be examined. Relatives and friends of the Filipino and the maid had to be traced and questioned. Newsboys, mail carriers, grocers’ delivery men, laundrymen, had to be found, questioned and, when necessary, investigated.

When the bulk of the reports were in, O’Gar and I sneaked away from the others—especially away from the newspaper men, who were all over the place by now—and locked ourselves in the library.

“Night before last, huh? Wednesday night?” O’Gar grunted when we were comfortable in a couple of leather chairs, burning tobacco.

I nodded. The report of the doctor who had examined the bodies, the presence of the two newspapers in the vestibule, and the fact that neither neighbor, grocer nor butcher had seen any of them since Wednesday, combined to make Wednesday night—or early Thursday morning—the correct date.

“I’d say the killer cracked the back door,” O’Gar went on, staring at the ceiling through smoke, “picked up the carving knife in the kitchen, and went upstairs. Maybe he went straight to Mrs. Ashcraft’s room—maybe not. But after a bit he went in there. The torn sleeve and the scratches on her face mean that there was a tussle. The Filipino and the maid heard the noise—heard her scream maybe—and rushed to her room to find out what was the matter. The maid most likely got there just as the killer was coming out—and got hers. I guess the Filipino saw him then and ran. The killer caught him at the head of the back stairs—and finished him. Then he went down to the kitchen, washed his hands, dropped the knife, and blew.”

“So far, so good,” I agreed; “but I notice you skip lightly over the question of who he was and why he killed.”

He pushed his hat back and scratched his bullet head.

“Don’t crowd me,” he rumbled; “I’ll get around to that. There seem to be just three guesses to take your pick from. We know that nobody else lived in the house outside of the three that were killed. So the killer was either a maniac who did the job for the fun of it, a burglar who was discovered and ran wild, or somebody who had a reason for bumping off Mrs. Ashcraft, and then had to kill the two servants when they discovered him.

“Taking the knife from the kitchen would make the burglar guess look like a bum one. And, besides, we’re pretty sure nothing was stolen. A good prowler would bring his own weapon with him if he wanted one. But the hell of it is that there are a lot of bum prowlers in the world—half-wits who would be likely to pick up a knife in the kitchen, go to pieces when the house woke up, slash everybody in sight, and then beat it without turning anything over.

“So it could have been a prowler; but my personal guess is that the job was done by somebody who wanted to wipe out Mrs. Ashcraft.”

“Not so bad,” I applauded. “Now listen to this: Mrs. Ashcraft has a husband in Tijuana, a mild sort of hop-head who is mixed up with a bunch of thugs. She was trying to persuade him to come back to her. He has a girl down there who is young, goofy over him, and a bad actor—one tough youngster. He was planning to run out on the girl and come back home.”

“So-o-o?” O’Gar said softly.

“But,” I continued, “I was with both him and the girl, in Tijuana, night before last—when this killing was done.”

“So-o?”

A knock on the door interrupted our talk. It was a policeman to tell me that I was wanted on the phone. I went down to the first floor, and Vance Richmond’s voice came over the wire.

“What is it? Miss Henry delivered your message, but she couldn’t give me any details.”

I told him the whole thing.

“I’ll leave for the city tonight,” he said when I had finished. “You go ahead and do whatever you want. You’re to have a free hand.”

“Right,” I replied. “I’ll probably be out of town when you get back. You can reach me through the Agency if you want to get in touch with me. I’m going to wire Ashcraft to come up—in your name.”

After Richmond had hung up, I called the city jail and asked the captain if John Ryan, alias Fred Rooney, alias Jamocha, was still there.

“No. Federal officers left for Leavenworth with him and two other prisoners yesterday morning.”

Up in the library again, I told O’Gar hurriedly:

“I’m catching the evening train south, betting my marbles that the job was made in Tijuana. I’m wiring Ashcraft to come up. I want to get him away from the Mexican town for a day or two, and if he’s up here you can keep an eye on him. I’ll give you a description of him, and you can pick him up at Vance Richmond’s office. He’ll probably connect there first thing.”

Half an hour of the little time I had left I spent writing and sending three telegrams. The first was to Ashcraft.

Edward Bohannon,

Golden Horseshoe Cafe,

Tijuana, Mexico.

Mrs. Ashcraft is dead. Can you come immediately?

VANCE RICHMOND.

The other two were in code. One went to the Continental Detective Agency’s Kansas City branch, asking that an operative be sent to Leavenworth to question Jamocha. The other requested the Los Angeles branch to have a man meet me in San Diego the next day.

Then I dashed out to my rooms for a bagful of clean clothes, and went to sleep riding south again.

VI

San Diego was gay and packed when I got off the train early the next afternoon—filled with the crowd that the first Saturday of the racing season across the border had drawn. Movie folk from Los Angeles, farmers from the Imperial Valley, sailors from the Pacific Fleet, gamblers, tourists, grifters, and even regular people, from everywhere. I lunched, registered and left my bag at a hotel, and went up to the U. S. Grant Hotel to pick up the Los Angeles operative I had wired for.

I found him in the lobby—a freckle-faced youngster of twenty-two or so, whose bright gray eyes were busy just now with a racing program, which he held in a hand that had a finger bandaged with adhesive tape. I passed him and stopped at the cigar stand, where I bought a package of cigarettes and straightened out an imaginary dent in my hat. Then I went out to the street again. The bandaged finger and the business with the hat were our introductions. Somebody invented those tricks back before the Civil War, but they still worked smoothly, so their antiquity was no reason for discarding them.

I strolled up Fourth Street, getting away from Broadway—San Diego’s main stem—and the operative caught up with me. His name was Gorman, and he turned out to be a pretty good lad. I gave him the lay.

“You’re to go down to Tijuana and take a plant on the Golden Horseshoe Café. There’s a little chunk of a girl hustling drinks in there—short curly brown hair; brown eyes; round face; rather large red mouth; square shoulders. You can’t miss her; she’s a nice-looking kid of about eighteen, called Kewpie. She’s the target for your eye. Keep away from her. Don’t try to rope her. I’ll give you an hour’s start. Then I’m coming down to talk to her. I want to know what she does right after I leave, and what she does for the next few days. You can get in touch with me at the”—I gave him the name of my hotel and my room number—“each night. Don’t give me a tumble anywhere else. I’ll most likely be in and out of the Golden Horseshoe often.”

We parted, and I went down to the plaza and sat on a bench under the palms for an hour. Then I went up to the corner and fought for a seat on a Tijuana stage.

Fifteen or more miles of dusty riding—packed five in a seat meant for three—a momentary halt at the Immigration Station on the line, and I was climbing out of the stage at the entrance to the race track. The ponies had been running for some time, but the turnstiles were still spinning a steady stream of customers into the track. I turned my back on the gate and went over to the row of jitneys in front of the Monte Carlo—the big wooden casino—got into one, and was driven over to the Old Town.

The Old Town had a deserted look. Nearly everybody was over watching the dogs do their stuff. Gorman’s freckled face showed over a drink of mescal when I entered the Golden Horseshoe. I hoped he had a good constitution. He needed one if he was going to do his sleuthing on a distilled cactus diet.

The welcome I got from the Horseshoers was just like a homecoming. Even the bartender with the plastered-down curls gave me a grin.

“Where’s Kewpie?” I asked.

“Brother-in-lawing, Ed?” a big Swede girl leered at me. “I’ll see if I can find her for you.”

Kewpie came through the back door just then.

“Hello, Painless!” She climbed all over me, hugging me, rubbing her face against mine, and the Lord knows what all. “Down for another swell souse?”

“No,” I said, leading her back toward the stalls. “Business this time. Where’s Ed?”

“Up north. His wife kicked off and he’s gone to collect the remains.”

“That makes you sorry?”

She showed her big white teeth in a boy’s smile of pure happiness.

“You bet! It’s tough on me that papa has come into a lot of sugar.”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eyes—a glance that was supposed to be wise.

“And you think Ed’s going to bring the jack back to you?”

Her eyes snapped darkly at me.

“What’s eating you?” she demanded.

I smiled knowingly.

“One of two things is going to happen,” I predicted. “Ed’s going to ditch you—he was figuring on that, anyway—or he’s going to need every brownie he can scrape up to keep his neck from being—”

“You God-damned liar!”

Her right shoulder was to me, touching my left. Her left hand flashed down under her short skirt. I pushed her shoulder forward, twisting her body sharply away from me. The knife her left hand had whipped up from her leg jabbed deep into the underside of the table. A thick-bladed knife, I noticed, balanced for accurate throwing.

She kicked backward, driving one of her sharp heels into my ankle. I slid my left arm around behind her and pinned her elbow to her side just as she freed the knife from the table.

“What th’ hell’s all ’is?”

I looked up.

Across the table a man stood glaring at me—legs apart, fists on hips. He was a big man, and ugly. A tall, raw-boned man with wide shoulders, out of which a long, skinny yellow neck rose to support a little round head. His eyes were black shoe-buttons stuck close together at the top of a little mashed nose. His mouth looked as if it had been torn in his face, and it was stretched in a snarl now, baring a double row of crooked brown teeth.

“Where d’ yuh get ’at stuff?” this lovely person roared at me.

He was too tough to reason with.

“If you’re a waiter,” I told him, “bring me a bottle of beer and something for the kid. If you’re not a waiter—sneak.”

He leaned over the table and I gathered my feet in. It looked like I was going to need them to move around on.

“I’ll bring yuh a—”

The girl wriggled out of my hands and shut him up.

“Mine’s liquor,” she said sharply.

He snarled, looked from one of us to the other, showed me his dirty teeth again, and wandered away.

“Who’s your friend?”

“You’ll do well to lay off him,” she advised me, not answering my question.

Then she slid her knife back in its hiding place under her skirt and twisted around to face me.

“Now what’s all this about Ed being in trouble?”

“You read about the killing in the papers?”

“Yes.”

“You oughtn’t need a map, then,” I said. “Ed’s only out is to put the job on you. But I doubt if he can get away with that. If he can’t, he’s nailed.”

“You’re crazy!” she exclaimed. “You weren’t too drunk to know that both of us were here with you when the killing was done.”

“I’m not crazy enough to think that proves anything,” I corrected her. “But I am crazy enough to expect to go back to San Francisco wearing the killer on my wrist.”

She laughed at me. I laughed back and stood up.

“See you some more,” I said as I strolled toward the door.

I returned to San Diego and sent a wire to Los Angeles, asking for another operative. Then I got something to eat and spent the evening lying across the bed in my hotel room smoking and scheming and waiting for Gorman.

It was late when he arrived, and he smelled of mescal from San Diego to St. Louis and back, but his head seemed level enough.

“Looked like I was going to have to shoot you loose from the place for a moment,” he grinned. “Between the twist flashing the pick and the big guy loosening a sap in his pocket, it looked like action was coming.”

“You let me alone,” I ordered. “Your job is to see what goes on, and that’s all. If I get carved, you can mention it in your report, but that’s your limit. What did you turn up?”

“After you blew, the girl and the big guy put their noodles together. They seemed kind of agitated—all agog, you might say. He slid out, so I dropped the girl and slid along behind him. He came to town and got a wire off. I couldn’t crowd him close enough to see who it was to. Then he went back to the joint. Things were normal when I knocked off.”

“Who is the big guy? Did you learn?”

“He’s no sweet dream, from what I hear. ‘Gooseneck’ Flinn is the name on his calling cards. He’s bouncer and general utility man for the joint. I saw him in action against a couple of gobs, and he’s nobody’s meat—as pretty a double throw-out as I’ve ever seen.”

So this Gooseneck party was the Golden Horseshoe’s clean-up man, and he hadn’t been in sight during my three-day spree? I couldn’t possibly have been so drunk that I’d forget his ugliness. And it had been on one of those three days that Mrs. Ashcraft and her servants had been killed.

“I wired your office for another op,” I told Gorman. “He’s to connect with you. Turn the girl over to him, and you camp on Gooseneck’s trail. I think we’re going to hang three killings on him, so watch your step. I’ll be in to stir things up a little more tomorrow; but remember, no matter what happens, everybody plays his own game. Don’t ball things up trying to help me.”

“Aye, aye, Cap,” and he went off to get some sleep.

The next afternoon I spent at the race track, fooling around with the bangtails while I waited for night. The track was jammed with the usual Sunday crowd. I ran into any number of old acquaintances, some of them on my side of the game, some on the other, and some neutral. One of the second lot was “Trick-hat” Schultz. At our last meeting—a copper was leading him out of a Philadelphia court room toward a fifteen-year bit—he had promised to open me up from my eyebrows to my ankles the next time he saw me. He greeted me this afternoon with an eight-inch smile, bought me a shot of what they sell for gin under the grandstand, and gave me a tip on a horse named Beeswax. I’m not foolish enough to play anybody’s tips, so I didn’t play this one. Beeswax ran so far ahead of the others that it looked like he and his competitors were in separate races, and he paid twenty-something to one. So Trick-hat had his revenge after all.

After the last race, I got something to eat at the Sunset Inn, and then drifted over to the big casino—the other end of the same building. A thousand or more people of all sorts were jostling one another there, fighting to go up against poker, craps, chuck-a-luck, wheels of fortune, roulette and twenty-one with whatever money the race track had left or given them. I didn’t buck any of the games. My playtime was over. I walked around through the crowd looking for my men.

I spotted the first one—a sunburned man who was plainly a farm hand in his Sunday clothes. He was pushing toward the door, and his face held that peculiar emptiness which belongs to the gambler who has gone broke before the end of the game. It’s a look of regret that is not so much for the loss of the money as for the necessity of quitting.

I got between the farm hand and the door.

“Clean you?” I asked sympathetically when he reached me.

A sheepish sort of nod.

“How’d you like to pick up five bucks for a few minutes’ work?” I tempted him.

He would like it, but what was the work?

“I want you to go over to the Old Town with me and look at a man. Then you get your pay. There are no strings to it.”

That didn’t exactly satisfy him, but five bucks are five bucks; and he could drop out any time he didn’t like the looks of things. He decided to try it.

I put the farm hand over by a door, and went after another—a little, plump man with round, optimistic eyes and a weak mouth. He was willing to earn five dollars in the simple and easy manner I had outlined. The next man I braced was a little too timid to take a chance on a blind game. Then I got a Filipino—glorious in a fawn-colored suit, with a coat split to the neck and pants whose belled bottoms would have held a keg apiece—and a stocky young Greek who was probably either a waiter or a barber.

Four men were enough. My quartet pleased me immensely. They didn’t look too intelligent for my purpose, and they didn’t look like thugs or sharpers. I put them in a jitney and took them over to the Old Town.

“Now this is it,” I coached them when we had arrived. “I’m going into the Golden Horseshoe Café, around the corner. Give me two or three minutes, and then come in and buy yourselves a drink.” I gave the farm hand a five-dollar bill. “You pay for the drinks with that—it isn’t part of your wages. There’s a tall, broad-shouldered man with a long, yellow neck and a small ugly face in there. You can’t miss him. I want you all to take a good look at him without letting him get wise. When you’re sure you’d know him again anywhere, give me the nod, and come back here and you get your money. Be careful when you give me the nod. I don’t want anybody in there to find out that you know me.”

It sounded queer to them, but there was the promise of five dollars apiece, and there were the games back in the casino, where five dollars might buy a man into a streak of luck that—write the rest of it yourself. They asked questions, which I refused to answer, but they stuck.

Gooseneck was behind the bar, helping out the bartenders, when I entered the place. They needed help. The joint bulged with customers. The dance floor looked like a mob scene. Thirsts were lined up four deep at the bar. A shotgun wouldn’t have sounded above the din: men and women laughing, roaring and cursing; bottles and glasses rattling and banging; and louder and more disagreeable than any of those noises was the noise of the sweating orchestra. Turmoil, uproar, stink—a Tijuana joint on Sunday night.

I couldn’t find Gorman’s freckled face in the crowd, but I picked out the hatchet-sharp white face of Hooper, another Los Angeles operative, who, I knew then, had been sent down in response to my second telegram. Kewpie was farther down the bar, drinking with a little man whose meek face had the devil-may-care expression of a model husband on a tear. She nodded at me, but didn’t leave her client.

Gooseneck gave me a scowl and the bottle of beer I had ordered. Presently my four hired men came in. They did their parts beautifully!

First they peered through the smoke, looking from face to face, and hastily avoiding eyes that met theirs. A little of this, and one of them, the Filipino, saw the man I had described, behind the bar. He jumped a foot in the excitement of his discovery, and then, finding Gooseneck glaring at him, turned his back and fidgeted. The three others spotted Gooseneck now, and sneaked looks at him that were as conspicuously furtive as a set of false whiskers. Gooseneck glowered at them.

The Filipino turned around, looked at me, ducked his head sharply, and bolted for the street. The three who were left shot their drinks down their gullets and tried to catch my eye. I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar:

ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE

I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more, when one of my confederates, the Greek, cleared his throat with the noise of a gasoline engine’s backfire. Gooseneck was edging down the bar, a bungstarter in one hand, his face purple.

I looked at my assistants. Their nods wouldn’t have been so terrible had they come one at a time; but they were taking no chances on my looking away again before they could get their reports in. The three heads bobbed together—a signal that nobody within twenty feet could, or did, miss—and they scooted out of the door, away from the long-necked man and his bung-starter.

I emptied my glass of beer, sauntered out of the saloon and around the corner. They were clustered where I had told them to wait.

“We’d know him! We’d know him!” they chorused.

“That’s fine,” I praised them. “You did great. I think you’re all natural-born gumshoes. Here’s your pay. Now if I were you boys, I think I’d sort of avoid that place after this; because, in spite of the clever way you covered yourselves up—and you did nobly!—he might possibly suspect something. There’s no use taking chances, anyway. ”

They grabbed their wages and were gone before I had finished my speech. I returned to the Golden Horseshoe—to be on hand in case one of them should decide to sell me out and come back there to spill the deal to Gooseneck.

Kewpie had left her model husband, and met me at the door. She stuck an arm through mine and led me toward the rear of the building. I noticed that Gooseneck was gone from behind the bar. I wondered if he was out gunning for my four ex-employees.

“Business looks good,” I chattered as we pushed through the crowd. “You know, I had a tip on Beeswax this afternoon, and wouldn’t play the pup.” I made two or three more aimless cracks of that sort—just because I knew the girl’s mind was full of something else. She paid no attention to anything I said.

But when we had dropped down in front of a vacant table, she asked:

“Who were your friends?”

“What friends?”

“The four jobbies who were at the bar when you were there a few minutes ago.”

“Too hard for me, sister.” I shook my head. “There were slews of men there. Oh, yes! I know who you mean! Those four gents who seemed kind of smitten with Gooseneck’s looks. I wonder what attracted them to him—besides his beauty.”

She grabbed my arm with both hands.

“So help me God, Painless,” she swore, “if you tie anything on Ed, I’ll kill you!”

Her brown eyes were big and damp. She was a hard and wise little baby—had rubbed the world’s sharp corners with both shoulders—but she was only a kid, and she was worried sick over this man of hers. However, the business of a sleuth is to catch criminals, not to sympathize with their ladyloves.

I patted her hands.

“I could give you some good advice,” I said as I stood up, “but you wouldn’t listen to it, so I’ll save my breath. It won’t do any harm to tell you to keep an eye on Gooseneck, though—he’s shifty.”

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.

Hooper came into my room in the San Diego hotel at a little before two the next morning.

“Gooseneck disappeared, with Gorman tailing him, immediately after your first visit,” he said. “After your second visit, the girl went around to a ’dobe house on the edge of town, and she was still there when I knocked off. The place was dark.”

Gorman didn’t show up.

VII

A bell-hop with a telegram roused me at ten o’clock in the morning. The telegram was from Mexicali:

DROVE HERE LAST NIGHT HOLED UP WITH FRIENDS SENT TWO WIRES.

GORMAN.

That was good news. The long-necked man had fallen for my play, had taken my four busted gamblers for four witnesses, had taken their nods for identifications. Gooseneck was the lad who had done the actual killing, and Gooseneck was in flight.

I had shed my pajamas and was reaching for my union suit when the boy came back with another wire. This one was from O’Gar, through the Agency:

ASHCRAFT DISAPPEARED YESTERDAY

I used the telephone to get Hooper out of bed.

“Get down to Tijuana,” I told him. “Stick up the house where you left the girl last night, unless you run across her at the Golden Horseshoe. Stay there until she shows. Stay with her until she connects with a big blond Englishman, and then switch to him. He’s a man of less than forty, tall, with blue eyes and yellow hair. Don’t let him shake you—he’s the big boy in this party just now. I’ll be down. If the Englishman and I stay together and the girl leaves us, take her, but otherwise stick to him.”

I dressed, put down some breakfast and caught a stage for the Mexican town. The boy driving the stage made fair time, but you would have thought we were standing still to see a maroon roadster pass us near Palm City. Ashcraft was driving the roadster.

The roadster was empty, standing in front of the adobe house, when I saw it again. Up in the next block, Hooper was doing an imitation of a drunk, talking to two Indians in the uniforms of the Mexican Army.

I knocked on the door of the adobe house.

Kewpie’s voice: “Who is it?”

“Me—Painless. Just heard that Ed is back.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. A pause. “Come in.”

I pushed the door open and went in. The Englishman sat tilted back in a chair, his right elbow on the table, his right hand in his coat pocket—if there was a gun in that pocket it was pointing at me.

“Hello,” he said. “I hear you’ve been making guesses about me.”

“Call ’em anything you like.” I pushed a chair over to within a couple of feet of him, and sat down. “But don’t let’s kid each other. You had Gooseneck knock your wife off so you could get what she had. The mistake you made was in picking a sap like Gooseneck to do the turn—a sap who went on a killing spree and then lost his nerve. Going to read and write just because three or four witnesses put the finger on him! And only going as far as Mexicali! That’s a fine place to pick! I suppose he was so scared that the five- or six-hour ride over the hills seemed like a trip to the end of the world!”

The man’s face told me nothing. He eased himself around in his chair an inch or two, which would have brought the gun in his pocket—if a gun was there—in line with my thick middle. The girl was somewhere behind me, fidgeting around. I was afraid of her. She was crazily in love with this man in front of me, and I had seen the blade she wore on one leg. I imagined her fingers itching for it now. The man and his gun didn’t worry me much. He was not rattle-brained, and he wasn’t likely to bump me off either in panic or for the fun of it.

I kept my chin going.

“You aren’t a sap, Ed, and neither am I. I want to take you riding north with bracelets on, but I’m in no hurry. What I mean is, I’m not going to stand up and trade lead with you. This is all in my daily grind. It isn’t a matter of life or death with me. If I can’t take you today, I’m willing to wait until tomorrow. I’ll get you in the end, unless somebody beats me to you—and that won’t break my heart. There’s a rod between my vest and my belly. If you’ll have Kewpie get it out, we’ll be all set for the talk I want to make.”

He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes from me. The girl came close to my back. One of her hands came over my shoulder, went under my vest, and my old black gun left me. Before she stepped away she laid the point of her knife against the nape of my neck for an instant—a gentle reminder. I managed not to squirm or jump.

“Good,” I said when she gave my gun to the Englishman, who pocketed it with his left hand. “Now here’s my proposition. You and Kewpie ride across the border with me—so we won’t have to fool with extradition papers—and I’ll have you locked up. We’ll do our fighting in court. I’m not absolutely certain that I can tie the killings on either of you, and if I flop, you’ll be free. If I make the grade—as I hope to—you’ll swing, of course. But there’s always a good chance of beating the courts—especially if you’re guilty—and that’s the only chance you have that’s worth a damn.

“What’s the sense of scooting? Spending the rest of your life dodging bulls? Only to be nabbed finally—or bumped off trying to get away? You’ll maybe save your neck, but what of the money your wife left? That money is what you are in the game for—it’s what you had your wife killed for. Stand trial and you’ve a chance to collect it. Run—and you kiss it good-by. Are you going to ditch it—throw it away just because your cat’s-paw bungled the deal? Or are you going to stick to the finish—win everything or lose everything?”

A lot of these boys who make cracks about not being taken alive have been wooed into peaceful surrender with that kind of talk. But my game just now was to persuade Ed and his girl to bolt. If they let me throw them in the can I might be able to convict one of them, but my chances weren’t any too large. It depended on how things turned out later. It depended on whether I could prove that Gooseneck had been in San Francisco on the night of the killings, and I imagined that he would be well supplied with all sorts of proof to the contrary. We had not been able to find a single finger-print of the killer’s in Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. And if I could convince a jury that he was in San Francisco at the time, then I would have to show that he had done the killing. And after that I would have the toughest part of the job still ahead of me—to prove that he had done the killing for one of these two, and not on his own account. I had an idea that when we picked Gooseneck up and put the screws to him he would talk. But that was only an idea.

What I was working for was to make this pair dust out. I didn’t care where they went or what they did, so long as they scooted. I’d trust to luck and my own head to get profit out of their scrambling—I was still trying to stir things up.

The Englishman was thinking hard. I knew I had him worried, chiefly through what I had said about Gooseneck Flinn. If I had pulled the moth-eaten stuff—said that Gooseneck had been picked up and had squealed—this Englishman would have put me down as a liar; but the little I had said was bothering him.

He bit his lip and frowned. Then he shook himself and chuckled.

“You’re balmy, Painless,” he said. “But you—”

I don’t know what he was going to say—whether I was going to win or lose.

The front door slammed open, and Gooseneck Flinn came into the room.

His clothes were white with dust. His face was thrust forward to the full length of his long, yellow neck.

His shoe-button eyes focused on me. His hands turned over. That’s all you could see. They simply turned over—and there was a heavy revolver in each.

“Your paws on the table, Ed,” he snarled.

Ed’s gun—if that is what he had in his pocket—was blocked from a shot at the man in the doorway by a corner of the table. He took his hand out of his pocket, empty, and laid both palms down on the table-top.

“Stay where y’r at!” Gooseneck barked at the girl.

She was standing on the other side of the room. The knife with which she had pricked the back of my neck was not in sight.

Gooseneck glared at me for nearly a minute, but when he spoke it was to Ed and Kewpie.

“So this is what y’ wired me to come back for, huh? A trap! Me the goat for yur! I’ll be y’r goat! I’m goin’ to speak my piece, an’ then I’m goin’ out o’ here if I have to smoke my way through the whole damn’ Mex army! I killed y’r wife all right—an’ her help, too. Killed ’em for the thousand bucks—”

The girl took a step toward him, screaming:

“Shut up, damn you!”

Her mouth was twisting and working like a child’s, and there was water in her eyes.

“Shut up, yourself!” Gooseneck roared back at her, and his thumb raised the hammer of the gun that threatened her. “I’m doin’ the talkin’. I killed her for—”

Kewpie bent forward. Her left hand went under the hem of her skirt. The hand came up—empty. The flash from Gooseneck’s gun lit on a flying steel blade.

The girl spun back across the room—hammered back by the bullets that tore through her chest. Her back hit the wall. She pitched forward to the floor.

Gooseneck stopped shooting and tried to speak. The brown haft of the girl’s knife stuck out of his yellow throat. He couldn’t get his words past the blade. He dropped one gun and tried to take hold of the protruding haft. Half-way up to it his hand came, and dropped. He went down slowly—to his knees—hands and knees—rolled over on his side—and lay still.

I jumped for the Englishman. The revolver Gooseneck had dropped turned under my foot, spilling me sidewise. My hand brushed the Englishman’s coat, but he twisted away from me, and got his guns out.

His eyes were hard and cold and his mouth was shut until you could hardly see the slit of it. He backed slowly across the floor, while I lay still where I had tumbled. He didn’t make a speech. A moment of hesitation in the doorway. The door jerked open and shut. He was gone.

I scooped up the gun that had thrown me, sprang to Gooseneck’s side, tore the other gun out of his dead hand, and plunged into the street. The maroon roadster was trailing a cloud of dust into the desert behind it. Thirty feet from me stood a dirt-caked black touring car. That would be the one in which Gooseneck had driven back from Mexicali.

I jumped for it, climbed in, brought it to life, and pointed it at the dust-cloud ahead.

VIII

The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks—its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. There were still four or five hours of daylight left, and while there was any light at all I couldn’t miss the cloud of dust from the fleeing roadster.

I didn’t know whether we were following a road or not. Sometimes the ground under me looked like one, but mostly it didn’t differ much from the rest of the desert. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.

The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious. But if I was going to avoid playing Indian among the rocks and cactus, I would have to get within striking distance of my man before he deserted his car and started a game of hide and seek on foot. I’m a city man. I have done my share of work in the open spaces, but I don’t like it. My taste in playgrounds runs more to alleys, backyards and cellars than to canyons, mesas and arroyos.

I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up—missed it by a hair—and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.

The roadster was empty. I kept on.

From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bounding and bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.

He fired again from the shelter of his car, and then dashed for a narrow arroyo—a sharp-edged, ten-foot crack in the earth—off to the left. On the brink, he wheeled to snap another cap at me—and jumped down out of sight.

I twisted the wheel in my hands, jammed on the brakes and slid the black touring car to the spot where I had seen him last. The edge of the arroyo was crumbling under my front wheels. I released the brake. Tumbled out. Shoved.

The car plunged down into the gully after him.

Sprawled on my belly, one of Gooseneck’s guns in each hand, I wormed my head over the edge. On all fours, the Englishman was scrambling out of the way of the car. The car was mangled, but still sputtering. One of the man’s fists was bunched around a gun—mine.

“Drop it and stand up, Ed!” I yelled.

Snake-quick, he flung himself around in a sitting position on the arroyo bottom, swung his gun up—and I smashed his forearm with my second shot.

He was holding the wounded arm with his left hand when I slid down beside him, picked up the gun he had dropped, and frisked him to see if he had any more.

He grinned at me.

“You know,” he drawled, “I fancy your true name isn’t Painless Parker at all. You don’t act like it.”

Twisting a handkerchief into a tourniquet of a sort, I knotted it around his wounded arm, which was bleeding.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk,” I suggested, and helped him up the steep side of the gully.

We climbed into his roadster.

“Out of gas,” he said. “We’ve got a nice walk ahead of us.”

“We’ll get a lift. I had a man watching your house, and another one shadowing Gooseneck. They’ll be coming out after me, I reckon. Meanwhile, we have time for a nice heart-to-heart talk.”

“Go ahead, talk your head off,” he invited; “but don’t expect me to add much to the conversation. You’ve got nothing on me.” (I’d like to have a dollar, or even a nickel, for every time I’ve heard that remark!) “You saw Kewpie bump Gooseneck off to keep him from peaching on her.”

“So that’s your play?” I inquired. “The girl hired Gooseneck to kill your wife—out of jealousy—when she learned that you were planning to shake her and return to your own world?”

“Exactly.”

“Not bad, Ed, but there’s one rough spot in it.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” I repeated. “You are not Ashcraft!”

He jumped, and then laughed.

“Now your enthusiasm is getting the better of your judgment,” he kidded me. “Could I have deceived another man’s wife? Don’t you think her lawyer, Richmond, made me prove my identity?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Ed, I think I’m a smarter baby than either of them. Suppose you had a lot of stuff that belonged to Ashcraft—papers, letters, things in his handwriting? If you were even a fair hand with a pen, you could have fooled his wife. She thought her husband had had four tough years and had become a hop-head. That would account for irregularities in his writing. And I don’t imagine you ever got very familiar in your letters—not enough so to risk any missteps. As for the lawyer—his making you identify yourself was only a matter of form. It never occurred to him that you weren’t Ashcraft. Identification is easy, anyway. Give me a week and I’ll prove that I’m the Sultan of Turkey.”

He shook his head sadly.

“That comes from riding around in the sun.”

I went on.

“At first your game was to bleed Mrs. Ashcraft for an allowance—to take the cure. But after she closed out her affairs in England and came here, you decided to wipe her out and take everything. You knew she was an orphan and had no close relatives to come butting in. You knew it wasn’t likely that there were many people in America who could say you were not Ashcraft. Now if you want to you can do your stalling for just as long as it takes us to send a photograph of you to England—to be shown to the people that knew him there. But you understand that you will do your stalling in the can, so I don’t see what it will get you.”

“Where do you think Ashcraft would be while I was spending his money?”

There were only two possible guesses. I took the more reasonable one.

“Dead.”

I imagined his mouth tightened a little, so I took another shot, and added:

“Up north.”

That got to him, though he didn’t get excited. But his eyes became thoughtful behind his smile. The United States is all “up north” from Tijuana, but it was even betting that he thought I meant Seattle, where the last record of Ashcraft had come from.

“You may be right, of course,” he drawled. “But even at that, I don’t see just how you expect to hang me. Can you prove that Kewpie didn’t think I was Ashcraft? Can you prove that she knew why Mrs. Ashcraft was sending me money? Can you prove that she knew anything about my game? I rather think not. There are still any number of reasons for her to have been jealous of this other woman.

“I’ll do my bit for fraud, Painless, but you’re not going to swing me. The only two who could possibly tie anything on me are dead behind us. Maybe one of them told you something. What of it? You know damned well that you won’t be allowed to testify to it in court. What someone who is now dead may have told you—unless the person it affects was present—isn’t evidence, and you know it.”

“You may get away with it,” I admitted. “Juries are funny, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d be happier if I knew a few things about those murders that I don’t know. Do you mind telling me about the ins and outs of your switch with Ashcraft—in Seattle?”

He squinted his blue eyes at me.

“You’re a puzzling chap, Painless,” he said. “I can’t tell whether you know everything, or are just sharp-shooting.” He puckered his lips and then shrugged. “I’ll tell you. It won’t matter greatly. I’m due to go over for this impersonation, so a confession to a little additional larceny won’t matter.”

IX

“The hotel-sneak used to be my lay,” the Englishman said after a pause. “I came to the States after England and the Continent got uncomfortable. I was rather good at it. I had the proper manner—the front. I could do the gentleman without sweating over it, you know. In fact there was a day, not so long ago, when I wasn’t ‘Liverpool Ed.’ But you don’t want to hear me brag about the select blood that flows through these veins.

“To get back to our knitting: I had rather a successful tour on my first American voyage. I visited most of the better hotels between New York and Seattle, and profited nicely. Then, one night in a Seattle hotel, I worked the tarrel and put myself into a room on the fourth floor. I had hardly closed the door behind me before another key was rattling in it. The room was night-dark. I risked a flash from my light, picked out a closet door, and got behind it just in time.

“The clothes closet was empty; rather a stroke of luck, since there was nothing in it for the room’s occupant to come for. He—it was a man—had switched on the lights by then.

“He began pacing the floor. He paced it for three solid hours—up and down, up and down, up and down—while I stood behind the closet door with my gun in my hand, in case he should pull it open. For three solid hours he paced that damned floor. Then he sat down and I heard a pen scratching on paper. Ten minutes of that and he was back at his pacing; but he kept it up for only a few minutes this time. I heard the latches of a valise click. And a shot!

“I bounded out of my retreat. He was stretched on the floor, with a hole in the side of his head. A bad break for me, and no mistake! I could hear excited voices in the corridor. I stepped over the dead chap, found the letter he had been writing on the writing-desk. It was addressed to Mrs. Norman Ashcraft, at a Wine Street number in Bristol, England. I tore it open. He had written that he was going to kill himself, and it was signed Norman. I felt better. A murder couldn’t be made out of it.

“Nevertheless, I was here in this room with a flashlight, skeleton keys, and a gun—to say nothing of a handful of jewelry that I had picked up on the next floor. Somebody was knocking on the door.

“‘Get the police!’ I called through the door, playing for time.

“Then I turned to the man who had let me in for all this. I would have pegged him for a fellow Britisher even if I hadn’t seen the address on his letter. There are thousands of us on the same order—blond, fairly tall, well set up. I took the only chance there was. His hat and topcoat were on a chair where he had tossed them. I put them on and dropped my hat beside him. Kneeling, I emptied his pockets, and my own, gave him all my stuff, pouched all of his. Then I traded guns with him and opened the door.

“What I had in mind was that the first arrivals might not know him by sight, or not well enough to recognize him immediately. That would give me several seconds to arrange my disappearance in. But when I opened the door I found that my idea wouldn’t work out as I had planned. The house detective was there, and a policeman, and I knew I was licked. There would be little chance of sneaking away from them. But I played my hand out. I told them I had come up to my room and found this chap on the floor going through my belongings. I had seized him, and in the struggle had shot him.

“Minutes went by like hours, and nobody denounced me. People were calling me Mr. Ashcraft. My impersonation was succeeding. It had me gasping then, but after I learned more about Ashcraft it wasn’t so surprising. He had arrived at the hotel only that afternoon, and no one had seen him except in his hat and coat—the hat and coat I was wearing. We were of the same size and type—typical blond Englishmen.

“Then I got another surprise. When the detective examined the dead man’s clothes he found that the maker’s labels had been ripped out. When I got a look at his diary, later, I found the explanation of that. He had been tossing mental coins with himself, alternating between a determination to kill himself, and another to change his name and make a new place for himself in the world—putting his old life behind him. It was while he was considering the second plan that he had removed the markers from all of his clothing.

“But I didn’t know that while I stood there among those people. All I knew was that miracles were happening. I met the miracles half-way, not turning a hair, accepting everything as a matter of course. I think the police smelled something wrong, but they couldn’t put their hands on it. There was the dead man on the floor, with a prowler’s outfit in his pockets, a pocketful of stolen jewelry, and the labels gone from his clothes—a burglar’s trick. And there I was—a well-to-do Englishman whom the hotel people recognized as the room’s rightful occupant.

“I had to talk small just then, but after I went through the dead man’s stuff I knew him inside and outside, backward and forward. He had nearly a bushel of papers, and a diary that had everything he had ever done or thought in it. I put in the first night studying those things—memorizing them—and practicing his signature. Among the other things I had taken from his pockets were fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, and I wanted to be able to get them cashed in the morning.

“I stayed in Seattle for three days—as Norman Ashcraft. I had tumbled into something rich and I wasn’t going to throw it away. The letter to his wife would keep me from being charged with murder if anything slipped, and I knew I was safer seeing the thing through than running. When the excitement had quieted down I packed up and came down to San Francisco, resuming my own name—Edward Bohannon. But I held onto all of Ashcraft’s property, because I had learned from it that his wife had money, and I knew I could get some of it if I played my cards right.

“She saved me the trouble of figuring out a deal for myself. I ran across one of her advertisements in the Examiner, answered it, and—here we are.”

I looked toward Tijuana. A cloud of yellow dust showed in a notch between two low hills. That would be the machine in which Gorman and Hooper were tracking me. Hooper would have seen me set out after the Englishman, would have waited for Gorman to arrive in the car in which he had followed Gooseneck from Mexicali—Gorman would have had to stay some distance in the rear—and then both of the operatives would have picked up my trail.

I turned to the Englishman.

“But you didn’t have Mrs. Ashcraft killed?”

He shook his head.

“You’ll never prove it.”

“Maybe not,” I admitted.

I took a package of cigarettes out of my pocket and put two of them on the seat between us.

“Suppose we play a game. This is just for my own satisfaction. It won’t tie anybody to anything—won’t prove anything. If you did a certain thing, pick up the cigarette that is nearer me. If you didn’t do that thing, pick up the one nearer you. Will you play?”

“No, I won’t,” he said emphatically. “I don’t like your game. But I do want a cigarette.”

He reached out his uninjured arm and picked up the cigarette nearer me.

“Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Now I hate to tell you this, but I’m going to swing you.”

“You’re balmy, my son.”

“You’re thinking of the San Francisco job, Ed,” I explained. “I’m talking about Seattle. You, a hotel sneak-thief, were discovered in a room with a man who had just died with a bullet in his head. What do you think a jury will make out of that, Ed?”

He laughed at me. And then something went wrong with the laugh. It faded into a sickly grin.

“Of course you did,” I said. “When you started to work out your plan to inherit all of Mrs. Ashcraft’s wealth by having her killed, the first thing you did was to destroy that suicide letter of her husband’s. No matter how carefully you guarded it, there was always a chance that somebody would stumble into it and knock your game on the head. It had served its purpose—you wouldn’t need it. It would be foolish to take a chance on it turning up.

“I can’t put you up for the murders you engineered in San Francisco; but I can sock you with the one you didn’t do in Seattle—so justice won’t be cheated. You’re going to Seattle, Ed, to hang for Ashcraft’s suicide.”

And he did.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Foreword” Copyright © 2016 by Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “The House in Turk Street,” “The Girl with Silver Eyes,” and “The Golden Horseshoe” Copyright © 1924 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

978-1-5040-3598-9

Published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.mysteriouspress.com

www.openroadmedia.com

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Foreword” Copyright © 2016 by Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “The House in Turk Street,” “The Girl with Silver Eyes,” and “The Golden Horseshoe” Copyright © 1924 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

978-1-5040-3598-9

Published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.mysteriouspress.com

www.openroadmedia.com

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Foreword: “Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

Introduction: The Middle Years, 1924–1925

The House in Turk Street

The Girl with Silver Eyes

The Golden Horseshoe

About the Author

Copyright