It was Jane, slumped down there at his feet. He recognized the camel’s hair coat she wore.
He knelt down and gasped.
It wasn’t Jane, but Kay Thayer who lay on the pine needles, her face streaming with blood.
“Kay! Are you hurt—”
“Go after him,” she said. “I’m not – not really she made a tremendous effort, “really hurt. Just battered, that’s all. Get the louse—”
Asey howled for the troopers.
“Hey, you! Here! This way, in the pines! Over here! Ahoy, there!”
He continued to yell until the two found him.
“Look after her,” he ordered. “Take her back to the hollow, an’ for God’s sakes, look for—”
“Where are you going, Mayo?”
“After the fellow. No, don’t you come. You watch out for her. Phone Lane, an’ Doc Cummings if she needs him—” Asey slid between two pines in the direction he thought the other person had taken.
Again he heard that strange laugh. The fog played with it and distorted it into something horrible and inhuman.
“Huh,” Asey muttered to himself, “with a pig an’ a canary bird, he’d coin money with Major Bowes—”
He couldn’t tell from what point of the compass the sound came. But in all probability, the fellow would stick quietly in the pines for a little while, where the going was soft and wouldn’t give him away. He’d have to make some noise when he cut out of the pine patch; the bayberries and scrub oaks and low underbrush would offer too good a sound track for anyone who might follow.
Asey paused.
Probably the fellow would wait to see if he were pursued. It was the sensible thing to do. Then, when he was certain that he was safe, he’d probably stroll off. There was everything to win by waiting, and everything to lose by making a hurried exit at this point.
“An’ so,” Asey thought, “I’ll out-wait you.”
Catlike, he swung himself up into one of the pines and prepared to wait.
By the greatest luck in the world, when he called the troopers he had given no hint of how many there were. Perhaps, if the fellow heard the two of them taking Kay back, he might figure it was Asey and a trooper, and that no one had started after him.
Closing his eys, Asey listened with all his might and main.
The branches above him rustled. In the distance he could hear Kay and the others making their way back to the house.
He wondered what in thunder the girl had been doing out here, anyway. Sara had promised to look out for them all, and here was Kay, out in these godforsaken woods, being slammed around by their man. For all the good Sara was doing, she might be first cousin to the fellow. Sara would hear from him, Asey told himself. Marching around with her sleepwalking, and inviting this girl to the house – not that the girl hadn’t been more of a help than a hindrance, but it was the principle of the thing. The shotgun was a help, and just being able to put herself into a position where this fellow had to declare himself, that was a help, too.
Kay would have told him if she had recognized the man. Obviously she hadn’t. But she would be able to tell him something about him, whether he was tall or short or fat or thin, and if he had spoken, what his voice sounded like. Or if he smelled of fish or tobacco or possibly perfume. Asey gave Kay full credit. She would have picked out some detail or other. Most women would have gone to pieces entirely, but Kay was too matter of fact. She had probably been frightened to pieces, but she still had sufficient sense to yell her head off. She would have found something out for him.
Asey could no longer hear the sound of the trio returning to the house, but now the fireworks were beginning to boom and splutter. A perverse wind faithfully swept every decibel and every echo over to the patch of pines in the hollow, giving Asey’s quarry every chance in the world to leave, if he so desired; he could, Asey thought, beat a drum and still leave no clew to his whereabouts.
Mentally Asey cursed General Phil- brick and his fireworks with all the vocabulary he had picked up in all his years at sea. Long before he finished, General Philbrick had been reduced to something you could hide in an envelope and drop into a letter box.
Once or twice he thought of giving up and returning home. The man was probably miles away by now. On the other hand, he had nothing to lose by staying.
For more than twenty minutes the fireworks boomed and crackled. Asey waited a quarter of an hour more and then decided to start back.
One foot was already reaching for the branch below when he heard another branch snap somewhere near him. A second later a light flashed on and then as quickly flashed off.
The fellow had returned to the place where Kay had been – of course! Dropped something, most likely. Something that he had no time to grab when Asey came running up, but something he had no intention of having found by anyone. That was how he had spent his time during the fireworks, edging back to that spot.
Asey dropped lightly out of the tree and started toward the place where the light had been.
He wanted more than anything else to race after the fellow as fast as his legs could carry him. But he restrained himself. Once he made a sound, the fellow would freeze into silence again, and while Asey tried to hunt, he would make an excellent target of himself. Using the flashlight was out of the question. In the fog, like a headlight, it would glow for a distance, but it wouldn’t actually illuminate more than ten or fifteen feet.
Asey stalked along. At first he was sure that the man did not know of his presence, but as he continued he became less positive.
He stopped for a moment, to listen and make certain that he was still on the right track. A blackberry vine pulled at his ankle; it was caught between the upper part of his shoe and the rubber sole, and in pulling it off, he made just the slightest noise. To him it sounded like more of General Philbrick’s fireworks, and he automatically drew back beside a tree.
Something whizzed past him, and he heard a popping sound.
Asey held his breath and tried to fit as much of himself as he could behind the tree.
The fellow was using a silencer.
Asey grinned. In his hip pocket was a full tin of pipe tobacco. He drew it out and threw it as far as he could to the right.
It hit a tree trunk and made a splendid clatter, and Asey waited, with his forty-five in hand, for the fellow to do something about it.
Two bullets thudded into nearby trees, and then two more.
“My, my,” Asey muttered. “He don’t like me.”
He could guess now where the fellow was, so he answered with three shots.
Somewhere away off in the distance, three shots replied to his. Asey nodded. That was Lane, or some one of his men, and they would be heartily welcome.
As the noise of the shots died out, the fellow began to run, apparently realizing that Asey was having reinforcements. Asey went after him.
In the chase that followed, he began to understand how Zeb Chase had felt the previous Saturday night.
No matter how grimly he continued, or how many times he tried to raise his speed, the man was always ahead, and just far enough ahead that Asey actually never once saw him. Once he took a pot shot, but a pot shot had no effect on that speeding, twisting, dodging human.
“If,” Asey thought, “the man is human!”
By degrees they circled around to where the ground sloped to the pond and the surrounding marshes.
When they reached the beginning of the marsh land, Asey slowed up.
He had no knowledge of this particular spot, but he knew enough about those treacherous muddy marshes in general to be very wary. In his childhood the marshes near his home had been to wandering cattle what the automobile later became to wandering dogs. A series of pictures flashed through his mind – the time his father’s best mare had gone down in a mud hole over by Holbrook’s, and the hastily improvised blocks and tackles, and the lanterns flickering, and finally his uncle borrowing a shotgun from Nate Holbrook.
The strange laug
h floated out ahead of him, but Asey stood still. Not even on the chance of catching a murderer would he let himself be manoeuvred toward that ground.
Instead he sat down and loaded his forty-five.
According to his calculations, he was on the edge of the swampy land east of the pond, and not over three hundred yards from the ice house where he had been with Kay and Brinley and the soprano earlier in the day.
Somewhere, this fellow must have a car. There were two approaches to the pond, the short narrow lane which he and Kay had used, and the road where Brinley had left his machine. The latter road was by far the better, but it was also farther from the pond and harder to reach in a hurry. But it seemed to Asey that if he were in this fellow’s shoes, he would prefer having a greater distance to cover in an emergency to the chance of being bottled up in that narrow path. It was about three to one that the car was parked on the east road.
Asey decided to abandon the chase and investigate the line of retreat. Trying to catch this fellow was on a par with trying to catch the greased pig at the old Barnstable fairs, the principal difference being that the pig at least was visible.
After three unsuccessful attempts, he finally reached the east road.
A parked car loomed out of the fog directly ahead of him, and the sight nearly made him whoop.
He waited in the bushes, flashlight in one hand, forty-five in the other. This business was going to come to a finish, right then and there.
At last the man came, sliding out of the underbrush so quietly that Asey almost missed him.
The fellow was panting, Asey noted with pleasure. His breath was in short quick gasps and he walked as though he were utterly exhausted. Asey knew how those feet felt. His felt exactly the same way.
The man was abreast of him.
Asey’s light flashed into his face and the forty-five ground above the fellow’s belt buckle.
“Reah – my God! So it’s you, is it, J. Arthur? Brother Brinley, the old – say, it is you, isn’t it?”
J. Arthur was shaking from head to foot.
“It’s me – who – are – is it Asey?”
“Old Mayo,” Asey said. “Nurmi Mayo. You turn around. That’s it. Keep on reaching. That’s right, J. Arthur. You don’t mind if I admit to bein’ flabbergasted, do you? I’d never suspected it in a hundred years. Feel this gun borin’ into your back? You do? Well, J. Arthur, you behave, or it’ll go off, with r’sults that’ll be a rev’lation to you.”
With the flashlight propped between his jacket buttonholes, Asey’s free left hand patted Brinley’s pockets.
“Not in a shoulder holster – my, my, what’d you do with your pop gun an’ silencer?” Asey asked. “Dropped ’em into the pond, did you? Or what?”
“What do you mean? I—”
“Brinley,” Asey said, “there’s no two-year-old in the world who wouldn’t tell you this is not the time to bluster. Pick up both feet, laddie, an’ march along the road. We ain’t takin’ to the bush no more tonight. That’s it. Just you hep right along. I’m behind you. March.”
Brinley marched.
“Can’t we,” he said breathlessly after a minute or two, “go in my car? That’s my car, there—”
“I just couldn’t trust myself to take rides with you, J. Arthur. Not after tonight. I somehow feel I mightn’t get a chance to walk home. I might just be tossed out. No, I think we’ll walk it.” Before they reached the main road, Brinley stopped short.
“Carry on, feller,” Asey said.
“It’s my corns,” Brinley said. “Really, I would like to take my shoes off. They hurt. And do I have to go along the main road with my arms up like this? I’d hate to have anyone see me – and besides, I don’t understand what this is all about, anyway! What is this all about?”
“The trouble with people like you,” Asey said, “is that other people don’t take ’em serious until it’s too late. When you get a comb’nation of a henpecked husband, an’ a Mister Milquetoast, who tries to be pompous an’ blustery, it’s sort of misleadin’. You don’t expect – whoa – you don’t turn around, J. Arthur, you—”
“I will so turn around!” Brinley said. “What I do is my business, and you have no right to interfere!”
“You might just as well save your breath,” Asey said, “an’ march along – hey, who’s that?”
Someone was calling his name. “Asey, Asey Mayo! Where are you?” Asey bellowed back, and shortly Hamilton appeared from the woods.
“You got him! Who – Brinley? Well, I’m damned!”
“He’s tryin’,” Asey said, “to be innocenter than a new born lamb. I hand it to him.”
“What went on?”
“I don’t know about the first part of it,” Asey said. “But he’s been givin’ me a workout I won’t forget in years. Had a little silencer arrangement, an’ used it lavish. Tried to bog me, too, but I r’fused to be bogged. How’s Kay? You seen her?”
“I guess she’s all right. She was up at the house, and Cummings was looking after her. Had a scalp wound. Just a scratch, but it bled a lot. I didn’t wait to hear her story. I started out for you. Lane’s out, too, and a bunch of his boys.”
“Did you get Prettyman off all right?” Asey asked.
Hamilton laughed. “That guy is a pip, Asey. He got on the train and walked smack up to Burley and said, ‘Let’s be friends, it’s so much easier that way.’ They got a wire from Burley before I left Boston. He said they were getting along swell. He said – hey, what’s the matter, Brinley? Get going!”
J. Arthur turned around.
“I will not,” he announced firmly, “move one more step until I have taken my shoes off, and I will not move very many steps after that! I tell you, my feet hurt!”
“With Hamilton here to help cope with you,” Asey said, “I can afford to be gen’rous. Go ahead.”
“Watch out,” Hamilton warned. “Wait, Brinley. I had a guy nearly kill me once, taking a stone out of his shoe. Little gadget in his shoe fired a slug. I’ll take the shoes off for you. Stick up a foot.”
Despite Brinley’s protests that he was perfectly able to remove his own shoes, Hamilton pulled them off.
“Okay,” he said. “And what fancy shoes you wear—”
“Say,” Asey interrupted, “I got a – let me see them shoes, Hamilton. I didn’t think to—”
They were white buckskin oxfords with leather soles.
“Put on your light an’ watch him, Ham,” Asey said. “I want to look into these things.”
They were not just white buckskin shoes, they were the whitest buckskin shoes Asey had ever seen. There wasn’t a scratch or a mark or a smudge on them. They were brand new.
Asey looked down at his own rubber- soled brown leather shoes. Briars and blackberry vines had scarred the leather in two dozen places. There were broken pine needles stuck in the lacings. The toes were wet. Lumps of dirt and mud from the lowlands showed on the toe and along the side.
He raised one foot. A mixture of leaves and dirt was packed solidly in the space between the low heel and the instep.
And J. Arthur’s buckskin shoes were white, and the leather sole was barely damp.
“He could have changed’em.” Hamilton voiced his own thoughts.
“Them, but he couldn’t have changed his whole outfit, Ham. Look at them pants,” Asey said. “Cuffs all clean. An’ his shirt. An’ collar. An’ tie. An’ then look at me. Hamilton, I wonder if I ain’t been pretty much of a plumb out an’ out fool!”
J. Arthur coughed. The cough said, plainer than words could have, that Asey had stated the case with admirable exactitude and clarity.
“Brinley,” Asey said in a subdued voice, “what was you doing up there? What’s your story?”
“Why, after I got home,” Brinley said, “Walter Rutledge called and told me that Win Billings had run off, and would I help hunt for him. I’d got my clothes off, and I didn’t want to much, but I felt that I ought to, and Bessie was busy around the house –
she hasn’t had a speck of time to get things done, of course – and she said, why not help for a little while. She thought it was my place to. So I changed my mind and told Walter I’d come—”
“Those your usual clothes for huntin’ people on a wet night?” Asey asked.
“Bessie had put out my clean things for tomorrow,” Brinley said, “and I never realized it until I got over to Walt’s, later. Walt said that Win had probably made for the woods somewhere, and I thought of the ice house – they say Win lived there one winter – so I came up here. I know the way pretty well, because of taking Amos up so often, and I thought I’d just look here and then go, and I wouldn’t get dirty. As a matter of fact,” he added in a burst of honesty, “I didn’t think Win could have got this far from town, and I didn’t go all the way to the ice house at all. These are my last clean pants, and the cleaner’s man doesn’t come till day after tomorrow.”
“Huh,” Asey said. “An’ there are lots of others out huntin’ Win Billin’s, too?”
“Oh, yes. Weston and Jeff Leach – that’s why I thought I’d better go, if they were taking the trouble. There were a dozen or so others. Jeff and Wes had a town map, and were marking off spots where Win might be, and everyone had a spot to go to—”
“Didn’t you take any kind of light with you?”
“I had a flash, but I lost it in the woods,” Brinley said. “I thought I knew the path pretty well, but I stumbled and lost the light, and rather than get dirty, I just turned around and came back. It must have been washed out in the rain, that tree root. I’m sure I don’t remember it whenever I’ve brought Amos up here, and I take that path so often—”
“Who was you with durin’ the fireworks tonight?”
“Sara, and Jane, and Jeff, and Bessie,” Brinley said, “and a lot of others. The fireworks weren’t very good tonight. The dampness, I guess. There’s no fog uptown now, and the radio says fair tomorrow, and I do hope it clears off for the tag day—”
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