Holliday began to cook a festive meal. The smells were savory and delicious, but Cheechako’s nose suddenly attracted him to an unusual spot. He went tentatively toward Holliday’s bunk. Being a well-mannered dog, he knew he should never climb upon his master’s bed, but something drew him there irresistibly. He sniffed, and Dugans’ smell was suddenly that of a thing in deadly fear. Cheechako turned his head and regarded him puzzledly. Dugan’s scent was on his master’s blankets, too, and Dugan had no business to be there. Cheechako sniffed, bewildered.
This other odor—
“There’s just one thing,” said Holliday with a sudden wistful gravity. “Old Sam’s dead. I told you how he was murdered. I wish—well, I wish he was going Outside with me.”
The faint rumbling outside that sounded like millstones grinding grew suddenly loud and harsh, as if the stones were crumbling up the last stray grains that had been fed to them. Cheechako cocked his ears, but that was only a noise. There was a queer smell on his master’s bunk. He heaved up his forepaws to sniff it more nearly.
“Cheechako!” snapped Dugan. Dugan had gone suddenly pale, and more than ever he had the smell of fear about him.
Holliday lifted his head and a curious expression came upon his face. Dugan went over and took Cheechako by the collar.
“Shedding fleas on your bunk,” he said to Holliday, grinning. “But he ought to share in the celebration, too. Got any molasses?”
He knew, of course. He reached up and took down the bottle of syrup Holliday had saved as a supreme luxury.
“Taught a dog to do this once,” grinned Dugan. “Here, you, Cheechako! Open your mouth!”
Cheechako sniffed at his leg. Then he saw the bottle. His eyes danced. Dugan had remembered at last! He jumped up to lick eagerly.
“Ho!” roared Dugan, as Cheechako struggled frantically to coax out the sticky sweet stuff faster than it would flow. “I knew you’d like it! Watch him, Holliday!”
Holliday straightened up.
“You’ve never heard me call that dog ‘Cheechako,’” he said queerly. “I’ve always called him ‘Pup.’ The only other man who’d know his name would be Sam Carson and—” Holliday’s voice changed swiftly—“and the man who killed him! And that trick—By God, you’re Sam Carson’s murderer!”
His revolver flashed out. Dugan gasped. The bottle fell to the floor and Cheechako lapped eagerly at its exuding contents.
“You shot him from behind,” said Holliday savagely. “With your gun not a foot from his head! Get out that gun now, Dugan. I give you just two seconds!”
Dugan’s teeth chattered. His eyes darted despairingly to the bunk. Holliday’s face was like stone. There was no faintest trace of mercy in it. With a sudden squeal like that of a cornered rat, Dugan rushed for him.
And Holliday’s revolver was out and in his hand, but Dugan’s open-handed attack brought an instinctive response in kind. His free fist shot out in a terrific blow. It caught Dugan squarely between the eyes and hurled him backward. He staggered, and his foot crushed Cheechako’s paw. The dog leaped up with a yelp and bared teeth and his movement was enough to upset Dugan’s balance completely. He toppled backward and a sudden terrible scream filled all the cabin.
He fell against the bunk and his arms clutched wildly, while his face showed only frozen horror. Then he crashed down on the blankets.
And there was a bellowing roar and a burst of smoke from the bunk. Dugan did not even shudder. He lay quite still. Presently a sullen little “drip-drip-drip” sounded on the floor.
Holliday bent over and pawed among the blankets. He brought out a curious little contrivance, very much like a trap. It was a board with a revolver tied to it and a thong so arranged that pressure on the thong would discharge the revolver into the source of the pressure.
Cheechako sniffed at it. It was the source of the peculiar odor he had noted in his master’s bunk. He wagged his tail placatingly and looked up at Holliday.
“Right where my head would have gone,” said Holliday, shuddering a little in spite of himself, “when I lay down to sleep. And he was going to stay here overnight. I see how he killed Carson now. Pfaugh!”
Sick with disgust, and a little shaken, he flung down the board.
Holliday did not go down-river at daybreak. It was nearer noon when he started. And instead of one deeply-carved cross in the ground about the cabin there were two. One read:
SAM CARSON MURDERED JUNE 2, 19—
And the other:
HIS MURDERER JUNE 2, 19—
Holliday paddled down the river with Cheechako in the bow of his canoe, looking with bright and curious eyes at all that was to be seen. Holliday had the gold that he had washed out himself during the winter. He had, besides, gold taken from Dugan’s pokes to the amount that Dugan had stolen. The surplus he had scattered in the river. He did not want it. He was going Outside to the girl who had waited for him.
And the mill? Oh, the mill had ground up all its grist. It stopped, until one day a half-breed killed a white man in some dispute over an Indian woman, and the echo of the shot traveled thinly over the wilds. And then a faint rumbling murmur set up which might, of course, have been the wind in the trees, or a landslide in the hills not so very far away. But, equally, of course, it might not.
TELETYPE
Originally published in Collier’s, March 15, 1936, as by “Will F. Jenkins.”
Bob Callahan’s brother-in-law Timmy came out of the west in a stolen automobile, which seemed to have nothing at all to do with punched-card machines or teletypes or pins with fancily colored heads to be stuck into large-scale maps. But it did. The first card was punched with information about Timmy when he went to jail, and there were other holes punched in it on later occasions. The teletype machines were actuated by events following his release. Some teletype memos caused the extravagantly tinted pins to be stuck into the map.
Callahan and his wife, Jeanne, of course, did not know about any of this. Their first information came one night while they watched the eleven-o’clock television news before going to bed. The children were already sound asleep. There was quite a lot on the newscast about the Suffolk holdup and murder of three days before, including pictures of the victim’s widow and children. Callahan and Jeanne felt sorry for those people, who had done nothing to merit disaster. But then the television went on to show pictures of the first trials of a new jet plane. And Callahan and Jeanne watched, letting the Suffolk robbery slip from their minds. Naturally they did not think about Timmy.
A long distance away, a card-sorting machine prosaically ran thousands of square-punched bits of pasteboard under groping, tiny, metal fingers. This was at state-police headquarters. From time to time, abruptly, a card would pop out of the flowing mass. A teletype absentmindedly clocked down the information that this man, description so-and-so, was wanted for abandoning his family. This boy, aged fourteen, had run away from home. A certain-named burglar was believed to be operating in this special area. A filling-station operator had been killed during a holdup, apparently as he tried to telephone an alarm.
Identical memos appeared in many diverse places. Teletypes duplicated, click by click, each one. In some places a particular item caused action. In other places, the action consisted only of reading the item into a microphone, for far-ranging state troopers’ cars to pick up.
But always each item of information was ultimately put onto a punched card, which could be filed and found by the card machines, and its information decoded or added to.
* * * *
It was just after eleven o’clock that night when Callahan heard a car drawing up to the curb before his house. It stopped. Jeanne cocked an ear toward the sound. Someone slammed a car door outside. Jeanne was in the act of rising when the doorbell rang.
She went out into the hall. The only sound, then, was the mellifluous voice of the news announcer, continuing
. Of course Callahan heard Jeanne’s footsteps on the floor. He heard her turn the doorknob. He heard her stifled exclamation. A moment later she reappeared in the living-room doorway. She was deathly white. “Bob! It’s Timmy!” she said through stiff lips.
Callahan did not quite grasp it for a moment. Then he rose slowly, his expression growing dogged. Timmy came into the room in exactly the manner of someone making a grand entrance. He looked sharp. He wore new clothes. They were expensive. They were elaborately pressed. Timmy always had sharp-edged creases in his trousers, and he scorned the kind of haberdashery that Callahan wore. He grinned. He was ostentatiously at ease.
Callahan said in a flat voice, “You made a break, Timmy? And you expect us to hide you? It wouldn’t be a good idea, you know.”
“You pain me, Bob,” said Timmy facetiously. The tone did not suit him; he was just a little over twenty. “You hurt my feelings. No, it isn’t a break. Haven’t you ever heard of parole boards? They shook their fingers at me and told me not to be naughty any more. So I’m out.”
He moved negligently, and it was additionally evident that his shirt was high-priced, and his necktie expensive. Timmy had a gift for making such matters clear.
“You undoubtedly have proof of that,” said Callahan without heat. “Mind letting me see it?”
Timmy grinned again, triumphantly. He reached into his pocket and brought out a folded document. He put it in Callahan’s hand. “You’re so cynical!” he said.
Callahan read, while the television set, in a series of eight-second flashes, displayed and recited the virtues of dog food, a deodorant, and a forthcoming boxing match.
He handed the document back to Timmy. “It’s a parole, all right,” he said evenly. “We didn’t know it was going to happen so soon.”
Jeanne looked sick, standing in the doorway. Callahan knew what she was thinking. The children. They went to school now. They knew that they had an Uncle Timmy, but they never asked questions about him. He was only a name. But Timmy had been involved in a very nasty business back in Canton. There had been a trial, and Timmy had called Jeanne as a witness to an alibi he’d tried to establish, and she had told the truth. She’d slanted it to favor Timmy, but he’d needed perjury.
So he’d gone to prison with his three partners. The four of them had posed and postured self-consciously during their trial. Callahan hated them horribly. They were fools, of course, but it is hard not to hate fools when they hurt your wife and children.
“You’ve prospered,” Callahan said in the same flat voice. “I don’t want to know how. Why did you come here?”
“To see my dear, dear sister,” said Timmy, grinning broadly, “who tried so hard to help me be a good little boy!”
The muscles of Callahan’s jaw bunched. Then he opened his mouth to speak—and shrugged his shoulders instead. You can talk to a man who listens to hear what you say; if you tell him something sensible, he may act on it. But Timmy listened only for a chance to score wittily in reply. He admired himself very much, did Timmy.
“Cut it!” Callahan snapped. “What do you want?”
“I need some gas for my car,” said Timmy, with bright eyes.
“I’ll buy you gas,” Callahan said. “I’ll give you eating money to get along with too, if that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t,” said Timmy. “I can buy gas. I’ve got a swell car. Big. Yellow. Two-eighty horsepower. Special trim. Best car I ever had.”
Callahan looked at him. Timmy grinned. “I—borrowed it,” he explained. “Cops are looking for it. Nosy guys, cops!”
Callahan ground his teeth. There is no law that insists a man must help his brother-in-law because of loyalty to his wife. But a man will do much to keep his children from learning about an uncle—their mother’s brother—who at least once has grinned triumphantly in a prisoner’s dock because he has risen from the distinction of delinquency to the eminence of adult crime.
“In fact,” said Timmy, brightly, “last time I went to get some gas, the guy there looked at the license plates too long. I started to drive away and he ducked inside his place. I went back and he was telephoning. I—stopped him.”
Jeanne caught her breath.
Callahan said harshly: “You’re stuck, then. There’ll be roadblocks, eh? So you came here to be caught? Figured I’d have to get you out of it?”
Timmy beamed. Callahan swore softly. Jeanne tried to speak, but Callahan knew what she’d say.
He said: “Shut up, Jeanne. I’m going to get him away, damn him!”
* * * *
Far away, the machine that swiftly felt the faces of punched cards following through it ejected one card, and another, and two more, and still another. A man picked them up and took them to a teletype. They constituted a memo and a list of names and addresses. There had been certain crimes, which climaxed in the theft of a rich man’s ostentatious car. There had been the Suffolk holdup and murder. And now there had been something else: a filling-station holdup and the killing of the filling-station attendant.
The card-sorting machine had gone through thousands of punched cards, looking for individual cards with highly individual combinations of punches. It had found a total of a dozen. The cards said—the punched holes did—that the wanted man was most probably one of a dozen named men. The crimes, taken together, had certain aspects that were like signatures. A painter can be told by his brushwork, and a writer by his style. A holdup man’s work has certain mannerisms, certain distinctive features, by which an expert or a business machine can determine the “school” of craftsmen to which he belongs. Often he can be identified outright. It is the method of an art critic applied electronically to crime. The machine had felt thousands of cards, successively, with tiny metal fingers. It announced an opinion: one of these dozen men was guilty.
This opinion went on teletype to many towns and cities. Those near the home addresses of the dozen suspects took action.
* * * *
In the living room of his house, Callahan stuffed a pair of heavy gloves into the pocket of his coat and then patted Jeanne’s shoulder comfortingly. “It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m in no danger. Timmy’s a fool, but not a big enough fool to do me any harm.”
“You’re wrong,” said Timmy. “I’m no fool. You’re just the same as anybody else to me. If anything goes wrong—” He stared menacingly at Callahan. His eyes were ugly. “If you got any idea of crossing me up,” Timmy went on, in sudden shrillness, “you forget it. She crossed me up, once—my own sister told on me on the witness stand! If she’d said what I told her to, I wouldn’t have spent two years where I did. You better not cross me up!”
Callahan ignored the threat. He led the way out of the house.
It was quite dark outside. The town of Bainbridge had street lights, but there were not enough of them to make any considerable glare in the sky. There were only one or two lighted windows visible from Callahan’s front porch. It was nearly midnight now, and there was practically no traffic.
The car outside Callahan’s door was yellow and big. It was shiny. It was luxurious. And it was stolen. It was not a car to steal for resale. It was not even a good getaway car. But it was the sort of car that went with Timmy’s very sharp clothes. It gave a dramatic impression of prosperity and importance. When a very young man drove it, to innocent eyes it would seem that he must be very rich indeed.
Callahan regarded it sardonically. “You must believe in advertising,” he said dryly. “You couldn’t attract more attention to yourself if you painted a sign on it, saying, ‘Look at me!’”
But Timmy was mollified by what he considered admiration. “It’s a nice car,” he said defensively. “You’ll never have a car like this!”
“True,” said Callahan. “Too true. But if the cops know you like I do, they won’t bother trying to catch you. All they’ll have to do is wait for you to clamor for their
attention. And that’s your safety, right now. They’ll never look for you on a bus.”
Timmy grimaced. But as they approached the car, its flashiness gave him confidence. He strutted as he drew near it. He got into it with an air of grandeur. Callahan got in on the other side. Timmy gunned the motor before he put it in gear. Had anybody been about, they would have had to turn to look.
Callahan’s jaw muscles tightened. He had no valid excuse for what he was doing; Timmy was unquestionably a criminal. But Callahan had two school-age children asleep upstairs in the house. He’d do a lot for them.
* * * *
The streets of Bainbridge were dark and cold and deserted. As they drove, the clock in the town hall struck twelve times, slowly and sonorously. There were no other sounds.
Timmy repeated as he drove: “You’ll never have a car like this!”
“Agreed,” Callahan said curtly. “Now listen. The bus gets here at twelve ten. It stops five minutes and then it goes on. I’ve offered you money for eating and fare—”
“You offering me money,” Timmy said. “That’s a joke!”
“There aren’t often any passengers for the bus,” Callahan went on as curtly as before. “You’ll go in the waiting room. Better go into the men’s room and wait there. Wait till the bus stops. Give it a minute more for passengers to get off and go away. Then come out and get on board.”
Timmy said humorously, “That’s good, that is. Me riding on a bus. Me!”
“Exactly,” said Callahan. “It’s not your type of trick. Now, the bus won’t be brightly lighted. People like to sleep at night. Get on, pay your fare—with small bills—and pick a seat by yourself and lie back and doze, or seem to. Don’t call attention to yourself. Believe it or not, Timmy, just wanting people to look at you is what’s got you into all the trouble you’ve ever been in. Lay off!”
Timmy said nothing. A car went across the road ahead, blocks away. Timmy watched it with a certain sudden tensity. The car kept going.
The Third Murray Leinster Page 45