If he had the keys, he could drive Harris’ station wagon to Mineral Wells. He tramped back upstairs. As he approached the darkened head of the stairs, he reached for his pistol, just in case.
It was gone. Neither was it lying where he had dropped.
But before he could re-enter Harris’ room, he heard a choked gasping, then a scream. A door slammed open, and Adele Lafourche burst into the hallway. Seeing Cragin, she stood there, blinking and gaping.
Cragin did the same. The strong side lighting from the door at her left made her chiffon nightgown look like the vapors that hissed from the volcanic earth about the spring. His initial ideas on Adele’s structure were dazzlingly confirmed. Though full breasted, she was firm; and the incurve of her waist accentuated the roundness of her intriguing hips.
Double eyeful? That frail froth of chiffon and lace clung to a tapering sweep of ivory legs that would have dazzled a streetful of eyes.
“Oh—I had the most awful dream!” she cried. “I thought my husband was killing me!”
“Where the hell is he?” groped Cragin, wondering how she had managed to drape herself all over him in one move.
The longer and tighter she clung, the more urgent an answer became. That warm armful was making him forget his battered head and its whirling queries. And it wasn’t entirely Adele’s perfume, though that was a mighty sultry compound that probably was called Nuit d’Ivresse or something dizzier.
“That’s what frightened me,” she gasped, incoherent. “He’s gone. Suitcase and all.”
Though two plus two does not invariably make four, Cragin was willing to bet that the twelve-lunged Packard had sneaked from its stable after Lafourche had slipped the dripping hunting knife into his hand. That, of course, would cancel his first hunch that the shaggy-headed madman had finished Harris.
She seemed to sense his thought.
“He always leaves his keys on the dresser with his watch,” Adele continued. “Do go and see if the car is in.”
It took Cragin a few seconds over a minute to learn that the long locomotive was gone.
“Oh—I know something dreadful’s happened!” she moaned as he returned. “Where’s Mr. Harris? And where’s Dale?”
She noticed that Cragin’s head was battered and his face smeared with grime and blood.
“Tell me!” she persisted. Then, as he groped for words: “I know—Oh, good God! Maurice has been acting so strangely!”
She was rapidly getting out of hand. If he told her what had happened, the madhouse would be complete. And if he didn’t, she’d guess, and it’d be just as bad.
“They’re both deader’n hell!” he blurted out. “And someone damn near brained me! Now pipe down, sister, and pull yourself together.”
She threw herself on the couch and lay there, a laughing, sobbing white length. Adele was plumb loco.
He kicked the door shut, and tried to remember how to snap a woman out of hysterics. He could not leave her this way while he went for the sheriff, and he’d go nuts it he had to listen much longer.
Cragin knelt beside the lounge and tried to draw her upright. His grasp slipped, and his hand brushed curves that set his blood racing.
That was no way to set a woman upright. Cragin regretfully shifted his grasp. But while his next attempt did not skid on curves, it was like taking a scoopshovel of pep tablets.
When Cragin did get her propped up among some cushions, Adele wouldn’t let go. And what was pressing against his shirtfront was warm and resilient and resentful of pressure.
As soon as she calmed down a bit more, he might be able to find out why Dale and Lafourche had come from Louisiana to this lost corner of the woods, and how they tied in with Harris. Such was his intention; but about the time Adele became rational, Cragin couldn’t stand it any longer.
He caught her in an embrace that squeezed her breathless, then kissed her until he himself had to come up for air. Before they broke, Adele was again making incoherent sounds, but this time it was not hysteria. It was something like a half-hearted attempt to say “Don’t…”
Cragin gave her some bigger and better kisses; and judging from the shudder that rippled to her ankles, she forgot more than her nightmarish premonitions.…
Unfortunately, absent mindedness had likewise overlooked the latch on door—
When it slammed open, Cragin disengaged himself from a tangle of arms and chiffon and other odds and ends just in time to hear a wrathful oath and see two men standing in the doorway.
One was Maurice Lafourche. The other, viewing the show from behind a single-action Colt whose muzzle gaped like a sugar barrel, wore a slouch hat, a tobacco-stained moustache, and a nickeled star the size of a saucer.
“Er…ug—gug—” But gestures as well as speech failed Cragin, It was going to be hard as the devil to explain.
“Stick ’em up!” The sheriff’s gnarled hand restrained the wrathful husband. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Gilbert Harris.”
“You’re crazy!” Cragin cut in. “Someone sapped me as I was knocking at his door, and when I snapped out of it, Mrs. Lafourche screamed, and—”
“You might try wrapping a blanket around yourself,” was Lafourche’s frosty command to his wife. Then, to the sheriff: “I heard a disturbance and saw this fellow dashing down the hall with a knife in his hand. When I found Harris dead, I knocked at Dale’s room, but he was not in.
“And so I drove out to get you. Didn’t want to alarm my wife. I never dreamed he’d come back. By God, sheriff, if I had a gun—”
“All right, young fellow!” the sheriff interrupted, “stick ’em out.”
Cragin knew that he had not a Chinaman’s chance of proving that he had been sapped by a madman with a rifle, but he tried it.
“Get Glendora,” he concluded. “Look in my room and see the bullet hole. Find out who killed Dale, up at the sulphur spring!”
“We’ll look into that,” was Sheriff Barker’s noncommittal answer as he snapped on the bracelets.
“Dale, dead?” gasped Lafourche.
“Sure he’s dead!” growled Cragin. “Ask Glendora. Look at the sulphur on her shoes, just like on mine.”
Sheriff Barker, holstering his Colt, was caught off guard by his prisoner’s vehement suggestion. He looked—
Cragin, nerves wire-edged, saw not only that the sheriff’s glance had shifted, but that Lafourche was looking at his own sulphur-caked shoes.
Smack! The heavy circlets of steel smashed against Barker’s head. He went down, his half-drawn revolver blasting the bottom out of his holster. Lafourche, stumbling as the sheriff dropped athwart his legs, took a nosedive into the room.
Cragin, though manacled, snatched the sheriff’s revolver.
“Get up, you louse-bound—!” growled the detective, cocking the ponderous Colt and shifting it to wrap Lafourche’s stomach around his spine. “You killed Dale! You were at the spring. And you framed me after knifing Harris!”
The sheriff, though still out, was mumbling and stirring. Lafourche turned gray as he stared into the oversized muzzle.
But before Cragin could devise a way of keeping Lafourche covered while getting Barker’s keys, the indiscreet wife took a hand. She had been lying on the lounge, face buried in the cushions to hide her confusion; but the way she hurled her overnight case would have made a goal from the sixty-yard line. And as the revolver was knocked out of line, Lafourche lunged, wrenching the weapon from Cragin’s grasp.
“Tie them both and blow, darling!” said Adele, her voice tense. “Honest, I had to do something to keep him amused—”
“You didn’t need to let him paw you over like he was taking lessons on a flute!” rasped Lafourche. Then, to Cragin, “Get up, you rat—if your hands weren’t tied, I’d let you have it, messing around with my wif
e.”
Cragin saw that Lafourche’s nerves were at the cracking point. He also noted that Adele’s overnight case had disgorged a bale of government bonds that would choke a sewer; but most important was that Lafourche was not familiar with a single-action revolver. It wasn’t cocked.
Cragin lunged as Lafourche tugged at the trigger, catching him amidships and knocking him smack against his wife’s richest curves. She tumbled nose first into the suitcase over which she was bending. The revolver skated under the bed.
“Never mind that gun!” barked a voice from the doorway.
Cragin, however, was moving too fast to stop; but when he did emerge, retrieved Colt in hand, he saw that while the sheriff was recovering, it was not he who had spoken.
The fuzzy-headed madman was in the doorway, rifle in hand.
“All right, Mr. G-man,” he said to Cragin, “I surrender. Those bonds on the floor clear me.”
“G-man?” Cragin blinked. Then, to the sheriff: “Here’s your Colt. Grab Lafourche. He killed Warren Dale. Look at the sulphur crystals on his shoes.”
“If you mean the fellow aiming this rifle at a window at this hotel,” interposed the shaggy man, “you’re wrong. I sapped him with a piece of pipe. I can beat a manslaughter charge. I was trying to prevent a felony.”
“Sure you can,” agreed Cragin, “but where do you get that G-man stuff?”
“I’m Morton Sloane, escaped from Atlanta. Harris was the crooked auditor who juggled the books. Lafourche and Dale cleaned up. I was the boob, taking the rap. For those stolen bonds. Those on the floor.”
And then Glendora stepped into the room. She had slipped her moorings. She stared at the shaggy man and in wide-eyed dismay demanded, “Dad—what on earth—”
“Dad?” echoed Cragin, glance shifting from Glendora’s dusky beauty to the not-so-madman’s fair skin.
“This is just a paint job,” laughed Glendora. “I followed Harris to recover these bonds, the theft of which is what really sent father to Atlanta. I had the combination of the safe, but he changed it.
“And this G-man business,” she continued, “was what Harris told Dale and Lafourche. To scare them out of giving him the works for hogging all the loot. That fancy rifle is Dale’s. I saw it in his baggage. Since he didn’t expect a G-man, he must have brought it to kill Harris.
“I doped you,” she concluded, “so I could go out into the woods and warn dad against making any attempts to capture the plunder.”
“You can’t prove I killed Harris!” flared Lafourche. “Sloane came out here for revenge. He did it.”
“I guess Sloane put those bonds into your wife’s suitcase!” snapped Cragin. “You went to the spring to check up on Dale’s absence, found him dead, then found me knocked cold, and saw your chance to go for the sheriff and frame me.”
“That’ll make an indictment two miles long,” rumbled the sheriff. “Sloane, I’m holding you for justifiable homicide, an’ if you don’t get a bounty for exterminatin’ varmints, I’ll eat the sights off my gun. Let’s go.”
He loaded his prisoners into Lafourche’s big car. Cragin took the wheel, and Glendora joined him.
“Probably you’re fed up on blondes,” she whispered, smiling in sweet malice, “so I’d better wash off my false complexion along with my phony name—”
“Maybe you’d better,” agreed Cragin, “Though we might go back and start where we left off…and sort of let the color wear off.…”
NIGHT IN MANILA
The broad-shouldered American who lolled in his chair and stared somberly at the colorful whirl of dancers in the ballroom of Chow Kit’s cabaret was still sober, though he had spent all evening challenging native liquor to do its worst. His white duck suit was still neat, and he was clean-shaven, but his craggy, bronzed face was drawn and deeply lined, and his blue eyes were haggard.
Lieutenant Dan Slade, posing as a dishonorably discharged soldier, had come to Manila to find out how Datu Ali, the Moro rebel down in Jolo, was getting United States government ammunition.
Chow Kit was the answer: but try and prove it. His fleet of inter-island trading boats had a dozen times been searched for contraband, but in vain. The only remaining move was to get the low down on that crafty Chinaman by a flank attack directed through the chain of dance halls and bawdy houses that made him wealthier every day.
Slade spat disgustedly as he saw Chow Kit emerge from the private office of the cabaret. Suave, immaculate in a shantung suit, his slanted eyes inscrutable as the moonstones that gleamed in the only ring that adorned his long-nailed, thin hands. The Chinaman was sizing up the colorful whirl of bailarinas whisked about the pavilion by dancing soldiers, sailors, and white civilians.
Exotic girls of every shade from walnut to old ivory. Malay, Japanese, Chinese; Eurasians, and mestizas whose touch of Spanish blood gave them an inflaming glamour that no white woman can have. Those girls had the inside rumors of Manila—but try to get at the truth behind their dance hall smiles!
Chow Kit, seeing that business was good, turned back to his office, leaving Slade to continue pondering on a bedroom and bottle approach to of government ammunition.
Presently the office door again opened. The gift who emerged could have no more than a drop of Malay blood. The slant of her dark eyes was scarcely perceptible, and the faint flare of her delicate nostrils was just enough to be exotic. And as she picked her way to a table near Slade’s, the American sensed that he was getting a break. She had the run of Chow Kit’s office, and she might warm up to a white man, and tell him things.
Bell shaped sleeves, and a scarf of incredibly fine piña cloth about her shapely shoulders, and the tall, glistening combs that adorned her high piled, blue black hair gave an oddly foreign touch to the apricot satin of an evening gown, cut low in front, and lower in back. And the piña scarf cast a tantalizing mist about the warm, firm curves that smiled at Slade as she reached across her table for a match.
His glance shifted from the pert breasts that rounded out the shimmering bodice, lingered along the inviting curve of her waist and the blossoming richness of her sleek hips.
“Let’s dance, chiquita,” he proposed as he caught her hand.
Agata Moreno’s clinging, supple curves aroused more than Slade’s hope of information. At the end of the dance, as she headed for her table, he countered, “Nuts on that notion! Let’s go home and talk—”
“About how nice a shack we can keep on thirty pesos a month?” mocked Agata in English almost devoid of accent. “Don’t be stupid, Dan.”
“Thirty pesos, hell! Wait till I fell you who I am, and then we’ll get your suitcase and spend a week or two in Baguio.”
Slade, short circuiting all arguments, headed Agata toward one of the square, bamboo houses on the main street of the village just off Paranaque Road, They’re primitive things, these nipa shacks, with floors of split bamboo. The cracks between the slats made plumbing unnecessary, and they’re high enough up on stilts to give a free range to the scavenging pigs and chickens. Agata’s shack, however, was ritzy. She had wicker furniture, and an American style bed instead of a grass mat.
Agata’s eyes narrowed speculatively as she regarded him for a moment. Then she said, “Let’s not talk about Baguio. Why don’t you go back to the States?”
His story had spread. She was sorry for him.
“To hell with the States! Not after the deal I got. Just pure luck I didn’t get three years and a kick, instead of a straight bobtail. So I’m staying. From now on.”
In the Islands, jobs for white men are as scarce as bailarinas who can say no. A nipa shack and a Tagalog girl to hustle the groceries is the only career left to a white drifter. Slade was paving the way for someone to hint that a rebellious Moro datu down in Jolo could use desperate American renegades as well as stolen ammunition.
&nb
sp; Agata’s dark eyes were troubled. She was white enough to sympathize with the American outcast in a way no native woman could. Which made her valuable.
“Don’t be stupid,” she whispered as she seated herself on the arm of his chair. “Go back. While you can.”
“Go back with me?” proposed Slade.
Her brows rose, but her smile contradicted the shake of her head.
“Sure you’ll go,” Slade urged. “As soon as I can raise enough money for the two of us to travel.”
And that was an offer that few mestizas can decline, coming from a white man, even if he is a renegade.
Agata’s smile was becoming more personal, but she hesitated.
“We’ll get married,” he added. That was the ultimate bait. And the only way a bobtailed soldier could raise transportation across the Pacific would be in some illicit enterprise. She’d talk to Chow Kit, now. “How about it?”
And before Agata could answer, Slade’s arms closed about her. Despite her parrying gesture, he found her unwilling lips. Unwilling—but only for a moment. She broke away, but only to be drawn closer, to have her mouth seared anew by that savage kiss.
Agata was a fragrant armful, and as Slade’s embrace tightened about her, he forgot that he was searching for information. Her slender hands clawed at his face, but he evaded their attack, kissing her throat and shapely shoulders; and as he shifted back again to her crimson lips, she no longer struggled, but clung to him. Each supple, rounded curve was quivering, and as one hand probed the sleek folds of the apricot satin skirt that was working its way over her knees, Agata shuddered, and sighed luxuriously.
Slade broke away long enough to catch a fresh breath, but her questing lips followed his.
“Don’t! Not tonight,” she begged; but her dark eyes were misty with promise. “And not here. Stay away from here, Dan! It’s dangerous.”
The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™ Page 14