The old woman turned quickly towards him. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said in a scolding voice. “Look at you, you’re just about to have a chill. You’ll sit right down there by the fire and let me get you something hot to drink.”
“Can’t, Mom,” he told her. “I’ve got to go places.”
Her blue eyes wherein age did not show became bright and keen. “When did you leave the hospital?” she demanded.
“Just now.”
She put her lips together hard, then opened them a little to say accusingly: “You walked out.” A shadow disturbed the clear blueness of her eyes. She came close to Ned Beaumont and held her face close to his: she was nearly as tall as he. Her voice was harsh now as if coming from a parched throat. “Is it something about Paul?” The shadow in her eyes became recognizable as fear. “And Opal?”
His voice was barely audible. “It’s something I’ve got to see them about.”
She touched one of his cheeks somewhat timidly with bony fingers. “You’re a good boy, Ned,” she said.
He put an arm around her. “Don’t worry, Mom. None of it’s bad as it could be. Only—if Opal comes home make her stay—if you can.”
“Is it anything you can tell me, Ned?” she asked.
“Not now and—well—it might be just as well not to let either of them know you think anything’s wrong.”
II
Ned Beaumont walked five blocks through the rain to a drug-store. He used a telephone there first to order a taxicab and then to call two numbers and ask for Mr. Mathews. He did not get Mr. Mathews on the wire.
He called another number and asked for Mr. Rumsen. A moment later he was saying: “ ’Lo, Jack, this is Ned Beaumont. Busy?… Fine. Here it is. I want to know if the girl we were talking about went to see Mathews of the Observer today and what she did afterwards, if she did.… That’s right, Hal Mathews. I tried to get him by phone, there and home, but no luck.… Well, on the quiet if you can, but get it and get it quick.… No, I’m out of the hospital. I’ll be home waiting. You know my number.… Yes, Jack. Fine, thanks, and ring me as often as you can.… ’By.”
He went out to the waiting taxicab, got into it, and gave the driver his address, but after half a dozen blocks he tapped the front window with his fingers and gave the driver another address.
Presently the taxicab came to rest in front of a squat greyish house set in the center of a steeply sloping smooth lawn. “Wait,” he told the driver as he got out.
The greyish house’s front door was opened to his ring by a red-haired maid.
“Mr. Farr in?” he asked her.
“I’ll see. Who shall I tell him?”
“Mr. Beaumont.”
The District Attorney came into the reception-hall with both hands out. His florid pugnacious face was all smiling. “Well, well, Beaumont, this is a real pleasure,” he said as he rushed up to his visitor. “Here, give me your coat and hat.”
Ned Beaumont smiled and shook his head. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I just dropped in for a second on my way home from the hospital.”
“All shipshape again? Splendid!”
“Feeling pretty good,” Ned Beaumont said. “Anything new?”
“Nothing very important. The birds who manhandled you are still loose—in hiding somewhere—but we’ll get them.”
Ned Beaumont made a depreciatory mouth. “I didn’t die and they weren’t trying to kill me: you could only stick them with an assault-charge.” He looked somewhat drowsily at Farr. “Had any more of those three-question epistles?”
The District Attorney cleared his throat. “Uh—yes, come to think of it, there were one or two more of them.”
“How many?” Ned Beaumont asked. His voice was politely casual. The ends of his lips were raised a little in an idle smile. Amusement glinted in his eyes, but his eyes held Farr’s.
The District Attorney cleared his throat. “Three,” he said reluctantly. Then his eyes brightened. “Did you hear about the splendid meeting we had at—?”
Ned Beaumont interrupted him. “All along the same line?” he asked.
“Uh—more or less.” The District Attorney licked his lips and a pleading expression began to enter his eyes.
“How much more—or less?”
Farr’s eyes slid their gaze down from Ned Beaumont’s eyes to his necktie and sidewise to his left shoulder. He moved his lips vaguely, but did not utter a sound.
Ned Beaumont’s smile was openly malicious now. “All saying Paul killed Taylor Henry?” he asked in a sugary voice.
Farr jumped, his face faded to a light orange, and in his excitement he let his startled eyes focus on Ned Beaumont’s eyes again. “Christ, Ned!” he gasped.
Ned Beaumont laughed. “You’re getting nerves, Farr,” he said, still sugary of voice. “Better watch yourself or you’ll be going to pieces.” He made his face grave. “Has Paul said anything to you about it? About your nerves, I mean.”
“N-no.”
Ned Beaumont smiled again. “Maybe he hasn’t noticed it—yet.” He raised an arm, glanced at his wrist-watch, then at Farr. “Found out who wrote them yet?” he asked sharply.
The District Attorney stammered: “Look here, Ned, I don’t—you know—it’s not—” floundered and stopped.
Ned Beaumont asked: “Well?”
The District Attorney gulped and said desperately: “We’ve got something, Ned, but it’s too soon to say. Maybe there’s nothing to it. You know how these things are.”
Ned Beaumont nodded. There was nothing but friendliness in his face now. His voice was level and cool without chilliness saying: “You’ve learned where they were written and you’ve found the machine they were written on, but that’s all you’ve got so far. You haven’t got enough to even guess who wrote them.”
“That’s right, Ned,” Farr blurted out with a great air of relief.
Ned Beaumont took Farr’s hand and shook it cordially. “That’s the stuff,” he said. “Well, I’ve got to run along. You can’t go wrong taking things slowly, being sure you’re right before you go ahead. You can take my word for that.”
The District Attorney’s face and voice were warm with emotion. “Thanks, Ned, thanks!”
III
At ten minutes past nine o’clock that evening the telephone-bell in Ned Beaumont’s living-room rang. He went quickly to the telephone. “Hello.… Yes, Jack … Yes.… Yes.… Where?… Yes, that’s fine.… That’ll be all tonight. Thanks a lot.”
When he rose from the telephone he was smiling with pale lips. His eyes were shiny and reckless. His hands shook a little.
The telephone-bell rang again before he had taken his third step. He hesitated, went back to the telephone. “Hello.… Oh, hello, Paul.… Yes, I got tired of playing invalid.… Nothing special—just thought I’d drop in and see you.… No, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m not feeling as strong as I thought I was, so I think I’d better go to bed.… Yes, tomorrow, sure.… ’By.”
He put on rain-coat and hat going downstairs. Wind drove rain in at him when he opened the street-door, drove it into his face as he walked half a block to the garage on the corner.
In the garage’s glass-walled office a lanky, brown-haired man in once-white overalls was tilted back on a wooden chair, his feet on a shelf above an electric heater, reading a newspaper. He lowered the newspaper when Ned Beaumont said: “ ’Lo, Tommy.”
The dirtiness of Tommy’s face made his teeth seem whiter than they were. He showed many of them in a grin and said: “Kind of weatherish tonight.”
“Yes. Got an iron I can have? One that’ll carry me over country roads tonight?”
Tommy said: “Jesus! Lucky for you you could pick your night. You might’ve had to go on a bad one. Well, I got a Buick that I don’t care what happens to.”
“Will it get me there?”
“It’s just as likely to as anything else,” Tommy said, “tonight.”
“All right. Fill it up for me. What’s the best road up
Lazy Creek way on a night like this?”
“How far up?”
Ned Beaumont looked thoughtfully at the garageman then said: “Along about where it runs into the river.”
Tommy nodded. “The Mathews place?” he asked.
Ned Beaumont did not say anything.
Tommy said: “It makes a difference which place you’re going to.”
“Yes? The Mathews place.” Ned Beaumont frowned. “This is under the hat, Tommy.”
“Did you come to me because you thought I’d talk or because you knew I wouldn’t?” Tommy demanded argumentatively.
Ned Beaumont said: “I’m in a hurry.”
“Then you take the New River Road as far as Barton’s, take the dirt road over the bridge there—if you can make it at all—and then the first cross-road back east. That’ll bring you in behind Mathews’s place along about the top of the hill. If you can’t make the dirt road in this weather you’ll have to go on up the New River Road to where it crosses and then cut back along the old one.”
“Thanks.”
When Ned Beaumont was getting into the Buick Tommy said to him in a markedly casual tone: “There’s an extra gun in the side-pocket.”
Ned Beaumont stared at the lanky man. “Extra?” he asked blankly.
“Pleasant trip,” Tommy said.
Ned Beaumont shut the door and drove away.
IV
The clock in the dashboard said ten thirty-two. Ned Beaumont switched off the lights and got somewhat stiffly out of the Buick. Wind-driven rain hammered tree, bush, ground, man, car with incessant wet blows. Downhill, through rain and foliage, irregular small patches of yellow light glowed faintly. Ned Beaumont shivered, tried to draw his rain-coat closer around him, and began to stumble downhill through drenched underbrush towards the patches of light.
Wind and rain on his back pushed him downhill towards the patches. As he went downhill stiffness gradually left him so that, though he stumbled often and staggered, and was tripped by obstacles underfoot, he kept his feet under him and moved nimbly enough, if erratically, towards his goal.
Presently a path came under his feet. He turned into it, holding it partly by its sliminess under his feet, partly by the feel of the bushes whipping his face on either side, and not at all by sight. The path led him off to the left for a little distance, but then, swinging in a broad curve, brought him to the brink of a small gorge through which water rushed noisily and from there, in another curve, to the front door of the building where the yellow light glowed.
Ned Beaumont went straight up to the door and knocked.
The door was opened by a grey-haired bespectacled man. His face was mild and greyish and the eyes that peered anxiously through the pale-tortoise-shell-encircled lenses of his spectacles were grey. His brown suit was neat and of good quality, but not fashionably cut. One side of his rather high stiff white collar had been blistered in four places by drops of water. He stood aside holding the door open and said, “Come in, sir, come in out of the rain,” in a friendly if not hearty voice. “A wretched night to be out in.”
Ned Beaumont lowered his head no more than two inches in the beginning of a bow and stepped indoors. He was in a large room that occupied all the building’s ground-floor. The sparseness and simplicity of the room’s furnishings gave it a primitive air that was pleasantly devoid of ostentation. It was a kitchen, a dining-room, and a living-room.
Opal Madvig rose from the footstool on which she had been sitting at one end of the fireplace and, holding herself tall and straight, stared with hostile bleak eyes at Ned Beaumont.
He took off his hat and began to unbutton his rain-coat. The others recognized him then.
The man who had opened the door said, “Why, it’s Beaumont!” in an incredulous voice and looked wide-eyed at Shad O’Rory.
Shad O’Rory was sitting in a wooden chair in the center of the room facing the fireplace. He smiled dreamily at Ned Beaumont, saying, in his musical faintly Irish baritone, “And so it is,” and, “How are you, Ned?”
Jeff Gardner’s apish face broadened in a grin that showed his beautiful false teeth and almost completely hid his little red eyes. “By Jesus, Rusty!” he said to the sullen rosy-cheeked boy who lounged on the bench beside him, “little Rubber Ball has come back to us. I told you he liked the way we bounced him around.”
Rusty lowered at Ned Beaumont and growled something that did not carry across the room.
The thin girl in red sitting not far from Opal Madvig looked at Ned Beaumont with bright interested dark eyes.
Ned Beaumont took off his coat. His lean face, still bearing the marks of Jeff’s and Rusty’s fists, was tranquil except for the recklessness aglitter in his eyes. He put his coat and hat on a long unpainted chest that was against one wall near the door. He smiled politely at the man who had admitted him and said: “My car broke down as I was passing. It’s very kind of you to give me shelter, Mr. Mathews.”
Mathews said, “Not at all—glad to,” somewhat vaguely. Then his frightened eyes looked pleadingly at O’Rory again.
O’Rory stroked his smooth white hair with a slender pale hand and smiled pleasantly at Ned Beaumont, but did not say anything.
Ned Beaumont advanced to the fireplace. “ ’Lo, snip,” he said to Opal Madvig.
She did not respond to his greeting. She stood there and looked at him with hostile bleak eyes.
He directed his smile at the thin girl in red. “This is Mrs. Mathews, isn’t it?”
She said, “It is,” in a soft, almost cooing, voice and held out her hand.
“Opal told me you were a schoolmate of hers,” he said as he took her hand. He turned from her to face Rusty and Jeff. “ ’Lo, boys,” he said carelessly. “I was hoping I’d see you some time soon.”
Rusty said nothing.
Jeff’s face became an ugly mask of grinning delight. “Me and you both,” he said heartily, “now that my knuckles are all healed up again. What do you guess it is that makes me get such a hell of a big kick out of slugging you?”
Shad O’Rory gently addressed the apish man without turning to look at him: “You talk too much with your mouth, Jeff. Maybe if you didn’t you’d still have your own teeth.”
Mrs. Mathews spoke to Opal in an undertone. Opal shook her head and sat down on the stool by the fire again.
Mathews, indicating a wooden chair at the other end of the fireplace, said nervously: “Sit down, Mr. Beaumont, and dry your feet and—and get warm.”
“Thanks.” Ned Beaumont pulled the chair out more directly in the fire’s glow and sat down.
Shad O’Rory was lighting a cigarette. When he had finished he took it from between his lips and asked: “How are you feeling, Ned?”
“Pretty good, Shad.”
“That’s fine.” O’Rory turned his head a little to speak to the two men on the bench: “You boys can go back to town tomorrow.” He turned back to Ned Beaumont, explaining blandly: “We were playing safe as long as we didn’t know for sure you weren’t going to die, but we don’t mind standing an assault-rap.”
Ned Beaumont nodded. “The chances are I won’t go to the trouble of appearing against you, anyhow, on that, but don’t forget our friend Jeff’s wanted for West’s murder.” His voice was light, but into his eyes, fixed on the log burning in the fireplace, came a brief evil glint. There was nothing in his eyes but mockery when he moved them to the left to focus on Mathews. “Though of course I might so I could make trouble for Mathews for helping you hide out.”
Mathews said hastily: “I didn’t, Mr. Beaumont. I didn’t even know they were here until we came up today and I was as surprised as—” He broke off, his face panicky, and addressed Shad O’Rory, whining: “You know you are welcome. You know that, but the point I’m trying to make”—his face was illuminated by a sudden glad smile—“is that by helping you without knowing it I didn’t do anything I could be held legally responsible for.”
O’Rory said softly: “Yes, you helped me without
knowing it.” His notable clear blue-grey eyes looked without interest at the newspaper-publisher.
Mathews’s smile lost its gladness, flickered out entirely. He fidgeted with fingers at his necktie and presently evaded O’Rory’s gaze.
Mrs. Mathews spoke to Ned Beaumont, sweetly: “Everybody’s been so dull this evening. It was simply ghastly until you came.”
He looked at her curiously. Her dark eyes were bright, soft, inviting. Under his appraising look she lowered her head a little and pursed her lips a little, coquettishly. Her lips were thin, too dark with rouge, but beautiful in form. He smiled at her and, rising, went over to her.
Opal Madvig stared at the floor before her. Mathews, O’Rory, and the two men on the bench watched Ned Beaumont and Mathews’s wife.
He asked, “What makes them so dull?” and sat down on the floor in front of her, cross-legged, not facing her directly, his back to the fire, leaning on a hand on the floor behind him, his face turned up to one side towards her.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, pouting. “I thought it was going to be fun when Hal asked me if I wanted to come up here with him and Opal. And then, when we got here, we found these—” she paused a moment—said, “friends of Hal’s,” with poorly concealed dubiety—and went on: “here and everybody’s been sitting around hinting at some secret they’ve all got between them that I don’t know anything about and it’s been unbearably stupid. Opal’s been as bad as the rest. She—”
Her husband said, “Now, Eloise,” in an ineffectually authoritative tone and, when she raised her eyes to meet his, got more embarrassment than authority in his gaze.
“I don’t care,” she told him petulantly. “It’s true and Opal is as bad as the rest of you. Why, you and she haven’t even talked about whatever business it was you were coming up here to discuss in the first place. Don’t think I’d’ve stayed here this long if it hadn’t been for the storm. I wouldn’t.”
Opal Madvig’s face had flushed, but she did not raise her eyes.
Eloise Mathews bent her head down towards Ned Beaumont again and the petulance in her face became playful. “That’s what you’ve got to make up for,” she assured him, “and that and not because you’re beautiful is why I was so glad to see you.”