“I hear you’re a more or less permanent fixture among us,” Ormsby said, proffering Steve cigarettes in a lacquered leather case, and shutting off his idling engine.
“For a while.”
Steve declined the cigarettes and brought out tobacco and papers from his pocket, adding, “There are things about the place I like.”
“I also hear you had a little excitement tonight.”
“Some,” Steve admitted, wondering whether the other meant the fight in which Kamp had been killed, the burglary at the MacPhails’, or both.
“If you keep up the pace you’ve set,” the factory owner’s son went on, “it won’t take you long to nose me out of my position as Izzard’s brightest light.”
Tautening nerves tickled the nape of Steve’s neck. Larry Ormsby’s words and tones seemed idle enough, but underneath them was a suggestion that they were not aimless – that they were leading to some definite place. It was not likely that he had circled around to intercept Steve merely to exchange meaningless chatter with him. Steve, lighting his cigarette, grinned and waited.
“The only thing I ever got from the old man, besides money,” Larry Ormsby was saying, “is a deep-rooted proprietary love for my own property. I’m a regular burgher for insisting that my property is mine and must stay mine. I don’t know exactly how to feel about a stranger coming in and making himself the outstanding black sheep of the town in two days. A reputation – even for recklessness – is property, you know; and I don’t feel that I should give it up –
There it was. Steve’s mind cleared. He disliked subtleties. But now he knew what the talk was about. He was being warned to keep away from Nova Vallance.
“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled, “who thought he owned all of the Pacific south of the Tropic of Capricorn – and had papers In prove it. He’d been that way ever since a Maori bashed in his head with a stone mele. Used to accuse us of stealing our drinking water from his ocean.”
Larry Ormsby flicked his cigarette into the street and started the engine.
“But the point is” – he was smiling pleasantly – “that a man is moved to protect what he thinks belongs to him. He may be wrong, of course, but that wouldn’t affect the – ah – vigour of his protecting efforts.”
Steve felt himself growing warm and angry.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, with deliberate intent to bring this thing between them to a crisis, “but I’ve never had enough experience with property to know how I’d feel about being deprived of it. But suppose I had a – well, say – a white vest that I treasured. And suppose a man slapped my face and threatened to spoil the vest. I reckon I’d forget all about protecting the vest in my hurry to tangle with him.”
Larry laughed sharply.
Steve caught the wrist that flashed up, and pinned it to Ormsby’s side with a hand that much spinning of a heavy stick had muscled with steel.
“Easy,” he said into the slitted, dancing eyes; “easy now.”
Larry Ormsby’s white teeth flashed under his moustache.
“Righto,” he smiled. “If you’ll turn my wrist loose, I’d like to shake hands with you – a sort of antebellum gesture. I like you, Threefall; you’re going to add materially to the pleasures of Izzard.”
In his room on the third floor of the Izzard Hotel, Steve Threefall undressed slowly, hampered by a stiff left arm and much thinking. Matter for thought he had in abundance. Larry Ormsby slapping his father’s face and threatening him with an automatic; Larry Ormsby and the girl in confidential conversation; Kamp dying in a dark street, his last words lost in the noise of the marshal’s arrival; Nova Vallance giving him an empty revolver, and persuading him to let a burglar escape; the watch on the floor and the looting of the blind man’s savings; the caravan Larry Ormsby had led toward the desert; the talk in the Vauxhall, with its exchange of threats.
Was there any connection between each of these things and the others? Or were they simply disconnected happenings? If there was a connection – and the whole of that quality in mankind which strives toward simplification of life’s phenomena, unification, urged him to belief in a connection – just what was it? Still puzzling, he got into bed; and then out again quickly. An uneasiness that had been vague until now suddenly thrust itself into his consciousness. He went to the door, opened and closed it. It was a cheaply carpentered door, but it moved easily and silently on well-oiled hinges.
“I reckon I’m getting to be an old woman,” he growled to himself; “but I’ve had all I want to-night.”
He blocked the door with the dresser, put his stick where he could reach it quickly, got into bed again, and went to sleep.
A pounding on the door awakened Steve at nine o’clock the next morning. The pounder was one of Fernie’s subordinates, and he told Steve that he was expected to be present at the inquest into Kamp’s death within an hour. Steve found that his wounded arm bothered him little; not so much as a bruised area on one shoulder – another souvenir of the fight in the street.
He dressed, ate breakfast in the hotel cafe, and went up to Ross Amthor’s ‘undertaking parlour,’ where the inquest was to be held.
The coroner was a tall man with high, narrow shoulders and a sallow, puffy face, who sped proceedings along regardless of the finer points of legal technicality. Steve told his story; the marshal told his, and then produced a prisoner – a thick-set Austrian who seemingly neither spoke nor understood English. His throat and lower face were swathed in white bandages.
“Is this the one you knocked down?” the coroner asked.
Steve looked at as much of the Austrian’s face as was visible above the bandages.
“I don’t know. I can’t see enough of him.”
“This is the one I picked out of the gutter,” Grant Fernie volunteered; “whether you knocked him there or not. I don’t suppose you got a good look at him. But this is he all right.”
Steve frowned doubtfully. “I’d know him,” he said, “if he turned his face up and I got a good look at him.”
“Take off some of his bandages so the witness can see him,” the coroner ordered. Fernie unwound the Austrian’s bandages, baring a bruised and swollen jaw.
Steve stared at the man. This fellow may have been one of his assailants, but he most certainly wasn’t the one he had knocked into the street. He hesitated. Could he have confused faces in the fight?
“Do you identify him?” the coroner asked impatiently.
Steve shook his head.
“I don’t remember ever seeing him.”
“Look here, Threefall” – the giant marshal scowled down at Steve – “this is the man I hauled out of the gutter – one of the men you said jumped you and Kamp. Now what’s the game? What’s the idea of forgetting?”
Steve answered slowly, stubbornly:
“I don’t know. All I know is that this isn’t the first one I hit, the one I knocked out. He was an American – had an American face. He was about this fellow’s size, but this isn’t he.”
The coroner exposed broken yellow teeth in a snarl, the marshal glowered at Steve, the jurors regarded him with frank suspicion. The marshal and the coroner withdrew to a far corner of the room, where they whispered together, casting frequent glances at Steve.
“All right,” the coroner told Steve when this conference was over; “that’s all.”
From the inquest Steve walked slowly back to the hotel, his mind puzzled by this newest addition to Izzard’s mysteries. What was the explanation of the certain fact that the man the marshal had produced at the inquest was not the man he had taken from the gutter the previous night? Another thought: the marshal had arrived immediately after the fight with the men who had attacked him and Kamp, had arrived noisily, drowning the dying man’s last words. That opportune arrival and the accompanying noise – were they accidental? Steve didn’t know; and because he didn’t know he strode back to the hotel in frowning meditation.
At the hotel he found that his bag had arrived from Whitetufts. He took it up to his room and changed his clothes. Then he carried his perplexity to the window, where he sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into the alley below, his forehead knotted beneath his tawny hair. Was it possible that so many things should explode around one man in so short a time, in a small city of Izzard’s size, without there being a connection between them – and between them and him? And if he was being involved in a vicious maze of crime and intrigue, what was it all about? What had started it? What was the key to it? The girl?
