'Some plugs that don't know enough to leave me alone.'
'Do I know them?' she asked, too casually, as she turned the car into a narrower and rougher road.
'Let it alone, kid,' Reno said. 'Better get as much out of the heap as it's got.'
She prodded another fifteen miles an hour out of the Marmon. She had plenty to do now holding the car to the road, and Reno had plenty holding himself to the car. Neither of them made any more conversation until the road brought us into one that had more and better paving.
Then he asked:
'So you paid Whisper off?'
'Um-hmm.'
'They're saying you turned rat on him.'
'They would. What do you think?'
'Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me.'
He looked at me while he said it. He was a man of thirty-four or -five, fairly tall, broad and heavy without fat. His eyes were large, brown, dull, and set far apart in a long, slightly sallow horse face. It was a humorless face, stolid, but somehow not unpleasant. I looked at him and said nothing.
The girl said: 'If that's the way you feel about it, you can--'
'Look out,' Reno grunted.
We had swung around a curve. A long black car was straight across the road ahead of us--a barricade.
Bullets flew around us. Reno and I threw bullets around while the girl made a polo pony of the little Marmon.
She shoved it over to the left of the road, let the left wheels ride the bank high, crossed the road again with Reno's and my weight on the inside, got the right bank under the left wheels just as our side of the car began to lift in spite of our weight, slid us down in the road with our backs to the enemy, and took us out of the neighborhood by the time we had emptied our guns.
A lot of people had done a lot of shooting, but so far as we could tell nobody's bullets had hurt anybody.
Reno, holding to the door with his elbows while he pushed another clip into his automatic, said:
'Nice work, kid. You handle the bus like you meant it.'
Dinah asked: 'Where now?'
'Far away first. Just follow the road. We'll have to figure it out. Looks like they got the burg closed up on us. Keep your dog on it.'
We put ten or twelve more miles between Personville and us. We passed a few cars, saw nothing to show we were being chased. A short bridge rumbled under us. Reno said:
'Take the right turn at the top of the hill.'
We took it, into a dirt road that wound between trees down the side of a rock-ridged hill. Ten miles an hour was fast going here. After five minutes of creeping along Reno ordered a halt. We heard nothing, saw nothing, during the half-hour we sat in darkness. Then Reno said:
'There's an empty shack a mile down the way. We'll camp there, huh? There's no sense trying to crash the city line again tonight.'
Dinah said she would prefer anything to being shot at again. I said it was all right with me, though I would rather have tried to find some path back to the city.
We followed the dirt track cautiously until our headlights settled on a small clapboard building that badly needed the paint it had never got.
'Is this it?' Dinah asked Reno.
'Uh-huh. Stay here till I look it over.'
He left us, appearing soon in the beam of our lights at the shack door. He fumbled with keys at the padlock, got it off, opened the door, and went in. Presently he came to the door and called:
'All right. Come in and make yourselves to home.'
Dinah cut off the engine and got out of the car.
'Is there a flashlight in the car?' I asked.
She said, 'Yes,' gave it to me, yawned, 'My God, I'm tired. I hope there's something to drink in the hole.'
I told her I had a flask of Scotch. The news cheered her up.
The shack was a one-room affair that held an army cot covered with brown blankets, a deal table with a deck of cards and some gummy poker chips on it, a brown iron stove, four chairs, an oil lamp, dishes, pots, pans and buckets, three shelves with canned food on them, a pile of firewood and a wheelbarrow.
Reno was lighting the lamp when we came in. He said:
'Not so tough. I'll hide the heap and then we'll be all set till daylight.'
Dinah went over to the cot, turned back the covers, and reported:
'Maybe there's things in it, but anyway it's not alive with them. Now let's have that drink.'
