'It isn't in a garage.'
'Right.'
He closed his eyes and sat. Pretty soon he opened them again and sighed. 'Where are we?'
'Two hundred and thirty-seven miles northeast of Times Square. Eighteen miles southwest of Crowfield, where the North Atlantic Exposition is held every year, beginning on the second Monday in September and lasting-'
'Archie.' His eyes were narrowed at me. 'Please save the jocularity. What are we going to do?'
I admit I was touched. Nero Wolfe asking me what to do! 'I don't know about you,' I said, 'but I'm going to kill myself. I was reading in the paper the other day how a Jap always commits suicide when he fails his emperor, and no Jap has anything on me. They call it seppuku. Maybe you think they call it hara-kiri, but they don't or at least rarely. They call it seppuku.'
He merely repeated, 'What are we going to do?'
'We're going to flag a car and get a lift. Preferably to Crowfield, where we have reservations at a hotel.'
'Would you drive it?'
'Drive what?'
'The car we flag.'
'I don't imagine he would let me after he sees what I've done to this one.'
Wolfe compressed his lips. 'I won't ride with a strange driver.'
'I'll go to Crowfield alone and rent a car and come back for you.'
'That would take two hours. No.'
I shrugged, 'We passed a house about a mile back. I'll bum a ride there or walk, and phone to Crowfield for a car.'
'While I sit here, waiting, helplessly, in this disabled demon.'
'Right.'
He shook his head. 'No.'
'You won't do that?'
'No.'
I stepped back around the rear of the car to survey the surroundings, near and far. It was a nice September day, and the hills and dales of upstate New York looked sleepy and satisfied in the sun. The road we were on was a secondary highway, not a main drag, and nothing had passed by since I had bumped the tree. A hundred yards ahead it curved to the right, dipping down behind some trees. I couldn't see the house we had passed a mile or so back, on account of another curve. Across the road was a gentle slope of meadow which got steeper further up where the meadow turned into woods. I turned. In that direction was a board fence painted white, a smooth green pasture, and a lot of trees; and beyond the trees were some bigger ones, and the top of a house. There was no drive leading that way, so I figured that there would be one further along the road, around the curve.
Wolfe yelled to ask what the devil I was doing, and I stepped back to the car door.
'Well,' I said, 'I don't see a garage anywhere. There's a house across there among those big trees. Going around by the road it would probably be a mile or more, but cutting across that pasture would be only maybe 400 yards. If you don't want to sit here helpless, I will, I'm armed, and you go hunt a phone. That house over there is closest.'
Away off somewhere, a dog barked. Wolfe looked at me. 'That was a dog barking.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Probably attached to that house. I'm in no humor to contend with a loose dog. We'll go together. But I won't climb that fence.'
'You won't need to. There's a gate back a little way.'
He sighed, and bent over to take a look at the crates, one on the floor and one on the seat beside him, which held the potted orchid plants. In view of the whim we had had, it was a good thing they had been secured so they couldn't slide around. Then he started to clamber out, and I stepped back to make room for him outdoors, room being a thing he required more than his share of. He took a good stretch, his applewood walking stick pointing like a sword at the sky as he did so, and turned all the way around, scowling at the hills' and dales, while I got the doors of the car locked, and then followed me along the edge of the ditch to the place where we could cross to the gate.
It was after we had passed through, just as I got the gate closed behind us, that I heard the guy yelling. I looked across the pasture in the direction of the house, and there he was, sitting on top of the fence on the other side. He must have just climbed up. He was yelling at us to go back where we came from. At that distance I couldn't tell for sure whether it was a rifle or a shotgun he had with the butt against his shoulder. He wasn't exactly aiming it at us, but intentions seemed to be along that line. Wolfe had gone on ahead while I was shutting the gate, and I trotted up to him and grabbed his arm.
'Hold on a minute. If that's a bughouse and that's one of the inmates, he may take us for woodchucks or wild turkeys-'
Wolfe snorted. 'The man's a fool. It's only a cow pasture.'
Being a good detective, he produced his evidence by pointing to a brown circular heap near our feet. Then he glared toward the menace on the fence, bellowed 'Shut up!' and went on. I followed. The guy kept yelling
