The Dain Curse

a lot I’d like to do yet, but I was hired, this time, by Andrews, to guard her while she was in the Temple. She isn’t there now, and Andrews doesn’t think there’s anything further to be learned about what happened there. And, as far as guarding her is necessary, her husband ought to be able to do that.”

“Her what?”

“Husband.”

Fitzstephan thumped his stein down on the table so that beer sloshed over the sides.

“Now there you are,” he said accusingly. “You didn’t tell me anything about that. God only knows how much else there is that you’ve not told me.”

“Collinson took advantage of the confusion to carry her off to Reno, where they won’t have to wait the Californian three days for their license. I didn’t know they’d gone till Andrews jumped on my neck three or four hours later. He was kind of unpleasant about it, which is one of the ways we came to stop being client and operative.”

“I didn’t know he was opposed to Collinson as a husband for her.”

“I don’t know that he is, but he didn’t think this the time, nor that the way, for their wedding.”

“I can understand that,” he said as we got up from the table. “Andrews likes to have his way in most things.”

Part III

Quesada

XIII

The Cliff Road

Eric Collinson wired me from Quesada:

Come immediately stop need you stop trouble danger stop meet me at Sunset Hotel stop do not communicate stop Gabrielle must not know stop hurry

Eric Carter

The telegram came to the agency on Friday morning.

I wasn’t in San Francisco that morning. I was up in Martinez dickering with a divorced wife of Phil Leach, alias a lot of names. We wanted him for spreading reams of orphan paper through the Northwest, and we wanted him badly. This ex-wife⁠—a sweet-looking little blonde telephone operator⁠—had a fairly recent photograph of Phil, and was willing to sell it.

“He never thought enough of me to risk passing any bum checks so I could have things,” she complained. “I had to bring in my own share of the nut. So why shouldn’t I make something out of him now, when I guess some tramp’s getting plenty? Now how much will you give for it?”

She had an exaggerated idea of how much the photograph was worth to us, of course, but I finally made the deal with her. But it was after six when I returned to the city, too late for a train that would put me in Quesada that night. I packed a bag, got my car from the garage, and drove down.

Quesada was a one-hotel town pasted on the rocky side of a young mountain that sloped into the Pacific Ocean some eighty miles from San Francisco. Quesada’s beach was too abrupt and hard and jagged for bathing, so Quesada had never got much summer-resort money. For a while it had been a hustling rum-running port, but that racket was dead now: bootleggers had learned there was more profit and less worry in handling domestic hooch than imported. Quesada had gone back to sleep.

I got there at eleven-something that night, garaged my car, and crossed the street to the Sunset Hotel. It was a low, sprawled-out, yellow building. The night clerk was alone in the lobby, a small effeminate man well past sixty who went to a lot of trouble to show me that his fingernails were rosy and shiny.

When he had read my name on the register he gave me a sealed envelope⁠—hotel stationery⁠—addressed to me in Eric Collinson’s handwriting. I tore it open and read:

Do not leave the hotel until I have seen you.

E. C.

“How long has this been here?” I asked.

“Since about eight o’clock. Mr. Carter waited for you for more than an hour, until after the last stage came in from the railroad.”

“He isn’t staying here?”

“Oh, dear, no. He and his bride have got the Tooker place, down in the cove.”

Collinson wasn’t the sort of person to whose instructions I’d pay a whole lot of attention. I asked:

“How do you get there?”

“You’d never be able to find it at night,” the clerk assured me, “unless you went all the way around by the East road, and not then, I’m sure, unless you knew the country.”

“Yeah? How do you get there in the daytime?”

“You go down this street to the end, take the fork of the road on the ocean side, and follow that up along the cliff. It isn’t really a road, more of a path. It’s about three miles to the house, a brown house, shingled all over, on a little hill. It’s easily enough found in the daytime if you remember to keep to the right, to the ocean side, all the way down. But you’d never, never in the world, be able to find⁠—”

“Thanks,” I said, not wanting to hear the story all over again.

He led me up to a room, promised to call me at five, and I was asleep by midnight.

The morning was dull, ugly, foggy, and cold when I climbed out of bed to say, “All right, thanks,” into the phone. It hadn’t improved much by the time I had got dressed and gone downstairs. The clerk said there was not a chance in the world of getting anything to eat in Quesada before seven o’clock.

I went out of the hotel, down the street until it became a dirt road, kept to the dirt road until it forked, and turned into the branch that bent toward the ocean. This branch was never really a road from its beginning, and soon was nothing but a rocky path climbing along the side of a rocky ledge that kept pushing closer to the water’s edge. The side of the ledge became steeper and steeper, until the path was simply an irregular shelf on the face of a cliff⁠—a shelf eight or ten feet wide in places, no more than four