She perched herself on the table and reached for the Scotch.
“Everything’s lovely,” I assured her, though probably I didn’t say it that clear.
I was fighting a battle with myself just about then. I had an idea that I wanted to dance. Down in Yucatan, four or five months before—hunting for a lad who had done wrong by the bank that employed him—I had seen some natives dance the naual. And that naual dance was the one thing in the world I wanted to do just then. (I was carrying a beautiful bun!) But I knew that if I sat still—as I had been sitting all evening—I could keep my cargo in hand, while it wasn’t going to take much moving around to knock me over.
I don’t remember whether I finally conquered the desire to dance or not. I remember Kewpie sitting on the table, grinning her boy’s grin at me, and saying:
“You ought to stay oiled all the time, Shorty; it improves you.”
I don’t know whether I made any answer to that or not. Shortly afterward, I know, I spread myself beside the Englishman on the floor and went to sleep.
V
The next two days were pretty much like the first one. Ashcraft and I were together twenty-four hours each of the days, and usually the girl was with us, and the only time we weren’t drinking was when we were sleeping off what we had been drinking. We spent most of those three days in either the adobe house or the Golden Horseshoe, but we found time to take in most of the other joints in town now and then. I had only a hazy idea of some of the things that went on around me, though I don’t think I missed anything entirely. On the second day someone added a first name to the alias I had given the girl—and thereafter I was “Painless” Parker to Tijuana, and still am to some of them. I don’t know who christened me, or why.
Ashcraft and I were as thick as thieves, on the surface, but neither of us ever lost his distrust of the other, no matter how drunk we got—and we got plenty drunk. He went up against his mud-pipe regularly. I don’t think the girl used the stuff, but she had a pretty capacity for hard liquor. I would go to sleep not knowing whether I was going to wake up or not; but I had nothing on me to give me away, so I figured that I was safe unless I talked myself into a jam. I didn’t worry much—bedtime usually caught me in a state that made worry impossible.
Three days of this, and then, sobering up, I was riding back to San Francisco, making a list of what I knew and guessed about Norman Ashcraft, alias Ed Bohannon.
The list went something like this:
(1) He suspected, if he didn’t know, that I had come down to see him on his wife’s account: he had been too smooth and had entertained me too well for me to doubt that; (2) he apparently had decided to return to his wife, though there was no guarantee that he would actually do so; (3) he was not incurably addicted to drugs; he merely smoked opium and, regardless of what the Sunday supplements say, an opium smoker is little, if any, worse off than a tobacco smoker; (4) he might pull himself together under his wife’s influence, but it was doubtful: physically he hadn’t gone to the dogs, but he had had his taste of the gutter and seemed to like it; (5) the girl Kewpie was crazily in love with him, while he liked her, but wasn’t turning himself inside out over her.
A good night’s sleep on the train between Los Angeles and San Francisco set me down in the Third and Townsend Street station with nearly normal head and stomach and not too many kinks in my nerves. I put away a breakfast that was composed of more food than I had eaten in three days, and went up to Vance Richmond’s office.
“Mr. Richmond is still in Eureka,” his stenographer told me. “I don’t expect him back until the first of the week.”
“Can you get him on the phone for me?”
She could, and did.
Without mentioning any names, I told the attorney what I knew and guessed.
“I see,” he said. “Suppose you go out to Mrs. A’s house and tell her. I will write her tonight, and I probably shall be back in the city by the day after tomorrow. I think we can safely delay action until then.”
I caught a street car, transferred at Van Ness Avenue, and went out to Mrs. Ashcraft’s house. Nothing happened when I rang the bell. I rang it several times before I noticed that there were two morning newspapers in the vestibule. I looked at the dates—this morning’s and yesterday morning’s.
An old man in faded overalls was watering the lawn next door.
“Do you know if the people who live here have gone away?” I called to him.
“I don’t guess so. The back door’s open, I seen this mornin’.”
He returned his attention to his hose, and then stopped to scratch his chin.
“They may of gone,” he said slowly. “Come to think on it, I ain’t seen any of ’em for—I don’t remember seein’ any of ’em yesterday.”
I left the front steps and went around the house, climbed the low fence in back and went up the back steps. The kitchen door stood about a foot open. Nobody was visible in the kitchen, but there was a sound of running water.
I knocked on the door with my knuckles, loudly. There was no answering sound. I pushed the door open and went in. The sound of water came from the sink. I looked in the sink.
Under a thin stream of water running
