I scooped up the gun that had thrown me, sprang to Gooseneck’s side, tore the other gun out of his dead hand, and plunged into the street. The maroon roadster was trailing a cloud of dust into the desert behind it. Thirty feet from me stood a dirt-caked black touring car. That would be the one in which Gooseneck had driven back from Mexicali.
I jumped for it, climbed in, brought it to life, and pointed it at the dust-cloud ahead.
VIII
The car under me, I discovered, was surprisingly well engined for its battered looks—its motor was so good that I knew it was a border-runner’s car. I nursed it along, not pushing it. There were still four or five hours of daylight left, and while there was any light at all I couldn’t miss the cloud of dust from the fleeing roadster.
I didn’t know whether we were following a road or not. Sometimes the ground under me looked like one, but mostly it didn’t differ much from the rest of the desert. For half an hour or more the dust-cloud ahead and I held our respective positions, and then I found that I was gaining.
The going was roughening. Any road that we might originally have been using had petered out. I opened up a little, though the jars it cost me were vicious. But if I was going to avoid playing Indian among the rocks and cactus, I would have to get within striking distance of my man before he deserted his car and started a game of hide and seek on foot. I’m a city man. I have done my share of work in the open spaces, but I don’t like it. My taste in playgrounds runs more to alleys, backyards and cellars than to canyons, mesas and arroyos.
I missed a boulder that would have smashed me up—missed it by a hair—and looked ahead again to see that the maroon roadster was no longer stirring up the grit. It had stopped.
The roadster was empty. I kept on.
From behind the roadster a pistol snapped at me, three times. It would have taken good shooting to plug me at that instant. I was bounding and bouncing around in my seat like a pellet of quicksilver in a nervous man’s palm.
He fired again from the shelter of his car, and then dashed for a narrow arroyo—a sharp-edged, ten-foot crack in the earth—off to the left. On the brink, he wheeled to snap another cap at me—and jumped down out of sight.
I twisted the wheel in my hands, jammed on the brakes and slid the black touring car to the spot where I had seen him last. The edge of the arroyo was crumbling under my front wheels. I released the brake. Tumbled out. Shoved.
The car plunged down into the gully after him.
Sprawled on my belly, one of Gooseneck’s guns in each hand, I wormed my head over the edge. On all fours, the Englishman was scrambling out of the way of the car. The car was mangled, but still sputtering. One of the man’s fists was bunched around a gun—mine.
“Drop it and stand up, Ed!” I yelled.
Snake-quick, he flung himself around in a sitting position on the arroyo bottom, swung his gun up—and I smashed his forearm with my second shot.
He was holding the wounded arm with his left hand when I slid down beside him, picked up the gun he had dropped, and frisked him to see if he had any more.
He grinned at me.
“You know,” he drawled, “I fancy your true name isn’t Painless Parker at all. You don’t act like it.”
Twisting a handkerchief into a tourniquet of a sort, I knotted it around his wounded arm, which was bleeding.
“Let’s go upstairs and talk,” I suggested, and helped him up the steep side of the gully.
We climbed into his roadster.
“Out of gas,” he said. “We’ve got a nice walk ahead of us.”
“We’ll get a lift. I had a man watching your house, and another one shadowing Gooseneck. They’ll be coming out after me, I reckon. Meanwhile, we have time for a nice heart-to-heart talk.”
“Go ahead, talk your head off,” he invited; “but don’t expect me to add much to the conversation. You’ve got nothing on me.” (I’d like to have a dollar, or even a nickel, for every time I’ve heard that remark!) “You saw Kewpie bump Gooseneck off to keep him from peaching on her.”
“So that’s your play?” I inquired. “The girl hired Gooseneck to kill your wife—out of jealousy—when she learned that you were planning to shake her and return to your own world?”
“Exactly.”
“Not bad, Ed, but there’s one rough spot in it.”
“Yes?”
“Yes,” I repeated. “You are not Ashcraft!”
He jumped, and then laughed.
“Now your enthusiasm is getting the better of your judgment,” he kidded me. “Could I have deceived another man’s wife? Don’t you think her lawyer, Richmond, made me prove my identity?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Ed, I think I’m a smarter baby than either of them. Suppose you had a lot of stuff that belonged to Ashcraft—papers, letters, things in his handwriting? If you were even a fair hand with a pen, you could have fooled his wife. She thought her husband had had four tough years and had become a hophead. That would account for irregularities in his writing. And I don’t imagine you ever got very familiar in your letters—not enough so to risk any missteps. As for the lawyer—his making you identify yourself was only a matter of form. It never occurred to him that you weren’t Ashcraft. Identification is easy, anyway. Give me a week and I’ll prove that I’m the Sultan of Turkey.”
He shook his head sadly.
“That comes from riding around in the sun.”
I went on.
“At first your game was to bleed Mrs. Ashcraft for an allowance—to take the cure. But
